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The Moore Institute, The School of Languages, Literatures & Culture &
Italian Studies
SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS: Identity and sustainability
Monday, 26 March 2012, 4pm, Moore Institute Seminar Room
Dr Francesco Ricatti, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia
Dealing with the (un)familiar: Italians’ uncanny perceptions of otherness, in Italy and abroad
It has often been argued, in academic studies as well as in media and public discourse, that Italian hostility towards immigrants is largely due to a sort of amnesia about Italy’s past as a country of emigration. This interpretation mirrors a similar understanding of Italian supposed amnesia about its colonial past. Against this prevailing interpretation of the relationship between emigration and immigration in Italy, this paper will argue that memories of Italian emigration have not been forgotten and that Italian hostility towards immigrants is to be related to a much more complex attempt by Italians to cope with manifestations of otherness, both in Italy and abroad. Employing the psychoanalytical frame of the uncanny –drawing inspiration from the Freudian suggestions about the unheimliche, and later interpretations by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek– I will argue that at least since Italian unification there has been a consistent and peculiar Italian way of reacting to the void between the imaginary unity of the nation and its actual fragmentation (due to both its geopolitical history and to mass migration).
Tuesday, 12 April 2012, 4pm, Moore Institute Seminar Room
Professor Paul Carter, Deakin University, Australia
Turbulent Zones: the poetics of sustaining places in unsustainable times
We experience a strange phenomenon: as our virtual geography extends, our social life grows more intense. A cyber-sociability that redefines us as parts of molecular structures stimulates an impatience with the inherited protocols governing meeting. In this talk I want to discuss the implications of this new dialectic for place-making. If new patterns of sociability are not to spiral back into cultural kitsch, they need to incorporate the foreign (a persistent trope in Galway’s own mythopoetic constitution). The foreign, which is also the global, has a different geography, archipelagic, or relationally defined. From the point of view of intensification, the globe is perhaps hollow or best imagined as a region of hollows.
Understanding intuitive relational geometries is a way of integrating cultural heritage, cultural production and public planning. There is no question that the institutionalized fissuring of these essentially similar practices is one of the symptoms of the phenomenon mentioned above. I will share some recent public place design work I have done in Australia, talk about the choreo-topography project (Australia/Italy) that seeks to understand the relationship between the ‘movement form’ of the crowd and discuss a project called ‘Turbulence’ that looks at the role of the humanities and creative arts in furnishing better public information about the complexity of change.
Francesco Ricatti is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia. He coordinates the Italian language program and teaches migration history. He is the author of Embodying Migrants: Italians in Postwar Australia (Bern, Peter Lang, 2011). He has published various book chapters on migration and on football, as well as articles in academic journals, including Australian Journal of Politics and History, History Australia, Annali d’Italianistica and (forthcoming in 2012) Women’s History Review and Modern Italy. He is the co-editor with Penny Morris and Mark Seymour of a recently published volume on Politica ed emozioni nella storia d’Italia dal 1848 a oggi (Rome, Viella, 2012), and a forthcoming special issue of the journal Modern Italy on Emotions in Italy.
Paul Carter is the author of many books including The Road to Botany Bay (1987, 2010), The Lie of the Land (1996), Repressed Spaces (2002), Material Thinking (2004), Dark Writing (2008). His new book is The Meeting Place: a history, theory and practice of encounter, to be published in 2012. He also writes regularly for Lettre International. He is also a sound artist and public artist. His public space designs include Relay (Sydney Olympics, 2000, with Ruark Lewis), Nearamnew (Federation Square, Melbourne, with Lab architecture studio) and Golden Grove (University of Sydney, 2007-2009 with Taylor Cullity Lethlean). Born in the UK, educated at Oxford, Paul has lived in Melbourne since the early 1980s; he is currently Chair of Creative Place Research, Deakin University.
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Professor Paolo Bartoloni
Head of Discipline, Italian Studies
Arts Millennium Building
National University of Ireland, Galway
University Road, Galway
Ireland
Tel. +353 (0)91 492392
Fax. +353 (0)91 495501
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http://www.nuigalway.ie/italian/staff/paolo_bartoloni.html
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