Editors: Carlotta Sorba (Università di Padova / European University Institute), Michele Magri (Università di Padova).
In recent decades, the ‘material turn’ in the social sciences and historiography has highlighted how material culture shaped individuals' past social experiences, worldviews, and political spheres. This approach has contributed to the renewal of political history by focusing on its most tangible aspects. It is particularly crucial for the long 19th century, a key period in the development of modern politics. Artifacts of common and everyday use, clothing, and personal accessories – such as cockades, rosettes, medals, pins, etc. – along with various gadgets, technical and scientific instruments, and natural relics, were imbued with political meanings and messages, playing a central role in this process. Research has shown how these objects, operating on multiple dimensions – communicative, emotional, and performative – made political ideas tangible, aroused support and promoted mobilisation.
A fundamental yet relatively unexplored characteristic of these objects is their intrinsic mobility – both in time and space. Whether handcrafted or more widely manufactured as consumer goods, political objects circulated through domestic and public spaces, often crossing national borders via local and global networks of production and trade. Nineteenth-century activism, driven by diverse demands across various contexts and shaped by transnational and imperial dynamics of mobility, dialogue, and exchange, further facilitated and accelerated their movement. These objects circulated both physically – often evading censorship and restrictions – and through the symbols and figurative languages, iconography, and imagery they conveyed. In different contexts, objects and symbols could also be reworked, adapted, and reinterpreted for new uses and practices, which gave their mobility both a spatial and a temporal dimension. They thus became instruments capable of connecting different insurrectional centres across Europe, reaching peripheral areas, and fostering interaction between revolutionary cultures in the Euro-Atlantic space and globally, while also connecting national and transnational counter-revolutionary movements. They played a significant role in shaping movements for nation-building, colonial and imperial expansion and their oppositions, debates around slavery and abolitionism, liberal, constitutional, and democratic movements and their opponents, as well as social and women’s rights activism.
This special issue of Contemporanea aims to reflect on the mobility of political material culture, analysing how its circulation and transformation, both physical and symbolic, generated connections between contexts and movements, disseminated and popularised images and imagination, and redefined and influenced political sensibilities and practices during the long 19th century. Contemporanea invites proposals that explore, but are not limited to the following themes:
- Itineraries of moving political objects across local, transnational, imperial, and global scales, and their role in connecting different political spaces;
- Circuits of production, trade and consumption;
- Re-appropriation, re-use, and reinterpretation in new contexts, meanings, and practices;
- Obstacles to the mobility of objects: censorship, borders, and confiscations;
- Objects as instruments of transnational mobilisation and the construction of political networks.
Proposals of approximately 500 words, written in either Italian or English and accompanied by a brief curriculum vitae of the author, must be sent by March 17, 2025, to the editors, Carlotta Sorba (carlotta.sorba@unipd.it) and Michele Magri (michele.magri@unipd.it), copying the journal’s editorial office (contemporanea@mulino.it). Selected essays must be submitted in their final form by October 4, 2025, and will be subject to a double-blind peer review process. The special issue is scheduled for publication in spring/summer 2026.
For more information about the journal, see: https://www.mulino.it/riviste/issn/1127-3070.
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