USC

French and Italian Department and UCLA Department of Italian

present

Women Write the Mediterranean:

A Transnational Symposium in Memory of Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998)

March 5-6, 2015


This symposium will address the relationship between women writers and the Mediterranean,
considered as a diverse region of interconnected histories and identities. A particular focus will be
dedicated to the Italian novelist Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998). With its unprecedented tensions and
oscillations between vivid realism and visionary transcendence, reportage and utopia, exactness and
hallucination, outrage and enchantment, modernist allegory and postmodern fluidity, Orteses work is
highly innovative, yet suggests many possible parallels with the experience of other important modern
and contemporary Mediterranean/European women writers, from Fatema Mernissi, Hlne Cixous and
Assia Djebar to lesser-known figures such as Elisa Chimenti, Danielle Barcelo-Guez, Leda Rafanelli, Etel
Adnan, Massa Bey, and Nagwa Shaban. Raised in Naplesa quintessential Mediterranean city that she
portrayed in documentary style in her early writings, and later transfigured into an imaginary Toledo
Ortese lived for a time in Libya, when the country was still an Italian colony under Fascism. As a self-
taught female writer from the historically underdeveloped and colonized South of Italy, herself a former
involuntary colonizer, and a citizen of literature who lived for most of her life a nomadic and solitary
existence in dire poverty, Ortese epitomizes the position of displacement, loss and exile of many
Mediterranean women writers: a position from which they nonetheless developed an unconventional
and unconstrained literary and ethical approach to the real. This symposium stresses the importance of
looking at womens writing that imagines and defines the Mediterranean as a transnational, mtiss,
multi-confessional, cross-cultural space, an alternative to the divisive, oppositional model represented by
national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or continental affiliations. The question of what the modern
Mediterranean is, and how it may be defined, understood or imagined has been addressed by many male
thinkers, critics and writers, but the perspectives of female writers have rarely been studied
comparatively or taken into account. Women Write the Mediterranean brings together scholars from
different backgrounds to reflect on the possibility of a transnational critical conversation and dialogue
about modern Mediterranean women writers and their work on Mediterranean-related themes and
problems.

Co-sponsored by
USC Dean of Dornsife College
USC Francophone Research and Resource Center
USC Center for Feminist Research
USC Department of Comparative Literature
USC Middle East Studies Program
USC Libraries
UCLA Dean of the Humanities
UCLA Dean of Social Sciences
UCLA Department of Gender Studies
UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Program

Thursday, March 5, 2015

USC Doheny Memoria Library, Academic Commons (DML 233)

3:00 pm Welcome

Peter Mancall, Vice Dean of the Humanities, USC Dornsife

Natania Meeker, Chair USC Dornsife Department of French and Italian


3:15-4:15 pm First Panel

Chair: Batrice Mousli Bennett (Director, Francophone Research & Resource Center USC)


Cristina Della Coletta (Dean of Arts and Humanities UC San Diego)

Anna Maria Ortese and the Mediterranean Uncanny

Lucia Re (Department of Italian and Department of Gender Studies, UCLA)

Ulysses or Penelope? Italian Women Philosophers, Narrators and Poets of the
Mediterranean


4:15-4:45 pm Coffee Break


4:45-6:30 pm Second Panel

Hala Halim (Department of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, NYU)

The Mediterranean Cosmopolitics of Nagwa Shabans Nawwat al-Karm

Andrea Baldi (Department of Italian, Rutgers University)

Resisting Modernity: Anna Marias Ortese Negotiations with the South

Friday, March 6, 2015

UCLA Royce Hall 236

9:00am Welcome

Tom Harrison, Chair UCLA Department of Italian

UCLA Deans of the Humanities and Social Sciences


9:15-10:15 am Third Panel

Chair: Gil Hochberg (Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA)


Barbara Spackman (Department of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, UC Berkeley)

From Italy to Egypt: The Ethnomasquerade of Leda Rafanelli

Gian Maria Annovi (Department of French and Italian, USC)

Anna Maria Ortese and the Mediterranean Effect


10:15-10:45 Coffee Break


11:45 am -12:30 pm Final Panel

Olivia Harrison (Department of French and Italian, USC)

Etel Adnans Transcolonial Mediterranean

Lia Brozgal (Department of French, UCLA)

Aux oubliettes de lhistoire : Massa Beys Microhistories


1:00 pm Lunch Buffet