F Ricatti
Biographic Data
| ID | 15124 |
|---|---|
| NAME | F Ricatti |
| GIVEN NAMES | F |
| FAMILY NAME | Ricatti |
| SIGNATURE | RICATTI F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Sunshine Coast |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0745-7287 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Indigenous Sovereignty and Multilingual Multiculturalism
This chapter interrogates Australia’s persistent monolingual mindset as a foundational feature of settler colonialism. Despite the multilingual reality of contemporary Australia, English remains hegemonic across political, educational, and cultural domains. The chapter argues that monolingualism is not merely a passive norm, but an active tool of colonial domination, racial exclusion, and extractive capitalism. Decolonisation in Australia demands…
Migropessimism of the Intellect, Migro-Optimism of the Will
Mapping transnational lives
This article considers three recent graphic memoirs that focus on Italian transnational migration and its legacies: Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Inheritance, Joshua Santospirito’s Swallows (Part I), and Pia Valentini’s Ferriera. We adopt the term carto-graphic memoirs (Mitchell 2007; Norment 2012), to describe graphic novels that aim to literally and metaphorically map transnational lives, identities, and memories, through complex artistic proces…
Transnational and decolonial Italian Studies
Migrant Lives on First Nation Land
Via ethnographic and oral history methods and transcultural memory work, this article presents the complex, ambiguous and at times contradictory relationship between a Greek family and an Aboriginal community, including the traditional landowners, in Central Australia in the 1960s. Within a commonplace narrative of colonists and pastoralists buying, owning and selling First People’s land, ownership by Greek migrants and the historical presence of…
Sport, social inclusion and the logic of assimilation in Prato (Italy)
In this article we discuss the extent to which sport might effectively encourage processes of integration and civic participation in Prato, one of the most multicultural cities in Italy. A discourse analysis of recent policies that aim to foster social inclusion of migrants and their children through sport in the city and in the broader region of Tuscany is conducted in the first half of the article; this is followed by the analysis of qualitativ…
Football is life
This paper takes the cultural text of Association football (soccer) and some media texts created in response to it, to explore the passions linked to the game. In particular, we examine several poems and ‘recitativo’ (spoken moments in musical performances) to trace some links between the notions of love, suffering and madness that are referred to so often in conversations regarding the cultural texts of Association football. As part of this we d…
Ethnic enclave or transcultural edge? Reassessing the Prato district through digital mapping
Relations between Italy and other countries – such as China – are often imagined within a binary frame that essentialises national and ethnic communities and fails to recognise the complex transcultural ramifications of an increasingly globalising world. This is particularly problematic when studying those social and cultural spaces that Ilaria Vanni (2016) has described as transcultural edges. These are marginal spaces of transition and encounte…
Re-Creating Home and Exploring Away in New Cities
Migrants are often characterized as in search of new homes, while spectator sports are frequently spoken of as providing homes for the followers of particular teams. However the particular kinds of ‘homes’ that spectator sports can provide for migrants is understudied. This paper explores the sporting ‘homes’ found by those who migrated from Italy to Australia after the Second World War. In particular it examines the different experiences of thos…
Italians in Australia
David Must Fall! Decentring the Renaissance in Contemporary and Transcultural Italian Studies
Through a focus on the Florentine Renaissance, and especially one of its most extraordinary icons, Michelangelo’s David, the authors provide two complementary reflections on how the banal and globalised understanding of the Italian Renaissance as the cradle of Western modernity and civilisation impacts on transcultural Italian Studies. The authors are interested in reflecting on how the pervasiveness of an often-idealised and stereotypical fantas…
Unico grande amore”
This paper considers songs devoted to (and sung for) the football team AS Roma by its supporters. Some of these songs were written by the very famous Roman singer-songwriter Antonello Venditti, others by less famous authors and singers, and often simply by supporters, who created new lyrics to be sung at the stadium to the melodies of famous songs. Many of these songs can be described as love songs, suggesting that for many Romans there is no gre…
A Country Once Great? Asylum Seekers, Historical Imagination, and the Moral Privilege of Whiteness
The current public debate on asylum seekers arriving to Australia by boat is profoundly emotional and divisive. Its emotional nature must not only be considered in the present context but also understood from a historical perspective. This article argues that often the asylum seeker debate has been structured as an emotional dispute about the morality of the Australian nation; and that one of the main functions of such a dispute is to reinstate t…
