About

Giulia Riccò is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University, an M.A. and B.A. from the Università di Bologna, and is trained in both Italian and Brazilian Studies. Her work focuses on the circulation and reimagination of ideas across time and space, particularly examining how Italian identity has evolved beyond the geographical boundaries of Italy and how the emigration of Italians has influenced notions of class, race, and gender in the Americas, especially in Brazil. Her notable contribution includes her book 'The Italian Colony of São Paulo: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Brazil,' which argues that Italians in São Paulo became racialized as white at the turn of the twentieth century, contrasting with their experiences in the United States. The book highlights how Italians in Brazil were associated with ideas of whiteness, modernization, and civilization, and it challenges conventional narratives about Italian racial ambiguity and oppression in the Americas. Riccò's research areas encompass Italian Studies, Brazilian Studies, Fascism, Migration, the Global South, Translation Studies, and Race and Ethnic Studies. Her teaching interests reflect her interdisciplinary and transnational research, covering topics such as fascist ideas across the Atlantic, contributions of Italians to race, gender, and class in the USA and Brazil, Italian literature, youth culture, and migration between Italy and Latin America.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Humanities
• Sociology
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy
• Art
• Ancient history
• Linguistics
• Law

Selected publications

• <b>Molly C. Ball</b> . 2020. <i>Navigating Life and Work in Old Republic São Paulo (1891–1930)</i> . University of Florida Press.

  Luso-Brazilian Review · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Molly C. Ball . 2020. Navigating Life and Work in Old Republic São Paulo (1891–1930) . University of Florida Press. Navigating Life and Work in Old Republic São Paulo (1891–1930) by Molly C. Ball is a captivating socioeconomic history of the working lives of paulistanos during a period

  PublisherDOI

• “Il segno di Menelik”: Enrico Corradini, the <i>Protocolos</i>, and the Re-Staging of Adwa in São Paulo

  Italian Culture · 2023 · 21 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • Ancient history

  This essay brings to light how the Italian loss at Adwa of 1896 inspires Enrico Corradini to reimagine the dream of an imperial Italy in his novel La patria lontana (1910). By turning to a little-known episode in the history of Italo-Brazilian relations that forms part of the backdrop for La patria lontana, this essay reveals that Brazil functions as a stand-in for Ethiopia in Corradini’s imaginary. In this highly Africanized, tropical, South American country, where large numbers of Italians had confronted hostile and resistant natives at the turn of the twentieth century, Corradini discovered a space that offered an opportunity to restage the First Italo-Ethiopian War as one in which Italians emerge victorious.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Critical issues in Transnational Italian Studies

  Forum Italicum A Journal of Italian Studies · 2023 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean by Camilla Hawthorne (review)

