Prof. Paolo Carusi
Email: paolo.carusi@uniroma3.it
Affiliation: Department of Humanities, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy
Research Interests: political history, cultural history, public history
The long season of protest movements in Italy between 1968 and 1978 has been widely studied, particularly from the perspective of political and social history. Yet these movements also accompanied significant cultural and intellectual transformations in the visual arts, literature, music, and other fields. A generation of artists and intellectuals, shaped by the political and social changes of the period, developed critical positions toward established Marxist and communist political culture and explored positions to the left of the Italian Communist Party.
The Italian protest movement, in fact, ended with the wave of protests in 1977, which marked a complete break of the movements from the ‘official left’ and the adoption of practices increasingly far from the political culture paradigms of the Italian Communist Party. The violent drift of this revolutionary flare-up led to its early exhaustion in the wake of the collective shock caused by the kidnapping and death of Aldo Moro.
This Special Issue aims to investigate these developments as part of the broader history of Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Through historical research, it will examine the relationship between political movements, cultural production, and changing intellectual and social values, placing the experiences of artists and intellectuals within their wider historical context. Particular attention will be given to the relationship between cultural actors and political movements, the tensions between revolutionary aspirations and artistic autonomy, and the interaction between cultural production and the emerging mechanisms of the cultural industry. The political and social transformations of the late 1970s, particularly around 1978, will also be considered in relation to the subsequent trajectories and historical legacy of these cultural experiences. By bringing together scholars with proven analytical expertise, the Special Issue seeks to move beyond autobiographical and nostalgic accounts of that generation and to offer a more rigorously historicized understanding of its cultural production. The Special Issue thus contributes to the journal’s engagement with the political, social, and cultural history of contemporary Italy.
Suggested themes include:
