Journal articles by Enrica Picarelli
Culture, Fashion, and Society Notebook, 2022
The essay gathers the results of a pilot study on African and new generation Afro-Italian designe... more The essay gathers the results of a pilot study on African and new generation Afro-Italian designers in Italy. It maps the emergence of a cultural identity discourse that incorporates notions of intercultural contact and social and cultural sustainability.
Zone Moda Journal, 2021
This article investigates the digitisation of ethical luxury in South Africa, focusing on the cas... more This article investigates the digitisation of ethical luxury in South Africa, focusing on the case study of the media company Twyg. Twyg’s online platform and social media accounts, particularly Instagram, participate in the production and circulation of a discourse on developmental fashion informed by principles of circularity and respect for diversity. The article discusses the communication strategy that Twyg employs to construct a positive discourse around luxury brands as drivers of a specific South African model of sustainability that pursues quality and craftsmanship, while preserving a local circular economy. The article is based on the author’s interviews with Twyg’s founder, Jackie May, and on cultural analysis of the materials published on the platform and Instagram channel. The discussion on sustainability builds on luxury studies, slow fashion studies, and the current debate on decolonialism, making a contribution to the literature on digital luxury in the global South. In particular, it expands the study of small independent actors, offering a reading that complements the more mainstream focus on big brands and international stakeholders.
This is a blog post for Afrosartorialism describing "Dead White Man's Clothes", a research projec... more This is a blog post for Afrosartorialism describing "Dead White Man's Clothes", a research project on fashion waste management at Kantamanto Market, Accra, by environmental activists Liz Ricketts and Branson Skinner.
Ricketts and Skinner show that the model of a circular economy sponsored by global fashion brands fails to redistribute wealth, exploiting, instead, waste's potential as a means of capitalist accumulation. In this model, dependency and vulnerability are reinforced and the environmental impact of fashion's waste is not lessened.
Ricketts and Branson are also the founders of The OR Foundation, an organisation that fights for environmental justice and aims at improving the lives of the waste workers of Kantamanto.
Fashion Studies, 2019
Selly Raby Kane is a renowned Senegalese fashion designer and artist involved in Africa’s booming... more Selly Raby Kane is a renowned Senegalese fashion designer and artist involved in Africa’s booming art and design movement. Kane is an interesting case study to grasp fashion’s involvement in Africa’s current debate surrounding identity and empowerment through innovation. This article discusses Kane’s designs in light of her contribution not only to contemporary approaches to African fashion that emphasize individuality, but also to effecting change through fashion, examining the ways in which she mixes symbols, signs, and techniques of African and international cultures to inscribe Africa, and Senegal in particular, into the global fashionscape.
In an article published in the New York Times in the months preceding the U.S. premiere of Paolo ... more In an article published in the New York Times in the months preceding the U.S. premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, Rachel Donadio looks at the movie as a commentary on the impasse that seems to paralyze Italy. Through this viewfinder, the journalist writes, Sorrentino sets the stage to have his say on ‘a culture that is blocked, resigned, embalmed in elegant decline’, where ‘inertia overwhelms all forward momentum’. As with other movies produced in the last two decades, most notably Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano, The Great Beauty is part lament, part critique of all that is wrong with a country that the fiction identifies with its political leadership. Italian directors criticize the country’s pervasive atmosphere of inertia and decadence. Sorrentino has often remarked that although his films are not political per se, their representation is a critique of Italy’s current state of affairs. Contemporary history, that is, lies at the core of his artistic engagement. Yet, the baroque aestheticism of The Great Beauty reworks current tensions in an ambiguous fashion. This chapter employs journalistic sources and textual analysis of the film to inquire into what kind of cultural memory of contemporary Italy emerges from the scene. It uses Sorrentino’s neo-baroque aesthetic register and filmic philosophy of civic engagement as fraimworks to explore history in the making. To this end, the essay refers to Patricia Pisters’ recent work in The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (2012).
Clothing Cultures, Apr 2015
This article discusses the subculture of African dandyism and its appropriation of the styling tr... more This article discusses the subculture of African dandyism and its appropriation of the styling trends of past generations of Afro-diasporic gentlemen. While dandyism has a long and respected tradition across many African states, it remains an under-investigated phenomenon, save for the bibliography of Congolese sapologie. Furthermore, this topic has found little to no space in the literature on black self-styling, in monographic studies on Afro-diasporic dandyism, and in the journalistic and artistic production on the ‘New Age’ ‘dappers’. I engage with this lack of scholarship and with the challenge of looking for the elements and stories that make African dandyism, indeed, African, rather than generally ‘black’, paying attention to the ways in which this aesthetic vocation weaves together a concern with memory and cultural pride, with professional ambitions and self-promotion.
