Session Abstract

Although Italians have often been –and still are - on the move (as migrants, exiles, colonialists), the history of modern Italy has tended to privilege a domestic, national perspective and to confine major phenomena such as mass migration and even colonialism to the margins of the national narrative.  Recent historiography has paid more attention to these integral components of the national past and has begun to investigate more systematically the connections between domestic political and social developments and the history of colonialism and migration. Yet much work remains to be done to redirect the historiography of modern Italy in a more global and transnational direction.        

This panel proposes to contribute to this reorientation of the historiography of modern Italy by assembling a group of scholars who specialize in comparative and/or transnational history -albeit with different approaches and methodologies, ranging from intellectual/cultural to social and institutional history.  The different subjects of their papers - the US experience in the shaping of nineteenth-century Italian nationalist/republican discourse; Italian colonialism in a global context in the aftermath of the Adowa defeat; the continuing role of the Italian diaspora in the shaping of citizenship laws - all point to the variety of world locales that enter into the making of national political cultures and experiences. They also show the importance of the international/global dimension for understanding -and complicating- the trajectory of national history.      

Gathering historians operating in different institutions in both the US and Europe, the panel also hopes to stimulate a reflection on the historical subjects and practices that could best serve the revision of old national narratives and the production of new ones, more apt to speak to an age that witnesses increasing flows of people across borders and the formation of identities that challenge the order and the conceptualization of the nation state.