Search

This article traces the leisure travel of British homosexual men in continental Europe between 1950 and 1975. The aim of this article is to challenge narratives of British post-war sexual rights discourses as isolated from continental Europe. Taking a transnational approach, which examines the ways in which Britain was embedded in processes of social and cultural change across Europe, it charts informal encounters and networks of cultural communication forged by homosexual men themselves during the post-war tourist boom. Using Oral Histories deposited at the British Library Sound Archive, I emphasize the role of homosocial spaces in the production and performance of the sexual self and establish how affluence provided access to spaces for sexual self-development during a period when homosexuality remained criminalized in Britain. It explores two distinct types of holidays taken by homosexual travellers, examined via a life writing approach—the Amsterdam city break and the southern European beach holiday—and shows how these experiences shaped their self-conception and hopes for a more tolerant society at home. In revealing how foreign forms of homosexual sociability influenced domestic politics, I argue for a stronger emphasis on British entanglements with continental Europe when tracing political and social transformations during the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the complex legacy of Chicanx encounters with the enduring sixteenth-century "idea of Europe": that is, Europe as an epistemic category signifying the modern "civilized" Western world. Chicanx intellectuals contest the presumption that Europe is the enlightened antithesis to Mesoamerica. But Europe has always occupied a vexed status in the Chicanx literary imagination. Even Alurista's seminal 1971 collection of cultural nationalist poetry, Floricanto en Aztlán, involves an eclectic blend of the Spanish Golden Age literary mode of "desengaño" (an ecclesiastical form of demystifi cation) and the Nahuatl "In Xochitl In Cuicatl" (Flower and Song) ritual poetics of transcendence. Chicanx life writing has never resolved this paradoxical fi liation with Spanish culture, which persists as a specter. This essay recovers and reassesses select twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century Chicanx testimonial journalism, autobiographical fi ction, memoir, archival documents, and an opera to show how various Chicanx invocations of Spain involve predictable as well as unexpected encounters, exchanges, and alliances that illuminate a profound ideological dissensus in Chicanx self-fashioning. These variously globalized Euro-Chicanx syntheses, or Euro-Chicanidades, pressure teleological models of Chicanx ontology and epistemology and gesture toward post-Chicanx and broader post-Latinx modalities that portend a global Latinidades paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paolo Boccone (1633–1704), a Sicilian botanist of the second half of the seventeenth century, was a figure who still arouses interest in the emblematic character of his scientific experience, which is connected with a personal history that is still in many ways mysterious and unexplored. Elements which help us understand the complexity of the character and the cultural and material difficulties that he had to face are to be found in his works. They have allowed us to build up a picture of his tireless activity as a traveller and his active presence in the majority of European cultural centres of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do peasants write ego-documents? We do find diaries and autobiographies written by peasants in modern Europe. But an autobiography is not necessarily an ego-document, if it reveals little about the ego and is very short on introspection. Peasant writings were characterized by their terse style, and their pragmatic concerns with the state of the harvest and the price of essential goods. They did not usually focus on the self. My article argues that the label 'ego-document' has been too freely applied to writings 'from below'. I briefly discuss some issues in the study of life writing, and present a remarkable exception to the rule of peasant writings: the case of the autodidact Luigi Daldosso. Daldosso was an 'ordinary exception': he was an ordinary writer of humble social origins who practised literary and compositional skills rarely found amongst peasant authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life-writing documents are not difficult to find; they are part of any archive’s inventory. Nonetheless, a number of European countries have recently witnessed the rise of a new, genre-based type of archive: the diary archive. The Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (1984) in Italy was the first of this kind, and more were to follow, such as the Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique in France (APA, 1992), the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (1998), and the Nederlands Dagboekarchief (Dutch Diary Archive, 2009). How and why did these archives come into being? What are their characteristic features, and what is the relevance of these form-based collections to gender studies? I asked Monica Soeting, co-founder of the Dutch Diary Archive, and contextualised the work of the Dutch in the broader field of European diary archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]