The limits of cultural nationalism: Italian Switzerland from a risorgimento perspective*

ABSTRACT. This article critiques the ‘cultural turn’ in Italian Risorgimento historiography by examining Italian Switzerland, and specifically Ticino. This area paradoxically aided and abetted Italian patriots, especially Giuseppe Mazzini, yet rejected becoming part of the Italian national project. This paradox is heightened by the fact that the vast majority of the Italian nationalist literary canon, as identified by Alberto Maria Banti, was republished in Ticino. The paradox is explained in terms of the conflict between long‐standing traditions of local autonomy and the idea of any form of uniform or centralised control, as originally represented by the Cisalpine Republic and then by both versions (Napoleonic and Piedmontese) of the Kingdom of Italy. However, I also use Banti's cultural concepts to demonstrate the creation of a powerful counter‐myth of Italian Swiss nationalism in the character of William Tell.     

黔中儒商戴子儒

戴子儒先生是贵州民国时期的著名商人,他虽然僻居黔中,但经商的理念、管理的模式都不落后,事业上也取得了很大的成功。本文根据安顺市档案馆所藏的安顺县商会档案,阐述戴子儒的经商理念、经营方式,分析其由学徒成长为企业家的原因及过程。对了解民国贵州商业状况有一定的价值。     

The rise of the ethical state in Italy. Neapolitan Hegelians and Risorgimento political thought (1848–1871)

ABSTRACT

The article examines the idea of the Ethical State in Italy within the context of the Risorgimento and of Neapolitan Hegelianism. The article first analyses the Neapolitan Hegelians’ idea of nationality and its relationship to the concept of “national character”. Then it focuses on the differences between Hegel’s and Spaventa’s concepts of the State. Finally, it places Silvio and Bertrando Spaventa’s liberalism within Risorgimento debates after 1848, pointing to differences with moderate liberals such as Cesare Balbo or Vincenzo Gioberti. By delineating the context of ideas such as nationality, national character, ethics, and the state, the article sheds new light on the relationship between liberalism and nationalism in nineteenth-century European political thought.     

论清末民初语言的“日化”现象——以鲁迅作品为例

清末民初盛行通过日译本转译西方著作,汉语中引进了大量的日语词汇和句法。笔者认为,比起一直以来通用的“欧化”的说法,把此现象称为“日化”更为贴切。本文以鲁迅作品中的具体“日化”语言实例为证,论证了“日化”的语言事实。对于“日化”语言一直以来遭忽视的现象,笔者从政治、经济、文化心理、汉字等方面分析了原因。     

Meridionalismo,the crisis of liberalism,and the advent of Marxism in post‐risorgimento Naples

For an ideology described by Marx himself as one that was suitable only for advanced societies, backward Naples ironically served as the point of entry for Marxism in Italy. As theorists and activists, the great Neapolitan Marxists—Antonio Labriola, Carlo Cafiero, Arturo Labriola, and Amadeo Bordiga—completely dominated the initial stages of the movement. For an understanding of the severe socio‐economic conditions that did much to make Naples the incubator of radicalism in post‐Risorgimento Italy, the literature of the meridionalisti (southern reformers) remains indispensable. Under attack on both sides of the Atlantic by a new generation of historians who admirably seek to produce a nuanced history of the South by rising above the stereotypes associated with a one‐dimensional image of the “Southern Problem,” the meridionalisti require supplementing today as historians. Nevertheless, the reaction against them has been too extreme. They remain invaluable eye‐witnesses to the conditions and events that formed the historical context of Marxism's momentous appearance in Italy.     

Italy's foreign policy toward China: missed opportunities and new chances

Abstract

This essay provides an account of the erratic and troubled history of the relations between Italy and the People's Republic of China since the 1950s. After reaching their highest point in the two years immediately following the Tiananmen events – when Italy, more than any other Western country, worked to break China's international isolation – they have considerably frozen for a long time. The reason has to be found not only in the crisis that, since 1992, has overcome the Italian political system, but even more so in the structural limits of Italy's economic foreign policy and in the lack of a coherent strategy aimed at promoting Italian goods in world markets that provide huge opportunities – opportunities mostly neglected by the political-economic Italian establishment. The Berlusconi government replaced this negligence with fear-mongering behavior and recurring and outspoken protectionist remarks of various centre-right leaders, who feared the potential damage caused by China's increased competitiveness (which represented, in their opinion, an unfair trade practice) to the national industry. Though too recent to say if it will bear fruit, Prodi has made a desperate attempt for Italy to make up lost ground by leading to China what has been emphatically defined ‘the greatest institutional and business mission ever organized by Italy’ just a few months after his comeback to Palazzo Chigi.     