  MLN · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean by Camilla Hawthorne Giulia Riccò Camilla Hawthorne. Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501762291, xx+302 pages Camilla Hawthorne’s Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean theorizes the Black Mediterranean as the framework to “disclose […] struggles over race, nation, and citizenship in Italy today”.1 Hawthorne’s Black Mediterranean is “simultaneously a descriptive project, an analytic, and (perhaps most importantly) an ethical demand”.2 This book analyzes, with superlative lucidity, the operations of race and racism in contemporary Italy and admirably grapples with—and simultaneously develops—two concepts, the first of which is citizenship. Because in Hawthorne’s analysis the liberal nation-state is always also a racial one, citizenship is freighted with specific racial connotations. The creation of the dichotomy between citizen and noncitizen leads to the creation of racialized ascriptive identities deemed inadmissible to the liberal nation-state. Thus, while constituting an important tool in the quest for inclusion and equal opportunity for migrants and their children, citizenship in Hawthorne’s discussion also serves to reinforce the exclusion of non-desirables. The second concept, imbricated with the first, is the Black Mediterranean. Hawthorne shows that “the particular conflation of race and citizenship in Italy was formed […] through Italy’s participation in broader, transnational trajectories of Euro-Mediterranean race-thinking and imperialism”.3 That is, the trope of the Mediterranean, which politicians of all stripes invoke as either a site of dangerous ethnic mixing or as a source of generative cultural hybridity, offers both an explanation for and a solution to the problems of race and racism in Italy that sit at the center of Hawthorne’s book. The book comprises five chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, a coda, and a methodological appendix. Chapters One, Two, and Three form Part I, which is aptly entitled “Citizenship”.4 In Chapter One Hawthorne explains how and why citizenship has become the central focus of the ReteG2 (2G Network), a burgeoning civil rights movement among second generation [End Page 231] Italians. This organization saw the push for ius soli (birthright citizenship) as the most productive way to expand the notion of “second generation” to encompass all those living in Italy who might not fit the conventional image of an “Italian.” Hawthorne notes how Black Italian activists make up the majority of those involved in the movement for citizenship “because Blackness and Black people are marked as the most extreme symbols of national nonbelonging in Italy”.5 The hope is that citizenship would, in turn, afford political rights and inclusion. Hawthorne further investigates the push for recognition in Chapter Two by turning to the inspiring success stories of Black Italian women entrepreneurs. She applauds the ways in which these women “have used their entrepreneurial projects to connect to the global Black diaspora, insert Blackness into the story of ‘Made in Italy,’ and advocate for more cosmopolitan and open-ended understandings of Italianness”.6 Yet Hawthorne also cautions against the idolization of economic productivity because, much like citizenship, such a concept creates difference and exclusion, sustaining the existence of an underserving migrant (similar to the undeserving poor). These entrepreneurs, as she shows, “have sought to resurrect an alternative geography of Italianness, one that is unabashedly oriented toward the Mediterranean and emphasizes cultural porosity rather than boundedness”.7 In Chapter Three Hawthorne historicizes the long standing role the Mediterranean has played in the racial formation of Italians. Hawthorne crucially shows that the cultural porosity of the Mediterranean has hidden the colonial violence that fostered such heterogeneity and has thus promoted a whitewashed vision of the Mediterranean that completely severs its ties with Africa (and Blackness). It is precisely this connection that she seeks to recuperate through the framework of the Black Mediterranean. Her impetus comes directly from those Black activists in Italy who today “are using the Mediterranean in novel ways: to demonstrate the historical continuities of a Black presence in Italy” and “the historical continuities in the violence of Italian racial formation”.8 The numerous merits of Hawthorne’s volume include its refusal to...

  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  University of Texas Press eBooks · 2022

  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  T his book had many previous lives, all of them traversed by the vibrant conversations and exchanges I had with colleagues and friends during the time it took to get to this, now published, version.Although it would be impossible to include in these acknowledgments everyone who played a role in this journey, I still would like to recognize some of those who did.The fi rst seeds of this project lay in the years I spent as a graduate student at Princeton University.I'm grateful to Gabriela Nouzeilles

