Research seminar: Migrant bodies
Thursday 28 February
1–2.30pm, Lecture Theatre 4, Science, Health and Education Building (I), University of the Sunshine Coast
Dr Francesco Ricatti will propose an innovative approach to migration and transnational studies, by reading and analysing selected and translated excerpts from Italian migrants’ letters written in the late 1950s in Australia.
In his approach the analysis of the relation between body and popular culture plays a central role. A history of Italian migration that ignores the body is connected to the construction of Italian respectability in migrant communities, where issues such as homosexuality, transsexuality, prostitution, abortion, infanticide, domestic and sexual violence, and mental disorders have been for too long hidden and consequently left solely to the attention of xenophobes who hold a negative impression of migrants.
On the contrary, a history of the migrant bodies should become an essential part of the history of (Italian) migration. This is not only a history of successful lives and wonderful contributions to the host countries where migrants went and settled. It is also a history of suffering, diversity, marginality, repression, semi-slavery, exclusion, illness, abjection, premature death and, at the same time, a history of escape, adventure, risk, interethnic and diverse types of sexual love, freedom, and hope.
Francesco Ricatti is Cassamarca Lecturer in Italian at the University of the Sunshine Coast. In 1999 he graduated in Contemporary Italian Literature from the University of Rome La Sapienza. In 2007 he completed his PhD at The University of Sydney. The title of his PhD thesis was Embodying Italian migrants. His main research interest focuses on the relation between body and popular culture in Italian and transnational contexts.
Members of the public are welcome.
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