Valentina Pagliai

Contrasting Histories: Italian Hip-Hop, Contrasto Verbal Duels and the Construction of an Afro-Mediterranean Belonging.  

American Anthropological Association meeting, New Orleans, November 2010.

This paper will consider some of the ways in which Italian Hip-Hop musicians articulate Italy as African and Mediterranean, rather than European. It will also consider the role played by Tuscan Contrasto verbal duels’ artists in constructing a connection between Hip-Hop and traditional Italian verbal duel genres. For the rap groups, the search for local legitimization (and for roots into local political communities) as well as authenticity in terms of a wider rap musical tradition, necessitates a reconstruction of Italian cultural history as African and Italian identity as migrant. This is facilitated by Contrasto artists, who are trying to make sense of the place of their art vis-à-vis other genres, on a global scale. The organizers of the performances hold an important role as well. These are a loose group of local intellectuals, fans and cultural activists, often belonging to the Left – many of them sympathizing with anti-racist movements that propose a multicultural view of Italian identity. These different social agents converge in creating an image of Italian Hip-Hop and traditional Contrasto duels as sharing an ancestral connection as Mediterranean genres, proposing alternative discourses of geography and history. In a moment when Italy is undergoing notable social changes (the inclusion in the European Union, the arrival of migrants from Africa and other continents), the rappers’ play with categories of race and racial belonging represents a form of opposition against the racism and exclusionary anti-immigrant policies of “fortress” Europe and of the Italian government.

Building the Normality of Racism in Media Discourse in Italy

Council of European Studies Conference, Montreal 2010

Why do traditionally leftist voters in Tuscany seem to have suddenly switched sides, voting for the extreme Right, and now advocating violent action against immigrants? Why it is possible for a crime such as apology of fascism, to become suddenly acceptable in Italy, in the name of defending the citizens from the threat of the “violent” and “criminal clandestine”? This paper focuses on the construction of a public opinion and the normalization and banalization of racism and discrimination against immigrants in Italian media discourse. Studies of the media’s influence on views of immigration have usually focused on the portrait that the media constructs of immigrants. In fact, the Italian media often propose a negative image of immigrants as poor, criminal, religious fanatics and even terrorists. However, there is a parallel and additional ongoing discourse in Italian media that could be subsumed as: “It is OK to be racist, since we have been cornered into it.” This discourse justifies racism as a “natural” answer to aggression, immigrant “invasion,” and injustice. The media thus allow people to interpret their racism as “justified racism.” This second effect must be scrutinized: the media not only represent the immigrants, but present to the Italians an image of themselves, interpreting for them what they feel and think (about immigration) and telling them that it is “OK” to feel and think that way. In contributing to an acceptance of racism as “normal feelings,” the media discourse aids the articulation of racist stances. These reinterpretations of racism as justified and natural clash against previously accepted views of racism as unjustified and “bad,” (and even “naturally” absent from Italy and fundamentally “other”). As acceptable in a regime of morality, racist discourse is now allowable and people do not have to “think twice” when proposing racializing and racist topics and stances. Finally, I will ask if this trend in the Italian mass media is an anomalous situation, or if similar trends can be found elsewhere in Europe.

Politics, Citizenship and the Construction of Immigrant Communities in Tuscany, Italy. Social Theory Forum, University of Massachusetts Boston.
Traditionally an immigrant-exporting society, Italy has become, over two decades, a receiving country, with the immigrant presence growing fourfold. In terms of receiving structures, laws, educational system, etc. Italy has been often unprepared for this influx. This created numerous obstacles to the immigrants’ successful integration, and a perceived competition for scarce socio-economic resources with the local population. At the same time, these immigration waves occur within the background of recent changes in European political and economic organization, and the connected attempts to create integration under a common European identity.  This is a period during which Italians identities are thus undergoing fast transformations. This paper will examine the role taken by Tuscan local institutions and voluntary associations in the processes of integration of immigrants in the larger Tuscan society. These institutions, I will show, tend to categorize immigrants as belonging in racial/ethnic “communities,” thus participating in processes of ethnicization and racialization. Particular immigrant persons, groups or elites thus come to be seen as representatives of the total of the immigrants and acquire political power, voice and, at times, funding from the institutions themselves. This on one hand further limits the channels through which immigrants may express their voices and, on the other hand, in so far as they can manipulate the available channels, allows them to advance as individuals or smaller groups. By establishing privileged interactions with these “fabricated” communities the local institutions also play at raising their authority and possibly garner votes.

