What to read after Ennio Flaiano and His Italy?

Disenthralling Ourselves portrays contemporary Israel in a process of transition. Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli communities share a nation-state divided by the separate truths of its conflicting fundamental narratives. This book considers ways of converting those separate and antagonistic narratives from fuel for conflict to seeds of change. Its purpose is to undo the convenient coherence of collective memory and master narratives through fostering a capacious moral imagination able to apprehend diverse, even contentious, stories and truths. Contemporary Israel functions as a case study in an in-depth and interdisciplinary exploration of conflict resolution, viewing Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli docpostwar Italian and European cinema it is much less known--especially outside of Italy--that such success has much to do with the writings of his fifteen-year collaborator and scriptwriter, Ennio Flaiano (1910-72), journalist, novelist, dramatist, and theater and film critic. This book identifies the ways in which Flaiano's distinctive travel diary--satirically registering the transformative journey from provincial Italian to global citizen--captured and shaped the changing tastes of an entire generation of Italians on the film set, in the newspaper office, and on the street. The book highlights Flaiano's uneven yet steadily developing anticolonialist stance, his emerging postmodern autobiography, and his interrogation of notions of regional, national and cultural superiority. Marisa S. Trubiano is Assistant Professor of Italian at Montclair State University.