  DOI

• Transnational Italian Studies

  Italian American Review · 2022-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this latest addition to the groundbreaking series Transnational Modern Languages, editors Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi propose a comprehensive paradigm for the study of Italian language and culture that disrupts the “homogenizing association between nation, territory, language and culture” (1). Far from wanting to erase existing approaches and methodologies, the editors and their contributors seek to expand and reshape the tradition of Italian studies with a heterogenous concept of national culture. Indeed, Burdett and Polezzi do not want to remove the “national” as a category of inquiry. Their provocation lies, instead, precisely in their insistence that the national and the transnational are inseparable (14), that transnational effects are always resident, and accessible, in the national idea. They remind us that artificial narratives of homogeneity and monolingualism have overshadowed the messier, plural, and ever-changing nature of the transnational. The question this volume seeks to answer, then, is this: How do we reveal the transnational contours of Italy?The nineteen chapters in this handbook answer this question in a multitude of ways. The diversity of historical periods, fields, and methods displayed by these essays speak to the heterogeneity and transdisciplinarity that lie at the heart of transnational Italian studies. It includes interventions in linguistics, psychoanalysis, history, translation studies, cinema and media studies, medieval studies, and eighteenth-century studies. Drawing on some of the most canonical Italian authors (from Dante to Svevo) and some of the most studied Italian historical moments (from the Renaissance to the Fascist ventennio), the book enables these interventions to showcase the “inseparability of the national and the transnational” (Burdett Polezzi 14). For example, Tristan Kay explains how “Dante's oeuvre . . . offers examples of, on the one hand, forms of allegiance and identity that transcend modern borders and territories, and, on the other, evidence of the many social, political and linguistic fault lines that existed within a terrain that we now conceive of as a single nation state” (Kay 296).At the same time, Polezzi insists that we approach Dante from a transnational perspective informed by “acts of translation” (32), or cultural mediations. Indeed, as we see in many of these essays, translation is “a fundamental component of the way in which culture is produced, articulated, mediated and remediated” (Polezzi 26) and to a certain extent informs and fuels the transnational. Polezzi's chapter delineates how “processes of translation . . . shape and regulate the borders of national culture, while maintaining their porosity” (33). We witness that porosity in Serena Bassi's chapter on the gay-liberation movement in Italy during the 1970s and how it appropriated, through various layers of translation, the slogans of proletarian youth groups and the US discourse on homosexuality. These chants, Bassi explains, “simultaneously deride and contest heteronormative society and normative ideas about language,” inviting us “to question our epistemological approach towards language in Italian studies” (Bassi 369). Bassi's essay, strategically positioned as the concluding one, functions as a cri de coeur for the decoupling of language and culture: If we keep thinking of “Italian” as a fixed, homogenous linguistic entity, we cannot fully embrace the transnational nature of the object of study identified as Italy.The question of language constitutes the most significant theme in this volume. We should not be surprised that language, a contentious issue since the time of Italian unification, emerges as a fundamental aspect of inquiry when scholars begin “unmooring Italian culture from its rigid association with the national” (Burdett and Polezzi 15). What Burdett and Polezzi, as well as other contributors here, hint at is the possibility that cultural productions written in languages other than standard Italian deeply shape Italian culture. Such a notion has major implications for anyone researching Italian diasporas. After all, the artistic works of Italian nationals and their descendants outside of Italy often appear only in dialect or the language of the host country. Consequently, such works “remain bound by the ‘national’ quality of the language in which they were produced” (Fiore 175). However, if we approach Italian studies from the transnational viewpoint advocated by the editors and their contributors, then these works not only allow us to redraw the landscape of Italian cultural history, but they also compel us to put new, previously overlooked figures and products at its center.For example, Giuliana Muscio argues that “a transnational study escapes the trap whereby national film histories erase the experience of the Italian immigrant stage” (145), giving light instead to the incredible success of first- and second-generation Italian actors in American silent cinema. Similarly, Polezzi brings to our attention the case of Giose Rimanelli, “defined as an Italian, an Italian American or a regional writer” (42), who “by privileging the position of dialect over that of national standards . . . defies traditional hierarchies of power and prestige among languages” (Polezzi 43).At the same time, the question of language applies even more forcefully to the “accented voice” (Duncan 329) of the diasporic groups who now inhabit Italy. Barbara Spadaro, looking at the work of comic artist Takoua Ben Mohamed, which mixes Arabic, English, and Italian, shows how the comic book becomes a privileged medium for representing the multilingual nature of modern Italy because of its “immediacy” and the “multimodal process enabled by the visual and written devices” (Spadaro 276). Likewise, Stefania Tufi observes how in urban settings one can easily witness Italy's multilingualism by paying attention to the composite nature of street flyers, which share a similar immediacy to the one displayed in the comic book. As Teresa Fiore points out, the student of the third millennium is “often multilingual” (161). According to Fiore, approaching our discipline from a transnational perspective would ultimately make the Italian classroom a more inclusive and diverse space not least because it would validate the life experiences of those students who already move across multiple languages (such as Spanish-heritage speakers) but might feel compelled to downplay their multilingualism, which often goes unrecognized in other contexts.Finally, to return to the question posed at the beginning, these essays, despite their disciplinary and methodological differences, all seem to agree that the transnational comes most sharply into view when we focus our attention on local realities, even—or perhaps especially—those which seem remote from the domestic concerns of Italy, such as the US culture industry or architecture in Ethiopia. And it is this, together with its powerful insights on the question of language, that makes this such an important and timely volume. Its contributions here capably chart what the future of Italian studies could (and perhaps should) look like. With so many study-abroad programs paralyzed by a global pandemic that has lasted for nearly two years, a transnational approach to Italian studies suggests the welcome possibility that students might be able to experience Italian culture right where they are.

