Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Third World’ between Africa and America: Race, Class, and the Analogical Imagination in 1960s Italy

Ara H. Merjian is the Professor of Italian Studies, New York University, and College of Professors, PhD Program in History, Culture and Theory of Society and Institutions, University of Milan

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tireless opposition to neocapitalism throughout the 1960s and early 70s took “Africa” as the allegory and instantiation of political resistance writ large – a fact not surprising given the number of countries which began to wrest back sovereignty from European colonizers during these years.  Yet there is another dimension of Africanness – bound up with the continent’s history yet simultaneously alien to it – which figures prominently into Pasolini’s aesthetics throughout the period: the African-American community and its particular cultural and counter-cultural expressions.  By virtue of the United States’ fraught racial politics, sprawling ghettoes, and imperialist ambitions, the country figured prominently into Pasolini’s “third-world” imaginary in a variety of media and genres – representations relatively overlooked in his influential oeuvre, and which this talk examines in detail.