DaShoW Principal Investigator, Dr. Matteo Brera, will present at the 14th annual conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit), held at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) in Brussels from September 9 to 11, 2026, on the theme “Periodicals and the World.”
His paper, “Periodicals as Diasporic Worlds: Italian-Language Newspapers and the Spatial Pedagogy of the Jim Crow South,” argues that Italian-language periodicals published in the U.S. South between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should be read as diasporic worlds in their own right, rather than as mirrors of an external social reality. In a region marked by segregation, racial volatility, and contested hierarchies of belonging, these newspapers functioned as shared symbolic environments through which Italian migrants learned how to inhabit the South socially, morally, and racially.
Far from simply describing landscapes or events, the paper contends that Southern Italian-language periodicals actively produced spatial meaning. Through editorials, civic commentary, news reporting, and moral instruction, they translated the racialized geography of the Jim Crow South into legible norms of conduct: where Italians could belong, how visibility should be managed, and which spaces — urban, rural, institutional, or civic — were compatible with respectability and with emerging claims to whiteness. Racial awareness, in this reading, emerged not only as an ideological formation but as a spatial practice learned through print.
The paper further shows that these periodicals operated across overlapping spatial scales, embedding local reporting within transnational imaginaries that connected the U.S. South to Italy, the Mediterranean, and other Italian diasporic sites in the Americas — producing a layered geography in which the South appeared at once provincial and global, marginal and aspirational. It closes by situating these dynamics in current debates in periodical studies and digital humanities, suggesting that digital archival and public-history projects reactivate the ethnic press's original spatial work.
The paper forms part of the panel “Longitudinal Landscapes Across Literary Journals,” convened with Francesca Billiani (University of Manchester), Monica Jansen (Utrecht University), and Maria Bonaria Urban (University of Amsterdam). The panel explores how literary journals spanning Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States helped construct real and imagined transnational cultural, ethnic, and social spaces, and how periodicals can mediate between textual and material space. Alongside Dr. Brera’s paper, Professors Billiani and Jansen will speak on modernism in avant-garde and sacred architecture in Dutch and Italian periodicals, and Dr. Urban on tourism writing and the making of a fascist Italianness in the publications of the Touring Club Italiano.
This is the concluding conference output of the DaShoW project for the strand concerned with the spatiality of the Italian-language press, and it brings together the project’s archival findings and its digital-humanities work — including the mapping of businesses and localities in historical New Orleans as they appear in La Voce Coloniale and L’Italo-Americano.
Conference details and program: clic.research.vub.be/esprit-conference-periodicals-and-the-world