Italian Transcultural Atmospheres. A Comparison of the Italian Forum in Sydney and Piazza Vittorio in Rome
This article is part of a larger study of Italian commercial and urban spaces developed around the world over the past fifteen years. It focuses in particular on the Italian Forum, a residential and commercial development built in Sydney in the late 1990s. Designed as an attempt to replicate a typical Italian piazza, the Italian Forum also aimed at celebrating the Italian contribution to Australian Multiculturalism, and at creating an urban space…
Connected to Something’
This paper explores the importance soccer can play in the lives, identities and memories of migrants by drawing on 32 oral history interviews conducted with Italians who settled in Sydney in the 1950s and 1960s. Sport can provide an illuminating lens for analysing the experience of migrants, because not only are sports sites of individual, regional, national and transnational identities, they can also facilitate social inclusion or, conversely, b…
Emotional Geographies of the Uncanny
The 'Emotional Geographies of the Uncanny' section of Cultural Studies Review aims to read transnational spaces constructed and inhabited by Italian migrants and settlers to Australasia as emotional spaces of uncanny perceptions, memories, narratives and identities. Drawing inspiration from the Freudian suggestions about the uncanny (das unheimliche), and later interpretations by Heiddeger, Derrida, Kristeva, Bhabha, Žižek, and Ahmed, we refer to…
The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny
Through references to four anecdotes, this article approaches the complex and often neglected topic of the relationship between Sicilian migrants in Australia and Aborigines. It does so not in search of clear evidences that may structure a well-defined historical narrative, but rather looking for moments of truth that may open up new dialogues, narratives, research. Within embodied otherness, it is the uncanny feeling towards the racialised other…
‘Roma non dimentica i suoi figli’
Italian football is renowned as much for the passion of its spectators as it is for the quality of its players, yet these spectators are understudied. Those studies that have been conducted have generally focused on the problems of violence and racism associated with some of the more extreme supporters, the so-called ultras . This paper aims to complement that research by analysing a different aspect of the passions of Italian spectators, namely …
Introduction
Characterised as the country of gestural expressiveness and animated verbal exchanges, of Latin lovers and of operatic excess, Italy has long been seen as a domain of emotional intensity. However, this association between Italy and the emotions has tended to remain a matter for popular imagination and stereotypical representations, and it is only recently that the question of emotions has started to become a focus for scholarly investigation. Thi…
Was I cursed?' 'Was I hypnotized?' Ethnic Moralism, Sexual Dilemmas and Spectral Fantasies of Italians in Australia (1956-1964)
The article considers the relation between gender, sex and identity in the context of Italian migration to Australia, between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, through the analysis of a series of letters written by migrants to Lena Gustin, the editor of two columns for the Italian newspaper in Australia La Fiamma. The first part of the article focuses on ethnic moralism, ethnic misogyny and the generational gap between Italian migrants and thei…
Embodying Migrants
This book constructs a suggestive, dramatic and colourful portrait of migrants’ everyday life in 1950s and early 1960s Australia, by focusing on important aspects such as health, sexuality, self-beautification, love, and morality. The book considers two columns edited by Lena Gustin (Mamma Lena) for the Italian-language newspaper in Australia La Fiamma between 1956 and 1964. Furthermore, the historical analysis is based on hundreds of original le…
Elodia and Franca
This article is the result of a dialogue that I have recently undertaken with two Italian women, a mother and her daughter, who migrated to Australia in 1956. The interviews were part of an oral history project that aims at investigating the role of hope in migrants ‘lives. It is argued that an emotional approach to migrants’ stories, memories and opinions can contribute to a more sensitive understanding of the complexity and intensity of migrant…
Italy and the emotions
Not peer-reviewed
Histories of Madness
In this article it is my intention to present some of the findings of my PhD research, 1 in which I have considered Italian migrants’ material and discursive practices about the body, through the analysis of a corpus of more than 1,000 original letters written by Italian migrants to Lena Gustin, the editor of two columns in the Italian Australian‐language newspaper La Fiamma . The specific focus of this article is on letters written by Italian mi…
Tokidoki, Cute and Sexy Fantasies between East and West
