Sprecher
Beschreibung
In the USA the 1960s and 1970s — driven by the civil rights struggles of African Americans and the decolonization movements — were marked by a keen interest on the part of the publishing world in the voices of Black intellectuals. Moreover, the 1960s represented a turning point in terms of the internationalization of cultural circles in Europe, where African American writers succeeded in reaching diverse segments of the public, increasingly attuned to Third World causes. Malcolm X had also been explicit on this point when he described African Americans as a colonized people and identified culture as one of the primary revolutionary tools. In 1965 Ronald Hobbs established the first – as far as we now – literary agency led by an African American, to provide a platform and legitimacy to emerging African American intellectuals and thereby challenge the white cultural establishment. For these reasons, Ronald Hobbs’s agency was founded with a strong political intent. My presentation aims to explore the richness of Ronald Hobbs’s archive and the possible avenues of research it opens up: through the case study of Hobbs and his biography, together with few paradigmatic examples of the reception of Black culture in Italy during the long 1968, my talk also investigates the networks and circuits of African American culture across the Atlantic, exploring the transnational connections between publishing, political action and thirldworldism.
Speaker Bio:
Anna Ferrando is a researcher in Contemporary History at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia, Italy. She has been fellow for the Spring Term 2025 at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies (Columbia University) in New York. She has published numerous articles in scientific journals on the relationship between publishing and politics from a transnational perspective, her main focus being cultural mediators and mediation in the 20th century. Focusing on these themes are the monograph Cacciatori di libri. Gli agenti letterari durante il fascismo [Book hunters. Literary agents under Fascism] (FrancoAngeli, 2019), that was awarded the SISSCO Prize for “Best Debut Book” by the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History, and the book she edited on translations under Fascism entitled, Stranieri all’ombra del Duce. Le traduzioni durante il fascismo [Foreigners in the Shadow of the Duce. Translations During Fascism] (Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2019). For the last years she has devoted herself to the history of the Adelphi publishing house, on which she wrote Adelphi. Le origini di una casa editrice (1938-1994) [Adelphi. The origins of a publishing house (1938-1994)] (Rome, Carocci, 2023).