New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies: Definition, Theory, and Accented Practices

191 Pages·2012·4.03 MB·English

by  Graziella Parati

NEW PERSPECTIVES IN ITALIAN CULTURAL STUDIES
The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series
In Italian Studies
General Editor: Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean
John D. Calandra Italian American Institute (Queens College–CUNY)
The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies is devoted to the publication of scholarly works on Italian
literature, film, history, biography, art, and culture, as well as on intercultural connections, such as Italian-American Studies.
Recent Publications in Italian Studies
Parati, Graziella, New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies—Volume 1: Definition, Theory, and Accented Practices
(2012)
Smith, Shirley Ann, Imperial Designs: Italians in China, 1900–1947 (2012)
Rosengarten, Frank, Giacomo Leopardi’s Search for a Common Life through Poetry: A Different Nobility, a Different
Love (2012)
Baliani, Marco (au.), Nicoletta Marini-Maio, Ellen Nerenberg, Thomas Simpson (trans. and eds.) Body of State: A Nation
Divided (2012)
Ducci, Lucia, George P. Marsh Correspondence: Images of Italy, 1861-1881 (2012)
Verdicchio, Pasquale, Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries (2011)
Parati, Graziella and Anthony Julian Tamburri (eds.), The Cultures of Italian Migration: Diverse Trajectories and Discrete
Perspectives (2011)
Trubiano, Marisa S., Ennio Flaiano and His Italy: Postcards from a Changing World (2010)
Halliday, Iain, Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English: Theory and Praxis of Literary Translation (2009)
Serra, Ilaria, The Imagined Immigrant: The Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924
(2009)
Lucamante, Stefania (ed.), Italy and the Bourgeoisie: The Re-Thinking of a Class (2009)
Van Order, Thomas, Listening to Fellini: Music and Meaning in Black and White (2008)
Billiani, Francesca, and Gigliola Sulis, The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions
(2008)
Parati, Graziella, and Marie Orton (eds.), Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy, Volume One (2007)
Orton, Marie, and Graziella Parati (eds.), Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy, Volume Two (2007)
Scambray, Ken, Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian-American Novel (2007)
Polezzi, Loredana, and Charlotte Ross (eds.), In Corpore: Bodies in Post-Unification Italy (2007)
Francose, Joseph, Socially Symbolic Acts: The Historicizing Fictions of Umberto Eco, Vincenzo Consolo, and Antonio
Tabucchi (2006)
Kozma, Jan (trans.), Grazia Deledda, Marianna Sirca (2006)
On the Web at http://www.fdu.edu/fdupress
NEW PERSPECTIVES IN ITALIAN
CULTURAL STUDIES
Volume 1: Definitions, Theory, and Accented
Practices
Edited by Graziella Parati
FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Madison • Teaneck
Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
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10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2012 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
New perspectives in Italian cultural studies : definitions, theory, and accented practices / edited by Graziella Parati.
p. cm.—(The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press series in Italian studies 19)
One of two volumes originating from a conference on Italian cultural studies held at Dartmouth College in 2010. The second
volume is entitled New studies in Italian culture : the arts and history.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61147-532-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-61147-533-3 (electronic)
1. Italy—Social life and customs—1945—-Congresses. 2. Popular culture—Italy—Congresses. 3. Italy—Civilization—1945—
Congresses. I. Parati, Graziella.
DG451.N49 2012
945.092—dc23 2012012323
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
VOLUME 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDYING CULTURES
PART I: DEFINITIONS AND THEORY
CHAPTER 1: INTELLECTUALS AND SUBALTERN GROUPS BETWEEN
STRUCTURE AND DISCOURSE
CHAPTER 2: NON FINITO
CHAPTER 3: COMMUNITY AND GLOBALIZATION
CHAPTER 4: “LE CENERI DI PASOLINI”
CHAPTER 5: POLYLINGUAL WRITING AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN
TODAY’S ITALY*
CHAPTER 6: THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA
PART II: PRACTICE (CASE STUDIES)
CHAPTER 7: “BETWEEN HIS GESTURE AND MY SMILE”
CHAPTER 8: “IS IT BECAUSE I’M A WOP?”
