Finding postcolonial figures: rediscovering Elvira Banotti and her role in the Italian feminist movement

In the late 1960s, many western countries witnessed rising social movements that challenged traditional ideas of gender and race. Italy presents a particular case where divided post-war politics, rapid economic growth and strong Catholic tradition created conditions in which intersecting phenomena of feminism and migration challenged conventional order. Elvira Banotti, a feminist writer from Italy’s former colonies, offers one striking example of this new configuration hiding certain women’s narratives from the public debate. Although historians have already looked at the history of Italian feminisms through a transnational lens, a postcolonial perspective is lacking from these discussions. This article seeks to offer a new perspective, employing a postcolonial lens and a focus on Banotti’s narratives to assess how both voices of women engaged in public debate and of women less heard, particularly of migrants, could provide a new postcolonial view of Italian feminisms.     

the ripples of violence

The received view in mainstream philosophy is that violence is an ‘act’, to be defined in terms of ‘force’ and ‘intentionality’. This approach regrettably and inexcusably tends to prioritise the agent performing the act of violence in question. This paper argues that we should resist this tendency, in order to prioritise the victim or survivor of violence, and her personal experience, not that of the perpetrator. Starting from an analysis of the devastating impact of violence that characterises the experience of sexual violation and its aftermath, based on the memoirs of Susan Brison (philosopher) and Alice Sebold (novelist), we will then proceed to argue that violence should not be thought of merely in terms of an ‘act’, but also as an ‘experience’, the difference being that an act is temporally determinate while an experience is temporally indeterminate. With the help of a phenomenological approach, we will argue that violence has time-indeterminate intended and unintended consequences; these are the ripples of violence. Finally, some of the moral, legal and political implications of acknowledging the temporal indeterminacy of violence will be highlighted.     

Twisting the knife: Frontier violence in the central Amazon of Brazil

The presence or absence of high rates of violence in the Central Amazon of Brazil, one of the last great frontiers of the world, is analysed in terms of a comparative approach to the study of global frontiers. Violence is shown to be low among historical peasantries in riverine and pastoral areas of old settlement located beyond the greater frontier where less inequity and imbalance between social classes, ethnic groups, sexual groups and age sets exist. The advancing frontier of open-field agriculture presents the opposite with some of the highest rates of violence in the country and is shown to be typical of a process of polarised development in Brazil.     

Reciprocity and rape: Blackness and the paradox of sexual violence

This essay expands Saidiya Hartman's unflinching paradigmatic analysis in Scenes of Subjection of the modes of historical continuity in which Black women are barred from reciprocity, recognition, and incorporation ab initio (Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.). By engaging the works of key Marxist feminist theorist Leopoldina Fortunati, I will demystify the ways in which these three homologies which non-Black women depend upon for the coherence of their complaint are parasitic on the flesh of Black women and men.     

postcolonial criticism,transnational identifications and the hegemonies of dancehall's academic and popular performativities

Despite the unprecedented freedoms that decolonization has brought for many Black people – especially in specific regions of the African Diaspora – freedom and its fulfilment, adequate signs and contested meanings remain a preoccupation within Black cultural discourses and practices. At the same time, while political and cultural nationalisms have led to greater political and civil rights, racism has not been eradicated. Furthermore, the new postcolonial globalizations of capital, people and cultures have destabilized the collective identities that framed twentieth-century struggles for national sovereignty and equal citizenship, without necessarily erasing them. Instead, they remain, no longer securely anchored in their old homogenous appearances, but re-configured through the inner differences and contradictions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religion. This article addresses these internal differences and the ways in which they produce new contestations over race, the meaning of Black representation and postcolonial freedom, negotiations that are increasingly traced on the intimate contours of the body and the self, through practices of personal consumption, erotic hedonism and style as key performances of freedom. It achieves this through examining two localized moments in the transnational and diasporic circulation of Jamaican dancehall culture, understood as a privileged public space for the performance of Black identifications and personal freedom. It argues that the eroticized discourses of ethnicity, race and gender found in dancehall culture articulate the dominance of neo-liberal conceptions of freedom at the same time as they express, resist and comment on new cultural hegemonies not reducible to racism or the power of the West; that is how dancehall expresses the new problematizations of postcoloniality.     

the gender politics of political violence: women armed activists in ETA

This article aims to contribute to the developing area of feminist scholarship on women and political violence, through a study of women in one of Europe's oldest illegal armed movements, the radical Basque nationalist organization ETA. By tracing the changing patterns of women's participation in ETA over the past four decades, the article highlights the historical factors that help explain the choice of a small number of Basque women to participate directly in political violence, and shows how these factors have differed from those for men. While the gender politics of radical nationalism are intricately linked to cross-cultural associations of militarism with certain forms of masculinity, the article also stresses the importance of understanding women's activism in ETA in the context of the organization's characteristic as an ethnic nationalist movement, as well as the wider historical circumstances of the movement's development, including the modernization of Spanish and Basque society over the past four decades. Although comparisons with women in other armed movements are possible, such historical specificities undermine any attempt to construct a universal theory of women and ‘terrorism’, such as Robin Morgan's ‘couple terrorism’ thesis. Finally, the article examines the changing representations of female ETA activists in the Spanish and Basque media. Although women ETA activists are now regarded as ‘normal’, popular representations continue to link women's armed activism with deviant sexuality and the transgression of their natural destiny as mothers. The different treatment of women is evident as well in claims of sexual torture made by some detainees. The article concludes that although the participation of women in political violence poses disquieting questions for the largely anti-militarist women's movement, case studies of women in armed organizations, as well as their place in the wider practices of conflict, are an important contribution both to feminist debates about violence and to wider studies of political violence.