Italy’s unification and its discontents: Giovanni Verga’s Cos’è il Re?

ABSTRACT

The article, ‘Italy’s Unification and its Discontents: Verga’s Cos’è il Re, focuses on the mental confusion of the protagonist, Cosimo, which becomes symptomatic of the southern rural masses’ disenfranchisement from the unification process. Verga’s political disillusion with the new state, for which he fought, comes to the fore, underlining how the Savoy kingdom’s constitution was no guarantee of a real improvement for the rural masses. Verga’s story contrasts the Savoy king, whose power is limited by the constitution, with the Bourbon Monarch’s Corpus Mysticum, as described by Ernest Kantorowicz, whose power is absolute, like that of Jesus Christ. The story denounces, then, the paradox that the Bourbon monarch, in his paternalistic governance, was better for the impoverished rural masses than the constitutional Savoy king. Moreover, Italy’s unification under the Savoy sovereign further developed a national discourse that systematically racialized Southerners because of their subaltern position within the nation.     

Lega democratica and the making of Italy’s center-left

This article analyzes the history of the Lega democratica, a group of Catholic intellectuals active between 1975 and 1987, and its impact on Catholic debates in Italy’s Second Republic. Despite its small membership, the group’s heritage influenced Italy’s post-1994 center-left and shaped its leadership. Such relevance is explained by describing the Lega democratica’s legacy on four issues. First, on Catholic pluralism: the group was central to a decade-long failed attempt to reconcile different souls of the Italian Catholic laity, which anticipated the end of the Christian Democratic party. Second, after Aldo Moro’s murder the Lega democratica theorized the impossibility of a ‘historic compromise’ between Communists and Christian Democrats: such a development framed their post-1994 attitude. Third, the group’s history reveals a growing generational split on how to achieve political reform (mediation vs. rupture). Finally, the emerging idea of a ‘primacy of civil society’ in the political sphere partly defined the Ulivo coalition’s ideology.     

The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy

This essay reviews a new history by Lucia Ceci of Italo-Vatican relations during the Fascist period, and evaluates its contribution to the vast but often polemical literature on the subject of Church–state relations in modern Italy. Ceci offers a detailed, sophisticated analysis that focuses specifically on leadership and decision-making in the Fascist regime and the Vatican respectively. Her argument that the Vatican’s relations with Fascist Italy were conditioned by a strategic choice to maintain diplomatic relations in exchange for autonomy in the state and civil society, while compelling, makes some contradictory and unconvincing claims. Ultimately, what is needed is a conceptual framework that can account for the complex reality of a relationship characterized by points of mutual interest and complementarity but also fundamental disagreement and open conflict.     

Education and the Origins of Quebec’s International Engagement

ABSTRACT

This article examines some of the ways that education has served as a catalyst for the engagement of Quebec and Quebeckers with the broader world, from the educational activities of French Canadian missionaries beginning in the late-nineteenth century to the growing involvement of secular nongovernmental organizations and of the government of Quebec itself in international educational assistance in the mid- to late-twentieth century. For the government of Quebec in particular, jurisdiction over education was integral to the development of Quebec’s own international identity and the Gérin-Lajoie Doctrine that both articulated and bolstered its claim to international competence. The controversy surrounding Quebec’s international educational endeavors has declined since the 1970s, and with it the relative amount of attention and funding devoted to it by the provincial government, yet education broadly defined remains a bridge linking Quebec and Quebeckers to the wider world and catalyzing their engagement with it.     

‘An entirely new land’? Italy’s post-war culture and its Fascist past

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the inter-relation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.     

Italian immigration: the origins,nature and evolution of Italy’s migratory systems

This article reconstructs the historical development of foreign settlement in Italy. It shows how Italy is part of a number of different migratory patterns, some of which are interconnected, while others are quite strongly differentiated. This diversity means that the standard images that link Italian immigration with a high degree of social marginalization do not correspond to the more complex realities, and by focusing on short-term aspects simply conflate highly differentiated patterns of migration into one single type. The article begins by reconstructing the patterns of foreign settlement in Italy since the time of Unification and then goes on to analyze the mechanisms of contemporary migrant flows to demonstrate how these derive from very different sets of motives and expectations. The motivations also explain why different immigrant groups respond to the different forms of regulation adopted by the Italian state. The article concludes by reviewing the data presently available on the numbers of foreigners currently in Italy, which indicate that over the last twenty years those numbers have decreased.     

Deep Impact: Robert Goddard and the Soviet ‘Space Fad’ of the 1920s

Using newly available information from Russian archives, this paper explores American rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard’s relationship to the Soviet space‐flight advocacy community in the 1920s. In post‐Revolutionary Russia, Goddard enjoyed a curious kind of fame. News of his alleged plan to launch a rocket to the Moon permeated widely through a Soviet audience interested in the possibility of space exploration. Goddard’s practical work in developing rockets became a metaphor for the aspirations of the many in Soviet Russia who were unwilling to limit their horizons to theory and prognostication. The new research into Goddard’s relationship to the Soviet space‐flight enthusiast community underscores how international contacts shaped the space advocacy movements of the early twentieth century. The new evidence prompts us to consider an alternative approach to the ‘foundation myth’ of space history involving Tsiolkovskii, Goddard and Oberth, one that privileges an international context instead of the usual multiple national contexts.     

Technological art and Studio International’s eclectic vanguardism

ABSTRACT

This article takes the editorship by Peter Townsend of Studio International, to which the author contributed regularly between 1969 and 1972, as a starting-point to recall decisive personal encounters with Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, Wen-Ying Tsai’s sculptures, Jasia Reichardt’s exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity and the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. It goes on to re-endorse the earlier argument that a long historical time-scale was required for the aesthetic implications of photography to become clear, and that, like photography, the computer and holography are technological media whose immediate interactions with aesthetics and the culture at large will take many decades to pan out. Earlier claims about the relationship between art and ecology are then reviewed. Finally the article suggests that though world politics have changed considerably since the 1960s and 1970s, artists have undiminished opportunities to grapple with the challenges of new technologies directly, rather than retreating into a closed system.     

The management and memory of fascist monumental art in postwar and contemporary Italy: the case of Luigi Montanarini’s Apotheosis of Fascism

In postwar Germany, the Allies and the German authorities moved quickly and systematically to destroy or physically remove all traces of Nazi art. No such process occurred in postwar Italy. This meant that hundreds of ideologically inspired statues, mosaics, murals and other artefacts survived into the republican period. This article uses Luigi Montanarini’s mural, the Apotheosis of Fascism, as a case study to examine the management, meaning and memory of fascist monumental art (and, more broadly, fascist monumental architecture) in postwar and contemporary Italy. To date, memory studies of fascism have largely overlooked the artistic and architectural legacies of the dictatorship. This article helps to address this historiographical lacuna and speaks to current debates and controversies in Italy surrounding the meaning and significance of historic fascism.     

The ‘everyday’ of banal nationalism – Ordinary people’s views on Italy and Italian

In 1995, Banal Nationalism set a new way to study nationhood. Away from the traditional concern with its historical origins (‘when’) and its substantialist features (‘what’), Banal Nationalism offered a systematic analysis of its reproduction (‘how’). Informed by social and discursive psychology, Billig pointed to the role played by familiar, unremarkable ‘little words’ (deixis) to explain the persistence and pervasiveness of the idea of a world divided into nations. The present article aims to expand Billig’s seminal study on the reproduction of nationalism, by incorporating an ‘everyday nationhood’ perspective, which attends more closely to human agency and contextual interaction. To give empirical substance to this move, the article relies on photo-elicitation group discussions and written essays collected in a vocational school in Milan, Italy, among an ethno-culturally diverse sample. By bringing the voices of people in as active producers of national meanings, the article offers a more complex picture of a world banally divided into nations. Both a national ‘we’ and a national ‘here’ emerge in fact as socio-spatially differentiated, fragmented and articulated at a plurality of scales, thus defying the logical linearity of banal nationalism, which unwittingly reproduces nations as singular, internally homogenous discursive entities. The article concludes by arguing for the need to complement the banal with the everyday in order to more fully capture processes of national reproduction in contexts of increasing ethno-cultural diversity.