Blackness, Power and Representation in Renaissance Florence

In collaboration with
NYU Department of Italian Studies

Co-sponsored by
NYU’s Medieval and Renaissance Center

Part of the series
Race, Migration, Italy

Blackness, Power and Representation
in Renaissance Florence

Short Film Screening
Il Moro (The Moor)
(Italy, 2021, 22 min.)
Written and directed by
Daphne Di Cinto
In ITALIAN with ENGLISH subtitles

Followed by a panel discussion featuring:
Daphne Di Cinto, director
Emily Wilbourne, CUNY (author of Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence; Oxford UP, 2023)
Moderated by Eugenio Refini, NYU

In ENGLISH

How was Blackness conceived in Renaissance Florence? When a man of African descent became the duke of Florence in the early 1500s, what was his experience? And how was he received? Daphne Di Cinto’s short film Il Moro (2021) explores these questions, imagining the story of duke Alessandro de’ Medici’s rise to power. The screening of the short film will be followed by a panel discussion with the director, Daphne Di Cinto, and Dr. Emily Wilbourne (CUNY), whose recent book Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence, asks questions about racial diversity in early modern Florence and the ways in which archival traces may speak to us about aspects of history that have been systematically silenced.

Trailer:

Daphne Di Cinto is a Black Italian screenwriter, director, actor and producer. She studied film and theatre in Rome, where she focused on acting at Scuola di Cinema, while getting her degree in Communication Science from Roma Tre University. She holds a Master in Fine Arts from The Actors Studio Drama School. Currently based in London, Daphne is the writer/director/producer of the award-winning short film Il Moro – The Moor, her directorial debut. As a screenwriter, she is developing both features and series within various genres, from comedy to sci-fi, although she has a soft spot for history. Daphne is interested in topics such as migration, ethnic identity and the female gaze. She was a finalist of the 2020 Phil Fox Award for Playwriting and of Screencraft Film Fund 2021 and a quarter-finalist of Emerging Screenwriters Genre Screenplay Competition 2021. Daphne received the Cultured Focus Visionary in Film Award during the 79th Venice Film Festival and she was awarded Best Director of a Foreign Language Short at the Madrid International Film Festival. Daphne played the Duchess of Hastings in the Netflix series Bridgerton.

Emily Wilbourne (PhD NYU) is Professor of Music at CUNY’s Queens College and The Graduate Center. She specializes in Italian theatrical music and sound during the seventeenth century, and in questions of embodiment, performance, race, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of several books: Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte (U of Chicago Press, 2016), Lesbian/Opera: Elena Kats-Chernin’s Iphis and Matricide: The Musical (Lyrebird Press, 2022), and Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth- Century Florence (Oxford UP, 2023); she has co-edited, with Suzanne G. Cusick, Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (Open Book Press, 2021). Dr. Wilbourne’s articles have appeared in numerous journals. In 2011, she was awarded the Philip Brett Award for excellence in queer music scholarship and, in 2017-18, she was a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.

—

Race, Migration, Italy is a series of events (book discussions, theatrical performances, film screenings, lectures) sponsored by Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in collaboration with NYU’s Department of Italian Studies. It aims to promote conversations on the intersections of race and migration in Italy and in Italian diasporic communities. Conceived in connection with courses taught in the Department of Italian Studies, Race, Migration, Italy revisits the format launched by Casa Italiana’s Virtual Salons: Discourses on Black Italia, held virtually during the pandemic, by bringing together artists and scholars in order to address questions about race and racialization across Italian history and multifaceted geography.