Daniela Dalpra is not a current MLA member as of 14 April.
Lidia Radi is not a current MLA member as of 14 April.
The goal of Searching for Inclusion in multilingual and multicultural world: Italy is to explore the complicated cultural and political barriers facing immigrants, especially those from Africa and China to a new nation, as well as those systemic practices of social injustice which spur anti-immigrant sentiments, racism, and gender discrimination. This particular topic intersects with many parallel issues that immigrants also face upon arrival in the United States. This special session will consider the ways in which these challenges to identity, as well as citizenship are confronted within immigrant and non-immigrant communities. The final presenters, will examine the ways in which a conscious evolution of the Italian linguistic system and language, might in some ways support inclusiveness in Italy and in the L2 classroom abroad.
Dr. Daniela Del Pra will begin the panel with a discussion on the intricacies of the path to Italian citizenship and the laws that govern it, which disproportionately affect Italians of African descent born on Italian soil. Of particular importance and interest to this panel, as well as the President’s Theme of a Multilingual US, is the recent proposal to obtain citizenship by means of cultural exposure for those second-generation Italians who are born, raised, and educated within the Italian school system. This concept of Ius culturae however, also raises questions about assimilation versus integration, as well as those concerning individual identity. Dr. Del Pra’s presentation will set the stage for those that follow by providing the “social foundation” upon which multilingualism and multiculturalism clash and/or mesh with the primarily monolinguistic Italian society, which despite a national mandate requiring the study of 2 or more languages, tends to not recognize immigrants (or speakers of other languages) as fellow citizens, or rather, equals.
The next two presenters in this special session, will speak directly to issues of identity, inclusion, and belonging facing two other immigrant communities in Italy, Chinese and Albanian.
First, Dr. Gaoheng Zhang will introduce attendees to Chinese migrant Sonia Zhou (or Zhou Fenxia) of Rome, who has been covered extensively by important Italian and English-language news outlets, becoming a veritable Chinese food celebrity in Italy. In his timely presentation, Food and Epideictic Rhetoric: A Chinese Restaurant Celebrity in Italy and Her COVID-19 Story, Dr. Zhang will consider issues of resurgent anti-Chinese/anti-Asian sentiment in Italy from both visual and sociolinguistic perspectives. He will discuss the important role that Ms. Zhou is playing right now, in the fight against racism and Covid-19 inspired discrimination occurring throughout the peninsula. The intersection of the Italian and English languages, foodways, and Zhou’s “star status” among the Italian and Chinese communities has helped to bring about cultural, if not linguistic understanding between the two cultures.
Gender, class, and ethnicity, and the ways in which they are perceived by Italians, are central to the next presentation, by Dr. Lidia Radi, Le belle ragazze albanesi: Trading Female Bodies in Dones’ Sole Bruciato. In 2010, Elvira Dones, a transnational writer of Albanian origins, published a powerful response, in the newspaper La Repubblica, to then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s labeling of young Albanians as “le belle ragazze albanesi,” an obvious reference to the mediatic image of vilified young women selling their bodies in the streets of Italy. Dones’ impassioned letter illustrated that the prostitution of young women was not a voluntary action, rather, an abhorrent phenomenon of human trade that traversed national borders. In her presentation, Dr. Radi will examine global mechanisms of corruption, oppression, and complicit silence that subjugated young women, often minors, to a lifetime of servitude and trauma, as well as the effect of the language and linguistic tendencies used to subjugate women, especially by those in power.
In the final presentation of this panel, Renewing the Italian Language to Fight Social Bias, Sara Galli and Mohammed Jamali, will discuss the inherent flaws of the Italian language, with regards to racism, sexism, and other biases. They will consider some of the issues discussed in the previous presentations, from a sociolinguistic perspective and offer suggestions for teaching Italian in the L2 classroom in a way that is both inclusive and socially just. This final presentation will conclude the session and provide tangible suggestions for promoting multilingualism and multiculturalism in our teaching of Italian, in a monolinguistic country.
Each presentation will be limited to 13 minutes, thus allowing for any technical issues that may arise and leaving 15 minutes at the end of the session for unstructured discussion.