From pioneer migration to family reunification: Polish women’s narratives of lifestyle preferences in Bologna,Italy

In the article I analyse the emergence of lifestyle considerations among former labour migrants and the importance of these new preferences for their choice to settle in the new location. The paper critically engages with the theoretical framework of ‘lifestyle migration’ and discusses its applicability to labour migrants from Central-Eastern Europe settling in Mediterranean countries. I present the interplay between economic and lifestyle reasoning based on two narrative biographical interviews with migrants in Bologna, drawing on my comparative qualitative research in Italy and the UK. The pioneer female migrants went to Italy as care workers in order to fulfill their households’ immediate economic needs. During the years of circular migration the women developed ties to Italy, but found prolonged periods of separation from their families no longer acceptable. The female migrants opted to transfer their whole households to Bologna. Based on the women’s experience and preferences, the families’ consumption preferences and leisure activities transformed in the course of settlement in the Italian city. I claim that lifestyle is a fruitful concept in researching migrants’ changing aspirations, way of life in the new location and the reasons for staying. This approach allows to go beyond the typologies based on the initial motivations for migration.     

Cross-cultural contact in Manchuria: approaches to lives in between, 1900s–1950s*

ABSTRACT

This article aims to uncover the lives of some of the individuals who, through the occupational and personal choices they made, moved between the Chinese and Russian societies of Manchuria (Northeast China) in the first half of the twentieth century. The Chinese Eastern Railway, which passed through the region and was central to its economy, provided the main framework for Chinese–Russian contact. Headquartered in Harbin, the Railway generated a need for interpreters and translators, while it also offered opportunities for commercial go-betweens. Russian schools employed Chinese teachers for language instruction. After a change in the balance of power, by the 1920s, Manchurian warlords hired former tsarist officers and soldiers into their armies. The article compares the functions of intermediaries in this region to the better-known examples of Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong. Research on ‘compradors’ has been more often conducted in these geographical settings, whereas the roles of cross-cultural intermediaries in late imperial and republican China still remain relatively unexplored.     

From invisibility to visibility? The appropriation of public space through a religious ritual: the Filipino procession of Santacruzan in Padua,Italy

Mainly employed as domestic workers and care providers since the 1980s, Filipino migrants have been, and still are, largely invisible in Italian public space. Since 1991, once a year, on the last Sunday of May, they transform the streets of Padua, city of Saint Anthony, into their own temporary ‘sacred space’ celebrating the finding of the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz). Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the paper analyses the preparation of the ritual and the embodied performance as a means to interpret the Filipino local and transnational territorialisation in the Italian context. The discussion underlines how the Italian setting affects the relationship between the sacred and the secular and between majority and minority religions in the urban texture. Urban space being the symbolic arena where identity and the process of boundary making are inscribed, we consider public space as a social process constituted by three levels: accessibility, temporary appropriation and visibility. Drawing on this immigrant religious ritual, we apply this perspective to look at the interactions between local society and newcomers and the blurring boundaries between religious and non-religious in the ambiguous Italian public space.     

From private initiative to public intervention in Spanish water management: the case of the Muga and Fluvià rivers (1850–1930)

During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century, Spain, along with some other European countries, underwent a process of transition regarding water resources management. One of the most obvious transformations that occurred during this period was the increasing lead taken by the government in the building of large hydraulic structures and the subsequent decrease in the influence of private initiative in this matter. The government's aim was to exploit the water resources provided by the rivers to their full, and in particular to use the water that was destined for irrigation to maximum effect. The repeated failure of projects promoted by private companies led the government, not without problems, to enact regulations and create hydraulic plans to be put into motion by the public sector. This change in focus is the key to understanding the frenetic pace of hydraulic infrastructure construction that occurred later and which made Spain one of the world's leading nations in terms of indicators such as the number of large reservoirs in use. This article focuses on the transition from private initiative to public intervention and evaluates the main stages of this process in Spain. The cases of the basins of the Muga and Fluvià rivers, located in the extreme north-east of the Iberian Peninsula in Catalonia, are described in light of this process. This research attempts to verify that despite their modest size and their distance from the main decision-making centres, these two cases reflected the situation at the national level. This was just one of the many local effects of the transition process of water resources management in Spain, even though the results of this transformation would be neither immediate nor effective in the short term.     

From Paper to Celluloid and Back Again: Finance and Form in Jorge Délano’s Films

This essay argues that our current understanding of the cinematic work by the pioneering Chilean film director Jorge Délano obscures a sophisticated interaction between politics, art and economics, one that reveals unexamined aspects of how the film industry developed in Chile. Most notably, it argues that Délano’s illustrated political satire magazine Topaze was central to the development of early sound cinema in the country. Following Rielle Navitski, the essay utilizes and examines tensions between models drawn from periodical studies and the concepts of remediation and intermediality in film studies. Examining illustrations from the first three years of Topaze’s production (1931–1933) in the context of the country’s economic situation, the essay argues that Délano remediated cinema in Topaze as a strategy of capital accumulation. This analysis also makes it possible to see how one of his sound films, Escándalo (1940), similarly remediated the illustrated paper periodical as he pursued financing for the production of cinematic commodities for export. The essay ends by examining the relationship between these issues and the political situation in early Cold War Chile.     

