About

Italian Culture at NU

This website is the result of a semester-long exploration of the concept of “identity” and “national identity” in our introductory course in Italian culture and history. The term identity has established itself in the journalistic as well as the academic lexicon, and has entered the language of social and political practices and analysis since 1960s. Together, we’ve endeavored to understand identity as a category of practice in so far as it is used by a group of people in some settings to make sense of themselves, of their activities, of what they share with and how they differ from others (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). We learned how identity is constructed, performed, imposed and transgressed in different fields of inquiry from language, politics, economy, to stereotypical representation. We’ve explored several primary sources as well academic literature on the topics and each contributor has offered a deeper analysis of a specific aspect of “national identity” studied in class, complementing it with illustrative and supporting media. Along the way, we’ve analyzed, theorized, historicized, and critiqued the different ways in which this concept has been shaped and imagined throughout time and space in the Italian peninsula. …