The Rothschilds in Naples

Abstract

The Rothschild bank in Naples was founded following the Restoration of 1815, and thereafter played a major role in the financial affairs of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and other Italian states until Italy’s Unification after which its operations were transferred to Turin and Rome in 1863. This article examines the career of Karl Rothschild and his son Adolphe in Naples, and describes their close contacts with the Neapolitan government, their intervention to finance the return of Pope Plus IX to Rome following the revolution of 1848–9, and their financial dealings with Cavour and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Savoy in the early 1850s. As well as contacts with the parent Rothschild banking operations in Frankfurt and London, the article examines the Rothschilds’ relations with other foreign and local bankers in Naples. It also explores their role in Neapolitan society and their role in the re-establishment of the Jewish community in Naples in 1830, which they continued to watch with interest long after the family’s banking interests in the city had been wound up.     

Southern rebels against Italian unification: the Great Brigandage in the province of Capitanata

This article explores counter-revolutionary brigandage in Southern Italy after 1860 (also known as Great Brigandage). Working from archival sources, the article offers a new interpretation of the interactions between the political, social and criminal aspects of the guerrilla war against the Risorgimento. Notwithstanding the plurality of the individual motives leading single actors to fight, it is argued that brigandage was an essentially political phenomenon and that the alliances between common bandits and loyalist forces were made possible only in the macro-political setting of the collapse of the Neapolitan monarchy, the difficulties facing Italian state-building, and the emergence of popular legitimist sympathies after 1860.     

壶井荣《蒲公英》的文体及其主题考辨

长期以来,壶井荣的《蒲公英》被认为是一篇表现反战题材的散文。本文试图对该作品的文体及其主题作一考证和辨析,认为《蒲公英》是一篇小说,其主题具有多元性。本文还对该文译者身份作一点初步推测。     

Mazzini in Italian historical memory

Abstract

The essay examines the reasons for the difficult ‘reception’ of Mazzini's image in Italy. With particular reference to themes dear to Mazzini, like the role of public monuments and publications, the author explains why Mazzini's image has had a precarious hold on the collective memory of the Italian people. He goes on to offer a brief overview of the revival of Mazzinian scholarship in the last 15 years (1993–2008), underscoring how the renewed interest is related to the ongoing European and global debate on the meaning of democracy. The author concludes with a list of titles appearing since 1993 that suggest new approaches to the study of Mazzini, and that will be of use to scholars and students.     

学术转型期的民国史研究--中华民国史国际学术讨论会纪要

2002年8月21－23日在北京举行了“中华民国史国际学术讨论会”。从提交此次会议的论文可以看出近年来民国史研究的几个基本特征：民国政治史在致力于突破,民国外交史因新史料的出现而凸现新意,民国社会史的研究日益深化,民国经济史的研究更加细化,民国思想文化与教育史领域的研究在不断拓宽,民国史料的不断发掘与学术史研究的重视。     

Fighting the Risorgimento: foreign volunteers in southern Italy (1860–63)

Abstract

Between 1860 and 1863 hundreds of men from all over Europe volunteered for service in the wars of southern ‘brigands’ on behalf of the exiled King Francis II of Naples. In an attempt to correct the often biased interpretation of this involvement (that was attributed simply to a thirst for adventure, romanticism or even psychological disorder) that coloured the accounts by Italian patriots, this essay suggests the need for fresh consideration. It develops three lines of inquiry that focus respectively on the strong impact of Italian Unification on conservative and Catholic opinion and the ways in which these sources portrayed the struggles of the southern insurgents, the clumsy efforts made by the Neapolitan government-in-exile to recruit volunteers and organize armed expeditions against the former kingdom, and the so-called ‘white international’ in which the warriors of the counter-revolution were depicted as combatants in conflicts that were both civil wars and at the same time episodes in a much longer international ideological struggle. In this context, the significance of foreign involvement in defence of the Neapolitan Bourbons takes on a significance that goes far beyond its poor military outcome.     

Dendrochronological analysis of bowed and plucked instruments from the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory,Naples

The Museo Storico Musicale of the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory of Music in Naples owns a collection of over 200 musical instruments of considerable historical importance. Within the collection, 30 bowed and plucked instruments representative of the Neapolitan violin-making tradition were analysed dendrochronologically to date them, estimate the provenance of the wood and investigate the instruments’ construction characteristics. The values of the statistical cross-dating tests were generally high and allowed 26 instruments to be dated. In all but one case, the dates were consistent with those of the catalogue. From the perspective of wood selection, we noted an unusual use of very old spruce wood, well beyond simple seasoning. The construction technique of the soundboard and other characteristics show good similarities with instruments analysed in other Italian collections. Thus, even in Neapolitan instruments, the growth rings are smaller in small instruments and larger in cellos or double basses. In conclusion, the Neapolitan violin-making school has shown great care in the choice of wood, most coming from regions as far away as Germany or Switzerland, thus confirming the existence of an active large-scale trade in wood for the production of musical instruments.     

