Gender, Law, and Legal Pluralism: The Trial of Giovanna Tellini, 1868, Tunis

In 1868 criminal proceedings for contraband and grand larceny were instituted against Giovanna Tellini and her household by the Italian consulate in Tunis, a port-city then undergoing massive, unregulated subsistence immigration from Mediterranean islands and southern Europe. The trial record written in the hybrid Italian and Arabic spoken in North Africa at the time represents one of the few accounts of immigrant women and men of ordinary means and their social universe in the era before colonialism. As the consular inquiry into smuggling, burglary, and fencing operations in which Giovanna was implicated evolved, she appealed to conventional gender norms her social milieu to gain a more sympathetic hearing. Representing an unusually rich document, this trial provides a glimpse of how gender configured narratives of love, crime, and honor within an overarching regime of legal pluralism. My paper employs these proceedings and other documents to develop strategies for reconstructing the world of immigrant women through a consideration of how gender, law, and legal pluralism intersected, shaping the historical record.