The Invitation Circle

This article discusses an invitation circle, a process of inviting workshop and classroom participants into collaborative and humanizing inquiry, and provides guidelines for initiating an invitation circle. Drawing from indigenous and posthuman traditions, invitation circles model decolonizing inquiry, encourage participants to develop humanizing connections with one another, and foster imagination of futures unconstrained by the colonial imaginary.

«Et io ne vidi uno in Napoli». Orientalismo e processi di patrimonializzazione dei femminielli napoletani

In Naples, as in several other cities of the Campania region (Italy), the word femminiello/femminella “traditionally” refers to effeminate men who behave and act as women. In the last decade femminielli/femminelle were the subject of a true heritagization process, intended to enhace and capitalize their “ancient identity”, now considered on the verge of extinction. Nonetheless, still today, people who self-identify as femminiello/femminella embody an “old-fashioned way” ideal of femininity, sometimes claiming the specificity of their local identity, and distancing themselves from the LGBTQI+ representations and identities. Based on the data collected during a long term fieldwork in Campania, this essay focuses on the processes of production, reproduction and manipulation of the femminielli/femminelle’ identities. More specifically by crossing literature and field notes, I will propose an analysis of the interactions between an orientalist and colonial imaginary that “produces” the femminiello/femminella as otherness (southern) and the reversal that occurs with the distinctive claim of gender experiences embodied by people who still identify as femminielli/femminelle. How do these imaginaries interact? And what implicit stereotypes lurk in such representations?

Memories of the marvelous. The representation of monsters and fantastic creatures in colonial Europe

Starting in the Middle Ages, the marvelous included unknown and mysterious creatures living in unexplored places. They were referred to as monsters and belonged to a dimension halfway between fantasy and reality. The understanding and description of these creatures gradually changed as a result of the colonization in the 19th century, when they became part of the colonial imaginary of Western explorers (Surdich, 2003). Gabrielli has suggested that the colonial imaginary of Africa reinterpreted some stereotypes of the Middle Ages. It developed a «duality between positive and negative: history-nature, technological-primitive, religion-superstition» (Gabrielli, 1998, p. 25). The present paper provides a critical assessment of the changes which occurred in the 19th-century colonial imagery. It focuses on how the representation of monsters evolved and investigates into history of imaginary, understood as a cultural history of education (De Giorgi, 2004, p. 265).