E. P. Thompson in Italy: Reception, Translation, and Class as a Historical Problem
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
With Gianmaria Brunazzi (Università degli Studi di Milano), RSHC Visiting Fellow
Book here (www.EPThompsonInItaly.eventbrite.co.uk)
Why did one of the most influential works of twentieth-century social history have such a limited and uneven impact in Italy?
This talk revisits the Italian reception of The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson, asking not simply how it was read, but how it was used and contended. First published in Italian in 1969 under a significantly altered title, and entering a highly politicised historiographical field, the book quickly went out of print and was never reissued.
From Communist Party labour history to operaismo and, later, the cultural turn, Thompson’s work was taken up in ways that shifted or neutralised its central problem. At times it was reframed; at others, absorbed without acknowledgment. What was lost in the process was precisely its understanding of class as a lived, historical formation.
Rather than a simple story of absence, the Italian case reveals a more complex pattern of selective reception, appropriation, and neglect. Revisiting this trajectory today – also in light of a new Italian edition which Brunazzi is editing – responds to a renewed openness to social history and a growing urgency to rethink class in historical terms, while also raising broader questions about how concepts travel and what is at stake in translating them across different political and intellectual contexts.
Contact Katy at RSHC for information (k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk)
Facilitated by the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a partnership between Birkbeck University of London and Queen Mary University of London.
Contact name: Katy Pettit
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