Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951-1961 Under the direction of Martin Rennalls, the Jamaica Film Unit aimed to make educational films for, by and about Jamaicans. Drawing upon close analysis of selected films, an interview with Rennalls, and press reports in The Daily Gleaner, this essay shows how available sound technology challenged the Unit's goals during Jamaica's pre-independence years, 1951-1961.

Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951-1961 Under the direction of Martin Rennalls, the Jamaica Film Unit aimed to make educational films for, by and about Jamaicans. Drawing upon close analysis of selected films, an interview with Rennalls, and press reports in The Daily Gleaner, this essay shows how available sound technology challenged the Unit's goals during Jamaica's pre-independence years, 1951-1961.

This paper provides a critique of accelerationism and accelerationist aesthetics through a negative reading of Pasolini's Porcile (1969). By reading the aesthetic of Porcile in relation to Agamben's concept of inoperativity and Leo Bersani's notion of queer anti-relationality this paper provokingly attempts to reveal the aporias of accelerationist politics.

In this article I propose a reading of Porcile which underlines the connections between Pasolini’s aesthetics and the so-called negative turn in queer theory, which stems from Leo Bersani’s and Lee Edelman’s works. In this reading I will take into consideration both versions of Porcile: the play, written in 1967, and the movie, released at the Venice Film Festival in 1969. Not only will I analyse some aspect of Pasolini’s work in light of contemporary theoretical debates, but I will also underline the potential that Pasolini’s work has for solving some of the aporias that emerged concomitantly to the negative turn in queer theory, especially in relation to issues of political viability. Thus, while reading Porcile through queer theory might allow us to understand better the complex ways in which aesthetics intersect with politics and sexuality in Pasolini’s late work, reading queer theory through Pasolini might allow us to focus on what is really at stake with controversial notions such as anti-sociality and ‘no future’.

This article focuses on the emergence of a dystopian imagery of Rome in Fellini's Toby Dammit and Roma and in Pasolini's Petrolio. In these films and novel, the cohabitation of vernacular and modern elements that had characterized Fellini's and Pasolini's works in the 1960s (Ragazzi di vita and Accattone, Le notti di Cabiria and La dolce vita) suddenly fades away. What surfaces instead is a dissociated and chaotic cityscape that tends toward a state of maximum disorder and to the incorporation of diversity into sameness. I propose an interpretation of this paradigm shift of Rome's imagery through the concept of 'entropy,' which in thermodynamics and information theory refers to a process of gradual decline of a self-enclosed system. I will first discuss the material mutations of Rome's 1960s map through an examination of urban analyses by Benevolo, Cederna, and Insolera, before moving to a close reading of Rome's image in Toby Dammit, Roma, and Petrolio. What I argue is that the process of dissociation and fragmentation of Rome's map theorized in urban studies is replicated at the aesthetic level by the sense of entropic confusion and the loss of spatial coordinates that mark Fellini's and Pasolini's 1970s engagements with Rome.

In this article I will propose a reading of Porcile which underlines the connections between Pasolini’s aesthetics and the so-called negative turn in queer theory, which stems from Leo Bersani’s and Lee Edelman’s work. In this reading I will take into consideration both versions of Porcile: the play, written in 1967, and the movie, released at the Venice Film Festival in 1969. Not only will I analyse some aspect of Pasolini’s work in light of contemporary theoretical debates, but I will also underline the potential that Pasolini’s work has for solving some of the aporias that emerged concomitantly to the negative turn in queer theory, especially in relation to issues of political viability. Thus, while reading Porcile through queer theory might allow us to understand better the complex ways in which aesthetics intersect with politics and sexuality in Pasolini’s late work, reading queer theory through Pasolini might allow us to focus on what is really at stake with controversial notions such as anti-sociality and ‘no future’.

This article analyses the atlas as a method of classification in literary theory. It investigates the link between the atlas as a form of epistemological organization and the ‘subversive’ and ‘anti-canonical’ use of cartography advocated by the proposers of the spatial turn of literature, including Malcolm Bradbury’s Atlas of Literature, Franco Moretti’s Atlas of European Literature and Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà’s Atlante della letteratura italiana. After assessing the ways in which these works address the dialectics between spatiality and historicity in relation to the constitution of the literary canon, I will move to a discussion of the way in which the atlas as a form of knowledge emerged in 16th century cartography (Abraham Ortelius and Gerhard Mercator). Then, in the final part of the essay, I will engage in an interpretation of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, which I read as an ‘anatopic’ object that keeps troubling any purely cartographic use of the atlas. In my reading, by theorizing an anti-foundational (and anti-identitarian) method of knowledge organization based on the morphological affect between disparate images and objects, Warburg’s atlas brings to the profanation of the atlas as a topographical machine. My use of the term ‘anatopy’ in this essay is at the same time speculative and heuristic, and aims to capture the disorienting potentialities which are intrinsic in non-cartographic explorations of space.

See Gaylyn Studlar, 'Masochism and the perverse pleasures of cinema', Quarterly Review of Film 'Seeing things-representation, the scene of surveillance, and the spectacle of gay male sex', in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories

This article aims to shed light on the intellectual relationship between Walter Benjamin and Pier Paolo Pasolini. While numerous scholars have commented on similarities and resemblances between the two authors, none of these critics has sought to further analyse them, thus leaving their relationship in the domain of the similitude. This essay aims to evolve from the analysis of analogies to that of a «discursive formation» (Foucault) between the works of the two intellectuals. It will do so through an archaeological investigation of concepts of 'allegory', 'history' and 'montage'. Its double objective will be that of shedding a new light on the complexities of both Pasolini's and Benjamin's discourses, and that positioning Pasolini within a broader context of Western intellectuals who investigated the reticular-rather than the positivistic and linear-development of capitalist modernity.