The Unmarking of racist Discourse in Italy and the Role of the Media. American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 2008.
A great deal of scholarship demonstrates the importance of media discourses in sustaining racism. My paper will contribute to that literature with a slight shift of perspective. I will consider how media discourse contributes to transforming racializing and racist discourses into unmarked topics of conversation in contemporary Italy. I will show that this unmarking has special consequences, especially in terms of the footing that the conversationalists take; for example, by putting the listener in a position of having to agree or openly disalign and thus endanger face. The paper is based on research conducted since 2005, focusing on racial formation processes in discourses concerning immigrants to Italy. During fieldwork it became apparent that racist/racializing narratives about the immigrants were used to initiate conversation among Tuscans who knew each other very little, just as in the United States people may comment about the weather. In this paper I argue the following: 1) The “unmarked” status of racist and racializing statements makes it easier for people to introduce them in conversation. Unmarked conversational stances are part of a regime of morality, thus they need no justification. Their repetition in turn reinforces their unmarkedness. 2) The media have an important role in this unmarking, as they continuously produce discourses about immigrants that are racist and racializing, while also reconstructing racism as a natural answer to immigrants’ “invasion.” 3) In understanding structural racism, we must consider the interaction between the role of the media and the role of individuals in everyday conversations.

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Conflict, Cooperation and Face-Work in Contrasto Verbal Duels. American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC.
Verbal duels reveal a subtly complex relationship between conflict and cooperation. Tuscan Contrasto duels are designed to conflict. The performers use their arguing skills to bring to the stage and debate the politics, customs and morals of contemporary Italy, calling attention to contradictions. As such they are bound to present different views of reality, unnaturalizing it, producing entangled knowledge rather than establishing clear domains of right and wrong. Yet, in creating a successful performance, the artists are also cooperating (through the rhymes, by suggesting directions for their arguments, etc.). This in turn points to a need to re-examine the meaning of communicative cooperation: for example, can we say that cooperation means building agreement? In verbal duels performers can cooperate in building disagreement, while skillful arguing can build sharing and agreement. What appears as an attack and insult can be the fruit of a careful synchronization and collaboration of the artists. At the same time, the performers can use politeness to disrupt a performance: thus politeness may reveal underlying conflict. Insults do not necessarily threaten a person’s face. In verbal duels, the exchange of insults may be a key to success, protecting face. What threatens the face of the performers is not the insult, but the possible failure to meet the requirements of a successful and entertaining performance. Here it is problematic to understand face-work as coterminous with politeness and polite behavior. In verbal duels, people collaborate in constructing conflict, and can use politeness to destroy cooperation and to insult.