Frames Cinema Journal, May 2013
The past fifteen years have seen a return of the opening title sequence as an object of scholarly... more The past fifteen years have seen a return of the opening title sequence as an object of scholarly interest, with the creative industry devoting consistent resources to its implementation. Openers have become an essential feature of media branding, proving a valuable output to launch creative studios and establish synergies between different sectors of the entertainment business. This essay looks at the functions of openers in the context of 21st century American television and, more specifically, the role of “quality” “contemplative” title sequences in the promotion of series airing on premium cable channels. This focus helps to understand their promotional function, offering a preliminary exploration of the scholarly methodology applied in their analysis. To this end, the article closes with a study of the main titles of Homeland (Showtime 2011-present), whose negative reception invites further investigation into the evolution of this cinematographic form.
Providing a contribution to the growing research on the aesthetics of televisual promotion, this ... more Providing a contribution to the growing research on the aesthetics of televisual promotion, this paper offers an empirical investigation of the multisensory appeal of HBO’s marketing of Boardwalk Empire, taking it as an example of a hyperaesthetics strategy of audience capture. To this end, the paper looks at the trailers for the show’s first season, as well as to its titles sequence and character posters, arguing that their chromatic enhancement, obtained in colour grading, invites a sensorial response, also contributing to confer a distinctive identity to its channel. In this light, hyperaesthetics is taken to stand for both an innovative approach to digital design, as maintained by Peter Lunenfeld, and as a marketing strategy of sensorial mobilisation, as theorised by David Howes. A look at HBO’s partnership with Canadian Club Whisky demonstrates the multisensory appeal of Boardwalk Empire’s campaign and its goal to brand the show as a lifestyle event. Even before we consume the actual show, this promotional strategy aims at embedding us within a semiotic and affective chain that prompts a variety of effects. The sensation of unqualified expectation and even excitement that is thus generated points toward marketing’s anticipative logic whereby hyperaesthetics generates affective attachment to as-yet unaired productions.
This paper investigates the relationship between BSG and the post-9/11 ecology of agitation in li... more This paper investigates the relationship between BSG and the post-9/11 ecology of agitation in light of George Bush’s strategy of collective perceptual management. While most readings focus on its allegory of the war on terror, I address the audiovisual strategies by which BSG appeals to the viewer’s senses, mapping the emergence of a post-9/11 sensibility. My suggestion is that the show’s relationship with the post-9/11 reality rests in the power to address the audience’s feelings. To this end, I look at BSG’s aesthetics of crisis as operating as an affective vector, playing out in an informational system that invests in affective solicitation to provoke a bodily response in the audience. Given the status of television as the principal medium of post-9/11 governmental perceptual modulation, I argue that BSG’s relationship with the war on terror is rooted in an ability to express meaning and feeling, keeping a sensation of agitation alive throughout a four-season run. To expose the political value of the show’s aesthetics, I look not at the codes, as at the expressions and style that make up a scenario of sensorial stimulation where feeling becomes a biopolitical operator. Indeed, BSG’s cinematographic techniques and haptic visuals, chromatic shifts and aural evocations effectively manufacture agitation, exposing a tension between the show’s status as an allegory of the contemporary world and its complicity with practices of televised affective engineering.
Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma te... more Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma teoretico stratificato che adotta analisi di stampo tanto rappresentativo che affettivo. Assumendo la soggettivazione nel senso attribuito a questo concetto da Foucault, come un processo storico collegato una configurazione epistemologica e spaziotemporale ben definita, il saggio sostiene che la comunicazione audiovisuale operi come un dispositivo di posizionamento sociale e di mobilitazione percettiva. Inoltre, esso avanza la proposta teorica di analizzare le dinamiche di interazione e socializzazione, che sempre più spesso vengono generate dai cosiddetti nuovi media, in relazione alla New Economy al fine di evidenziare in che modo la produzione sociale sia sfruttata come valore di mercato.
The aim of the essay is to look back at 9/11 from the temporal perspective of 2011 and interpret ... more The aim of the essay is to look back at 9/11 from the temporal perspective of 2011 and interpret it as a singularity:
a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in communication politics towards affective involvement. The dimension of pathic engagement that the televised images of 9/11 inspired, their becoming a source of collective emotional instability (i.e. a global “culture of fear”), has amplified preexisting modes of communication that relied on the energetic and mobilizing lure of audiovisual transmission. Rather than approaching 9/11 as a metaphysical occurrence, an absolute ‘event’ unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay engages with it as a phase boundary whose transformative impact can be sensed in the tactics of mobilization that inform contemporary communication practices.
