Description: First authoritative testimony of the debate that has characterized contemporary Italian critical thought, which has recently caught the attention of an international audience.
Brief description: Glenda Garelli is research associate at Queen Mary, University of London and adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works at the intersection of political theory and urban studies on immigration and refugee issues in the central Mediterranean. Her single and co-authored work appeared in Materiali Foucaultiani, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and Etnografia. She is currently co-editing a special issue on the Mediterranean movements in the journal Antipode and working on a book manuscript drawing from her dissertation The Humanitarian Frontier in the Mediterranean. Border Work and the Right to Presence.
Review Quotes:
"Italian Critical Thought demonstrates that there are theoretical and political alternatives to the grand narratives of neoliberalism; that the vocabulary of globalization, free market, competition, and crisis can be displaced by critical imagination and militant philosophy. This volume provides a necessary toolbox for naming the excess of politics and mobilizing what resists against, or escapes from, the horizon of the nation-state and its categories." --Federico Luisetti, Professor of Italian Studies, University of St. Gallen
"What exactly is Italian thought and how might it help us respond to some of the political and ethical predicaments we face today? In this virtuous collection, Gentili, Stimilli and Garelli have arranged a number of incisive pieces that do justice to the broad and ecumenical perspectives that make up contemporary Italian thought. From autonomia to biopolitics to political theology and its critique, the snapshot that emerges of Italian thought is one of a powerful ontology and immanence able to enhance difference in a political moment that sorely needs it. It also happens to be a wonderful introduction for those new to Italian philosophy." --Timothy C. Campbell, Professor in the Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University