The Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists took place in Rome in March-April 1959. It was organized by the journal and publisher Présence Africaine and the Societé Africaine de Culture, in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano per l’Africa. The Congress was an unprecedented event in Italy, which gathered more than one hundred delegates from Africa, Americas, and Europe, including some of the most prominent intellectuals of the time. The event revolved around the crucial and problematic question of the unity of Black Africa (and beyond). It drew on and contributed to a network of transnational collaborations, between a variety of cultural and political institutions but also affective communities. For this reason, the Congress, as a key moment in the articulation of Black cultures and politics in and beyond Europe but also as an example of transnational exchanges in post-war Italy, merits urgent critical scrutiny.
This workshop aims to bring together the community of scholars, archivists, curators, and artists who are currently working on the Congress, approaching it from different angles. It will be an occasion to create a network, share first findings, discuss approaches and challenges, acknowledge the importance of the event in its 65th anniversary and prepare the ground for larger initiatives to mark its 70th anniversary in 2029.
Convenors Erica Bellia (University of Cambridge) and Luca Peretti (University of Warwick)
About the convenors
Luca Peretti is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. He wrote Un dio nero un diavolo bianco. Storia di un film non fatto tra Algeria, Eni, Solinas e Sartre (Marsilio, 2023) and co-edited volumes on terrorism and cinema (Postmedia books, 2014), Pier Pasolini Pasolini (Bloomsbury Academics, 2018), and on Italian cinema and Algeria (AAMOD, 2022). His work has appeared in, among others, Senses of Cinema, The Italianist, Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Annali d’Italianistica, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Historical Materialism, Comunicazioni Sociali, L’Avventura, He is the editor-in-chief of Cinema e Storia. He wrote and co-produced the film Mister Wonderland (dir. Valerio Ciriaci, 2019) and collaborates with newspapers and magazines.
Erica Bellia is a Gulbenkian Early-Career Fellow in Italian at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. She is currently working on a research project entitled Anthologising Blackness in Post-Fascist Italy, which looks at anthologies of Black Literature published in Italy from 1945 to the present. Between September and December 2023, she was a Rome Awardee at the British School at Rome, where she conducted research on how the Italian periodical press reacted to the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Rome, 1959). Erica is also working on her first monograph, based on her PhD: The Colonial Allegory: Narratives of Industry and Decolonization in Italy, 1955-1965. She is an active member of the OBERT (Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail).
Header: Former Museum of Italian Africa, Rome, photo by Luca Dammicco, February 2023
Square image: Frantz Fanon at a press conference during a writers’ conference in Tunis, 1959, Wikimedia commons