Rebel with a cause? From traitor prince to exemplary martyr: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's representation of San Hermenegildo

El mártir del sacramento, San Hermenegildo is an auto sacramental or Eucharistic play, written in the 1680s by the Mexican nun and literary superstar, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The play centres on the story of a (purportedly Catholic) Visigothic prince who died in Seville in 586 by order of his Arian father, Leovigild. Contempary sources vary in their portrayal of Hermenegild, with most painting him as a traitor who rebelled against his father for political gain. Gregory the Great, however, championed Hermenegild as an exemplary martyr who died in defence of the Faith. One thousand years on, Spain saw a revival of its Visigothic ‘Golden Age’, and Hermenegild was among those to be venerated; he was canonised in 1585 and his memory was brought to life in various artistic forms; in poetry, paintings and even on the stage. This paper will examine the part that Sor Juana's auto played within this tradition, exploring the purpose of the play and the various historical and biblical sources used to create it.     

From The Iron Curtain to Franco’s Spain: Right-Wing Central Europeans in Exile

After the Second World War, anti-communists of different backgrounds from Central and Eastern European countries decided to settle in Franco’s Spain, where they sought safety and a place to live during the Cold War. This article will provide an overview of their political profiles and assess the reasons these exiles chose Spain, a country excluded from the United Nations until 1955 and led by Francisco Franco. The article also shows how they settled in the dictatorship linked to the Nazis and Italian Fascists, and the ways in which they continued their struggles against Communism with public and private resources.     

Monitoring the French Panthéon: From Rondelet’s Historical Surveys to the Modern Automatic System

The damage of a historical structure can be today controlled with many sophisticated instruments. Nevertheless, this type of monitoring can give information only over a very short period of time compared with the long life of the building. This approach can be insufficient to reconstruct the whole evolution of the damage, and thus to understand the stress distribution inside the structural elements, particularly in cases for which long-term phenomena (such as viscosity or soil settlements) are present. To reach this more complex aim, an approach of historical monitoring should be applied, both looking at technical historical documents and surveying the traces of history directly on the monument itself. The case of the French Panthéon is presented in this study, showing the usefulness of this approach also for the present stability assessment. The comparison among the plentiful historical documentation (including 18th-century surveys, monitoring, and technical reports), the present surveys of deformations and the “modern” structural monitoring allowed a complete quantitative reconstruction of the main damages evolution from the construction till now, laying the base for a possible future conscious intervention.     

Sur les traces de Cortés: L'expédition du Mexique d'après Le Monde illustré

Unlike L'Illustration, with which it competed under the Second Empire, the weekly Le Monde illustré, which first appeared in 1857 and which was protected by the imperial government, did not count among the political newspapers overtaxed under Napoléon the Third's repressive regime. For this reason, it made great strides thanks to its blind allegiance to a French imperialism that had asserted its authority during the Crimean war, but which spent itself during the war against Juárez and his republican partisans in Mexico. While the French liberal press criticized the Second Empire foreign policy, Le Monde illustré persisted in turning the Mexican war into an antijuarist pacification favorable to a new Latin colonial empire, as well as to an application of the Saint-Simonian doctrine on Mexican industry and economy. In order to achieve this, the illustrated reports on the expeditionary force, military operations, and French victories were a warmongering that aimed to place this campaign in the afterglow of the conquistadors' era, as well as to idealize the imperial army as a symbol of the French nation.     

From Old Practices to New Governance Models: Contractual Schemes in Africa’s Political Development

Drawing on various historical documents, the article uses process tracing methods and analytic narratives to establish a relationship between historical contractual practices and state formation in nineteenth-century East Africa. I trace the process through which local political leaders historically sought to secure monopolistic deals over trade with foreign entrepreneurs through incomplete contracts for tangible economic goods (arms and slave trades, manufactured goods) and intangible political goods or services (security, knowledge, independence). By showcasing agents’ bargaining strategies in contractual agreements, the article sheds light on notions of sovereignty and independence articulated through public contracting in Africa’s political development. Historical understandings of notions of independence and sovereignty by procurement practitioners in East Africa provide seeds for thought in controversial debates about government outsourcing today. Is outsourced sovereignty always threatening? Can we outsource sovereignty and remain independent? These are perhaps the most important conceptual queries that make East Africa’s historical contractual experience pertinent today as new public-private partnerships for development, including government outsourcing, increasingly call for the use of private means to solve public problems in the developing countries.