Scenarios of Poiesis: Italian New Media (1994–2004)

This essay attempts to read a number of interventions in Italian new media over the last decade as both a response to and an implicit critique of posthumanism. After a brief discussion of the principal terms in question—new media, interaction, and posthumanism—and a survey of the most important contributors to the discourse of posthumanism in Italy, the essay maps the principal features of Italian media as embodied by the works of three contemporary new media artists. These characteristics include the privileging of a prosthetic model for understanding interaction and more generally the staging of interaction as moments of poiesis. They also include more recently the cancellation of the boundaries between ‘scientific’ and cultural images. The essay insists that by foregrounding the primacy of Italian cultural patterns for determining how meaning is generated in new media, Italian new media artists implicitly critique a reifying tendency among posthuman observers in Italy. The essay concludes with a broad assessment of the importance of poiesis for an Italian technological imaginary.     

Between Medieval Continuities and Early Modern Change: Proto-industrialization and Consumption in the Southern Low Countries (1300–1800)

Abstract

This essay discusses two interrelated questions about historical change: in what sense did early modern industries differ from their medieval predecessors; and which elements explain the diverging historical dynamics of European proto-industrial regions? Also considered is the issue of how and why some regions succeeded in selling their products in growing markets, while others apparently failed. This essay also assesses four aspects which have influenced regional success or failure, and which at the same time differentiated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century production and consumption from the late medieval world: the new role of the state, the world economy, rural consumption, and the challenge of fashion. It examines the main changes occurring in these fields between roughly 1650 and 1800, distinguishing between different phases of development for different regions and arguing that some of the success or the failure of a region, and thus their developmental capacities, lay in the interaction with these four fields. Textile industries serve as case studies, with a focus on the Southern Netherlands and comparisons from France, the Dutch Republic, Germany and England.     

Understanding criminal mobility: the case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Italian mafias are now present and active abroad, and many national legal economies are undermined by their activities. The American government responded to this threat in 2011 by introducing an ‘executive order’ that blacklisted the Camorra's (the Neapolitan mafia) activities in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing debate on criminal mobility and, in particular, why, when and how Italian mafiosi move out of their territory of origin and expand into new foreign territories. Recent literature suggests that Italian mafias change their behaviour across territories and will succeed in ‘transplanting’ when there are emerging new markets. This article examines some brief case studies of camorristi in Europe to discuss these concepts of mafia mobility; and it concludes by suggesting that there is no ‘one size fits all’ analysis and that more attention should be paid to the interdependence of territories.     

Women's history in Italy (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

This essay surveys the development of women's history in Italy since its origins, examining the principal questions that have driven research and debate from the 1960s to the present, the ways in which women's history in other countries (notably the US) has been influential in Italy, the impact of women's history on other branches of historical research in Italy and its place — or rather lack of place ‐ in Italian universities.     

THINKING AFTER HITLER: THE NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY1

This review essay seeks to direct attention to intellectual history as a new and flourishing subfield in the historiography of post‐1945 Germany. The essay probes and critically interrogates some of the basic arguments of Dirk Moses' prize‐winning monograph German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. It does so by engaging with a series of German‐language monographs on key intellectuals of the postwar period (Alexander Mitscherlich, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse) or groups of intellectuals that have appeared during the last few years. The essay also includes two books that focus on intellectual transfers from and to the United States and hence transcend the purely national framework. The essay highlights some broader themes such as West German intellectuals' confrontation with the Nazi past and with the memory of Germany's failed experiment with democracy during the interwar Weimar Republic. It also discusses the significance of the West German student movement in the 1960s for West German intellectual history. The essay concludes with some broader reflections on writing intellectual history of the postwar period, and it points to some avenues for further research. It underlines the significance of intellectual debates—and hence of intellectual history—for charting and explaining the process of postwar democratization and liberalization in the Federal Republic of Germany.     

Italy's Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the Southern Frontier of Europe

In Italy, like in many other European countries, cultural roots and national identity are currently shifting as the result of contemporary transnational migrations and globalization. This essay analyses how the paradigm emerging from the Italian national case contributes to a redefinition of the postcolonial canon centered on British history and culture and to the notion of a “European” postcolonial as a whole. To this aim, the authors identify in colonial history and contemporary immigration the threads that connect the postcoloniality of Italy to that of other European countries. At the same time, they locate the specificity of the Italian postcolonial in the intersection between these factors and other events in Italian history that have strongly influenced the process of shaping an Italian national identity: the Southern question, intranational and international mass emigrations, new mobilities, the subaltern position of Italy within the European Union, and the geopolitical dislocation of Italy as the Southern frontier of Europe. The authors close their essay by presenting a Mediterranean Southern perspective grounded in new forms of knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities that counteract Europe's sense of encroaching and its politics of border protection.     

US Foreign Relations in the Twentieth Century: from World Power to Global Hegemony

The turn of the millennium has produced much thinking about the current direction of American foreign policy. In an interpretative essay on the broad patterns of American foreign relations during the twentieth century, Michael Dunne traces some recurrent themes in American diplomatic practice and its underlying ideologies. His conclusion is that the traditional introversion of American culture is likely to be projected abroad, as it has been in the past, by a rhetorical mixture of national and supranational idealism couched in the peculiar and self-referential discourse deriving from the earliest days of the Republic.