Co-authored with Giulia Marchetti: Conversational Footing and the Creation of Racialized Sameness and Difference in Tuscany. International Pragmatics Conference, Sweden, July 2007.
As Italy is quickly becoming a receiving country, immigration is today a common topic of conversation. Notions of what “the immigrants” are like or act like are continuously proposed in conversation. This paper looks at the way people, in everyday conversation, shift their footing and align or dis-align with each other during the telling of narratives about immigrants. Our findings are based on an ongoing research carried out in Tuscany, in the metropolitan area between Florence, Prato and Pistoia, an area with high immigrant presence. We videotaped everyday conversations in public places, such as barbershops and social centers. In these settings people often discuss at length the immigrants’ presence and their behavior. The simple mention of immigrants immediately shifts the frame of the encounter, as people begin to reflect on the behavior, ways of thinking, ways of acting, and causes for actions of “us” (the Italians and Tuscans), versus “them” (the Albanians, Chinese or other immigrant group). As the relevant parties come to be animated in the narratives, becoming characters in the talk, speakers participate in the everyday creation of discourses about identity, belonging, and race. In the articulation of participant frameworks around the telling of stories about immigrants and their behavior, conversationalists may align toward each other as if they were sharing identities (Italian, Tuscan, etc.), at the same time underlining sameness among them and difference from the immigrant other. Whenever discriminatory statements are introduced, the conversationalists are doubly pressured to align with them to continue upholding identity and to protect face. This mechanism seems to unavoidably work at reinforcing racializing or racist discourses already present in the society, by reproducing them and creating consent around them. However, in many occasions conversationalists can also contradict statements about the essence of certain immigrants groups or persons, shifting footing toward disalignment. It is extremely important to understand how this happens, and how people are able to effectively dis-align themselves from racist discourses and contradict racist or racializing narratives. Studying dis-alignments could furnish information on the ways people, in interaction, can deconstruct categorizations and make identities fluid. This information could in turn be important for those groups trying to fight racism. Institutions in Italy that today are training social workers and teachers as “cultural facilitators” may find, for example, that an effective technique to contrast discrimination against immigrants is to teach people how to disalign themselves from it. If it is true, as Cameron (2001) argues, that people think through the discourses they have available, then an effective technique could be to teach them to effectively use different discourses present in a society to contrast racist narratives.

Art, Insult and Freedom of Expression in Italian Contrasto Verbal Duels. Performance Studies International Conference in London, June 2006.
A genre of improvised sung verbal duel that has existed in Central Italy since the Middle Ages, the Contrasto has offered a place where the voices of the poor and the oppressed could be heard.  Silenced during the Fascist dictatorship, it continues to be performed today.  This unique form of folk performance addresses topics like the War in Iraq, Globalization and the misdeeds of Italian politicians.  The Contrasto is performed by two artists who impersonate two characters chosen by the audience, and proceed to exchange insults, using stanzas of eight verses each, in rhyme. I will present one of these Contrasto, in which the characters featured are “Prodi and Berlusconi” (the ex-European president and current Italian prime minister). Using an ethnopoetic approach to language use in performance, I will examine how the veils of the performative style afford a protection to the artists, who can invoke tradition when they have to defend themselves from accusations of having insulted public figures. I will also show how the poets achieve their critique through a systematic use of ambiguity and through a use of language that increases what Paul Friedrich’s called “the indeterminacy of meaning.” Thus tradition becomes action and art “authorizes” the creative person to become the commentator and critic of society.

Art and the Meaning of Being Human in the Tuscan Contrasto. Canadian Anthropology Society Conference in Montreal, May 2006.
Identity and a sense of the self are deeply connected to art and political militancy for the Tuscan Poeti Bernescanti. Their sung verbal duels, called Contrasti, have expressed the voices of the peasant masses for centuries. Here, I present the poets’ views of the essence of being human. I argue that their sense of identity, their vision of art, and their ethos as individuals contradict hegemonic views of “Italianness.” In their lyrics and through their lives, the poets contest sources of authority, to speak about art and about human feelings, reflecting on the deeper morality of existence in unresolved dialectics.

The Mirror of Ethnography: Interpreting the Creation of Italian Folk Art and Its Exclusions. Central States Anthropological Society Conference, April 2006.
In this paper I use ethnography as a tool to investigate how Italian folklorists and anthropologists have approached traditional art genres in a way that silenced, ignored or explained away those that did not fit into the mold of “ethnic art” they were creating. I will examine the case of the Contrasto, a Tuscan form of verbal duel where artists impersonate opposing characters and engage in a contentious dialogue, presenting veiled social critiques and attacking powerful political figures. This beautiful genre has been largely disregarded by Italian scholars or labeled as “not art.” I will argue that the reason for such disregard is to be found in its blurring the established boundaries of “folk art” and “high national art” categories.  The Contrasto destabilizes the boundary between oral and written tradition, going against the images of the rural folk accepted as a foundation of an Italian fictional sense of national self.

