CfP for the panel Text, Space, Memory: Italians Rewriting the Global and U.S. Souths
This panel investigates how Italian transnational communities, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have produced, negotiated and monumentalized cultural identity through literary texts, material practices and spatial imaginaries. Bringing together approaches from Italian studies, ethnic studies, literary analysis, spatial theory and material culture, the panel considers how Italian migrants in the Global and U.S. Souths used both texts and objects to articulate belonging, negotiate racial hierarchies and inscribe themselves into local landscapes.
We invite papers that explore how identity is shaped, contested, and remembered through:
1. Literature, Journalism, and Migrant Voices
- narrative and poetic representations of Italian migration and settlement;
- ethnic print cultures (e.g., community newspapers, serialized fiction, civic writing, public rhetoric);
- writers, editors, grassroots intellectuals and cultural mediators who shaped local identities
2. Spatiality, Modernity and the Italian Imagination
- spatial representations of modernity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature or visual culture;
- literary constructions of southern geographies (Mediterranean, Latin American and U.S. Souths);
- the role of space in negotiating whiteness, marginality, or social mobility.
3. Material Culture, Craft, and Memorial Practices
- Italian American memorialization practices (monuments, plaques, markers, commemorative objects);
- Italian craft, artistic labor, and material expertise in the creation of southern monuments:
- intersections between artisanal traditions, racial identity, and cultural memory.
4. Archives, Public History and Digital Humanities
- community archives, material or textual;
- digital approaches to migrant storytelling, spatial mapping or narrative circulation;
- public-facing practices that connect literature, objects and community memory.
We welcome contributions from literary studies, Italian studies, ethnic studies, art history, spatial humanities, history and digital humanities. Papers addressing understudied archives, multilingual sources, or intersectional methodologies are especially encouraged.
Please submit a 250–300 word abstract and a brief bio (50–75 words) to the panel organizers, Matteo Brera and Alessia Martini, at matteo.brera@unipd.it and almartin@sewanee.edu by December 12, 2025.
This panel is part of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature’s 2026 Biennial Conference; for full conference details, please visit the official SSSL conference website: https://southernlit.org/conference/
