This Roundtable on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy brings together scholars from the arts, humanities and social sciences to discuss historical constructions of Italian whiteness and national identity in relation to the current xenophobic discourse on race and migration, stressing their rootedness in as yet unchallenged modern notions of scientific racism. Building on postcolonial historian and anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s definition of the colonial archive as a ‘site of knowledge production’ and a ‘repository of codified beliefs’ in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009: 97), the discussants conceive the archive as a multi-layered, collective repository of aspiration, dominance, desire, self-aggrandizement and fear through which the development of society’s self-image can be revealed but also – through a systematic and critical approach to the (visual) archive of coloniality – contested. Based on the analysis of visual cultures (photographs, news footage, advertisements, propaganda, fiction film, etc.) the Roundtable addresses and connects wide-ranging issues such as: the gaze from above and below in colonial-era ethnographic film; the depiction of migration in the Far Right’s rhetoric; representations of fears and fetishisms towards Others in Federico Fellini’s work; and the exploitation of the colonial past in the Italy–Libya Bilateral Agreements on migration. The Roundtable was organized in response to the surge in xenophobic violence sparked by the Italian Parliamentary elections of March 2018 and to mark the publication of Gaia Giuliani’s monograph Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2018).

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意大利视觉、种族和民族圆桌会议

本次意大利视觉、种族和民族圆桌会议汇集了艺术、人文和社会科学领域的学者，讨论与当前种族和移民的仇外话语相关的意大利白人和民族认同的历史建构，强调其根植于尚未受到挑战的科学种族主义的现代观念。讨论者基于后殖民历史学家和人类学家 Ann Laura Stoler 将殖民档案定义为“知识生产场所”和“沿档案谷物：认知焦虑和殖民常识”（2009：97）中的“编纂信念的储存库”，讨论者将档案想象成一个多层次的、集体的愿望、支配、欲望、社会自我形象的发展可以通过自我膨胀和恐惧来揭示，但也 - 通过对殖民（视觉）档案的系统和批判性方法 - 存在争议。基于对视觉文化（照片、新闻片段、广告、宣传、小说电影等）的分析，圆桌会议解决并连接了广泛的问题，例如：殖民时代民族志电影中来自上方和下方的凝视；极右翼言论中对移民的描述；费德里科·费里尼 (Federico Fellini) 作品中对他人的恐惧和拜物教的表现；以及意大利-利比亚双边移民协定中对殖民历史的剥削。