Fuori dal coro: Cultura pop femminile e mutamento sociale nell’Italia del dopoguerra
by Elizabeth Leake

Fuori dal coro discusses the role of women in Italian pop culture from the postwar period to 1980. It analyzes pop culture as a phenomenon capable of recording processes of cultural transformation and influencing Italy’s social and political dynamics. The feminist revolution that swept through Italian society in the second half of the twentieth century did not only take place in the squares and assemblies. Popular culture, too, played a fundamental role in generating change: cultural products considered purely entertaining, which did not convey explicitly political messages, were able to influence individual habits even more than explicitly revolutionary cultural operations. Popular culture reflected the changes taking place in society, but at the same time promoted them, making them possible. It was a form of grassroots activism, acting on the level of the everyday and the informal. Pop served as a vector for the recognition of women as political subjects, giving strength and weight to the causes that were being advanced, in various forms, by feminist collectives and consciousness-raising groups. Examining, among others, sentimental tunes, the raucousness of the Urlatori, musicals, melodramas, feminist retreats and teenage coming-of-age stories, Leake’s research (some of which was conducted as a Heyman Fellow) delineates an innovative history of Italian feminism that elucidates how Italian mass culture was deeply political, more capable of impacting individual habits than the cultural artifacts programmatically promoted by the Left.

About the Author

Elizabeth Leake iis a professor and Chair in the Italian Department at Columbia. Her research interests include twentieth-century Italian narrative and theatre, the cultural history of Fascism and of the Republic, and the history and criticism of Italian cinema. She is a recipient of the Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies for her first book The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone (2003) as well as The National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars. Her book, After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth Century Italy, was published by University of Toronto in 2011. A co-authored book on the history, literature, and cinema of internal exile during Fascism was published in 2019 with Manchester University Press. With Il Mulino, she published Tex Willer: un cowboy nell’Italia del dopoguerra (2018), which was reviewed in La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, and presented on the national radio program Rai Fahrenheit.

About the Speakers

Rebecca Bauman is an ​​Associate Professor of Italian at Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY in New York City, where she teaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures and is affiliated faculty in the Department of Film, Media and the Performing Arts. She is Film and Digital Media Reviews Editor for the journal Italian American Review, and she has published in such journals as the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Italian Studies, and Film, Fashion and Consumption.

Giancarlo Lombardi conducted his undergraduate studies in Italy, where he began his investigation of contemporary world literature. He came to the United States in 1990, and obtained a Ph.D. in Romance Studies at Cornell University, where he pursued his interests in 19th and 20th century Italian, French, English, and American literature, literary theory, film studies, and cultural studies. He taught Italian cinema at the University of Rochester, and then spent four years at Smith College, where he taught Italian language and literature. Since 1999, he has been working at the College of Staten Island, where he coordinated the Italian program as well as teaching courses in Italian, Film Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies as well as Science, Letters and Society. In 2002, he received an appointment in the Comparative Literature program at the Graduate Center, where he has taught courses on Italian Cinema, Italian Women Writers, the Decadent Movement, and Gender Studies. Since 2014, he has been serving as Executive Officer (Chair) of the PhD/MA Program in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Jennifer G. Rhodes is a Lecturer in the Department of Italian at Columbia University. Her research centers upon sites of interchange between literature and the visual and performing arts, with a specialization in opera and the novel. She is particularly interested in the ways in which narratives travel across the permeable membranes of medium, culture, and time. Her current book projects are a monograph that explores the influence of Richard Wagner on the modern novel, and a large-scale translation of Wagner's theatrical and theoretical works.

Nadia Urbinati is the Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University. She is a political theorist who specializes in modern and contemporary political thought and the democratic and anti-democratic traditions. She co-chaired the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Political and Social Thought and was a co-editor with Andrew Arato of the academic journal Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Foundation Reset Dialogues on Civilization and the Feltrinelli Foundation (Milan).

Please note that the panel and discussion will be conducted in English.

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