Italian art has long been identified with its nation, in spite of the complex history of Italian migration and exile, which many of its prominent artists have also experienced. This may be because Italian art has enjoyed a privileged position as a leading and somewhat self-contained centre of art and culture for many centuries. Yet, in the present globalising world, it is becoming increasingly difficult for any nation to maintain cultural identit…
Connected to Something’
This paper explores the importance soccer can play in the lives, identities and memories of migrants by drawing on 32 oral history interviews conducted with Italians who settled in Sydney in the 1950s and 1960s. Sport can provide an illuminating lens for analysing the experience of migrants, because not only are sports sites of individual, regional, national and transnational identities, they can also facilitate social inclusion or, conversely, b…
Emotional Geographies of the Uncanny
The 'Emotional Geographies of the Uncanny' section of Cultural Studies Review aims to read transnational spaces constructed and inhabited by Italian migrants and settlers to Australasia as emotional spaces of uncanny perceptions, memories, narratives and identities. Drawing inspiration from the Freudian suggestions about the uncanny (das unheimliche), and later interpretations by Heiddeger, Derrida, Kristeva, Bhabha, Žižek, and Ahmed, we refer to…
A Country Once Great? Asylum Seekers, Historical Imagination, and the Moral Privilege of Whiteness
The current public debate on asylum seekers arriving to Australia by boat is profoundly emotional and divisive. Its emotional nature must not only be considered in the present context but also understood from a historical perspective. This article argues that often the asylum seeker debate has been structured as an emotional dispute about the morality of the Australian nation; and that one of the main functions of such a dispute is to reinstate t…
The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny
Through references to four anecdotes, this article approaches the complex and often neglected topic of the relationship between Sicilian migrants in Australia and Aborigines. It does so not in search of clear evidences that may structure a well-defined historical narrative, but rather looking for moments of truth that may open up new dialogues, narratives, research. Within embodied otherness, it is the uncanny feeling towards the racialised other…
Migrant Lives on First Nation Land
Via ethnographic and oral history methods and transcultural memory work, this article presents the complex, ambiguous and at times contradictory relationship between a Greek family and an Aboriginal community, including the traditional landowners, in Central Australia in the 1960s. Within a commonplace narrative of colonists and pastoralists buying, owning and selling First People’s land, ownership by Greek migrants and the historical presence of…
Football is life
This paper takes the cultural text of Association football (soccer) and some media texts created in response to it, to explore the passions linked to the game. In particular, we examine several poems and ‘recitativo’ (spoken moments in musical performances) to trace some links between the notions of love, suffering and madness that are referred to so often in conversations regarding the cultural texts of Association football. As part of this we d…
Re-Creating Home and Exploring Away in New Cities
Migrants are often characterized as in search of new homes, while spectator sports are frequently spoken of as providing homes for the followers of particular teams. However the particular kinds of ‘homes’ that spectator sports can provide for migrants is understudied. This paper explores the sporting ‘homes’ found by those who migrated from Italy to Australia after the Second World War. In particular it examines the different experiences of thos…
Sport, social inclusion and the logic of assimilation in Prato (Italy)
In this article we discuss the extent to which sport might effectively encourage processes of integration and civic participation in Prato, one of the most multicultural cities in Italy. A discourse analysis of recent policies that aim to foster social inclusion of migrants and their children through sport in the city and in the broader region of Tuscany is conducted in the first half of the article; this is followed by the analysis of qualitativ…
Elodia and Franca
This article is the result of a dialogue that I have recently undertaken with two Italian women, a mother and her daughter, who migrated to Australia in 1956. The interviews were part of an oral history project that aims at investigating the role of hope in migrants ‘lives. It is argued that an emotional approach to migrants’ stories, memories and opinions can contribute to a more sensitive understanding of the complexity and intensity of migrant…
Tokidoki, Cute and Sexy Fantasies between East and West
Italian art has long been identified with its nation, in spite of the complex history of Italian migration and exile, which many of its prominent artists have also experienced. This may be because Italian art has enjoyed a privileged position as a leading and somewhat self-contained centre of art and culture for many centuries. Yet, in the present globalising world, it is becoming increasingly difficult for any nation to maintain cultural identit…
Sentirsi ‘Uomo’ An Emblematic Case of Desired Transsexuality in a Migratory Context
