Friday, April 27, 2018, 9:30am-5:45pm - Saturday, April 28, 2018, 9:30am-5:20pm - John D. Calandra Italian American Institute - Queens College, CUNY - 25 West 43rd Street, 17th Floor, New York NY 10036. Click here for the conference program in PDF form.

The 1935 song "Faccetta Nera," a paean to the Fascist imperialist enterprise in Africa, addresses the "little black face" that is the anonymous Abyssinian woman, an object of Italian colonial desire. This jaunty march with its suggestive miscegenation proclaims a gendered liberation of African women with the line "our law is slavery of love" (la legge nostra è schiavitù d'amore). The song was made famous by tenor Carlo Buti and eventually became a staple of festa band repertoires among the diaspora. In contemporary Italy black women are routinely taunted and humiliated with this Fascist-era tune.

The song is but one example of the myriad ways in which the body figures in discourses and cultural productions concerning Italy's histories and identities, within and well beyond the country's geopolitical boundaries.

This interdisciplinary conference recognizes the body in its literal, metaphorical, and hybrid constitutions as found in the modern nation-state of Italy, the larger Italian diaspora, and among former colonies. It builds on the array of seminal work on body politics mainly developed in women's and gender studies where corporeal imaginaries construct and reposition identity and agency.

Italy and italianità, with its complex position within a Western hegemony-connected to colonialism, transnational migration, and larger discourses of power-is a particularly interesting locus for focusing a series of critical interventions around the body.