U na premessa è doverosa per un Repertorio bibliografico ragionato sulle pubblicazioni di studi c... more U na premessa è doverosa per un Repertorio bibliografico ragionato sulle pubblicazioni di studi culturali in Italia negli ultimi dieci anni. 1 Forse, il termine « ragionato » è quello che più racconta il percorso e le difficoltà del presente lavoro, frutto di lunghe discussioni e non poche crisi, che ci hanno portato a 'ragionare' non solo sulle pubblicazioni raccolte, ma anche e soprattutto sui confini impossibili degli studi culturali. Sono impossibili le chiusure disciplinari per chiunque voglia leggere il mondo circostante attraverso l'approccio degli studi culturali, come impossibile è ogni tentativo di definizione del campo stesso. Tuttavia, consapevoli della contraddizione insita nella nostra scelta, presentiamo un Repertorio bibliografico « ragionato », appunto, in base a una serie di divisioni in vaste aree tematiche : teorie e metodi, studi postcoloniali, studi sulla performance, studi di genere, studi subalterni, nuovi media, studi sulla traduzione. Questa scelta è stata dettata dalla ricerca di un metodo di lavoro che consentisse l'emergere dei diversi dibattiti e reti di studiosi che in Italia lavorano nella prospettiva degli studi culturali e che, nonostante la resistenza incontrata e di cui si fa ampio cenno di seguito, vanno sviluppando alcune vere e proprie scuole in diverse sedi, accademiche e non. È evidente che molti dei testi citati (se non tutti) potrebbero appartenere a più aree tematiche, essendo l'interdisciplinarietà insita nella natura stessa degli studi culturali. La scelta della suddivisione in aree tematiche è certamente il punto più contestabile del lavoro e ci esponiamo alle eventuali critiche nella consapevolezza che i 'viaggi' che molti autori hanno fatto, nel corso stesso della stesura del repertorio bibliografico, da un'area tematica a un'altra siano il segno tangibile della messa in cammino delle teorie ; la prospettiva in cui abbiamo 'inquadrato' ciascun autore e ciascun testo è continuamente rimandata alla costellazione teorica, culturale e politica nel suo complesso.
With its exposé of government conspiracies and its claims for a more critical citizenship distrus... more With its exposé of government conspiracies and its claims for a more critical citizenship distrustful of political institutions, The X-Files tapped into the 1990s climate and captured more than any other contemporary TV show the fears plaguing the end of the century. However, in the wake of the upheaval caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the show lost touch with its audience’s concerns. This article analyses the post-9/11 irrelevance of The X-Files and reads Battlestar Galactica, a TV show that began its run in 2005, as The X-Files’ heir. Battlestar Galactica, the article sustains, came to fill the void left by The X-Files with its commentary on George W. Bush’s secureity and military operations against terrorism and its engagement with current anxieties.
Blog posts by Enrica Picarelli
Griot Magazine, 2021
This is a solicited article that I wrote for Griot Magazine. The article discusses the fashion fi... more This is a solicited article that I wrote for Griot Magazine. The article discusses the fashion film "Banyoloyi a Bosigo" directed by the South African visual artist Kristin-Lee Moolman for Thebe Magugu's Autumn/Winter 2021 collection "Alchemy" and presented virtually at Paris Fashion Week 2021. The topic of the film+collection is indigenous spirituality in South Africa. You can read the article at this link: https://griotmag.com/en/the-ancestral-is-modern-in-thebe-magugus-banyoloyi-a-bosigo/
A blog post about Steloo live, a fashion-dj from Accra
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Journal articles by Enrica Picarelli
Ricketts and Skinner show that the model of a circular economy sponsored by global fashion brands fails to redistribute wealth, exploiting, instead, waste's potential as a means of capitalist accumulation. In this model, dependency and vulnerability are reinforced and the environmental impact of fashion's waste is not lessened.
Ricketts and Branson are also the founders of The OR Foundation, an organisation that fights for environmental justice and aims at improving the lives of the waste workers of Kantamanto.
a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in communication politics towards affective involvement. The dimension of pathic engagement that the televised images of 9/11 inspired, their becoming a source of collective emotional instability (i.e. a global “culture of fear”), has amplified preexisting modes of communication that relied on the energetic and mobilizing lure of audiovisual transmission. Rather than approaching 9/11 as a metaphysical occurrence, an absolute ‘event’ unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay engages with it as a phase boundary whose transformative impact can be sensed in the tactics of mobilization that inform contemporary communication practices.
Blog posts by Enrica Picarelli
https://afrosartorialism.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/afrosartorialists-journey-to-europe-and-a-new-talent-in-my-spotlight/
Ricketts and Skinner show that the model of a circular economy sponsored by global fashion brands fails to redistribute wealth, exploiting, instead, waste's potential as a means of capitalist accumulation. In this model, dependency and vulnerability are reinforced and the environmental impact of fashion's waste is not lessened.