Anti-Language in the Contrasto and the Italian “Question of the National Tongue.” Council for European Studies International Conference, March 2006.
In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have demonstrated that nationalism constructs correspondences between imagined homogenous standard languages and imagined nationalities (Irvine and Gal, 2000:73).  In the Italian case standard Italian was molded in conjunction with an emergent model of Italian citizenship, in the nineteenth century.  These processes, establishing the subordinate place of the other languages present in the Italian state (considered since as “dialects”), however, have not gone unopposed. In this paper, I will examine how language use in Tuscan sung verbal duels, called Contrasti, destabilizes the “standard” language and becomes a centrifugal force in the Italian language.  Invariably seen as dangerous by the state powers, and as “gibbering” by the literati establishment, the Contrasto’s language could be seen as a form of anti-language expressing the voices of the subaltern strata of Italian society.  The non-homogeneity of the artists’ language, where several varieties are mixed with the use of poetic and obscene registers, points to the non-homogeneity of their identities and, by extension, of Italian identities.  By showing and exalting the indeterminacy of linguistic expression, the artists index the chaotic element, the assemblages that constitute the national language.  Their poetry points out the indeterminacy of meaning and structure, and thus the falsity of linguistic boundaries and the mythological essence of “standard” language.  To understand the impact that this last effect can have in Italy, I will discuss the fundamental role that the creation of the Italian language played and still plays in the attempts to centralize Italians under a nationality.

Co-authored with Elia Gilbert: “What We Don’t Know We Create:” Teaching the Art of Insulting in Tuscany. Central States Anthropological Society conference.
The Contrasto is a Tuscan Italian form of sung verbal duel, performed in improvisation by pairs of artists called Poeti Bernescanti. In the performances, the artists impersonate opposing characters and engage in a contentious dialogue, artfully insulting each other in highly structured and metaphorical poetry. Carrying on a tradition based in the middle ages, such duels are a locus for presenting veiled social criticisms and attacking powerful political figures. Today, however, the Contrasto is in danger of disappearing. Its survival is in the hands of a few young people that are still interested in learning it. This paper, based on an ethnographic research conducted between 1994 and 2001, will examine the contradictory and complex relationship between the older artists and their protégées. Since the first believe that poetic creativity is innate to the person and cannot be taught, the second feel they lack knowledge of the genre. Thus, relying on a copresent view of creativity as norm-breaking, they introduce changes in the music, the language and performance, to meet the expectations of new social contexts. The performances become the ground for a dialogue between two generations of artists, through which the Contrasto is changed from one generation to the next.

Verbal Duels: The Participation Structure of Disrupting Everyday Realities.  Poster paper, American Anthropological Association.
The relevance of gendered categories, political parties, occupational statuses, and the reputations of Tuscan medieval towns is commonly debated through the elaborately structured verbal duels that Tuscan Italians know as Contrasti. Carrying on a tradition based in the middle ages, such duels provide venues in which the form and substance of popular debate is set to verse. I conducted research on the Contrasti performances since 1994, showing how the performers can veil effective political critique and negotiate definitions of gender and ethnic identities. In this poster, using videoclips of the performances as well as their integral texts, I illustrate the elaborate rhymed structure of the duels that transform insults into a carefully calculated dance, where personal conflict becomes a filter through which to carry out attacks on social norms. I turn my attention on the form of the verbal duel to examine how ritual insults define a participation structure that allows for the disarticulation of everyday discourses defining common sense truths and realities. This participation structure allows for the collaborative disarrangement of face among participants: here selves and identities are made and shattered. From Rap to the Yemenite Balah poems, verbal duels are a form of expression and resistance in many cultures. Notwithstanding this, they have received relatively little attention in recent times. The poster intends to become a space to start a dialogue among scholars interested in ritual insults and their different forms across cultures.

