Named after its first proponent, Socialist senator Lina Merlin (1887-1979), the Italian Law 75/1958 – as summarized on the website of IROKO (an Italian NGO “supporting victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation”) – «abolished brothels – 560 of them when it was approved -, the embodiment of State regulation of prostitution. It abolished the keeping of records of prostituted women, freeing them from the heavy stigma and providing an opportunity for them to escape from prostitution. Essentially, this law aimed to avoid any woman being forced, coerced or encouraged to get into or to remain in prostitution. The Merlin Law can be seen as a pioneer for recent abolitionist laws, approved in various countries around the world and it serves as our point of reference to reflect both culturally and politically on prostitution itself. Nonetheless, or perhaps precisely for this reason, the law periodically comes under fire».
As summarized by leading scholar of Italian Studies, John Foot, in his entry on Basaglia for the The Oxford handbook of phenomenological psychopathology: «A radical psychiatrist, Franco Basaglia was born in Venice in 1924. He came into contact with phenomenological texts while studying psychiatry at the University of Padua in the 1940s and 1950s. When he became Director of the Psychiatric Hospital in the north-eastern city of Gorizia in 1961 he began to apply these ideas to the reform of the hospital. Wards were opened, walls knocked down (by the patients), and meetings held. Gorizia became a beacon for change in 1968 with the publication of Basaglia’s edited volume L’istituzione negata (The Negated Institution) (Einaudi 1968). A movement developed which culminated in the 1978 “Basaglia Law,” which closed down the entire Italian asylum system».
You can browse the guide below, or otherwise feel welcome to ask me a PDF version.
Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance Languages (21)
The topic of the first Library guide Italian Studies was national identity, which easily related to diversity, equity and inclusion through the ways a given people defines its collective identity, and what kinds of diversity that identity includes, on equitable ground.
The present Library guide – on the mafia and other organized-crime groups – might seem less related to diversity, equity and inclusion, were it not for the ways that Italian collective history and identity and, therefore, (stereotyped) image and reputation, are often (prejudicially) defined by the role of organized crime in the Country’s past and present.
In the curricular context of a bachelor’s in Italian Studies it is therefore relevant to help students find scholarly sources about how fiction and media explore and represent the Italian mafia, and how such representations might contribute to (de)construct stereotypes and prejudices.
The Library guide is therefore organized around four different themes, i.e. mafia and literature; mafia and cinema/television; Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (two anti-mafia judges murdered by the mafia in 1992); and Questione meridionale and Mezzogiorno. Among the readings are titles such as Donne, mafia e cinema: Una prospettiva interdisciplinare (Women, mafia and cinema: An Interdisciplinary perspective), or La questione: Come liberare la storia del Mezzogiorno dagli stereotipi (The problem: How to free Southern Italy’s history from the stereotypes).
You can browse the guide below, or otherwise feel welcome to ask me a PDF version.
Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance languages (20)
This blog series, as laid out a year ago when starting, aims among others at being «a collaborative effort to help broaden and diversify both the UvA Library collections and the way staff and students, assisted by Information specialists, search, find and evaluate (scholarly) information».
Thanks to the collaboration with Elio Baldi and Linda Pennings at the Department of Italian Studies, aimed both at broadening the UvA Library holdings (with acquisitions on topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion) and at increasing students’ access and use of the UvA Library (books) collections, I’ve designed a ‘Library guide’ consisting of some reading lists on a given curricular topic, the first one being national identity.
Each list is introduced by the UvA CataloguePlus search on which it is based. While all listed publications are (at least in part) relevant to the topic, the readings are not meant to be exhaustive, as they are inherently limited by their drawing only from UvA Library holdings. Additional search examples from other online resources are given at the end of each guide. You can browse the guide below, or otherwise feel welcome to ask me a PDF version.
Postuum uitgegeven in 2022 door uitgever Seuil – samen met een interactieve website waarop de volledige tekst op verschillende manieren te onderzoeken is – Lieuxvan Georges Perec (1936-1982) «is een onvoltooid gebleven, autobiografisch en etnografisch project waaraan Perec werkte van 1969 tot 1975. Het bestaat uit jaarlijkse beschrijvingen van twaalf plekken in Parijs die voor hem persoonlijke ‘lieux de mémoire’ waren. Het zijn momentopnames van een bepaalde plek maar ook herinneringen die met die plek verbonden zijn. Het project mondde uit in een rijk en fascinerend geheel van teksten, foto’s en persoonlijke documenten»[Platform Frans].
Significantly, also the book winning the second prize at the Campiello 2023, Silvia Ballestra’s La Sibilla: Vita di Joyce Lussu, relates to women’s role during the Italian Resistance, as it explores the life of partisan, translator and writer Joyce Lussu (born Gioconda Beatrice Salvadori Paleotti, 1912-1998).
Tobagi and Ballestra’s success comes with the growing (scholarly) attention to the role played by women (also) during the Italian Resistance against nazi-fascism. This, combined with my personal interest in the topics – i.e. women in history, and the Italian Resistance – lead me to explore the UvA Library relevant holdings, starting with a visit to the P.C. Hoofthuis shelves where, among others, Tobagi’s book stands next to that milestone of Italian wartime diaries represented by Ada Gobetti‘s Diario partigiano, first published in 1956 (see the 2017 post Resistance as friendship: Ada Gobetti’s Diario partigiano).
The Library of Congress Classification Code (D802.I8*) assigned to all the books on the shelves corresponds to the Library of Congress Subject HeadingWorld War, 1939-1945–Underground movements–Italy, and as such helps to group several relevant printed titles on the same spot in the physical library.
