Black Futurity and The Eternal City: Formal Innovations in Literary and Visual Arts in Cold-War Rome


 European Languages and Studies     Jan 27 2021 | 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM Zoom

This talk will position 1950s and 1960s Rome as a dynamic site for experimental Black American cultural production, with a focus on William Demby’s and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s respective work in and regarding The Eternal City and the Black Mediterranean. Their texts defamiliarize and reckon with racial injustice in the United States from a critical distance through difficult forms and layered temporalities. Demby’s and Chase-Riboud’s travels in the region and their collaborative practices with Italian filmmakers and artists in Rome activate more expansive futures on a global scale. 

Bio: Melanie Masterton Sherazi received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside, and is a former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at UCLA. This talk comes from her manuscript in progress about Black American writers’ and artists’ genre-bending cultural work in Cold War Rome and their Italian creative cohorts in the cinema and literary and visual arts. In Spring 2021, Sherazi will be in residence at the American Academy in Rome as a Terra Foundation Affiliated Fellow. Her scholarly work appears in journals includingModernism/Modernity,Italian Quarterly,ARIEL, andMELUS, and is forthcoming inPacific Coast Philology.

Respondent, SA Smyth:
Bio: Dr. SA Smythe is a poet, translator, and scholar working as an assistant professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA. Smythe is currently completing Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean, a transdisciplinary study of contemporary black literary production in Italian that addresses the racial politics of citizenship and black belonging. Smythe's work has been published or is forthcoming in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; Transgender Studies Quarterly; Forum for Modern Language Studies; The Middle East Report, gender/sexuality/italy; the National Political Science Review; The Johannesburg Salon; California Italian Studies; and elsewhere.

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