Beat, Black, Queer: Pasolini's 'Other America'

Pier Paolo Pasolini's first trip to the United States in 1966 unexpectedly redirected his aesthetic output and its ideological impetus. Civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, and the denizens of New York's ghettos embodied for him an "idealist America" reminiscent of Europe's anti-fascist Resistance. Encounters with Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael, and others fatefully reshaped Pasolini's work and worldview on everything from decolonization to the events of 1968. Italy's most prominent postwar intellectual and heterodox Marxist thus discovered in America not sterile conformity, but a reinvigorated will to commitment. "In Europe everything is finished; in America one has the impression that everything is about to begin."By the time of his second visit in 1969, the King and Kennedy assassinations and Nixon's presidency evoked anything but a redemptive future. Pasolini had already warned of a possible "civil war." Yet amidst the country's travails he found fresh leftist energies, compelling precisely in their autonomy from Marxist doctrine. Even years later, he quipped: "I would like to be an American. Naturally, I would be an American of the other America." This book traces the origins and afterlives of Pasolini's Other America.