The Construction of Images of Masculinity and Family Ties in Tuscan Verbal Art. International Pragmatics Conference.  Part of the panel “Masculinities in the Plural: Discourse Analyses of Men's Identity
Performances.” Works on gender today have pointed increasingly to the relationship between gender and kinship, interrogating their connections as they are both “concerned with understanding the rights and duties that order relations between people defined by difference” (Collier, J. F. and S. J. Yanagisako 1987 Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis.  Stanford: Stanford University Press.  Page 29).  Unfortunately, most of these studies are still centered on “womanhood.”  Masculinity and male identities seem to be still understood as separate from family ties. In this paper, I analyze and trace how in Tuscan Italian verbal duels, known as Contrasto, the difference between a man and another is defined according to their position vis-a-vis marriage.  As the dueling artists present themselves as “males,” they construct images of masculinity.  These include definitions of rights and duties connected to the creation and maintenance of the family unit and the meaning of “care” inside it. The Contrasto is a traditional genre of sung performance poetry, where two or more poets impersonate different characters and trade insults according to a chosen topic.  I videotaped these performances over several fieldwork periods between 1994 and 2002.  The topics that I will take into consideration include “the bachelor vs. the married,” “the husband vs. the lover,” “the husband vs. the wife,” and similar.  Here, the reciprocal insults among male performers most often involve attacks on each other’s masculinity. The analysis follows a Pragmatic and Ethnopoetic approach to language use to show that “men” as a discursively constructed category cannot be taken as existing outside social relationships.  The male identities portrayed in the Contrasto show that one is always a “man in relation to.”  Thus, I will argue, when the poet positions himself as a man, (but not a generic man, rather a husband, or a bachelor, etc.), he also positions himself with respect to a universe of social and family relationships.

Ideologies of Art and the Formulation of Subaltern Aesthetic Systems in Italian Verbal Art. American Anthropological Association.
This paper examines how artists and their communities construct alternative ideologies of style, performance and language use, accepting or resisting dominant definitions of art while strategically articulating subaltern aesthetic systems.  Definitions of art and artistry reflect dominant discourses, often reinforced by the hegemonic apparatuses dedicated to the study of “art” itself, like art academies, art critics and academic disciplines.  These definitions have important effects on the work and the bodies of the artists, since they create categorizations and hierarchies (“high” art, “folk” or “ethnic” art, etc.) that can then become reflected in policies of inclusion and exclusion.  The verbal artists and community artists I work with in Tuscany (like many other “ethnic” artists) often find themselves among the excluded.  As a result, they may be denied access to funding or performance venues.  While such artists have partially internalized the ideologies that portray them as “not really” artists and their work as “not really” art, on the other hand, they resist dominant definitions by creatively weaving alternative discourses around the meaning of art.  They reaffirm their systems of perceptions regarding their own and others’ performances, and their place in the panorama of various art genres.  In this essay, I will use data from interviews with Tuscan artists conducted during my past fieldwork on Tuscan Italian verbal art, verbal duels and community theater.  I will demonstrate how the alternative aesthetic systems that the artists share allow them to recover a positive image of the self, continuously re-constructing their identities as artists.

Co-Authored with Brooke Bocast. Performing Hierarchies: Language and Gender in Italian Verbal Art, Conference on Language Interaction and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles.
The study of the construction of hierarchies among women shows that women may uphold or oppose ideas of gender and gender roles in a strategic way, to obtain or maintain power.  In this paper, drawing on research on the performance of Italian verbal duels, known as Contrasti, we analyze and trace how the artists manipulate language to assert dominance over one another.  Many Contrasti require the poets to impersonate "women” in particular sexual or kinship roles (e.g. mother-in-law and daughter-in-law).  Thus the Contrasto becomes a locus where power relationships among women can be portrayed, contested and negotiated.

