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An important contribution to early public debates on the nature of women written by a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Pompeo Colonna’s In Defense of Women (1530), presented in this volume in Latin and English translation, is one of several important defenses of women composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by male advocates of women’s moral and intellectual worth. Known as a cardinal and a warrior, but also as an active participant in sixteenth-century Italian literary circles, Colonna addresses the work to his cousin Vittoria Colonna, the most renowned Italian woman poet of the era, who, he writes, had urged him to undertake it. His Defense not only refutes arguments of women’s inferiority and incapacity but, remarkably, asserts their ability to hold political office and govern. It contains original Latin text and a critical introduction by Franco Minonzio. It also features a foreword by Margaret L. King, as well as a postscript by King, tracing the separate male-authored and female-authored Renaissance defenses of women.
 

The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular. The thirteen essays of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation present a radical reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume’s contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theater, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period not only merits study but is positively innovative. Contributors include such renowned critics as Virginia Cox and Amedeo Quondam, two of the leading scholars on the Italian Counter-Reformation.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

Intimate Positions offers the first sustained study of Sino-Italian writing, foregrounding the ways in which cultural belonging is imagined through love. Beginning from the premise that intimacy is never merely private, the book examines literary works written in both Chinese and Italian by authors of Chinese origin living in Italy, showing how romantic and familial attachments become charged sites where wider social and political questions take shape. In dialogue with affect theory, Intimate Positions approaches intimacy as both a literary theme and a force that binds individuals to families, communities, nations, and inherited ideas of identity.

Across five chapters, Intimate Positions traces a movement from normative attachments towards increasingly unstable and transformative forms of belonging. Chapters examine works in which romantic intimacy reinforces collective and patriotic visions of Chineseness; working-class narratives in which precarious lives and fragile solidarities fracture the image of a unified Chinese community in Italy; family and marriage in writing by first- and second-generation authors; interracial relationships as unsettled spaces shaped by gendered power, desire, and inequality; and queer forms of self-representation, in which Chineseness and Italianness emerge as fluid positions that can be performed and remade.

At once an interdisciplinary contribution to Sinophone studies, Italian studies, cultural studies, and mobility studies, Intimate Positions combines close textual analysis with interviews with writers, artists, activists, and cultural mediators. It illuminates a field underexplored by scholarship, and offers a relational understanding of belonging as an ongoing process of affective positioning, continually made and remade through intimacy.
 

Growing up in Mogadishu, Somalia, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel was immersed in the language and culture of Italy, Somalia’s former colonizer. Yet when she moved to Italy as a young mother in the 1970s, she discovered a country where immigrants and Muslims were viewed with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion­–where, even today, she and her children must seemingly prove they are Italian. 
 
In Islam and Me, Fazel tells her story and shares the experiences of other Muslim women living in Italy, revealing the wide variety of Muslim identities and the common prejudices they encounter. Looking at Italian school textbooks, newspapers, and TV programs, she invites us to change the way Muslim immigrants, and especially women, are depicted in both news reports and scholarly research. Islam and Me is a meditation on our multireligious, multiethnic, and multilingual reality, as well as an exploration of how we might reimagine national culture and identity so that they become more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist. 

 

In Italy to Argentina: Travel Writing and Emigrant Colonialism, Tullio Pagano examines Italian emigration to Argentina and the Rio de la Plata region through the writings of Italian economists, poets, anthropologists, and political activists from the 1860s to the beginning of World War I. He shows that Italians played an important role in the so-called conquest of the desert, which led to Argentina's economic expansion and the suppression and killing of the remaining indigenous population. Many of the texts he discusses have hardly been studied before: from Paolo Mantegazza’s real and imaginary travel narratives at the time of Italian unification to Gina Lombroso’s descriptions of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina in early 1900s. Pagano questions the apparent opposition between diaspora and empire and argues that there was a continuity between the “peaceful conquest” though spontaneous emigration envisioned by Italian liberal intellectuals at the turn of the century and the military colonialism of Italian Nationalists and Fascists. He shows that racist assumptions about Native American and “creole” cultures were present in the work of progressive authors like Edmondo de Amicis, whose writings became enormously popular in Argentina, and anarchist militants and legal scholars like Pietro Gori, who founded the first revolutionary unions in Buenos Aires while remaining dangerously attached to Cesare Lombroso’s theories of atavism and primitivism. The “growl” of Italian emigrants about to land in Argentina, found in Dino Campana’s poem Buenos Aires (1907), echoes throughout Pagano’s book, and encourages the reader to explore the apparent oxymoron of “emigration colonialism” and the role of literature and public media in the formation of our social imaginary.

“Italy to Argentina shows meticulous bibliographic work and is attentive to both fundamental and marginal texts in a double task, on the one hand, of textual analysis, and on the other, of rescuing and recovering a corpus forgotten by critics even when it is highly significant. It is, then, a research work that addresses the Italian emigration to Argentina from an original point of view, linking texts that have not been studied or that have not been sufficiently analyzed.” —Fernanda Elisa Bravo Herrera, author of Huellas y recorridos de una utopía: La emigración italiana en la Argentina

"From Boccadasse to La Boca. Tullio Pagano complexifies the relationship between ‘diaspora’ and ‘colonialism’ in the context of Italian migration to South America. In six thematic chapters, Pagano explores the thought of authors on and off the canon. Such diverse voices lead the reader to a new approach to the study of emigrant colonialism and creole studies, towards a deeper, more realistic understanding of the  ‘conquest of the desert’ that Italian emigrants wanted to perform in Argentina."—Giuseppe Gazzola, Stony Brook University