Geographies of the Elsewhere: Italy and the Making of Global Imaginaries

This graduate seminar examines how the imagination of places situated “elsewhere” has been instrumental in shaping Italian culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Through close analysis of literary texts, essays, and films, students will consider how ideas of distance, alterity, desire, limit, and crisis have been generative for spatial imaginaries extending across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, Africa, and the planet. Themes and authors addressed in the course includes Antonio Gramsci and the Southern Question; Fascism and confino; the Mediterranean Sea between history and myth (Elsa Morante, Cesare Pavese, Anna Maria Ortese) and its contemporary militarization as a border; transatlantic emigrations; colonialism and its legacy (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gabriella Ghermandi, and the contested memory of Cristopher Columbus); planetary and multispecies thinking (Anna Maria Ortese, Giacomo Leopardi).