The Space Between: Analyzing Modern and Past Italian Immigration/Emigration

Italy’s current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom’s Empire’s Mobius Strip investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state’s historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today’s refugee crisis. Teresa Fiore’s Pre-Occupied Spaces links Italy’s long history of emigration to all continents in the world, contemporary transnational migrations directed toward it, as well as the country’s colonial legacies. In doing so, Fiore’s book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. Through an interdisciplinary cultural approach, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may hold interesting lessons about inclusiveness for the present.

Nov. 2
6:40 p.m.

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Speakers:

Teresa Fiore is the Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Montclair State University (New Jersey, USA). The recipient of several fellowships (De Bosis, Rockefeller, and Fulbright), she was Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard University, NYU, and Rutgers University. Her book Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies (Fordham UP 2017) received the 2017 American Association of Italian Studies Book Prize, an Honorable Mention at the 2018 MLA Marraro Prize; and the 2019 Gadda Prize as Runner Up. Fiore is also the editor of the 2006 issue of Quaderni del ‘900, devoted to John Fante, and the co-editor of a special section of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies’ Fall 2018 issue about the migration “crisis” in the Mediterranean.

Stephanie Malia Hom is an academic and nonprofit executive. She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, Italian literature and culture, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism studies. She is the author of two books: Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell, 2019) and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto, 2015). She also co-edited the volume, Italian Mobilities, with Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Routledge, 2015). Her essays and articles have been published in wide range of venues, including the leading journals in the fields of Italian studies, tourism history, urban studies, and folklore.

Moderator:

Ken Shulman is a veteran print and broadcast journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, the BBC, and PBS. Ken spent 15 years in Italy covering European soccer, culture, and politics. He is the author of non-fiction books on art conservation and astronomy, and believes himself to be the only American who speaks the Logodourese dialect of the Sardinian language. He is a two-time RTDNA Edward R Murrow winner for excellence in broadcasting, and was named a Champion of Justice by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Ken currently hosts Away Games, a television travel show and learning platform about sport, politics, and human rights. He is a graduate of Middlebury College and holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Freedman-Martin Media Fellow.