Modern Italy最新文献

The article explores media depictions of industrial labour in Italy, with a special focus on visual, film and television portrayals, spanning from the 1960s to the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Rather than delving into an analysis of labour processes, the primary objective of the article is to scrutinise the gendered representations of work and whether and how the representation of work, including all professions, has played a pivotal role in shaping narratives about Italian society and its inherent contradictions. In this context, the article also emphasises the significance of what remains unrepresented, highlighting the absence of work as equally consequential as its presence. Of particular importance within this exploration is the examination of women's work, a realm less frequently depicted than that of men. The article dedicates specific attention to unravelling the nuances of women's role in the workforce, recognising their portrayal as a key element in understanding broader narratives about Italian society and its complexities.

This article draws on a broad range of under-explored historical sources to document the career trajectories of the women who worked in the Italian film industry between 1930 and 1944. Challenging established histories that normalise male dominance in Italian cinema during and after Mussolini's regime, the article sheds light on women's overlooked contribution to Italy's sound film industry and explores the multilayered, shifting dimension of their precarious and gendered labour. Engaging with key questions raised by historians of Italian Fascism and by feminist research in film and media history, the article delineates intersectional barriers to film employment faced by women in the years of the dictatorship and points to their historical legacy.

From a gender historical perspective, labour precarity constitutes a long-term phenomenon. Women's work represents a privileged observatory to understand how instability and precarity also characterised the cycle of economic and industrial expansion of the 1950s and 1960s. The article compares the conditions of female factory workers with those of home-based workers, a traditionally invisible category of workers, who between the 1960s and 1970s promoted demonstrations and protests with the support of trade unions, women's associations and local institutions. Changes in the subjectivity of women workers and homeworkers, whose demands often came together and gave rise to joint protests, not only became part of broader discussions on the relationship between industrial crisis and precariousness, but also generated discourses on specific forms of work that are now central to debates on flexible/precarious work such as part-time work.

It has been over 20 years since Donna R. Gabaccia's seminal work Italy's Many Diasporas was published (London & New York, 2000), an overview of the social, cultural and economic history of Italy's various migrations. Much has changed since then, but this book remains a classic. In this roundtable, historians Lucy Riall, Pamela Ballinger and Konstantina Zanou reflect on the value of Gabaccia's work and on the historical moment of its production. They discuss with the author the developments in the historiography of Italian and other diasporas during the last two decades, and offer insights on new avenues of research including settler colonialism, race and belonging, migration and environmental change, global microhistory and biography, and the Mediterranean context of Italy's migrations.

The article aims to sketch out the main features of the political culture of the Radical Party (PR). This political culture is paradigmatic of a much broader phenomenon that has affected the politics of Western democracies since the 1970s: the critique of traditional parties in the name of a party model formed by spontaneous groupings of society; the extreme emphasis placed on individual choices in political action, and the programmatic tracing of the latter back to the former; and the call for a less ‘mediated’ relationship between citizens and institutions. Yet, this culture contained certain ingredients that would distance it from the populist forms of the twenty-first century. After grafting anti-authoritarianism onto its liberal matrix the PR identified the promotion of civil rights as the goal and battle for the transformation of the relationship between politics and the citizen. This transformation emphasised the sphere of individual freedom and the liberty to participate in community decisions, and thus implied a transformation of the ways and means of doing politics. In the late 1970s, the PR deepened its critique of parties and partitocracy and, at the same time, emphasised a supranational view of politics, eventually becoming a ‘transnational transparty’ party in 1989.

This article links the study of transnational and imperial fascism in the context of the Italian occupation of Albania by examining how Italian authorities sought to turn Albanians abroad into assets rather than liabilities. Organising and monitoring Albanians occurred through conferences, youth institutions and consular activities. Studying such concrete contacts and negotiations allows us to explore the practical issues latent in expanding fascist political subjectivity in transnational and imperial contexts. On the one hand, Italians hoped to verse Albanians in a fascist identity by using existing organisational strategies while silencing or converting potential anti-Italian critics. On the other, many Albanians expressed and offered support for these Italian efforts, though with reservations and conditions, raising questions as to what it meant to be an Albanian nationalist and/or fascist in the years of occupation. The Albanian case therefore contributes to our understanding of the tensions inherent in ‘universalising’ fascism for colonial subjects.