Feltrin-Morris and Freitag convened a panel entitled “Looking Eastward: Italy and the Orient,” which included scholars from Canada and New Zealand as presenters. The panel examined how the Orient (real, desired, or fabricated) has historically occupied a prominent position in the Italian imaginary, inspiring travelers, academic orientalists, writers, and artists.
Feltrin-Morris and Freitag also presented a paper entitled “Sandokan in India: Facets of Nobility in Emilio Salgari’s Pirates of Malaysia Cycle.” This paper explored the work of Emilio Salgari, famed Italian adventure writer, and his legendary character Sandokan, the noble pirate-warrior of Borneo. Breaking from much of the existing scholarship on Salgari, we argue that Salgari’s use of India as a setting for some of his works allows him to interrogate questions of nobility, hierarchy, and identity within a geographical space that in Orientalist representation and in its historical reality fluidly enacts many forms of hierarchy and stratification. India provides Salgari with the room to work out a preoccupation with the dynamic ways that nobility, aristocracy and morality function. Furthermore, we explore how how powerful Romantic categories such as love, loyalty, honor, bravery, and justice play out against the unique backdrop of Salgari’s India, within the context of European Romantic Orientalism.
More information about the conference can be found here: https://canadianassociationforitalianstudies.org/Program-2024