Vol. 28 No. 1 (2024): Real and imaginary archives between the Americas and Italy

This thematic proposal is inserted in the area of Comparative Studies that encompasses the culture of Portuguese and Spanish speaking American countries and the Italian culture, with the aim of bringing together contributions that deal with the rich tangle of cultural transits between these regions of the world. The approaches can cover both texts related to the analysis of imaginary archives (thinking of the representations, even stereotypical ones, that come from an image collection that has not necessarily gone through the author's autobiographical, experiential sieve) and those originating from actual experience, of biographical memory, based on changes, stays, travels and contacts, reread and “translated” through documentary and/or fictional representations and transfigurations. There is, for example, the case of J. Rodolfo Wilcock, an Argentinean who moved to Italy and started writing in Italian; J. L. Borges, who read Dante; Italo Calvino who read Borges himself, who later also appears in the verses of Giorgio Caproni; the Commedia reread from the Andes by Gamaliel Churata; the famous journeys of Marinetti, Ungaretti, Gadda, Pasolini, and others, who passed through Latin American territory; the Mexican visions of Carlo Coccioli and Pino Cacucci. One can also think about the opposite movement of José Carlos Mariátegui, Manuel Puig, Clarice Lispector, Murilo Mendes, and Cecília Meireles, who had experiences in Italy reported in their works, or the image contained in the narratives of Vitaliano Trevisan and Paolo Sorrentino of Brazil as a place of escape, alienation and new beginnings. The aim of the dossier is to re-read this network, sometimes rhizomatic, made up of historical and cultural relationships, as well as of a discontinuous flow of readings, interpretations and symbols, also based on the problematization of their tensions, in short “unarchiving” from its entire limbo this historical and visual heritage.