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Valentina PagliaiAnthropology
Active Research
Racial Formation Processes in Everyday Interaction in Italy Since 2005 I have been conducting research in Tuscany, on racial formation processes in everyday interaction, and on the emergence of racialized discourses about immigrants. The research has been funded through a Wenner Gren Fellowship for Anthropological Research, a grant from the National Science Foundation and a Powers Travel Grant from Oberlin College. Below is a summary of the original project:
I am currently analyzing the data gathered and publishing the results. Among them, I have almost finished an article based on this research, tentatively entitled “Disagreement, Agency and Racialization: Conversations about Immigrants among Italians.” I intend to submit it for review by October 2011. The article focuses on the articulation of dissent with racializing discourse, and the argumentative tools used by speakers in problematizing everyday racism. I am working on a second article on the representation of immigrants in the Italian mass media, tentatively entitled "Building the Normality of Racism: Media Discourse in Italy." I intend to submit it for review by the end of 2011. I have also recently co-organized, with Jennifer Reynolds (U of South Carolina) a panel for the American Anthropological Association Conference (Montreal, November 18, 2011). Here is the info: Panel: TRACES OF ENCOUNTERS AND PLACES IN
NARRATIVES OF MIGRATION
Co-Organizers: Valentina Pagliai
(CUNY Hunter College) & Jennifer Reynolds (U of South Carolina)
This panel emphasizes the traces that narratives of migrations perform on places as immigrants and natives reconfigure and display complex individual and collective understandings of identity, belonging, and senses of place. Through intertextual links and degrees of keyed performance, narrative activities may reconstruct political economic histories of rootedness and movement, locality, and migration on the landscape (be it a city, village, or industrial landscape). Specifically, narratives may chronicle and interpret the ways in which political economies shape people’s social networks and life trajectories so much so that they become part of the felt experience of the persons. This is a process of sense making where personal life history in fact merges with the political economy of the place as chronotope. Memories are constructed, ways of remembering are enacted, leaving an imprint as people across the life span traverse back and forth between story worlds and actual worlds. Narratives are also reflexive spaces of action and imagination where people struggle with beliefs and convictions, define and perceive problems as well as imagine ways to solve them. Thus narratives reveal as well as influence how people think perceived problems could or should be solved. They reflect on strategies, including linguistic strategies, of persuasion and conflict resolution, recontextualizing prior speech events and acts where various genres, discourses, and moral logics are marshaled to persuade. Thus, narratives simultaneously provide an inward and outward looking glass enabling perspectives that speak to political economic and socio-historical relations, forged within and through a place. Through them, selves are reworked and displayed in various forms of subjectivity and personhood. People reveal moral and ethical conflicts connected to what they should be thinking, what they think, and what they feel. Narrators position themselves as agents or agentless, and at the same time, they position their audience(s), including the anthropologist. In this way, narratives both constrain and enable agency. All the papers in this panel focus on narratives that trace and retrace places, encounters and political-economic histories. Both Rhodes & Wortham, and Reynolds consider the New Latino Diaspora within US regions that historically have not been gateways of migration, examining how different residents narrativize local histories, regiment social identities via different forms of personhood, and envision social action to confront incipient class, gender, and ethnoracial divisions. Lindstrom deploys the concept of partible places in examining trans-island (village to city) migration experiences in Vanuatu. Through narration, people reconstruct their movement from place to place and the connected shifts in the perception of personhood. Pagliai shows how, as Tuscan people narrate about migrant Selves and Others, they shift footing, revealing complex socio-political-economic allegiances and connected feelings. In the town of Prato, these narratives recount the layers of historical changes on the landscape. Garcia-Sanchez’ work on Moroccan immigrant children sojourning between Spain and Morocco traces early life cycle narratives as children actively trace hybrid childhood landscapes and rework relations of belonging with kin and peers. They do so by emplotting spatial trajectories in order to transcend the social and spatial frontiers of difference.
