“Marginal” places – including slums, mental asylums, colonial peripheries, poor rural areas, “nomad camps” – have long held a particular fascination for writers, photographers and filmmakers. This talk looks at what lies behind that fascination, with specific reference to the Italian case. It examines the link between social exclusion and the formation of the nation state. It considers the power relations in play when photographs or films of marginal people or places are made by and shown to people from a more culturally prestigious center. And it considers a number of attempts to reverse these ways of looking and showing by describing marginal people more empathetically or by involving them in the production of accounts about themselves.

The talk draws on a research project carried out in 2008-12, whose main outputs have been an exhibition, shown in Rome and New York, of 100 found photographs and film clips, and the book, Italy’s Margins, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and as Margini d’Italia by Laterza in May 2015.

David Forgacs is Guido and Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò Chair in Contemporary Italian Studies and Professor of Italian at New York University. View Professor Forgacs’ NYU faculty page here.

This event is the keynote lecture for the 2015 Italian Studies Graduate Student Conference, held on Saturday, October 24, 2015. See the event details here.