Tag Archives: Allessandra Magrin

“‘It Was a Damned Bad Day When Columbus Discovered America’: Italian Reception of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’s Show and (Native)American Reactions to the Cradle of Civilization,” Allessandra Magrin, University of Strathclyde

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’s show could be envisaged as a pioneering attempt of exporting the newborn American Culture into the Old World, like a sort of backlash colonization. It can be therefore interpreted as an embryonic example of American transnationalism. The Italian stopovers of the Wild West’s tour, although sporadically tackled by previous scholarship, proved to be focal in the construction of a transnational awareness, especially considering the history of mass-migrations of the time. In particular this paper looks at one specific aspect of such perception, which is the two-sided understanding of ‘otherness’, showing the double point of view in which both the Italians and Western (and Native) Americans kept relationships with one another and defined their identities.

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