"Ota Benga". Small Stories That Make History | Casa Italiana Zerilli / Marimò

"Ota Benga". Small Stories That Make History

Antonio Monda, writer, essayist, director, and professor in the Department of Film and Television at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, is one of the most famous faces of the Italian cultural scene in New York City. He has just published the third book of a “ten-volume novel.” In the following interview, he and Stefano Albertini, director of NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli- Marimò, discuss this book, entitled Ota Benga, set in Monda’s beloved New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Through the true story of Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy kidnapped and brought to the United States to be exhibited in a zoo in 1904, the novel merges fiction with history and touches upon issues such as the practice of “pseudo-science” and racism in the era of modernization. Click here to read the full interview in English.