The Long 1950s:

Popular Culture and the (Un)Making of Italian Identity

1945, World War II ends, a new era begins. A very common description of the postwar period, shared by many different countries. Yet, Italy enters in one of its most interesting and debated moments of its history. On the one hand, its past, with all its contradictions and traumas linked to the Fascist regime. On the other hand, its present and its future, split between two political forces, Communists and Christian Democrats, that since 1948 reveal that the war is not really over. In this context, what happens to the Italian people and its culture?

The “Long 1950s: Popular Culture and the (Un)Making of Italian Identity” is the title of a series of conferences that want to investigate the Italian past critically. 1950s Italian, media, society and popular culture will be the protagonists of these conferences, which also follow the dissemination of this culture through emigration fluxes, especially in Canada, especially in Montréal.

Scholars, filmmakers, architects and writers from all over the world will wonder how we can re-think this long decade, often described as silent, and make it speak more loudly. The 1950s have many things to say about both the Italian past, when Italians chose how to remember what they had been – fascists, partisans or just and stereotypically “brava gente” – and the Italian present, where the tendency to forget and disregard what is troublesome is still alive. Against this trend, made of erasures, concealment and repression, our aim is to open the 1950s to a critical analysis made of personal and social memories, media and objects that populated Italy at that time and whose stories are not to be misinterpreted anymore.

Italians’ private and collective memory, affected by this “respectability-making” amnesia, would be deprived, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, of “the salutary identity crisis that permits a lucid re-appropriation of the past and of its traumatic charge.” This is why we need to remember, this is why we need to revisit the process by which Italians both made and unmade their own identity.

Professor Eugenio Bolongaro, McGill University

Professor Giuliana Minghelli, McGill University

Paolo Saporito, PhD student, McGill University

All the events are made possible by the generous support of SSHRC, Istituto Italiano di Cultura at Montreal and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, McGill University.

website curated by Paolo Saporito

Popular Culture and the (Un)Making of Italian Identity

The Long 1950s:

Popular Culture and the (Un)Making of Italian Identity

All the events are made possible by the generous support of SSHRC, Istituto Italiano di Cultura at Montreal and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, McGill University.

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