Objects of Collecting in Naples and Naples as Object of Collecting

This workshop will consider ‘Naples’ and ‘Neapolitans’ as subjects of collecting and of dispersal. Thus material culture in Naples, export of goods, and exile of persons, tourism, treasures and trade are considered in relation to each other. We will seek to address the ways in which Neapolitan culture has been orientalized and exoticized through discourses of collecting, to trace how Naples developed as object of fascination for collectors and visitors, Grand Tourists, ‘Orientalizers’ and ‘primitivizers’ from the days of the Grand Tour to the present, and to examine how spectacle — whether theatre, music, dance, or their visual or verbal representations — might be studied without exoticization or orientalization. Studies of particular objects of fascination and their representational and museological fortunes will be interwoven with these diasporic critical histories.

Papers for this Workshop to be received by Helen Hills & Melissa Calaresu by 18 August 2009

Speakers: