Blaxploitation Italian Style: Exhuming and Consuming the Colonial Black Venus in 1970s Cinema in Italy

3 p.m. Wednesday, February 29, 2012

This event is sponsored by: African and African American Studies
Women and Gender Studies
Arts, Media and Engineering
International Letters and Cultures
Italian Language and Culture Program
WGHL (Wrigley Hall) 201
Campus: Tempe
Cost: free

Guest speaker Rosetta Giulani Caponetto will discuss how director Luigi Scattini's 1970s Blaxploitation trilogy - which established model Zeudi Araya as an erotic icon in Italian culture - taps into the social and political crises of 1970s Italy. Caponetto will also explore how the notion of cannibalism applies to the movie trilogy in terms of the associations between black femininity and anthropophagy, as well as the scopophilic relationship between Italian male spectators and the female black body. Caponetto is an assistant professor of Italian at Auburn University.