Titolo della tesi: The Role of Women of Afghan Diaspora in the Green Turn of Art In Italy Social practices and Artistic interventions for Sustainable Development
This thesis analyses Afghan women in the Italian Diaspora through three artistic fields—fashion, cinema, and theater—using the interdisciplinary lenses of Green Studies and Diaspora Studies. The research investigates the roles of artistic production as sites of identity negotiation, cultural resistance, and sociopolitical commentary for Afghan women living in exile, drawing on these theoretical perspectives. The sections utilize different methodological paradigms to examine the intersection of migration, gender, and artistic expression.
The fashion section situates Afghan sartorial history within the frameworks of postcolonial studies, tracing the definitions of Afghan women’s dress codes through the influence of colonial and modernist interventions. It then examines Afghan fashion in the Italian diaspora, particularly the La Via en Bleu collection and the Green Afghanistan–Italy collection. In this analysis, I illustrate how Afghan designers use fashion as a practice of transnational identity construction and diasporic cultural expression.
The input discusses theatre using a theoretical application of applied theatre to help articulate the lived experience of Afghan women living in exile. A case study of The Herat School in Exile provides an analytic lens into the performative construction of safety, the politics of representation, and the role of theater as a space of resistance to both the patriarchal and exclusionary structures of their country of origin and the host society.
The last part examines the cinema through the perspective of subaltern studies and intersecting approaches, considering the representation of the Afghan women of the Italian diaspora in the documentary Dreamers by Alessandro Galassi and Refugee Girls by Leonardo Cinieri Lombroso. Using an intersectional lens, this study challenges how the films construct complexities of gendered displacement, changing sociocultural molds, and negotiations of hybrid identities within broader discourses of migration and marginalization.
This work highlights the importance of fashion, cinema, and theater as both aesthetic and political arenas whereby Afghan women's identities can be contested and redefined in the diaspora. The research connects with wider debates on gendered migration, cultural hybridity, and the agency of artistic practices in negotiating transnational subjectivity.