Cornette Gives Two Lectures on Black Italia for International Studies and Italia March 16 & 17

Carla Cornette, teaching associate professor at the University of Missouri, will be on campus Monday and Tuesday, March 16-17, with the International and Global Studies Program and the Italian Program discussing her research with our students. Faculty, staff and the community are warmly invited to join all of the following events.

On Monday, March 16, at 6 p.m. in J.B. HUNT 144, Cornette will give a lecture titled "Italiano vero/True Italian: Translating Ghali, Navigating Plurilingualism, Transculturality and Diaspora." This talk outlines a decolonial approach to translating Afro-Italian hip-hop artists, employing the music of Ghali Amdouni as a case study. The polyglottic, diasporic nature of the lyrics of Black Italian artists highlights their political and societal labor to recast Italy and Italian as also Black, plurilingual and existing at the intersection of multiple cultures and national contests.

On Tuesday, March 17, at 5 p.m. in Giffels Auditorium (Old Main 201), Cornette will provide a second presentation, "Leaticia Oedraogo's Nassan tanga: Afro-Italian Women Writers and Black Feminism in the Italian Context." The presentation collocates Nassan tanga, the decolonial manifesto-memoir of Leaticia Ouedraogo, Italian author originally from Burkina Faso, in the context of Black Italian women voices and their original contributions to the international conversation around Black Feminism. Via their activism and novel literary contributions, Ouedraogo and other Afrodescendant Italian women writers deconstruct the fantasy of a homogenous, monolithic racialized Italian citizen and proffer a utopian vision of a more just, humane Italy.

This event is being sponsored by a SEC Travel Grant and co-sponsored by the International and Global Studies Program, the Italian Program and The Professor Antonio Marinoni and Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni Endowed Chair in Italian. If you have any questions, or would like the texts that will be discussed in English, please contact Prof. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder (calabret@uark.edu).