The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner

Author:Rachel Kushner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Go to Italy and few mention the 1970s, when their country literally almost had a revolution. That explosive era and its joys, traumas, and failures have been all but erased. Luckily, there are some remainders, like the amazing photographs of Tano D’Amico. Here he captures the gates of Sapienza University in Rome on February 17, 1977, when it was occupied by students, as Luciano Lama, leader of the biggest labor union in Italy, came to pay them a visit and was heckled and expelled.

“Mara” is Mara Cagol, a former leader of Italy’s leftist-militant Brigate Rosse (BR). “Le altre” are the militant women in Italy in the 1970s, whose Leninism and bombs were only one small and contested facet of a vast and complex wave of feminist actions that transformed the landscape of Italy. Ida Faré, coauthor of this book, was an important theorist of both feminism and architecture, a professor, activist, writer, and founding member of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. While writing The Flamethrowers, I was invited to the collective’s monthly meeting and dinner. That night, Faré was the appointed host of our discussions. The other women in attendance that evening were all similarly legendary and radical figures of the 1970s. They wore black, chain-smoked, had perfectly coiffed hair, and they called each other gruffly by their last names. At dinner, they simultaneously scolded me for my ignorance and were incredibly generous and warm. Ida Faré died in 2018.

It’s curious that for the cover of this book, an image from Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise was chosen. Not an image of a real female engaged in armed struggle, of which Italy produced several, but a still from a film where an actress (Juliet Berto) plays a terrorist, crouching behind a machine-gun turret built of stacked copies of Mao’s Little Red Book. The real terrorist, Mara Cagol, successfully broke her husband, fellow BR leader Renato Curcio, from prison in 1975. The same year, she was gunned down in a shoot-out with carabinieri. The founder of Feltrinelli, the press that published this book, had died accidentally in 1972, attempting to sabotage Milan’s power supply.

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