The Rise and Fall of ‘Mediterranean Atlanticism’ in Italian Foreign Policy: the Case of the Near East

The article aims at studying the reasons for the new way of looking at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by the Italian political world: the mutual recognition of Israel and the Vatican, the visit to Jerusalem by the leader of the formerly fascist party, Mr. Gianfranco Fini, and the beginnings of a movement of interest towards the Jewish State also within the political left. From a historical viewpoint, anti-Semitism in Italy found its origins in the Church's attitude toward the ‘deicide people’. Beginning with WWI, to this position was added the worry that the Holy Places might fall under Jewish control. From those times dates the Holy See's evermore manifest liking for the Arab populations of Palestine. Nowadays the line of conduct of the Church has as its basic objective the defense of Christian minorities in the Middle East, and for this reason it maintains dialogues with all actors in the region. The weight of the Church influenced also the attitude of the Italian State, even though from its inception the latter had to make adjustments because of other international requirements. This multiple subordination caused the different republican governments to always keep an official equidistant stance among the conflicting parties in the Near East. Behind this apparent neutrality, however, the feelings of benevolence for the Arab countries and the Palestinians have gradually intensified. Italian leaders have been trying to conduct a Mediterranean policy on the borders of the Western alliance, and their feelings have been oriented in consequence. During the 1970s, the governments went as far as to conclude a secret pact with Palestinian terrorists, to avoid terror acts on the Peninsula in exchange for some freedom of action. And in the mid-eighties the Craxi government did not hesitate to challenge the US in order to guarantee the continuity of that line of conduct. On that occasion Craxi, speaking in Parliament, compared Arafat to Mazzini. The end of the Yalta-established order has modified the traditional data of Italian foreign policy. However, the increased attention paid to Israel has also other causes: the changed attitude of the Church after the civil war and the Syrian occupation in Lebanon, events which both caused difficulties for the consistent Christian minorities; the hope that the Oslo process could reward the Italian ‘clear-sightedness’; last, but not least, the quarrelsome internal politics that make the Palestine conflict a mirror of the Roman conflicts. Lastly, the article connects the recent goodwill for Israel with the threats of Islamic terrorism in Italy. A political opinion trend would revisit the Middle Eastern conflict as the upturned perspective of a ‘clash of civilizations’ already existent nowadays. And a possible act of terrorism in Italy might give to this opinion a mass basis.     

The Meaning of Things: Kipling’s Formative Journey ‘Home’ in 1889 and the Late Victorian Imperial Tour

The ‘seven years’ hard’ Rudyard Kipling spent as a journalist in north India are generally seen as the making of both his poetic and his politics. But, important as origin, community, identity and ‘my father’s house’ are to Kipling, he should also be seen as a wayfarer of no fixed abode. In 1889 he used his first royalties to return to metropolitan fame by the long way round: Burma, the Straits, Japan, the Pacific and a transcontinental journey past landmarks of his Americanophile boyhood reading. Both distressing and exhilarating, it was a journey that stimulated the productive tension in him between the parochial and the universal. If an upcountry Punjab station had impressed him with the necessity of colonial rule, it was this voyage that engendered his all-embracing imperial vision. If he had honed his eye for ‘local colour’, this trip intimated to him that his metier would lie in culturally translating disparate portions of the empire to one another. Anticipating Baden-Powell’s call to ‘look wider’, vagabonding proved to be an agreeable mode of existence, but metropolitan arrival was to hold its own unforeseen challenges and anxieties. At a time when English writers like Arthur Symons aestheticised their sensation of cultural rootlessness in the figure of the vagabond, Kipling sought to foreground his own vagabondism with a persuasive claim to belonging.     

On the ‘Arab Inequality Puzzle’: The Case of Egypt

This article surveys and discusses prominent protagonists of the debate on socio-economic inequality in the Arab region, with a special focus on the World Bank and Egypt. According to official data, the region holds remarkably low Gini coefficients in a context of declining inequality. This contradicts the popular perception of high social inequality as a major cause of regional protests since the Arab Spring; hence the reference to a ‘puzzle’ in mainstream literature. The debate about the reality of social inequality in the region has developed since 2011 — particularly in regard to Egypt, where income and consumption data are periodically collected by means of household surveys. Inequality measures based on this method alone, while income taxation data are inaccessible, are highly questionable and conflict with various observations and calculations based on other indicators such as national accounts, executive income or house prices. Yet, the World Bank upholds official inequality findings in portraying the Arab upheaval as the revolt of a ‘middle class’ that aspires to greater business freedom, in consonance with the neoliberal worldview.     

‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris

The paper considers William Morris's belief that modern language was ‘degraded’, and explores how his late fiction tried to resist this degradation. Morris was influenced by the romantic philology of the mid-Victorian period which depicted languages as living organisms. Philologists such as Max Müller claimed that modern civilization had arrested this growth, mechanizing language into conventional signs; and Morris adapted the idea into a critique of industrial capitalism. He conceptualized modern English as manufactured external forms, sundered from organic history. His late prose fictions trace the ‘natural’ meanings of words which he imagined feudalism and capitalism had suppressed. However, this narrative of organic origins existed in tension with Morris's socialist ideals, which sought an objective language above local or national perspectives. The older Morris was writing at a time when romantic philology was coming under attack from a new generation of scholars. These proto-linguists regarded meaning as conventional and narratives of organic ‘roots’ in the distant past as mere mythology. Morris's struggles to reconcile the contradictions in his philosophy of language reflect wider tensions in romantic philology. His imaginary worlds in which everyone spoke the same relied upon myths of original linguistic unity and stasis which new research and theories were undermining. Ironically, Morris's attempts to re-organicize English inadvertently demonstrated the conventionality and perspectivism of language, relying upon common cultural frames of reference.     

‘Hollywood is a Woman's Town’: Masculinity and the Leading Man in American Fan Magazines of the 1930s

In their address to a predominantly female readership, fan magazines of the 1930s asserted that Hollywood was one place in which women were not subordinated to men as female stardom was superior to that of male stardom. The magazines’ representations of male actors were both compliant with, and resistant to, the tough-guy image of hegemonic masculinity. The personas of most ‘leading men’ who led the supporting casts of female stars were represented as softer forms of masculinity than that of the majority of male stars. The on-screen hard forms of masculinity of male stars were softened by the magazines’ reports of their off-screen personas, and the personas of some actors were presented as a bipolar masculinity that combined soft and hard forms.     

The league of leagues: Meta-populism and the ‘chain of equivalence’ in a cross-border Alpine area

Radical right populist parties claim to act on behalf of people who need to be protected from a series of risks initiated by ‘others’. Border control is a key topic in the narratives developed by these movements in Europe. However, populist parties located in different states can shape a cohesive discourse across state borders with regard to the protection of the people. They consequently forge a discursive ‘chain of equivalence’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 144) implying the reduction of state-bounded differences while preserving some territorial singularities. This process, which can be termed ‘meta-populism’ (de Cleen, 2017, p. 356) supposes a series of interactions, which are not often analysed in Europe's borderlands. Based on a Critical Discourse analysis, we investigate the building-up of transregional meta-populism powered by two regionalist parties positioned in different states, but located in a single European area: the Regio Insubrica in-between Italy and Switzerland.     

‘The Old Woman as Hare’: Structure and Meaning in an Irish Legend

This paper looks at the St Kitts and Nevis Mummies' plays as published in Folklore by Roger Abrahams (1968). It demonstrates that the texts were originally taken from a play published by the Victorian children's author Mrs J.H. Ewing. This play appeared in several editions, most notably in two series issued by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Mrs Ewing's text was itself compiled from three northern English chapbook texts and a version from Silverton, Devon. The relative contribution of these texts to Mrs Ewing's play, and the way she put them together, are both explored.     

‘‘The Acceptable Face of the Unintelligible’: Intermediality and the Science Play’

Abstract

The limitations of the ‘science-in-theatre’ genre is explored and the concept of the intermedial science play is introduced as an alternative to conventional science plays. How the science-in-theatre play dampens the mediality of the stage in order to establish a specific contract with its audience in order to realize what Carl Djerassi calls ‘didactic realism’ is considered. By virtue of the dramatic form and the didacticism it establishes, the science-in-theatre play limits the means by which audiences may encounter and enjoy responding to science. In particular, when staging concepts from the postclassical sciences, the intermedial science play offers artists and spectators new approaches to the sciences of infinities, complexity and emergence whilst also establishing a new, interactive contract with the audience based on forms of pedagogy associated with the thinking of Jacques Rancière. Using the media theory of Peter Boenisch and others, intermediality is identified as more than the mere presence of multimedia, but in terms of the effects it produce on the sensorium of the spectator.     

Embracing the Complexities of ‘Big Data’ in Archaeology: the Case of the English Landscape and Identities Project

This paper considers recent attempts within archaeology to create, integrate and interpret digital data on an unprecedented scale—a movement that resonates with the much wider so-called big data phenomenon. Using the example of our work with a particularly large and complex dataset collated for the purpose of the English Landscape and Identities project (EngLaID), Oxford, UK, and drawing on insights from social scientists’ studies of information infrastructures much more broadly, we make the following key points. Firstly, alongside scrutinising and homogenising digital records for research purposes, it is vital that we continue to appreciate the broader interpretative value of ‘characterful’ archaeological data (those that have histories and flaws of various kinds). Secondly, given the intricate and pliable nature of archaeological data and the substantial challenges faced by researchers seeking to create a cyber-infrastructure for archaeology, it is essential that we develop interim measures that allow us to explore the parameters and potentials of working with archaeological evidence on an unprecedented scale. We also consider some of the practical and ethical consequences of working in this vein.     