I find verbal duels and ritual insults to be one of the most intriguing forms of performance. I have been working on a Tuscan genre of verbal duels, called Contrasto, for the past fourteen years. Out of this research I wrote my PhD dissertation, and I am currently finishing a book. The temporary title is Thorny Rhymes: Poetry, Insults and Politics in Verbal Duels. The book starts with a question: what is so disturbing about the Contrasto, that it had to be obliterated from Italian scholarship, and its artists oppressed by the various Italian governments which have succeeded each other over the last two centuries? I first look for an answer in the characteristics of the genre itself and in its alternative aesthetic system. The Contrasto symbolically and in action opposes hegemony by raising political consciousness among its audience through its texts, and by symbolically negating the primacy of national art and national standard language. Since its creation in the nineteenth century, the Italian nation-state constructed an ideal of national art, with artists seen as embodying the image of the prototypical national citizen. Intellectuals, folklorists and other scholars contributed actively to the creation of this image. This ideal of art silences and excludes genres like the Contrasto, which present an aesthetic system and a sense of self subversive of nationalist ideals. It is in the cracks of power that the Contrasto exerts its pressure, making evident the realities of the varied array of Italian languages and claiming their validity for artistic expression, revealing the multiplicity of politicized identities where state power attempts to create the illusion of a unified and apolitical Italian one. My book will also present a cross-section of verbal duels' traditions across the globe. I recently guest edited a journal issue on Argumentative Discourse and Verbal Duels. It was published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Spring 2010. The volume includes pieces by Chantal Tetreault; Eva-Marie Dubuisson; Samy Alim, Jooyoung Lee and Lauren Mason; Jonathan Larson; Matthew Wolfgram; Barbara LeMaster; Marjorie Goodwin and Samy Alim; John Haviland; Judith Irvine and myself.
Gender and Sexual Identities, Minority Rights I first started studying gender identities when I was working on Contrasto verbal duels. Contrasto poets are often asked to impersonate gendered characters dueling with each other, such as "husband vs. wife," "mother-in-law vs. daughter-in-law," or "the married vs. the unmarried man." These duels reveal a multiplicity of models of masculinity and femininity, more or less dominant or subaltern, all of them playfully represented and deconstructed in the performances. In the same period I started working on Tuscan Community and Amateurs theater as well. Many theater groups see a strong presence of women in acting, directing and other roles. Their performances are a great context to see the way Tuscans think about womanhood and manhood, through the way they represent them on-stage. Unfortunately, I never really published on these data, and I have always wanted to find time to go back to them. More recently, I started working on sexual minorities' rights in the context of immigration. This summer I conducted pilot fieldwork in Italy on LGBT activism. This, I think, may become an important topic for my future research. 2011 "The Bad and the Good (Queer) Immigrant in the Italian Mass Media" 2011 "The Good an the Bad (Queer) Immigrant in Italian Mass Media." 2009 "Putting Discrimination against Sexual Minorities on the Map in Italy." 4/9/08 Language and Sexual Identity. 2005 Valentina Pagliai and Brooke Bocast. "Singing Gender: Contested Discourses of Womanhood in Tuscan-Italian Verbal Art." Article. Pragmatics Journal, 15 (4), December 2005. 2003 Valentina Pagliai and Brooke Bocast. "Performing Hierarchies: Language and Gender in Italian Verbal Art." 2003 "The Construction of Images of Masculinity and Family Ties in Tuscan Verbal Art." 2000 "Singing Gender: Womanhood, Ideology and Power." 2000 "Singing the ‘Original’ Male: Doing/Undoing Masculinity in Speech Play." 2000 (Co-organized with Cynthia Strathmann) Repositioning Masculinity as Public Display: Anthropological Perspectives. 1999 "Like Romeo and Juliet Upside Down: Gender and Power in Tuscan Community Theater."
Italian American Identities Project I have been interested in Italian Americans since 1994. I first did fieldwork with the Los Angeles Italian American Community in 1994-95 (see my Master Thesis). Since then, I maintained an interest in that community, participating to the Italian American Oral History Project, and later I took care of the web page of the Italian Oral History Institute until 2001. I am not sure when I will have the opportunity, but in the future I would like to expand my research on racial formation processes to the US by looking at the construction of race among Italian Americans. I am particularly interested in seeing their attitudes toward recent immigrants to the US and how a sense of their own immigrant origin may affect them. 2011 "Language and Italian American Identities in Los Angeles." 2004 "The Italians in the United States." 2001 Book Review. "Che
Bella Figura! The Power of
Performance in an Italian Ladies' Club in Chicago" by G. Nardini. 1997 "Narrando l'Identitá Etnica: Gli Italoamericani a Los Angeles" (Narrating Ethnic Identity: The Italian Americans in Los Angeles) 1996 "Confronting Identities in Los Angeles: Italian Americans and Italian Nationals on Uncommon Ground." 1996 "Code-Switching and the Communicative Construction of the Italian American Identity." 1995 "The Italian Americans in Los Angeles: Representations of Identity and Community."
Over the years I have worked with several wonderful Research Assistants and Teaching Assistants. A owe a lot to each of them: 2010-2011
2009
2007, 2008
2006
2004, 2005 and 2006
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CUNY Hunter College
UCLA Department of Anthropology
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(Here with my daughter Elena
Francesca Minonne
Claudio Guler
Elia Gilbert
Sarvnaz Lotfi 
Ashley Suarez 
Clare Cira 
Nedra Lee
© Copyright 2006 Valentina Pagliai. All Rights Reserved. Website Template by Interspire 
Last updated 8/28/2011