This paper argues, through the analysis of an episode of desired transsexuality by an Italian-Australian girl in the early 1960s, that migration history must not overlook the way the body was lived, spoken and silenced by individual migrants and by their ethnic community. It particularly focuses on the impossible dialogue attempted by the girl with her family and her community, illustrating some of the cultural, religious and medical means of con…
Histories of Madness
In this article it is my intention to present some of the findings of my PhD research, 1 in which I have considered Italian migrants’ material and discursive practices about the body, through the analysis of a corpus of more than 1,000 original letters written by Italian migrants to Lena Gustin, the editor of two columns in the Italian Australian‐language newspaper La Fiamma . The specific focus of this article is on letters written by Italian mi…
Tokidoki, Cute and Sexy Fantasies between East and West
Italian art has long been identified with its nation, in spite of the complex history of Italian migration and exile, which many of its prominent artists have also experienced. This may be because Italian art has enjoyed a privileged position as a leading and somewhat self-contained centre of art and culture for many centuries. Yet, in the present globalising world, it is becoming increasingly difficult for any nation to maintain cultural identit…
Elodia and Franca
This article is the result of a dialogue that I have recently undertaken with two Italian women, a mother and her daughter, who migrated to Australia in 1956. The interviews were part of an oral history project that aims at investigating the role of hope in migrants ‘lives. It is argued that an emotional approach to migrants’ stories, memories and opinions can contribute to a more sensitive understanding of the complexity and intensity of migrant…
Italy and the emotions
Not peer-reviewed
Embodying Migrants
This book constructs a suggestive, dramatic and colourful portrait of migrants’ everyday life in 1950s and early 1960s Australia, by focusing on important aspects such as health, sexuality, self-beautification, love, and morality. The book considers two columns edited by Lena Gustin (Mamma Lena) for the Italian-language newspaper in Australia La Fiamma between 1956 and 1964. Furthermore, the historical analysis is based on hundreds of original le…
‘Roma non dimentica i suoi figli’
Italian football is renowned as much for the passion of its spectators as it is for the quality of its players, yet these spectators are understudied. Those studies that have been conducted have generally focused on the problems of violence and racism associated with some of the more extreme supporters, the so-called ultras . This paper aims to complement that research by analysing a different aspect of the passions of Italian spectators, namely …
Introduction
Characterised as the country of gestural expressiveness and animated verbal exchanges, of Latin lovers and of operatic excess, Italy has long been seen as a domain of emotional intensity. However, this association between Italy and the emotions has tended to remain a matter for popular imagination and stereotypical representations, and it is only recently that the question of emotions has started to become a focus for scholarly investigation. Thi…
Was I cursed?' 'Was I hypnotized?' Ethnic Moralism, Sexual Dilemmas and Spectral Fantasies of Italians in Australia (1956-1964)
The article considers the relation between gender, sex and identity in the context of Italian migration to Australia, between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, through the analysis of a series of letters written by migrants to Lena Gustin, the editor of two columns for the Italian newspaper in Australia La Fiamma. The first part of the article focuses on ethnic moralism, ethnic misogyny and the generational gap between Italian migrants and thei…
Connected to Something’
This paper explores the importance soccer can play in the lives, identities and memories of migrants by drawing on 32 oral history interviews conducted with Italians who settled in Sydney in the 1950s and 1960s. Sport can provide an illuminating lens for analysing the experience of migrants, because not only are sports sites of individual, regional, national and transnational identities, they can also facilitate social inclusion or, conversely, b…
Emotional Geographies of the Uncanny
The 'Emotional Geographies of the Uncanny' section of Cultural Studies Review aims to read transnational spaces constructed and inhabited by Italian migrants and settlers to Australasia as emotional spaces of uncanny perceptions, memories, narratives and identities. Drawing inspiration from the Freudian suggestions about the uncanny (das unheimliche), and later interpretations by Heiddeger, Derrida, Kristeva, Bhabha, Žižek, and Ahmed, we refer to…
The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny
Through references to four anecdotes, this article approaches the complex and often neglected topic of the relationship between Sicilian migrants in Australia and Aborigines. It does so not in search of clear evidences that may structure a well-defined historical narrative, but rather looking for moments of truth that may open up new dialogues, narratives, research. Within embodied otherness, it is the uncanny feeling towards the racialised other…
Italian Transcultural Atmospheres. A Comparison of the Italian Forum in Sydney and Piazza Vittorio in Rome
