Continuity / discontinuity in the history of 20th-century Italian art and culture. Visual arts, society and politics from fascism to the neo-avant-gardes (2018-1)
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Recently, national and international art historiography scholars dedicated to 20th-century Italian art have raised a call for new interpretive models and more detailed historical-cultural analysis, which are currently lacking. In particular, it is clearly difficult for non-Italian-speaking scholars to access untranslated sources and engage with a greater number of texts and voices, both primary and secondary, in order to carry out a well-developed reconstruction of contexts.
Without a revitalization of history/art studies, understood in the broader and more germane sphere of cultural history, we run the risk – and this is to a great extent the case of the journal October and the historians and critics who write for it – of advancing arbitrary interpretations, or of tying the entire reconstruction of the Italian 20th century, from the period between the wars to at least the neo-avant-gardes, to a “fascism|antifascism” antithesis which, although important, does not seem historiographically conclusive for a great many artists, critics etc. In fact, it has for decades been an object of debate among political historians, social scientists and jurists of the most diverse and varied leanings. Above all, we are incapable of grasping certain existing continuities in art history between the first and second halves of the 20th century, and thus of coming to terms with an issue that historians have been discussing for some time, which is: what, if any, are the social and cultural continuities in Italy in the passage from fascism to Republic, i.e. in a period of intense political/institutional discontinuity? And what are the links, or the disconnections, between the first and second halves of the 20th Century – say, the 1930s and the 1950s or ‘60s? With what “suppressed memories” of post-war or later historiography must the new generation of scholars come to terms with?
It has been suggested that “the idea of fascism as a parenthesis, or an isolated caesura between the fascist period and Republican Italy, is erroneous. Or rather, it corresponds more to the need on the part of contemporaries to establish a distance between fascism and themselves than to the reality of events.” (Sabino Cassese, Lo stato fascista, 2010). How, and with what expected outcomes, can the study of certain figurative documents, or the history of art criticism, or of cultural institutions, policies and heritage, contribute to a debate that has progressively widened its net since the 1960s to involve a diverse gamma of disciplines?
Today, it seems that we must go beyond our faith in self-declarations, memorials and testimonies (“ego-documents”) to approach works in a more aware and critical way, recognizing that there may be – and some have been widely documented – amnesias, retrospective self-restylings and distortions, and that the “ego-documents” we deal with, even in the light of dramatic political and social changes and urgent needs for individual repositioning, may be cryptic or reticent. It has often been observed that 20th-century Italian cultural history, marked by periods of profound political, economic, ideological and military upheaval, is a sort of layering or stratification: every generation rewrites it, altering “paradigms” and dictionaries. This makes it more difficult, but perhaps also more fascinating, to dig for clues and re-compose histories. And yet, it is evident that reductively mono-disciplinary points of view, considerations limited to a mere history of “style” and deracinated historiographic practices will never manage to get beneath the surface of the event and circumstances under discussion.
For historical-social, ideological-political and cultural reasons, the struggle between “resistance” and “assimilation,” between “identity” and internationalism, is dramatized to its greatest extent in Italian cultural history between the two wars and in the post-World War II period. Thus we must examine in-depth, applying a wide range of the most sophisticated instruments and from a long-term perspective as well, the themes of “consensus”, “nation”, “identity”, “inheritance”, “populace”, “responsibility” and others, if possible leaving aside pre-established positions and instead seeking to reconstruct the evolution of unrest, myths and “national self-representations” and their relationships to shifting continental or global contexts: for example, the post-WWI Europe molded by the League of Nations; the “new order” of the 1930s and early 1940s; the post-WWII Atlantic context; the Cold War and the protest years.
The interested professors, critics and scholars can submit their proposals to the evaluation of the Editorial Board by sending them as an attachment to the following email address:
redazione.pianob@unibo.it
Furthermore, in order to submit an article applicants must also comply with the following indications.
No later than the 27th November 2017 the applicants must send to the email address redazione.pianob@unibo.it as an attachment a text in a .doc format containing a short abstract (maximum length of 1500 characters, spaces included), no more than 5 keywords and a short biography of the applicant, the valuation of which is entrusted to the Guest Editors of the specific issue. In addition to the original language of the text, the abstract, the applicant’s biography and the keywords must be compulsorily submitted also in English. Once the abstract has been accepted by the Editorial Board, the author can proceed with the writing of the article (a monographic article or an essay) that must not exceed the maximum length of 30.000/40.000 characters (including footnotes and spaces). The drafting of the text, that can be written in Italian, English or French, must follow the editorial guidelines of the journal. All articles must be emailed to the aforementioned email address no later than the 15th March 2018, specifying the title of the article and the full name of the author in the body of the accompanying email. Each submission will undergo a double blind peer-review process and the article will be anonymously send to two referees. If the judgments of the two referees are in contrast, the Editors (dialoguing with the Guest Editor or the Guest Editors) will decide whether to take responsibility and publish the article or send it to a third referee. The Editorial Staff will communicate to the authors the evaluation process results. The upcoming exit of the issue of “piano b” is planned for Summer 2018.
See also Author's Guidelines
