Maurizio Meloni

'Othering' is an increasingly used term in international debates on structural racism and decolonization. It can be defined as a form of a binary thinking, or stereotyping through which whole groups are treated as inferior or abnormal, and their differences reified, magnified, misrepresented, or caricatured. The first talk describes othering processes in the Italian humanistic and Renaissance writings following two key moments. A) the establishing of an ancient-medieval-renaissance sequence which will become a future pattern to read people "without culture" as belonging to a "Dark Age" ; B) the impact of the Ottoman menace in humanistic representations of the Other and its consequences on the reception of Arabic and Persian scientific and medical writing in early modern science. The talk will introduce the audience to recent literature on the postcolonial Middle Ages and the politics of periodization across the modern-premodern boundary (Davis, 2008) as a key political strategy in the production of colonial modernity.