CHAPTER 9: ITALY MADE IN JAPAN
CHAPTER 10: ITALY’S UNMENTIONABLE RACISM
CHAPTER 11: ARCADIAN HISTORIES
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
hese two volumes of essays would have not have been possible without the wonderful
people at Dartmouth College who first supported the Conference on Italian Cultural Studies
held in May 2010 and, later, the collected essays from that event. In particular I need to thank
Ken Yalowitz and Christianne Hardy Wohlforth at the Dickey Center for International
Understanding; Adrian Randolph, director of the Humanities Center; Carol Folt, dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Kate Conley, associate dean of the Humanities; and Barry Scherr,
provost of Dartmouth College, and the Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund of the Department
of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. I am particularly grateful for the funds from the
Paul D. Paganucci Chair in Italian Literature and Language. I owe thanks to every one of the
contributors to this collection, all of whom considered it worthwhile to devote a great deal of
time and energy to participating in this collection of essays. Special thanks go to Marie Orton
for her help, as usual, and to a wonderful librarian, Miguel Valladares.
VOLUME 1 INTRODUCTION: STUDYING CULTURES
Definitions, Theory and Accented Practices
Graziella Parati
E
ngaged cultural studies is academic work (teaching, research, dissemination, and the like) on
contemporary culture from nonelite or counterhegemonic perspectives (“from below”) with an
openness to the culture’s reception and production in everyday life, or more generally, its
impact on life trajectories.1
In his book Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification, John
Storey traces the changes in the disciplines of cultural studies from Raymond Williams to the
more recent developments in the field. Indebted to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and his
observations on the relationship between culture and power, Storey affirms that cultural studies
is an “academic practice concerned to think culture politically.” As an academic discipline,
cultural studies is a “politically committed field”2 that has expanded Gramsci’s focus on class
and power to an emphasis on issues on gender, ethnicity, identity, and the like. Cultural studies
traces the construction of meaning and investigates how meanings are validated, transmitted,
and consumed. These processes of construction and validation of meaning are filled with
tensions and anxieties, which become apparent in analyzing Italian contemporary culture.
Contemporary Italy has witnessed Silvio Berlusconi’s attempts to disseminate specific
creations and representations of a culture by means of his popular television channels, which
reproduce highly specific interpretations of gender roles, of a market logic, and of values that
he has translated into his political agenda. The former prime minister has understood what
cultural studies affirms; namely, that culture is “an aspect of all human activities” and not just
an “intellectual production.”3 As Storey states, cultural studies has shown us how “signification
has a ‘performative effect’; it helps construct the realities it appears to describe.”4 There is no
better description of the processes of signification taking place in Italian media today. The
cultural representations that have appeared in Italy since the liberalization of private television
channels, Berlusconi’s programming have signified Italian culture through representations of
the humiliation of women’s bodies, the reproduction of only one model of Italianness based on
consumerism, and the construction of news reporting as a way to reiterate the necessity of
Berlusconi as cultural and political icon and model. This successful cultural project has
performed Italian culture along distinctly prescriptive lines. In more recent years, translated
into the programming of the channels of public television, Berlusconi’s models of signification
have saturated Italian culture.
Berlusconi’s populist agenda of construction of meaning has permeated his media holdings
from television to the press, but has not taken into consideration that meanings are both
consumed and contested. Resistance to Berlusconi’s cultural architecture has always been
present and has never been efficiently contained or reabsorbed within his political construction
of meanings. Culture is never singular and Italy has seen the circulation of dominant cultural
models that have been reacted against in order to incorporation. The cultural productions that
counter Berlusconi’s widespread cultural models cannot be erased. They sustain our critical
gaze and our study of the complexity of meanings and significations that are “never definitive
but always provisional always dependent on contexts.”5
The two volumes New Perspectives on Italian Cultural Studies and New Studies in Italian
Culture: The Arts and History, originate from a conference on Italian cultural studies held at
Dartmouth College in 2010. A number of essays from the conference have been selected for
these two volumes, which are designed as both a tool for research in the specific field of
Italian cultural studies as well as instrument for teaching cultural studies. This two-volume
collection of essays is grounded in the concept of cultural studies as a field of inquiry that
questions separations and privileges the imbrication of areas of research in order to construct
acts of contamination. In describing Italian cultural studies as a space of exchanges, I
inevitably define it as a border area that operates within a national cultural context. It
constructs new proximities in a local, intranational context within the contested spaces that are
“national cultures.” Relating the local, the intranational, to the national demands the additional
step of moving from micro to global issues, that is, to more international contexts, thus creating
a repetition of cultural border areas that the practice of cultural studies can explore.