Yet: realizing that another book I’ve recently read – and warmly recommend – Giovanna Zangrandi’s I giorni veri: Diario della resistenza, was not on the D802.I8* shelves, and being familiar with some LCC/LCSH’s idiosyncrasies, I decided for a wider exploration of the topic via de UvA CataloguePlus, which could also help discover relevant online sources.
If I run an ‘Advanced search’ in CataloguePlus by ‘subject’ or ‘title’ with (donn* OR women OR woman) (partigian* OR resistenza OR resistan* OR partisan) (italy OR italia*), twenty-two books are retrieved, ten of which are e-publications or have received another classification code than D802.I8*, i.e. they are elsewhere at the P.C. Hoofthuis Library. Nineteen titles (see list below) actually deal with the topic of women of the Italian Resistance.
By adjusting the different components of the search query – dropping (italy OR italia*)? Searching ‘Any field’? Including also journal articles? – it will be possible to vary the results. It will also be worth the effort to run searches for the names of (well-)known women partisans, such as the already mentioned Ada Gobetti (1902-1968), Giovanna Zangrandi (1910-1988), and Joyce Lussu, or Bianca Guidetti Serra (1919-2014), Elsa Oliva (1921-1994), Frida Malan (1917-2002), Silvia Pons (1919-1958), among others.
Fritz Peter Kirsch, Sur les francophonies et leurs littératures: Approches interculturelles «Based on an analysis of literary texts, this essay explores the historical phenomena that, from the Middle Ages to the present day, have led to the predominance of France, its language, and its culture. The relationship between French and Occitan culture is closely examined».
Dima Samaha, Le Pays envolé: Romans libanais de l’émigration (1998-2012) «The first comparative study of novels published between 1998 and 2012, in English and in French, by Lebanese writers who emigrated after the start of the civil war, this essay explores the narrative strategies and historiographical processes involved in a permanent questioning of filiation».
Active since 2016 and making the headlines with their protest at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, «Les Colleuses – the gluers – [are] feminist activists who have found a simple, cheap and effective way to make women’s voices heard» [source], i.e. pasting collages of black-lettered texts on walls, to denounce femicide and gender-related violence. While originating in France, similar (groups of) artists activists are now working also elsewhere, such as The Hate Lovers in Barcelona or LeDiesis in Firenze.
While the literature on graffiti and street art is vast, (scholarly) interest in the role played by women in the development of collage (i.e. the 2019 exhibition Cut and Paste at the National Galleries of Scotland) and of (overtly activist forms of) graffiti and street art (i.e. Diego López Giménez’s 2022 book Yo grafitera: Grafiti, street art y muralismo de mujeres) is – alas, unsurprisingly – more recent. Let’s take a look at how to explore it.
Before starting Even without considering this blog series’ focus on the Romance languages, it’s the international character of both phenomena – gender-related violence and creative answers against it – that advises to set up search strings in several languages and for different resources. While using French and English in the following examples, it is important to remember that the search strings below can also be translated into other languages and used in the same (and other) resources (check UvA-Library lists for Italian and Spanish).
Other (broader) search terms, and different (language specific) resources If deciding for a broader scope of our literature search, CataloguePlus can be explored with the following combination of search terms (or part of it), to find (scholarly) literature on:
feminist French street art (or French street art by women): (feminis* OR femme* OR woman OR women) AND (france OR francais* OR french) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
French street art: (france OR francais* OR french) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
feminist street art (or street art by women): (feminis* OR femme* OR woman OR women) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
At Google Scholar – first check its search options at the Library333 post Google Scholar: bias, settings, advanced search, alerts – you can use strings such as (“street art” OR graffiti OR collage OR collagisme) “féminisme” (mind féminisme’s grave accent and quotation marks) or (“street art” OR graffiti OR collage) women: compare the results when changing language, both of the search terms and of Scholar‘s interface (see screenshot below for an example).
Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance Languages (17)
Reviewed last month in The Guardianon the occasion of the hardcover release (by editorial L’Encobert), and published open access earlier this year, Las cartas de la memoria is an initiative of the association Memoria y libertad (Memory and freedom), began in 2005 «by relatives of people shot by Franco’s regime in the postwar years, with the purpose of sharing data, gather information, show the results online and contact other family members and relatives of the victims to pursue a just recognition and tribute to the dead» [source].
The volume is edited by Tomás Montero Aparicio, whose grandfather Tomás Montero Labrandero – one of over 2.900 Republicans executed in Madrid between 1939 and 1944 – was shot on June 14, 1939 in the Spanish capital’s Cementerio de la Almudena (earlier Cementerio del Este). To his cousin Martín, Tomás wrote the following few lines on the day of his killing:
Recto: To be delivered to Juan Álvarez Labrandero. Gallery 3 ª, Hall 5ª, Porlier. Farewell Martín. I’m sending you the purse with 6 pesetas and my ring for you to keep as memory of me. Farewell forever, good luck to all of you. Farewell.
Verso: Martín I bid farewell to you and the whole family forever. Farewell to all, your cousin. Tomás Montero
Among the documents and stories collected in the volume, both the postcards sent (after having decorated them) by Fernando Izquierdo Montes (killed on May 19th, 1943) to his wife and son, and the letters written by some women, such as Dionisia Manzanero Salas (shot on August 5th, 1939), help make for a collective portrait and poignant monument to the victims of fascist violence.
Dionisia Manzanero Salas (with rifle) and other members of the Batallón Octubre de la JSU-Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Unified Socialist Youth)
Postcard sent by Fernando Izquierdo Montes to his wife María Pascual Sánchez
N.B. English translations are mine. All pictures are from the book.
Blog Nostrum 