Co-Authored with Nedra Lee. Nationalism, Art and Language in the Unfinished Creation of the Italian Nation State.  International Conference of Europeanists. 
In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have demonstrated that standard languages are not only key to the creation of nation-states, but are themselves "imagined" together with the nation-states. In the Italian nation-state case a common language and a national art were molded in conjunction with an emergent model of Italian citizenship, in the nineteenth century. Through processes such as "iconicity, "fractal recursivity" and "erasure" (see Irvine, J.T. and S. Gal 2000 "Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation." In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities. Santa Fe: SAR Press), the Italian folklorists, linguists and literati were involved in the creation of this model of "citizenship." These processes at the same time established the subordinate place and definition of the other languages present in the Italian state (considered since as "dialects") as well as the subordinate positions of other aesthetic systems. This is the case of the "Contrasto," a Tuscan Italian genre of verbal art which proposes a view of art which is alternative and in partial opposition to the dominant image of artistry, thus proposing an alternative model of "citizenship." The creation of Italy as a nation-state was never "finished business," as contrasting interests intermingled in its definition, each contributing to the creation of today's Italian regional and local identities. Although pushed aside, art forms like the "Contrasto" have continued to propose alternative aesthetic systems that are both in opposition to the national view of "art" and that refuse to use the "standard" Italian language.

Singing the ‘Original’ Male: Doing/Undoing Masculinity in Speech Play.  American Anthropological Association.
This paper starts from the analysis of the “Contrasto,” a traditional Tuscan Italian genre of sung verbal duel.  The reciprocal offences among male performers in these verbal duels most often involve attacks on each other’s “masculinity” through attacks on the “sexual prowess” of the other person.  Using a Pragmatic and Ethnopoetic approach, I show that these public performances are key to understanding how masculinity is imagined in Tuscany.  Thus, at one level of analysis, the performance represents a Tuscan ideology of manhood, showing the workings of the construction of gender identity.  However, the positioning of the self as “male” -- through an evocation of “masculine” attributes and behaviors -- is driven to its extremes by the performers.  In this sense, the speech play becomes a parody that shows not only the means through which the construction of masculinity is achieved, but also its weak points, the juncture where the verbal attack can effectively negate the other person’s masculinity.  This parody and humor invites the audience to look into the complexity of the construction of the social self, and the complexity of the social elements that make each person a unique individual.  By laughing, the audience indirectly shows recognition of the portraiture, but also an appreciation of the deconstruction implied in making manhood a “laughable matter.”  Thus, they show to recognize in the “Contrasto” a mono-dimensional account of what, in everyday experience, is instead a unique construction of individual particular selves.

Like Romeo and Juliet Upside Down: Gender and Power in Tuscan Community Theater.  American Anthropological Association.
Performance does not just reflect pre-existing social realities, but it has the power to rearrange them, create them, comment on possibilities. In this paper, I show how Tuscan Italian Community Theater performances create a gendered view of Tuscan social values, cultural memories, and identities. The analysis is based on the result of my fieldwork in Tuscany (between 1994 and 1998), where I worked with several theater groups, videotaping their performances and participating to their preparation and rehearsal. The groups use performance to propose alternative readings of people's behaviors and decisions, touching on gender roles, family relations, the meaning of friendship and love. The presentation of old customs and new ones, often reflected in the text through the contrast between generations, allows performance to become a way of reflecting on the self, of reckoning with the possibility and conflict, of being at times “men” and “women”, as they are at times “Tuscans”. As they stand at the intersection of gender and cultural identities, of art and everyday life, of past and present, theater performances become a mean of empowerment. Through their heteroglossia, they present a different view of what counts as real, what has been hidden from view, what is relevant and what is not. They scrutinize the accepted moral values of Tuscan society, at the same time that they give voice to those values. The groups thus become mediators between the past and a present in which recovery of memory and reflection on the meaning of cultural heritage becomes fundamental.

