UCSB professor Stephanie Hom is teaching a new version of the course, The Art of Translation, in which she focuses on race in Italian literature.
By Anne Parayil
This winter, UC Santa Barbara professor Stephanie Hom is applying her research background in Italian colonialism to probe how the experience of Blackness is translated in literature.
“The power of the words we choose, and the power that those words can impart and can hold over people,” is the idea Hom says she is exploring in her featured Italian Program course, The Art of Translation: Race and Italophone Literature.
Hom researches how the Italian colonial experience of the late 19th and early 20th century “reverberates and echoes into today.” The Art of Translation is a course that rotates around the Italian program, and Hom felt the timing was right to examine race. Even the Italian word “ciao,” which we recognize as slang for “hello” came from the Italian word for slave, she says.
In a recent virtual interview, Hom discussed her new course in the Department of French and Italian and how language and translation can be used to evaluate complex cultural issues.
Q: Can you tell me about the featured Italian course you are teaching this winter, The Art of Translation?
A: The way that I look at translation is that it's not just linguistic, but it's also cultural and contextual. I wanted to focus this course in particular on race, as conceived as Blackness, and the Black experience in Italy, because there's an incredible tie to the BLM movement here in the US and what's happening in Italy, as well.
What's unique about the Italian experience is particularly the colonial history that's behind it. In Italy, there's this amnesia surrounding colonialism. People don't even know that it happened, and if they do know it happened, from 1890 to 1945, it's covered over with this myth that Italians were good colonizers, or ‘brava gente.’ So, I wanted to excavate that myth and how it gets presented in Italian literature but also in this corpus of texts that I'm calling Italophone literature.
Q: Can you talk about your previous research and how you integrate it into this course?
A: One of my research specializations is Italian colonialism. In my recent book, which came out in 2019, called Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention, I looked at the ways in which the current immigration crisis in Italy has roots in its colonial experience. I looked at how the experiences of colonial rule came back with greater force in today's crisis of migration and detention.
Part of what I'm doing for this course on recent Italophone literature is looking at the separate group of sources that I looked into for the book but didn't have time to write about. So that's where I'm coming from.
UCSB Professor Stephanie Hom’s 2019 book, Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention.
Q: How can this class add to discussions about race and social justice activism?
A: I'm hoping it makes us more attentive to language, and the power of the words we choose, and the power that those words can impart and can hold over people. So for example, in class, we did this lesson, we actually went to see Ta-Nehesi Coates speak as part of UCSB Arts and Lectures, and we're talking about his intervention, or “interventio Italiano.” The conversation around race in the US has as its basis of the experience of slavery. In Italy, I would also argue that the colonial experience is there…Italy in the Renaissance and late medieval period was a center for the Mediterranean slave trade. Venice, in particular, was a center for this. Typically, these were white slaves that were defined more by faith or religion than by race.
A mural in Milan painted by the graffiti artist Ozmo as part of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations during Summer 2020. It depicts a 12-year-old child bride known as Destà on a pedestal, demonstrating her freedom and power. Source: @ozmone on Instagram.
Coming back to the point about the words we choose, the word in Italian for “slave” is “schiavo” in the Venetian dialect that becomes “s-ciào,” which has been passed down to us in the word “ciao” that we all know in Italian like “hello.” What you're actually saying when you say “ciao” is “I will bow down to you as if I am a slave.” So being attentive to the history and the roots of these words that are something that seems so innocuous, like the word “ciao” invokes this entire history of slavery, of domination in power relations.
Q: Do you have any upcoming research projects?
A: We're doing a team podcast that's going to come out of the course. So that's going to be one of our main projects. I'm working on an article about a particular text that was written by a journalist named Orio Vergani called Io, povero negro. It was written in 1929, and it's ostensibly according to reviews, the first fictional text in modern Italian literature with a Black protagonist. It's written in Italian for an Italian audience as Italy is colonizing East Africa. So it's establishing this kind of rhetorical precedent that is then. And then what's interesting about the author is he becomes one of the main reporters, journalists in East Africa.
Anne Parayil is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in communication. She wrote this piece for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.