As an organising principle, the research predominately involves approaching associations and organisations with which global Italian communities are engaging, such as exhibitions, reunions, gatherings and rituals. Burdett is quick to point out that these mobile communities ‘become co-producers [themselves] of the research’, being as they are, ’tremendous repositories of all sorts of material’ - from photographs and artworks, to fiction (both professional and amateur), personal stories and memorabilia. All, he underlines, ‘express themselves and who they are’. This will then produce a wealth of material which can be further analysed, ‘whilst avoiding falling back onto stereotypes of what Italian culture might be’ and offer ‘a daily working sense of self and community’.
Professor Burdett has recently returned from Ethiopia, the site of Italian colonial expansion, where he is specifically researching Post-War Italian communities. He says that Italian communities in Ethiopia are ‘not unproblematic’. His research poses questions such as "what is the reality of living between cultures?", "how do you see the Italian community here evolving over time?", "where has it come from?", "where’s it going" and "what’s your sense of culture more generally?’ He notes that ‘people come up with astonishingly interesting replies to these questions’.
One of the major outputs of the project is to produce a series of texts on Italian culture and its sense of identity with the Liverpool University Press. The research findings will also lead to various exhibitions being held around the world, with the collaboration of the Italian Cultural Institute in London and the British School in Rome, all of which will focus on how one’s sense of belonging to a hybrid culture is expressed through writing, photographs and objects. There are also plans for travelling exhibitions in Australia, New York and, hopefully, Ethiopia.
In all this, Professor Burdett hopes above all, ‘that the project will develop a model of how one can approach the study of Modern Languages in a transnational and transcultural world’ which may ‘potentially reframe the discipline of modern languages’.
Zee Bland
Park Sunga, Flickr
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