Colloquium Event

The Once Powerful Mediterranean: Changing Estimations of Italy’s Centrality to Canonical Political Thought

Jane Gordon and Steven Manicastri Department of Political Science University of Connecticut

Monday, November 30 12:30pm | Oak 438

Free and Open to the Public

About the Talk: On the one hand, the place of Italy is indispensable to the history of political thought. Pick up any comprehensive survey of political ideas and alongside 5th-century Athens, Rome and proto-Italian city-states are fundamental examples in historic and even contemporary republican thought. At the same time, after Niccolò Machiavelli and throughout the period of European modernity, except in explicitly Marxist and anarchist debates and recent feminist work on historic women political thinkers, Italy ceases to have any canonical place as a source of political theoretical reflection. We seek to explore the significance of this shifting estimation of Italy, by unveiling how geography and changing understandings of its central locations, reorient the depiction of political thought, especially the sites expected to generate universal values.

About the Speakers: Jane Anna Gordon is Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at UCONN. She is a specialist in political theory, with a focus on modern and contemporary political theory, Africana political thought, theories of enslavement, political theories of education, methodologies in the social sciences, and political theory in film and literature. She is author of Why They Couldn’t Wait (RoutledgeFalmer, 2001) and Creolizing Political Theory (Fordham University Press, 2014), co-author of Of Divine Warning (Paradigm Publishers, 2009), and co-editor of Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm Publishers, 2006), A Companion to African-American Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), and Creolizing Rousseau (Rowman and Littlefield).

Steven Manicastri is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science, writing a dissertation on the Italian autonomous labor organization, the Cobas. He is also the Vice President of the UCONN Graduate Student Union, GEU-UAW Local 6950.