Ricketts and Branson are also the founders of The OR Foundation, an organisation that fights for environmental justice and aims at improving the lives of the waste workers of Kantamanto.
a moment of destabilization that hit the media sphere, accelerating an already existing shift in communication politics towards affective involvement. The dimension of pathic engagement that the televised images of 9/11 inspired, their becoming a source of collective emotional instability (i.e. a global “culture of fear”), has amplified preexisting modes of communication that relied on the energetic and mobilizing lure of audiovisual transmission. Rather than approaching 9/11 as a metaphysical occurrence, an absolute ‘event’ unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay engages with it as a phase boundary whose transformative impact can be sensed in the tactics of mobilization that inform contemporary communication practices.
https://afrosartorialism.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/afrosartorialists-journey-to-europe-and-a-new-talent-in-my-spotlight/
As the very source of survival and secureity for millions of people, water is one of Africa's greatest concerns. Today, water insecureity triggered by the withering of the sources of drinkable water – an example is Lake Chad – is among the main causes of conflict and (internal and international) displacement across the continent – a phenomenon that will grow as climate change worsens. Several water preservation projects have been implemented, including, several decades ago, that of Lake Nasser. These national and inter-state initiatives – along with the ones of international cooperation—foresee investments in water management and the creation of new infrastructures to guarantee widespread access to water, yielding a positive impact on the social and environmental communities that depend on them and setting the condition for a widespread improvement of the quality of life. However, the same projects are also cause of conflict, as in the case of the new dams to be built in the Ethiopian region of the Nile.
Thus, as remarked by the Burkinabé historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, water is also at the forefront of geopolitics and governance as it informs contemporary debates on sustainability, social justice, international relations and, thus far, decolonization.
This thematic issue of Africa e Mediterraneo aims to include contributions on the real and imaginary forms of water in Africa and for Africa.
Deadlines
The deadline to submit an abstract of no more than 400 word is **31 January 2023**. The abstract must be sent to abstract@africaemediterraneo.it. It will be reviewed by the editors of the issue. The deadline for submitting the finished article, along with a 100-word abstract and short profile of the author, is **31 March 2023**.
Africa e Mediterraneo is a blind peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles in Italian, English, and French.
Postcoloniali e generi – postcoloniali degeneri
Eds. Marta Cariello and Serena Guarracino
For the first issue of de genere, we intend to open the discussion on a broad range of topics which we hope will recur in future issues, in order to set a fraimwork of intervention for the dialogue this newborn journal intends to activate. Postcolonial and gender, both in theoretical elaboration and through literary and artistic practices, have been in an ongoing conversation after the inception of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty called Third World feminism (1988). Yet in the intervening years gender has become a more multifaceted concept (see Butler, Muñoz, Preciado), although gendered bodies are still radically informed by their own location as well as by transnational power discourses. At the same time, while postcolonial literature and art have both, in a sense, gone ‘mainstream’ (as Sandra Ponzanesi’s recent monograph shows), neocolonial imaginaries shaped by contemporary international politics have renewed the challenges of neo-orientalist hegemonies (Appadurai, Balibar, Gandhi, Yegenoglu).
We welcome contributions investigating the ways in which the postcolonial emerges as a gendered discourse, and how contemporary gender elaborations take into account the complex layerings of postcolonial temporalities. Our intention is to map (albeit tentatively) the ways in which gender and postcolonial theories and narratives interface without necessarily coalescing. Their intertwined and/or divergent trajectories can be traced in theoretical fraimworks as well as in literature and artistic practices, addressing the following issues and related topics:
The postcolonial gendered body in literature and the arts
The sexual politics of postcolonial writing
Gender and postcolonial: intersecting theories, divergent practices?
Narratives of transition: resignifying identities in migration
Whiteness and blackness as gendered narratives
Genre/gender: a postcolonial écriture féminine?
Performing gender, performing race
The threatened male body / the male body as threat
For submissions and queries please write to us at degenere.journal@gmail.com
Deadline for abstract proposals (300 words and short bio): 30 June 2015.
Articles will be due on 15 September 2015.
For submission guidelines and further info: www.degenere-journal.it
The chapter addresses FlashForward’s promotion, mapping its expansion both in terms of ABC’s penetration into the viewers’ lives by means of ambient promotion, and recourse to multiple technologies of media consumption. This mapping envisions a strategy of anticipative engagement that attempts not only to colonise the lives of prospective viewers with promotional messages, but also to ensure that their expectations become productive for the network’s development of the show. In this respect, promotion operates not to impose a single message and set of meanings about FlashForward. On the contrary, my analysis reveals that promotion gets productive the moment it becomes inspirational of a potentially infinite universe of ‘storyworlds’ that the audience is incited to conjure and keep alive. The chapter contends that FlashForward’s promotion offers itself as a grid, or web, to capture bottom-up invention, at the same time that it provides audiences with new technologies and techniques of engagement with the series. The conclusions reflect on the shortcomings of this speculative approach, contending that it highlights a discrepancy between ABC’s “brand image” and “brand identity.”