In Rhyme I Will Answer You: Verbal Fights and the Poetical Construction of Politics in the Tuscan Contrasto.  VII Annual Symposium About Language and Society Austin.
This paper explores a genre of Tuscan Italian verbal art, the “Contrasto” to show the articulation of politics and language in verbal dueling. The “Contrasto” is a kind of improvised sung poetry, in Tuscan dialect, performed in the context of public festivals and events. The detailed analysis of the performances of two Tuscan Poets, shows how the Contrasto’s complex, articulated and precise structure offers a protection, that allows the artist to voice opinions on social behaviors and political decisions. This includes bringing attacks to the established political structure, to religious institutions, and to social norms and roles, using offending words that would not otherwise be appropriate. Moreover, the bipolar structure of the genre allows and requires that two opposite voices may be heard, and both in turn be attacked. Thus the Contrasto always present two sides of reality. It transforms power relationships and political knowledge into a highly dynamic terrain of dispute. The dueling poets depict, and thus create, the political arena itself, showing its boundaries and their arbitrariness. Thus performance becomes a mediating link between the socio-political structure and the personal lives of the individuals. The data and results presented are part of a larger research on Tuscan verbal art, carried on over several different fieldwork seasons, starting from 1994. The methods used included extensive videotaping of performances, participant observation, and interviews. From the study, emerges the potentiality of art as a means of reflection over social events and of expression of people’s voices. The potential for social change and resistance is shown to reside in the creative potential that verbal art unleashes, in its heteroglossia, and in the number of possible and alternative realities that performance presents to the view. As different discourses are represented in it, performance furnishes a commentary on society, and thus acquires agency, and becomes reflexive.

I Found Myself Singing in This land: Reflexing Emotions/ Creating Identities in the Tuscan Contrasto.  American Anthropological Association.
This paper on a genre of Tuscan Italian verbal art, the Contrasto, uses performance as a key to look at the connections between art and ethnic identity. The Contrasto is a kind of improvised sung poetry, in Tuscan dialect. It is performed by pairs of artists called Poeti Bernescanti, in the context of public festivals and events. The Contrasto takes its name, “contrast”, from its humorous representation of a verbal duel among entities, people or ideas. Structurally, it is formed by a series of chained Octets, in hendecasyllables. The first six verses have an alternated rhyme, while the last two have a coupled rhyme. The data and results presented are part of a larger research on Tuscan verbal art, carried on over four different fieldwork seasons (from July 1994, to September 1998). I worked with several artists, using a vast range of methodologies. These included extensive videotaping of performances, participant observation, and interviews. I recorded a total of more than 35 hours of videotapes and 15 hours of audio-tapes. Here I focus in particular on the performances of two artists, Altamante Logli and Realdo Tonti. The paper is articulated in two parts. First, through the analysis of the “openings” of several Contrasti, I will show how a “repertoire” of ethnic identities becomes evident in the way the artists choose to represent themselves across contexts. These identities are connected to place. They are rarely defined at the regional level. They are instead connected to towns, villages, valleys and mountains, monuments and historical events and legends. By referring to particular Tuscan sub-groups or sub-cultures,the Poets portray the identity that allow them to feel closer to the audience. Thus, Tuscan ethnic identities and the communities to which they refer come to be imagined in the dialogue between the poets and their public, they are emergent in the performance itself. In the second part of the paper, the in depth stylistic and textual analysis of a Contrasto furnishes a key to understand how performance names and defines, but also contests, definitions of places and the associated identities. As identities overlap over the landscape, connections to places become contested sources of identification. Poetry and singing thus become a way for expressing contrasting Tuscan voices. In performance, the contrast between a very articulated and precise structure and the great freedom as to the topics discussed and the attitudes expressed, brings to view the layers of complexity of ethnicity, warning us against fixing and simplifying descriptions of it. Ethnic identity in the Contrasto is always shifting, constructed, bipolar or multipolar, dual or multiple, and defined in opposition to others. The Contrasto, thus, mines at its root the sense of the absoluteness of a particular identity, showing to the public how it lays in the eye of the beholder.

Confronting Identities in Los Angeles: Italian Americans and Italian Nationals on Uncommon Ground.  American Ethnological Society.

Code-Switching and the Communicative Construction of the Italian American Identity.  California State University Conference on Theory and Research on Communication and Culture.
Italian and Italian Americans today, have different images and definitions about what “being an Italian” means. These representations are influenced, and must be related to the American context, and to the transnational encounter. In my analysis, part of a study on the Italian American construction of ethnic identity, I start from a case of misunderstanding involving an Italian American and two Italians, to show how these different images can clash. Withdrawal from the communication and experience of negative feelings can be the consequence, especially considering the Italian tendency to not recognize their past as immigrants.

The Italian Americans in Los Angeles: Representations of Identity and Community. American Anthropological Association.