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The "Long Italian Anthropocene"

Europe's temperatures are increasing approximately twice as fast the global average due to anthropogenic climate change, making it the fastest-warming continent on the planet. Despite this dramatic contemporary reality, Italy's natural and cultural trajectories have long been intimately interconnected, yet understudied and undervalued. 

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This umbrella project aims to promote a diverse range of newer research approaches in Italian and Mediterranean Studies that overcome the corrosive nature/culture divide to explore the inmate connections between Italian cultural practices and discourse—broadly understood—and the natural world.

 

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La fine dell’Antropocene (2020) Painting by Mario Pratesi

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Which theoretical approaches can be harnessed to better include and understand natural agents as an integral participants of ecocultural co-becoming rather than a passive backdrop for human concerns? Could we justify and examine a “Long” Italian Anthropocene that encompasses many different historical eras (Early Modern, Risorgimento, Colonial, Liberal, Fascist, Postwar, Postcolonial and/or Contemporary)? 

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