Women's rights and misogyny in Brazil: An interview with Debora Diniz

In 2018 anthropologist and feminist Debora Diniz appeared as an expert witness in a Supreme Court hearing that addressed decriminalizing abortion. After receiving death threats, she was placed under police protection and forced to go into hiding. The police discovered that a right-wing extremist gang plotted an attack against her, and Diniz had to go into exile abroad, a fate she shares with several other academics working on women's rights and economic and racial inequalities. In this interview, Diniz reflects on the Brazilian political climate and its consequences for academics, freedom, women's rights and healthcare.     

A View from Palestine: An interview with Three Senior Delegates

[On March 5, 1992, three Palestinian delegates to the peace talks in Washington, D.C., spoke at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: Dr. Samir Saleh Abdullah, professor of economics at An-Najah University; Dr. Jaba Fada, lecturer in English and education at the Islamic University of Gaza and school supervisor for United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA); and Sharhabeel Y. al-Zaeem, attorney and legal adviser for UNRWA in Gaza, head of the defense committee which defends Palestinian detainees in the Israeli military courts in the Gaza Strip, and a consultant on the delegation. Afterwards, they were interviewed by Dr. Mohammed M. Aman, editor of DOMES.]     

Italian Industrial Districts: An Industrial Economics Interpretation

The Italian debate on industrial districts suggests that local development can be based on small and medium-sized firms, provided they work in teams and are embedded in a local system of social relations. If the availability of local public goods complements the private supply of local specialized services and goods, Marshallian external economies are engendered. When inner social and economic relations boost the supply of local public goods, and are reproduced by the consistent economic behaviour of local (economic and political) agents, they become local factors of economic development, or, in other words, the district's social capital. These propositions are considered within a three-layered framework comprising structure, conduct and performance. The relations among these levels allow joint consideration of three different processes of economic selection: competitive, strategic, evolutionary. This complexity is necessary if the conditions that foster significant Marshallian external economies are to be represented correctly.     

The English Patient and the Italian Risorgimento: Medical Tourism and the Body Politic in Giovanni Ruffini's Doctor Antonio (1855)

Doctor Antonio (1855), Giovanni Ruffini's novel of therapeutic travel, cross-cultural love and Risorgimento propaganda, pairs an English patient's quest for renewed health in Italy in the 1840s with the concurrent resurgence of the Italian nation through political action. An Italian revolutionary activist turned man of English letters, Ruffini wrote seven novels in English, of which the second, Doctor Antonio, was his greatest critical and popular success. Employing the popular Victorian practice of recuperative travel as a key plot device, and using this device to convey Italian political messages to nineteenth-century English readers, the novel offers a context-specific variation of the rhetorical tradition of representing the ‘body politic’ as a site of health, disease and medical management. This essay investigates Doctor Antonio's relation to Anglo-Italian literary, political and medical contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses how the novel's medical plot supports Ruffini's aims of challenging negative stereotypes of Italians and advancing the cause of Italian liberalism. A reading of Lucy Davenne's illness and treatment as an allegory for the condition of the ailing, but potentially resurgent, Italian nation is developed and critically reflected upon. The intersection of medical and political frames of meaning in the text is further explored by interpreting the space and community of Lucy's convalescence as the model of an ideal society to which both English and Italians might aspire. Finally, the essay considers the novel's material impact on the development of medical tourism in northern Italy, and the political significance of this impact.     

Youth as a metaphor: an interview with Carmen Leccardi

Abstract

What are the specificities of youth in Italy as a group? How are they received in civil society and beyond? What kind of approaches have characterized the study of youth in Italy throughout the last decades? In this interview, the editors of this Special Issue open a conversation with Carmen Leccardi, a leading scholar in the field whose work has impacted the study of Italian youth not only in Italy but also internationally. Leccardi investigates these issues diachronically, following and commenting some salient aspects of Italian history that have had an impact on how the lives of young people have unfolded, among them social movements, policies and labour market fluctuations. Revisiting and updating the notion of uncertainty in young people’s lives, the interview concludes that youth can be considered as a metaphor particularly able to capture contemporary social changes.     

Byron to D'Annunzio: from liberalism to fascism in national poetry, 1815–1920

ABSTRACT. From Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824 to D'Annunzio's capture of Fiume for Italy in 1919, the nationalism of universal liberalism and independence struggles changed, in literature as in politics, to cruel dictatorial fascism. Byron was followed by a series of idealistic fighter‐poets and poet‐martyrs for national freedom, but international tensions culminating in World War I exposed fully the intolerant, brutal side of nationalism. D'Annunzio, like Byron, both a major poet and charismatic war leader, was a key figure in transforming nineteenth‐century democratic nationalism into twentieth‐century dictatorial fascism. The poet's ‘lyrical dictatorship’ at Fiume (1919–20) inspired Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922, with far‐reaching political consequences. The poet became the dangerous example of a Nietzschean Übermensch, above common morality, predatory and morally irresponsible. This article shows how the meaning of nationalism was partly determined and transformed by poets, illustrating their role as ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’.     

In Love with Garibaldi: Romancing the Italian Risorgimento

This article discusses the meaning of ‘love’ in the political transfer of the Italian Risorgimento. After a general introduction on the possible connections between love and nineteenth-century politics, the author focuses on Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of the most colourful Founding Fathers of modern Italy. While Garibaldi's overwhelming presence in Italian monuments suggests that his political role has been defined by the Italian nation, he started his career as an international fighter for freedom for whom national borders did not matter. In fact, the Garibaldi myth that made the Italian Risorgimento a popular cause in other countries might have been heavily shaped by ‘warm attachments’ between Garibaldi and women and men all over the world. By analysing how these ‘foreigners’ turned both themselves and Garibaldi into vehicles of revolutionary politics, this article shows that in the political transfer of Garibaldi it is not so clear who is the receiver and who the transmitter, what is the centre and what the periphery, male and female: as happens in romantic love as imagined by revolutionaries like Garibaldi, the active and passive subject alternate, giving shape to a political practice that is truly interactive and international.

Résumé: Cet article se penche sur la signification de ‘l'amour’ dans le transfert politique du Risorgimento. Après une brève discussion des connections entre amour et politique au dix-neuvième siècle, l'auteur discute plus en détail Giuseppe Garibaldi, le père fondateur le plus pittoresque de l'Italie moderne. Alors que les représentations monumentales de Garibaldi suggèrent un rôle politique purement national, il commença sa carrière comme un internationaliste combattant pour la liberté plutôt que pour des frontières. De fait le mythe Garibaldi qui fit du Risorgimento une cause populaire dans bien des pays aurait été produit par des attachements chaleureux entre Garibaldi et des hommes et femmes à travers le monde. En analysant comment ces étrangers se firent des agents de la politique révolutionnaire cet article montre que dans le transfert politique Garibaldien il n'est pas très aisé de distinguer qui donne et qui reçoit, qui est au centre et qui est périphérique. Tout comme dans l'amour romantique imaginé par des révolutionnaires comme Garibaldi, les sujets passifs et actifs alternent et donnent forme à une pratique politique véritablement interactive et internationale.