Rethinking ‘Global Dickens’: The Case of the Cross-Cultural Transfer of David Copperfield

This article revisits and challenges some of the presumptions and methodologies pertaining to the current ‘global’ turn in Dickens scholarship, and Victorian studies in general. It uses the case of the cross-cultural transfer of David Copperfield from Britain to China in the early twentieth century to demonstrate the importance of attending to local differences and cultural specificities when examining cross-cultural interactions. This article investigates the influence of the Chinese life-writing traditions on the way in which the text was adapted and translated for the Chinese readership, and explores the relationship between self and society as manifested in the adapted work at a specific historic moment. It reveals the complexities surrounding cross-cultural interactions and demonstrates the intricate relationship between the global and the local, thereby challenging any simplified pursuit of the concept of ‘Global Dickens’.     

The politics of the ‘Church’ in the Italy of Pope Wojtyła

Abstract

This article analyzes the development of different political tendencies with the Italian Church during the pontificate of John Paul II. Two different strategies enabled the episcopal conference to maintain stability for a long period, in which time Cardinal Ruini played a key role, first as secretary and then president of the bishops. In his years the conference of bishops accepted that the political unity of the Catholic world was over, but it still tried to retain a strong political influence even though the mediation of the Christian Democratic Party was no longer available. With the end of Wojty?a's pontificate, however, this period came to a close and the different tendencies that make up the rich and complex world of the Italian Catholic Church have become more visible.     

The First ‘Urnfields’ in the Plains of the Danube and the Po

Journal of World Prehistory - Archaeological research is currently redefining how large-scale changes occurred in prehistoric times. In addition to the long-standing theoretical dichotomy between...     

The Figure of Man and the Territorialisation of Justice in ‘Enlightenment’ Natural Law: Pufendorf and Vattel

Discussions of early modern philosophical anthropology in postcolonial studies often treat it as tied to Eurocentric conceptions of civilisational supremacism and to the ideologies of imperialism and colonialism served by these conceptions. In discussing the conceptions of man contained in two key early modern doctrines of the law of nature and nations – those of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel – this paper casts a sceptical eye on the postcolonial accounts. The anthropologies deployed by Pufendorf and Vattel relate not to European imperialism and colonialism but to intra-European problems associated with the formation of territorial states and the bellicose relations between them.     

The Ideational Dimension of Federalism: The ‘Australian Model’ and the Politics of Equalisation in Canada

This article examines the ideational dimension of federalism and its consequences for the analysis of policy development. With this objective in mind, the article offers an explanation for Canada's rejection of the two main aspects of the ‘Australian model’ of equalisation: the assessment of expenditure needs and the existence of an arms-length commission to determine payments. As argued, the ideological prevalence of provincial autonomy in Canada explains why federal officials opted to reject the ‘Australian model’ as they prepared to establish the country's program and why subsequent reforms never introduced a needs-assessment dimension or created an arms-length agency to administer equalisation. At the theoretical level, this article shows how ideational factors can shape policy outcomes.     

The Capture and Curation of the Cannibal ‘Vendovi’: Reality and Representation of a Pacific Frontier

ABSTRACT

The United States Exploring Expedition into the Pacific launched in 1838 was marked, like the continental expansion westward, by violent encounters with Native peoples. By examining the record of the expedition's kidnapping of the Fijian Ro Veidovi, the fate of his body after death, and the ways his story came to be invoked in the official narrative of the expedition, the popular press, the ‘National Gallery’ and, more recently, the Fijian press, this paper demonstrates how violent contacts on the Pacific frontier were remembered, effaced, and reconceived. The changing story of Ro Veidovi permanently bridged distant locales in an emerging ‘Pacific World’, setting in motion transcultural negotiations that continue to this day.     

The Profumo affair in popular culture: The Keeler Affair (1963) and ‘the commercial exploitation of a public scandal’

This article demonstrates that the Profumo affair, which obsessed Britain for large parts of 1963, was not simply a political scandal, but was also an important cultural event. Focussing on the production of The Keeler Affair, a feature film that figured prominently in contemporary coverage of the scandal but which has been largely overlooked since, the article shows that this film emerged from a situation in which cultural entrepreneurs, many of them associated with the satire boom, sought to exploit the scandal for financial gain. Many Profumo-related cultural products found an audience, and thus formed an integral part of, and helped to shape public attitudes towards, the Profumo affair. However, these products did not go uncontested, and resistance to them, and especially to the idea that Keeler might benefit materially from her role in the scandal, speak to concerns about cultural mediations of sex, politics and humour in early-1960s Britain.