In considering Italian culture as an intrinsically complex web of encounters, we need to think
of the national itself as a border area and a place that can give birth to global citizenship. In his
article “Cosmopolitan Patriots” (1996) and his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of
Strangers (2006), Anthony Appiah highlights the tensions between the global and the local,
thus moving the discussion into the realm of ethics. Embracing ethics involves thinking about
the role of localized discourse in the construction of meaning at a historical time in which the
local is not enough. My essay, “Alleanze letterarie e culturali nelle migrazioni
contemporanee,” (2010) focuses on the localized resurgence of nostalgia for communities that
never actually existed but whose formulations are now part of a generalized historical
amnesia. These nostalgic constructions provide reassuring narratives about a national and
traditional past that seeks to function culturally as a refuge from change. Thinking about the
local without losing sight of the global allows us to ethically contrast narratives that enclose
rather than connect contexts of knowledge beyond rather limited spheres.
New Perspectives on Italian Cultural Studies and New Studies in Italian Culture: The Arts
and History endeavor to be both a contribution to Italian cultural studies and an exploration of
cultural connections outside the limiting boundaries of what was considered to be Italian in the
past or is in the present. Therefore these volumes dialogue with the content of previous
volumes in cultural studies and at the same time endeavor to render discussions of post-
national issues fundamental in Italian cultural studies. These volumes are indebted to the
research and edited volumes produced by Michele Cometa, David Forgacs, Robert Lumley,
Robert Dombroski, Dino Cervigni, Norma Bouchard, Beverly Allen, and Mary Russo, whose
work has been instrumental in revising cultural studies and in discussing the role of cultural
studies in the field of Italian studies. In order to introduce the present volumes, I will offer only
a brief summary of the genealogy of Italian cultural studies, which, fortunately, has left its
infancy and has reached, if not maturity, at least an adolescent stage demonstrated by the wealth
of publications on the subject.
Forgacs and Lumley’s groundbreaking Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1996) was
the first text that collected essays addressing a specific brand of Italian cultural studies. The
editors note that cultural studies in Italy was taking a long time to stake out its territory. They
eloquently discuss the reasons for such a delay in participating in such an innovative
theoretical discussion. Their goal was to move away from the concept of culture as
predominantly print culture, a definition that was in need of revision as it is far too limiting.
Beginning with an overview of definitions that moves diachronically from the neo-idealism of
Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile through the 1970s, the editors comment on the
unexplained lack of discussion and changes in the interpretations of the concept of culture from
antifascism to the protests and resistance that coincided with the 1960s and 1970s. However,
they remark that even after that time, “the same traditional link between culture, intellectuals,
and book-learning . . . persisted . . . [which] is . . . surprising given the extent of the counter-
cultural movements.”6 For the editors, popular culture served as the conduit to innovate an
approach to culture as they began to study “marginalized and subaltern culture.”7 Anthropology
and ethnography were clearly at the forefront of such explorations. These explorations were
highly politically motivated and engaged the public debates while studying the movements in
mass culture.
Analyzing mass culture requires an investigation of the political stance that defines what mass
culture is. The left defined it “as inauthentic and as bringing about the commodification of
cultural life”8 until intellectuals such as Umberto Eco analyzed the most recent changes in
Italian life, embraced semiotics as a theoretical framework of analysis, and translated
foundational works by other European intellectuals into Italian. Mass culture and politics
remain at the center of many discussions in Italian cultural studies placing a considerable
emphasis on politics. Forgacs and Lumley conclude that the study of culture in Italy “has been
heavily conditioned by politics.”9 Their statement is supported by the fact that political parties
in Italy have openly competed in influencing the country’s economic, broadcasting, publishing,
and even sport industries. They also add that cultural studies in Italy has been fueled by the
compelling work studies mainly generated by historians “of the modern and contemporary
periods,”10 including the groundbreaking work of feminist historians such as Luisa Passerini,
whose writings on oral history and autobiography has had an impact across disciplines.
Concentrating on the issues into which the volumes sections were divided—“Geographies,”
“Identities,” “Media,” and “Culture and Society”—Forgacs and Lumley’s edited volume
became the compass for subsequent projects in cultural studies, particularly those of the post-
World War II period.
It would, however, be misleading to consider the innovations represented by Forgacs and
Lumley’s text without reminding the reader of previous works on culture authored by Zygmund