California Italian Studies

This article investigates how some white Italian feminists have begun to reckon with the colorblindness and ethnocentrism of their theories and are contributing to the development of a critical white feminism. An examination of key feminist texts from the 1970s will be followed by an investigation into more recent iterations of difference feminism that have critically reengaged and redefined both Marxist theories of social reproduction and cultural practices of female intersubjectivity. In addition to addressing the existence of differently situated gender positionalities and their diverging struggles, this critical white Italian feminism is also attempting to meaningfully incorporate and center feminist perspectives that have been traditionally marginalized. The article will stress the key role that both international antiracist feminisms (intersectional and decolonial) and local transnational feminisms which had already been reimagining the feminist struggle in Italy, have had in redefining white Italian feminist imaginaries.

The article is a reflection on the genealogy of the organizations of the Italian revolutionary left of the 1970s and on the relationship of this multifaceted topic within the context of "Sixty-eight", understood not so much as "the long sixty-eight", but rather as a student and youth protest in the phase of welding with other forms of social and political antagonism (that is the period from 1967 to 1969, with its antecedents and aftermath). The aim is to understand whether there is a “parental relationship” between the far-left and 1968 and, if so, what kind of bond might be conceivable. Are we facing a revolutionary left of the seventies born from the student and workers movements of the sixties, or is this event-process, instead, a consequence of the diffusion of the political culture of the revolutionary left in the previous decade?

In 1884, Edmondo De Amicis joined a group of over 1,500 emigrants travelling from Genoa to Buenos Aires on the ship Nord America. Based on the transoceanic crossing and the two months he spent in Argentina, De Amicis produced several texts: a long account of the transatlantic journey, Sull’Oceano, published in 1889; a short story, “Dagli Appennini alle Ande,” included in his 1886 best-seller, Cuore; and a lecture, “I nostri contadini in America,” delivered three times in 1887. Collectively, these texts describe Italian emigration to South America in its different stages, from departure to settlement and, for some, return.

This essay explores how De Amicis, a renowned literary promoter of national consciousness and national cohesion, addresses the blatant failure in the nation building project represented by the exodus from the nation of the poorest among its new citizens. Sull’Oceano identifies class discord as the primary motor of the Italian post-unitary diaspora and proposes reformed elite behavior as antidote to emigration and safeguard of national allegiance among transplanted Italians. “Dagli Appennini alle Ande” and “I nostri contadini in America,” instead, focus on Argentinian nativism as the cause of the transplanted Italians’ continuing suffering, and advocate that the Argentinians recognize the Italian farmers’ contribution to the settlement of the country and that the Italian government play a protective role towards its citizens abroad, thus returning to the country of origin the role of protective mother figure which the emigrant flux had compromised.

While Sull’Oceano focuses on national class division and the possibility of the migrants’ disaffection from the nation, “I nostri contadini” superimposes international ethnic conflict on class division and concentrates on the absence of the nation in spite of the migrants’ renewed affection. Both texts offer an emotional solution to the ruptures they highlight. In the first one, interclass empathy ensures the loyalty of the migrants to the nation. In the latter, empathy has to travel across more axes, from the Argentinians to the Italians and from the ruling class in Italy to the migrants across the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, in this case the solution is delayed to the future. Should the circulation of affect be successful, however, the migrants would be both “nostri,” children of the land they left behind, and “figli del paese” in Argentina. Instead of searching for a mother, they would have two. The mother across the ocean, moreover, would be “altera” rather than shamed. De Amicis, in other words, would have reconciled emigration and nationalism.

This article examines Pier Paolo Pasolini’s anthology of popular poetry, Canzoniere italiano (1955). Deeply connected to its author’s well-known passion for dialects and regional, lower-class cultures first evidenced in his Friulian poetry, Canzoniere represents a key moment in Pasolini's thought. The collection exemplifies his theorization of language and power, the role of the popular in national culture before the ravages of neocapitalistic growth, and the aesthetic significance of dialect traditions. This project, intended to preserve dialect traditions after the fall of Fascism, also echoes the work of the nineteenth-century folklorists who sought document and disseminate folk cultures as a testament to national popular traditions of a newly-unified Italy. Pasolini’s methodological approach, especially, connects him to these previous folklorists. His dependence on written anthologies rather than ethnographic research, his valorization of popular poetry as a literary tradition, and his insistence on the archaic and ahistorical nature of the lowest classes all contrast sharply with the emerging discourse in the 1950s—promoted in particular by the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino—that working-class people participated in history and expressed forms of political consciousness through their cultural practices. I argue that Pasolini’s own understanding of popular poetry, as articulated in the introduction to the Canzoniere, betrays the radical promise of the work itself and reveals it to be an inherently conservative project. When taken in the context of other theories of folklore in the postwar, it embodies a late gesture of a traditional aesthetic and literary approach to working-class people and their culture.

Even though Mussolini’s famous definition of cinema as “the strongest weapon” implies a common ground between filmmaking, propaganda, technology, and warfare, a casual viewer of Fascist-era films would be hard-pressed to find explicit references to this interconnectedness. In fact, narrative films made at the time hardly ever dealt with the realities of the regime, to the point that in 1979 Carlo Lizzani spoke of Fascist cinema by calling it “an absence.” Nonetheless, the Fascist obsession with modernity and technological innovations emerges in different ways from most films produced during the Ventennio. Despite their surface-level optimism and faith in the process of modernization, many of these films betray the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that accompanied the shift from tradition to modernity, reflecting the complexity of the regime’s own attitude towards these cultural modes. In particular, films shot on location in the colonial territories of Eastern Africa display an interesting ambivalence towards technology and the colonial effort itself: while their narratives are seemingly celebratory, the cinematic style they display reveals a more complicated relationship with the Fascist myth-making agenda.

This paper will examine four titles belonging to this body of films, grouped by Ruth Ben-Ghiat under the label of Fascism’s Empire Cinema, and will explore their portrayal of modernity by focusing on their representation of the relationship between technology and the human body. I will argue that these films reflect the contradictions intrinsic to the Fascist ideology of progress, and the technological mediation of the camera allows for this ambivalence to emerge without being explicitly stated. That is why, rather than adopting a cultural studies approach, I will employ film analysis as a tool to conduct historical research. I will depart from the film texts and, by analyzing the formal structure of some of their key moments, will locate the places in which feelings of uncertainty towards Fascist ideals of progress, strength, and masculinity ripple underneath a seemingly triumphal surface.

As a metaphor, the intersection features in several contemporary autobiographical narratives that explore the social complexities of identity formation. Foregrounding both cultural hybridity and mechanisms of marginalization, this image captures the lived experiences of individuals who live across multiple communities. In my analysis of Kym Ragusa’s The Skin Between Us (2006), I bridge the study of life-writing and social theory to demonstrate how the author uses spatial forms of representation, including the crossroads and the map, to critique preconceived notions of race and belonging. Ragusa’s memoir confronts the several types of violence that occur at the junction between social structures, as it points to their ability to reproduce over time. By placing Ragusa’s understanding of identity as social position in relation with her interest in geo-historical stratifications, my reading suggests that her poetics of location opens onto a theory of implication, whereby subjects are constantly folded into structures from the past and are called to act upon them in the present.