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This chapter examines an Italian collection of refugee stories from 2018, Anche Superman era un rifugiato: Storie vere di coraggio per un mondo migliore (Superman Was a Refugee Too: True Stories of Courage for a Better World) to analyze key elements that Italian literature brings to discourses about migration literature, including questions about who is included in this category and the connections between texts and authors across time. Arguing for the importance of including untranslated works in debates about migration literature, the chapter puts Anche Superman era un rifugiato in conversation with two well-known collections, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (2018) and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns (2019) in order to trace how Italy is positioned in these three migration literature anthologies. Italy decenters ideas of one-directional migratory movement, because its history, geography, and politics highlight the complexity of describing migratory movement and the issues with assuming all countries follow similar models in terms of migration and its representations. The chapter ends with a discussion on how Anche Superman era un rifugiato reveals the connections between colonialism, migration, racism, and antisemitism in Italian history and criticism.
This chapter considers exile as being fundamental to the origins of Italian poetry through the lens of the twelth-century Sicilian Arab poet Ibn Hamdîs and how his nostalgia for Sicily resonates with the global affinities forged in Dante’s Commedia. How might our ideas of Italian literature and identity shift by considering the Arab poets of Sicily as part of the Italian canon? In similar fashion, how might we orient our reading of Dante through the perspective of migration? Aspects such as self-identification with the cultural other, experiments in multilingual poetry, and expressions of global connectivity emerge to give voice to a poet attuned with the medieval realities of migration and one whose vision is by no means to be relegated solely to the world beyond.
Touted as the first testimonial written in Arabic (Morocco’s official language) about the experience of Moroccan migrant workers in Spain, Rachid Nini’s Diario de un ilegal (Diary of a Clandestine Migrant, 1999) speaks to the multilingual nature of contemporary Spain – and therefore, Spanish letters. This chapter analyzes how Nini interrogates presumptions about North African migratory flows precisely by directing an Arabic literary work to a Spanish audience. Tybinko argues that, while Diario de un ilegal has often been read in terms of migrant precarity, it similarly speaks to Spain’s own precarious position within the European Union and the country’s contentious relationship with its neighbors to the South. Drawing on Judith Butler’s definition of precarity, the author offers a vision of how works like Nini’s can therefore be read as an integral part of the Spanish canon. It is exemplary of the way narratives of migration fill a lacuna in the story of Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, from European outlier to gatekeeper for the EU, from sending to receiving country, and from bust to boom (and back again).
This chapter introduces the concept of the ‘aesthetic turn’ to describe the gradual broadening of the meaning of aesthetics after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and the greater openness of the USSR to the outside world that followed. The aesthetic turn resulted in the formation in the USSR of what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls an ‘aesthetic regime of arts’ – a mode of identifying different arts as equal and valuable in their specificity. The chapter analyses the new aesthetic regime of arts by highlighting its key concepts: realism, contemporaneity and taste. These concepts acquired new meanings during the 1950s–early 1960s: realism was now seen as a specific quality of things, not depictions; contemporaneity appeared as a measure of social relevance of an object’ and taste became a tool for probing the limits between authenticity and appearance.
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
This chapter shows that just as VNIITE designers had built a theoretical basis for action by the late 1960s and started developing new prototypes for modern household objects, such as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators, they also started to recognise the inadequacy of the object as a basic unit of socialist material culture. Following the theorists of the Ulm School of Design (1953–68, a school critical of American styling and promoting an interdisciplinary approach to design), VNIITE designers tended to see environments, and not objects, as the ideal end products of their work. Without abandoning the avant-garde’s idea of a comradely object, after the late 1960s Soviet designers and theorists dwelled upon another notion of the avant-garde: the artist as the organiser of all aspects of society’s life, including the material environments of work and leisure. After discussing several projects for home appliances from the early 1970s, the chapter explains the notion of a design programme – an elaboration including systems of objects, environments and labour processes. By analysing two cases of design programmes, one from the early 1970s and another from the 1980s, I demonstrate that this type of design was flexible: it intended to regulate broad areas of human activity but also left space for consumer activity and variation.
The introduction surveys the approaches of material culture and objects starting from the 1920s avant-garde and ending with recent critical inquiries. It situates the book’s subject in relation to the avant-garde both as a historical precedent and a theoretical framework, reinvigorated by the recent material turn. It explains that the concern for things was at the forefront of Soviet designers’ professional ambitions and attitudes towards the socialist system, and, therefore, things can say a lot about late Soviet professional and intellectual culture. The introduction then proceeds to outline the story of Soviet design activities and institutions between the state’s repudiation of the avant-garde and the death of Stalin in 1953. Further, the introduction describes the methodology and sources of the book: how different materials are approached and brought together. And, finally, it critically engages with the key terms – ‘avant-garde’, ‘material culture’, ‘design’, ‘decorative art’ – and outlines the content of the following chapters.
This chapter considers the identity crisis of the 1970s–early 1980s, experienced by decorative artists in the state-sponsored infrastructure including factories, workshops and exhibitions. It shows the joint attempt of artists and critics to renegotiate the position of decorative art vis-à-vis industrial design, industrial production, craft and easel art. The proposed solution – the creation of a vigorous interdisciplinary production culture based on mutual respect between artists, engineers, technicians and administrators – proved insufficient to satisfy the decorative artists’ creative and critical urges. Even factory-employed artists tended to dissociate themselves from the state-run campaign to improve consumer products and living standards, instead promoting anti-utilitarianism, and focusing on consumers’ ‘spiritual needs’. I illustrate this tendency using the case of the non-pottery ceramic group One Composition, which was active in Leningrad from 1977 to 1986 and proposed the notion of ‘image-ceramics’ as opposed to pottery.
The chapter identifies an artistic tendency that emerged in the 1960s that I call, following art critic Iurii Gerchuk, ‘neodecorativism’ — a set of artistic strategies to redefine the meaning of decoration and reconceptualise applied art as decorative. Comparing works of applied art from the early and the late 1960s, the chapter reveals the techniques that the artists used to criticise the state-sponsored campaign to improve consumer culture. Far from being a tool of the Party and the government, Soviet decorative art in the late 1960s became a forum for commentary on the fundamental challenges of Soviet modernity and explored the language of postmodernism. It raised such questions as the place of individuality in the world of uniform mass production and consumption, the fate of traditional crafts in the industrial age, the role of diverse folk motifs in Soviet cultural internationalism and the meaning of sincerity and spirituality in a socialist society guided by Party dogmas. Working within the framework of Soviet institutions and policy guidelines, decorative artists and critics of the 1960s advocated the personal freedom of artists and of ordinary people without, however, explicitly resorting to the language of human rights and civil society.