Deadline: December 9, 2022
Contact: Gioia Woods, Northern Arizona University
Email: gioia.woods@nau.edu
Phone: 928-255-3560

Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”

July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

In the Introduction to Italy and the Environmental Humanities, editors Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past describe a peninsula in environmental crisis, a victim of what they call “the strange mechanism that transforms cultural richness into misery, and public good into a private supply for short-term speculations” (2). While that continues to be true in many sectors, there are abundant examples in the country’s arts, literatures, and social practices that suggest what political scientist Elinor Olstrom called a “miracle of the commons.”

This panel seeks to understand and problematize historic and contemporary practices and representations of the commons in Italy and the Italian peninsula. How do land use practices—from the latifundia to the mezzadria— appear in literature and visual art, in culinary practices and activist agendas? What traces do these systems of slavery and serfdom leave on the Italian (or international) imagination? Where, from the Etruscans to the European Union, has competition for resources (animals, soils, marbles, seas, seeds, etc.) become tragedy, and where has collaborative management given rise to miracle?

Topics for this interdisciplinary panel include but are not limited to:
• Italian writers, historical or contemporary, at home or in diaspora
• Artists, writers, activists and theorists imagining and transforming the Italian commons
• Monuments, museums, markets
• Locations of resilience, resistance, and rebuilding
• Intersections among historical and political legacies and cultural expression
• Italian environmental humanities

Submit abstracts of ~250-300 words to Gioia Woods (gioia.woods@nau.edu) by December 9, 2022.

Posted on October 14, 2022