MLA International Symposium, “Being Hospitable: Languages and Cultures Across Borders”
June 17–19, 2021, Glasgow, Scotland
Panel: “Homing and Hosting: Transnational Belonging across Italian Cultures”
Organizers: Kate Driscoll (Freie Universität Berlin) and Elisa Russian (University of California, Berkeley)
Often conceived as a private, intimate space, the “home” is also host to a variety of social, political, and economic dynamics that bring questions of domesticity to merge and interact with broad, even abstract, concerns. Taking as its point of departure the recent critical analysis of “home” as “a matter of search...an open-ended and possibly unaccomplished process” (Boccagni 2017), this session will address how “homing,” “hosting,” and “Italianità” speak to issues of identities, mobilities, and negotiations. Parsing “home” as a place and “homing” as a practice, this panel will concentrate on three major themes: translations and transitions, communities and environments, and hybrid homes and hybrid hosts. Encounters between individuals and groups lie at the crossroads of these three topics; thus, a parallel focus will be on the importance of the “host” - from the translator to the facilitator - and this figure’s role in conveying, mediating, or potentially complicating forms of hospitality and belonging.
Since the thirteenth century, examples of “homing” and “hosting” across borders, oceans, and peoples have characterized diasporas of Italian cultures throughout the globe. Such cases indicate that the histories of cultural and physical mobilities shape - and are shaped by - the circulation of ideas and the transmission of knowledge, political and religious expansionism, capitalism and colonialism, globalism and communications, and humanitarian crises. The complex interactions among homes and hosts bring into relief the transhistorical and transnational variables that influence the construction and reconstruction of cultures within Italy and abroad.
