Abstract

My workshop positions some Italian sof-porn films produced and broadcasted in the Seventies within the semantic context of the Republican coding of race, beauty and gender, in order to map continuities and discontinuities between, on the one hand, ‘post-Fascist’ constructions of (white and heretosexual) masculinity and (black) femininities, and, on the other, Liberal and Fascist ideas of race, gender, and visuality.

It focuses on the specific roles played by Indonesian-Dutch-Italian Laura Gemser in the “Emanuelle nera" series (Emanuelle nera by Albert Thomas 1975, Emanuelle nera - Orient Reportage 1976 by Joe D’Amato) and on the characters played by Eritrean-Italian actress Zeudi Araya (La ragazza dalla pelle di luna 1972, La ragazza fuoristrada 1973, Il corpo 1974 by Luigi Scattini).

They will be framed within a braoder exploration of visual productions (1962-1980) focused on constructions of black femininities and white masculinities within a numer of other filmic productions – from neo-realist docu-fictions (Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giovannino Guareschi), to mondo-movies (by Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara e Franco Prosperi) and horror-mondomovies (by Ruggero Deodato, Lucio Fulci). In fact, althought they belong to different genres, this broader production shares some important features – that is, the eroticisation of the exoticised/eroticised Other(s) – that I propose to identify by means of two main concepts: post-Fascist postcolonial male heterosexual ‘voyerism’ and ‘symbolic anthropophagy’.

Recommended Readings:

Giuliani, Gaia (2016), “Gender, Race and the Colonial Archive. Sexualized Exoticism and Gendered Racism in Contemporary Italy”, Italian Studies, 71 (4), 550-567.

Giuliani, Gaia (2014): “L'Italiano Negro”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16 (4), 572-587.

[Para ter acesso aos artigos em discussão deverá enviar um e-mail para gw@ces.uc.pt]

Bio

Gaia Giuliani (PhD University of Torino 2005; Postdocs University of Bologna 2009; University of Technology Sydney 2010) is FCT postoctoral researcher (2015-) at the Centro de Estudos Socias (CES), University of Coimbra, Portugal, undergraduate supervisor at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK (2014-2015), and founding member of the Interdisciplinary/Intersectional Research Group on Race and Racisms (InteRGRace) based at the University of Padova (2014-).

She has been honorary visiting scholar at the University of Technology Sydney, NSW (June2007-June2011), at the University of Leeds, UK (Oct-Dec2013) and at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK (April-Dec2014).

Among her publications: the authored books Beyond curiosity. James Mill e la nascita del governo coloniale britannico in India (2008); Bianco e nero. Storia dell'identità razziale degli italiani with dr. Cristina Lombardi-Diop (2013), awarded the First prize in the 20^th-21^st century category by the American Association for Italian Studies; Zombi, alieni e mutanti. Le paure dall’11 settembre ad oggi (2016). In 2015 she also edited the collective book Il colore della nazione on visuality and race in post-colonial Italy (2015). She has also translated (R. Guha, G.C. Spivak, T. Asad, J. Butler, Ch.T. Mohanty) and published several journal articles and book-chapters in international and Italian academic journals on the racial and colonial imaginary entailed in British, Australian and Italian imperial experience and on the contemporary Euro-American debate on race and racism.

Since 2013 she is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Australian academic journal Settler Colonial Studies. In 2013-2015 she has been Secretary of the Editors of the Italian academic journal Studi Culturali. Since 2016 she is member of its International Advisory Board.