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Chapter Four - Muslim in Milan: The Orientalisms of Leda Rafanelli

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Summary

Cultural cross-dressing and conversion to Islam were practices at once strategic and practical: many Westerners who spent any amount of time in the Middle East adopted local dress the better to accomplish their ends, whether scholarly or commercial, and conversion to Islam was in some cases similarly profitable. As we have seen, both cultural cross-dressing and the topos of “turning Turk” raise anxieties about the relation of exteriority and psychic interiority. To what extent can identities be assumed strategically, donned and taken off at will? Did those Christian converts to Islam – the rinnegati who “turned Turk” – merely assume the “external practices” of one religion while maintaining belief in another “in their hearts,” as the Catholic Church itself had sanctioned through the tribunals of the Roman Inquisition? This latter notion functioned as a discursive rescue operation making it possible to reclaim the Christian through an insistence that psychic interiority be strictly separable from the “merely” exterior. By the same token, the practices of passing and posing as Muslim, practices to which cultural cross-dressing was integral, informed performances as skillful as that of Richard Frances Burton, who entered Mecca as a non-believer, or as successful as that of the lesser-known Italian, Giovanni Finati, who entered Mecca as the Muslim Mahomet. In this chapter I turn to a rather different case of cultural cross-dressing and conversion to Islam, that of Leda Rafanelli (1880–1971). The stage upon which she posed was that of twentieth-century Milan, and the audience for her posing was, on the one hand, a small readership made up mostly of fellow anarchists and, on the other, the camera itself. Unlike those of her nineteenth-century predecessors, Rafanelli's “ethnomasquerade” was performed with promise of neither commercial profit nor the thrill of transgressive passing on sacred ground. And, unlike other cross-cultural cross-dressing female travelers, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Grace Ellison, and Isabelle Eberhardt, Rafanelli did not favor the şalvar (the divided skirt widely referred to by Westerners as “harem pants”) that was associated with freedom from strictures of femininity, both physical and social, but rather combined an “Egyptian” aesthetic with a “Gypsy” overlay that emphasized an Orientalized femininity.

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Accidental Orientalists
Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands
, pp. 154 - 210
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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