"Italianicity is not Italy". Questioning Contemporary Italian Art History
Edited by Tenley Bick

Authors: Tenley Bick, Antje Gamble, Rhiannon Welch.
Book review: Stella Cattaneo and Raffaele Bedarida.

While scholarship has brought the postcolonial (and, increasingly, transnational) turn to bear on studies of modern and contemporary Italian culture, such inquiry into Italian art has been slower to arrive. In support of this work, this issue of Palinsesti is dedicated to postcolonial approaches to contemporary Italian art history. Drawing its title from Roland Barthes’ famous description of “Italianicity” and the artificial, even “barbarous” regulation of connotative meaning, the issue features exciting new scholarship in art history and related disciplines that rethinks Italian identity through close engagement with its cultural geographies, past and present, and through examination of work by artists in relation to issues of representation, race, migration, and diaspora.

Articles

Introduction
Tenley Bick

Italian Culture As White Culture in Postwar United States
Antje Gamble

Crisis, Deceleration, and the Visual Poetics of Refusal. Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio’s “Sudeuropa” (2005–7)
Rhiannon Welch

Photography between Desire and Disillusionment. West African Studio Portraiture, Diaspora, and Italy in the Work of Silvia Rosi
Tenley Bick

“Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States”
Interview with Raffaele Bedarida
Stella Cattaneo

The issue is open access and available at this link: https://teseo.unitn.it/palinsesti
Published by the University of Trento under Common License (CC-BY-SA) on the OJS platform.