Alice Balestrino is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies and The Initiative for the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies. Her dissertation focuses on two Jewish authors who collaborated, to varying degrees, with fascism: Margherita Sarfatti and Gertrude Stein. Caught between resistance to the totalizing power of fascist politics which threatened them as gendered and racialized subjects and the adhesion to it, Sarfatti and Stein flipped, in different ways, their delicate position into an instrumental one, controversially navigating a grey zone of power and vulnerability. This comparative analysis examines these authors’ texts, shedding light on how their transnational, transcultural, multilingual, and intersectional outlook did not, in the end, overthrow existing racist and sexist apparatuses and, in fact, enabled them. Stein’s and Sarfatti’s narratives generate destabilizing forms and proto-feminist messages, while also reproducing unfair power structures. Benefitting from materials consulted at Stein’s and Sarfatti’s archives, Balestrino’s research looks into this friction between generation and reproduction, one possibly outlining distinct identities and a problematic comprehension of genealogy.
Image