This article is part of a larger study of Italian commercial and urban spaces developed around the world over the past fifteen years. It focuses in particular on the Italian Forum, a residential and commercial development built in Sydney in the late 1990s. Designed as an attempt to replicate a typical Italian piazza, the Italian Forum also aimed at celebrating the Italian contribution to Australian Multiculturalism, and at creating an urban space…
Unico grande amore”
This paper considers songs devoted to (and sung for) the football team AS Roma by its supporters. Some of these songs were written by the very famous Roman singer-songwriter Antonello Venditti, others by less famous authors and singers, and often simply by supporters, who created new lyrics to be sung at the stadium to the melodies of famous songs. Many of these songs can be described as love songs, suggesting that for many Romans there is no gre…
A Country Once Great? Asylum Seekers, Historical Imagination, and the Moral Privilege of Whiteness
The current public debate on asylum seekers arriving to Australia by boat is profoundly emotional and divisive. Its emotional nature must not only be considered in the present context but also understood from a historical perspective. This article argues that often the asylum seeker debate has been structured as an emotional dispute about the morality of the Australian nation; and that one of the main functions of such a dispute is to reinstate t…
David Must Fall! Decentring the Renaissance in Contemporary and Transcultural Italian Studies
Through a focus on the Florentine Renaissance, and especially one of its most extraordinary icons, Michelangelo’s David, the authors provide two complementary reflections on how the banal and globalised understanding of the Italian Renaissance as the cradle of Western modernity and civilisation impacts on transcultural Italian Studies. The authors are interested in reflecting on how the pervasiveness of an often-idealised and stereotypical fantas…
Italians in Australia
Ethnic enclave or transcultural edge? Reassessing the Prato district through digital mapping
Relations between Italy and other countries – such as China – are often imagined within a binary frame that essentialises national and ethnic communities and fails to recognise the complex transcultural ramifications of an increasingly globalising world. This is particularly problematic when studying those social and cultural spaces that Ilaria Vanni (2016) has described as transcultural edges. These are marginal spaces of transition and encounte…
Re-Creating Home and Exploring Away in New Cities
Migrants are often characterized as in search of new homes, while spectator sports are frequently spoken of as providing homes for the followers of particular teams. However the particular kinds of ‘homes’ that spectator sports can provide for migrants is understudied. This paper explores the sporting ‘homes’ found by those who migrated from Italy to Australia after the Second World War. In particular it examines the different experiences of thos…
Football is life
This paper takes the cultural text of Association football (soccer) and some media texts created in response to it, to explore the passions linked to the game. In particular, we examine several poems and ‘recitativo’ (spoken moments in musical performances) to trace some links between the notions of love, suffering and madness that are referred to so often in conversations regarding the cultural texts of Association football. As part of this we d…
Migrant Lives on First Nation Land
Via ethnographic and oral history methods and transcultural memory work, this article presents the complex, ambiguous and at times contradictory relationship between a Greek family and an Aboriginal community, including the traditional landowners, in Central Australia in the 1960s. Within a commonplace narrative of colonists and pastoralists buying, owning and selling First People’s land, ownership by Greek migrants and the historical presence of…
Sport, social inclusion and the logic of assimilation in Prato (Italy)
In this article we discuss the extent to which sport might effectively encourage processes of integration and civic participation in Prato, one of the most multicultural cities in Italy. A discourse analysis of recent policies that aim to foster social inclusion of migrants and their children through sport in the city and in the broader region of Tuscany is conducted in the first half of the article; this is followed by the analysis of qualitativ…
Mapping transnational lives
This article considers three recent graphic memoirs that focus on Italian transnational migration and its legacies: Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s The Inheritance, Joshua Santospirito’s Swallows (Part I), and Pia Valentini’s Ferriera. We adopt the term carto-graphic memoirs (Mitchell 2007; Norment 2012), to describe graphic novels that aim to literally and metaphorically map transnational lives, identities, and memories, through complex artistic proces…
Transnational and decolonial Italian Studies
Migropessimism of the Intellect, Migro-Optimism of the Will
Sociology (21 works) · History (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Art (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Media studies (11 works) · History (10 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (10 works)