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• Uma farsa: Post-Dictatorial Strategies of Forgetting and Remembering in Bernardo Kucinski’s K. Relato de uma busca

  MOARA – Revista Eletrônica do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras ISSN 0104-0944 · 2021-12-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The novel K. Relato de uma busca, whose publication coincided with the Brazilian National Truth Commission, has proven remarkably more effective in producing a public and institutional reckoning with the crimes of the military regime than any of the institutional mechanisms implemented by the government or any other testimonial novel previously written about the abuses of the military regime. Its appeal, in part, has to do with Kucinski’s usage of various discourses—fiction, testimonial, epistolary—that successfully challenge the authoritative, and non-dialogic discourse of the military regime. This essay argues that in this novel, politics and fiction are inverted: instead of having a law that fictionalizes the memory of the violence perpetrated by the dictatorship, we have a work of fiction that, by memorializing the struggle of a father in search of his disappeared daughter, brings the crimes committed by the military back into the political discourse.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Teaching <i>It Can’t Happen Here</i> in the Trump Era

  Radical History Review · 2020-09-17 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In the dystopian 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis imagines what it would look like if fascism came to the United States. It Can’t Happen Here is a richly productive text for anybody interested in teaching fascism, but the work requires pedagogical caution, as students tend to find it overwhelming, especially in the post-2016-election era. In this short essay, I consider how best to teach students to read a novel that, though originally intended as a satirical take on the political situation of the United States and the world in the interwar period, has now become unnervingly relevant and prescient.

  PublisherDOI

• COVID-19 pandemic: Practical advice for Endoscopy Units. Mistakes to be avoided. Experience of the Italian North-Eastern Venetian Region

  Russian Journal of Evidence-Based Gastroenterology · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Rodella L, Capezzuto E, De Palma G, Maurano A, Geraci G, Golia M, Marciano E, Polese L, Ricco G, Trentino P, Nikonov EL, Kashin SV. COVID-19 pandemic: Practical advice for Endoscopy Units. Mistakes to be avoided. Experience of the Italian North-Eastern Venetian Region. Russian Journal of Evidence-Based Gastroenterology.

  PublisherDOI

• Editors’ Introduction

  Radical History Review · 2020 · 6 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Epistemology

  Abstract By taking as a point of departure post-1945 self-proclaimed anti-fascist movements, whose claim to combat fascism has often been discarded as politically irrelevant or bombastic, this introduction invites readers to speculate on the rhetorical value implied in the word fascism. Although the term carries within it an almost abysmal capacity for political oversimplification, we argue that it also possesses an undeniable rhetorical value whose function as a catalyst for action against forms of political, economic, and social oppression deserves our attention. In the first part of this introduction we offer a brief but salient overview on the historiography dedicated to defining fascism and on current debates surrounding the recent rise of the radical right on the world stage. In the second part, we address the relatively smaller attention received by anti-fascism post-1945 and discuss possible reasons for why that has been the case. We conclude by showing how the articles collected in this issue invite us to rethink our definitions of fascism and anti-fascism so that we can better understand our current political time.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Nemser

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• Kate Jenckes

  University of California, Riverside

  4 shared

• Michèle Hanoosh

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• David Kazanjian

  4 shared

• Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel

  4 shared

• Gareth Williams

  4 shared

• Ivonne del Valle

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

• Paulina L. Alberto

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• 27th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione MLA Award for a Manuscript in…