On Friday, April 10, the Department of French and Italian will hold a one-day international conference on Modern Italian Studies. Organized by Italian faculty members Jonathan Mullins and Qian Liu, this conference explores new ways of understanding the agons of 20th and 21st century Italian social and cultural history. The theme "Rupture and Repair" endeavors to think about responses to them through gestures and practices, both material and immaterial, of restructuring and care, intentional redistributions of matter, energy and affect.
The term “rupture” seeks to understand a variety of disturbances: trauma, revolution, racial anxiety, environmental disaster, institutional chaos, the everyday and even what many have named slow violence. We are interested in different scales of rupture, micro and macro-bursts and breaks, with different temporalities, some plainly intelligible, and others with so long a duration that they are nearly invisible.
Repair would seem to be the inadmissible supplement to classic psychoanalysis, or a practice that belongs in an unattainable utopian fantasy. We are interested in assessing the retrospective vision of repair, the looking back that it entails, but also forms of repair that mean not the reassembly of past states, but insist on futures with very little resemblance to the present or past. Repair can mean reparations, but also reformations with that look like disassembly, disappearance.
These two processes – rupture and repair – are not isolated from one another; rather, they are inextricably linked in numerous ways. However, in this conference, we also seek to challenge the normative dialectical perception of rupture and repair – moments of rupture create the conditions for repair, and rethink their oppositional connotations (unease and despair vs. hope and utopian fantasy). How do moments of disturbance lead to new ways of thinking and organizing? Is repair an act of resistance or transcendence, or is it a process that unfolds just in response to ruptures?
Speakers (in alphabetical order):
- Timothy Campbell (Cornell University)
- Achille Castaldo (Emory University)
- Ramsey McGlazer (University of California, Berkeley)
- Angelica Pesarini (University of Toronto)
- Alessia Ricciardi (Northwestern University)
- Filippo Trentin (University of Pennsylvania)
- Rhiannon Welch (University of California, Berkeley)
Zoom participants are required to register.
The College of Arts and Science generously supports this conference through its Large Grant Program. For questions and accessibility concerns, please contact Jonathan Mullins (mullins.429@osu.edu) and Qian Liu (liu.12199@osu.edu).