Italian Modernities Lecture Series: Talk by Barbara Spackman on "“Accidental Orientalists: The Case of Leda Rafanelli”

Speaker(s): Barbara Spackman (UC Berkeley)

This talk will examine the cultural cross-dressing and conversion to Islam of the early twentieth-century Italian anarchist and writer Leda Rafanelli, and argue that these practices provided her with a site of enunciation from which to critique Western femininity. Unlike those of her nineteenth-century predecessors, Rafanelli’s cultural cross-dressing was performed with promise of neither commercial profit nor the thrill of transgressive passing on sacred ground. And unlike other cross-cultural cross-dressing female travelers such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Grace Ellison and Isabelle Eberhardt, Rafanelli did not favor the divided skirt (widely referred to by Westerners as “harem pants”) that was associated with freedom from strictures of femininity, both physical and social, but rather combined an “Egyptian” aesthetic with a “Gypsy” overlay that emphasized an Orientalized femininity.  The talk will attempt tease out some of the ideological implications of Rafanelli's cultural cross-dressing through a set of photographs taken between 1912 and 1919. 
 
About the speaker:
Barbara Spackman is Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, and holder of the Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair in Italian Literature at UC Berkeley. She works on nineteenth and twentieth century Italian literature and culture, with special interests in decadence, the cultural production of the fascist period, feminist theory, travel writing and Italian Orientalism. She is the author of Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio (Cornell University Press, 1989) and Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), which won the 1998 MLA Howard R. Marraro, and Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes for Italian Literary Studies. Her most recent book, Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2017 and won the American Association for Italian Studies Best Book Prize.
 
The talk will be held in English.