Valeria Finucci, Duke University

Orientalism, Colonialism, and Post-Colonial Italian Literature aims at retracing the discourse of the “Other” as registered in orientalist, colonial and new immigration writing in Italy. We will start with early modern examples of racial differences (or racial erasures) during the Renaissance (as in Tasso’s rendering of the Ethiopian woman warrior Clorinda, in travel narratives of the Mediterranean like Eco’s Baudolino, and in accounts of North African slaves, etc.). We will add to this context the voice of non-Europeans looking at Renaissance Italy, such as Pamuk’s rendering of the Turkish fascination for Renaissance Venetian art in My name is red and Maalouf’s sense of papal Rome in Leo Africanus. Next we will examine the fascination for orientalism in the 18th century, as in the play by Gozzi, Turandot, in writings of visits to Turkish harems and in the fantasized Japan evoked by Baricco in Silk. We will conclude by visiting critically the discourse on colonization and the “meticcio” that propped up the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and Somalia under Mussolini and the more recent narratives of immigration by extra-European community nationals.

Required Texts:

Baricco, Alessandro, Silk (New York: Random House, 1998).
Giuseppe Verdi and Antonio Ghislanzeri, eds. Aida: Libretto in Italian and English (New York: G. Schirmer, 1995).

All other material for this course will be available in a course pack at the beginning of the semester or on line, according to the syllabus.