Abstract
Reviewed by: Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Loyola University Chicago, USA
Teresa Fiore’s Pre-occupied Spaces examines migrant cultural production in and around Italy’s many diasporas, defying disciplinary boundaries and crossing spatial and temporal borders. The book travels across space, time, media, genre, and texts, critically examining a great variety of cultural material, including songs, documentaries, novels, films, the visual arts, and architecture. In its investigation of apparently disparate cultural productions, the volume remaps Italian culture while engaging with the representation of migrant space as an overarching and unifying principle of diasporic expression. Being truly pre-occupied with space, Fiore organizes the volume according to a carefully constructed structure that takes the question of migratory space extremely seriously.
The volume comprises six chapters, distributed over three parts. Each part is organized thematically, designating a migratory space and trope. Part I is about water and focuses on the analysis of sea and ocean journeys of emigration and immigration through the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The songs by Gilda Mignonette—the Neapolitan singer turned diva—and Emanuele Crialese’s 2006 film Nuovomondo form this part’s central corpus. Part I also includes other transnational texts about voluntary and forced voyages across oceans and seas, such as The Skin Between Us (Kym Ragusa’s 2006 memoir of return to Italy), and Libera, a lesser-known 2005 narrative of escape from Eritrea across the Mediterranean by Feven Abreha Tekle. Part II, on houses, gathers texts about different types of settlement narratives, such as Laura Pariani’s 2007 novel Dio non ama i bambini—set among Italian migrants in turn-of-the century Buenos Aires; Amara Lakhous’ 2006 novel Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore in Piazza Vittorio, set in Rome’s multiethnic neighborhood of Esquilino; and Mohsen Melliti’s novel Pantanella. Canto lunga la strada. The chapter also journeys to New York, through the analysis of Melania Mazzucco’s 2003 novel Vita. After looking at migration journeys through water and at residential occupation, the book turns to labor and migrant work. Part III covers stories of workplaces as its designated space, with special attention to the cultural expressions concerned with labor safety and the attendant exploitation in migrant domestic and construction work, two sectors that are strongly marked by separate gender spheres and concerns. Each of the chapters in Part III deals with one of the identified labor sectors through the analysis of François Cavanna’s 1978 autobiographical novel Les Ritals—about Italian construction workers in France; Mariana Adascalitei’s novella “Il giorno di San Nicola;” Renata Ciaravino’s play Alexandria—about women from the Friuli region emigrated to Egypt, read in tandem with one of the stories of migration included in Gabriella Ghermandi’s 2007 novel Regina di fiori e di perle, about an Ethiopian woman employed by an Italian family.
Fiore describes her methodological approach as a cartography of “interconnected spaces,” a form of critical mapping that allows her to uncover the complex network of points of proximity, distance, and recurring topoi existing across time and space in the cultural history of the dissemination and dispersion of Italianness transnationally. The types of pre-occupied spaces she is concerned with, Fiore explains “simultaneously allow for a remapping of Italian culture and identity which challenges fixed forms of belonging in a fast developing multiethnic country like Italy. At the center of this remapping lies the cultural text, because of its simultaneous powers of documentation, evocation, and imagination at the crossroads of the local, the national, and the transnational” (p. 14). One example of Fiore’s unorthodox approach is found in chapter 1 (Part I). Here, migrant songs from the 1930s and 1940s are thematically linked to a contemporary film via the figure of the ship, a trope connecting spatial, cultural, textual, and historical discontinuities. Similarly, in chapter 3 (Part II), the examination of a fictional work by an Argentinian writer of Italian origin stands side by side to the analysis of a novel by an Algerian writer who migrated to Italy, the file rouge here being the detective genre and the “delinquent” subversions of the novels' protagonists.
What holds the whole structure together is Fiore’s sophisticated and brilliant work of theoretical scaffolding, one that never loses sight of the perils of its iconoclastic undertakings. The book’s well-crafted structure helps the reader navigate from one text to the next, and from one part of the book to the next, each of its parts being prefaced by an “aperture.” The aperture functions as an introduction to the theme and topoi of each part via the analysis of a ‘mediating’ text that holds all the others together.
The non-chronological and transnational thematic approach provides a fresh perspective on migration, yet the effect on the reader can be dizzying. Fiore’s rich critical language captures with extraordinary precision the layered complexities of some the works she analyzes. Yet, the variety and diversity of the cultural material under consideration do not always allow for full consideration of each ‘text’ in its own terms. Moreover, by de-emphasizing the critical genealogy of each text, Fiore’s thematic analysis runs the risk of losing sight of the text’s historical context, mitigating its collective impetus and political impact. One such example is the analysis of the domestic space in Gabriella Ghermandi’s “The Story of Woizero Bekelech and Signor Antonio,” a story included in Ghermandi’s 2007 novel Regina di fiori e di perle. Fiore’s thematic preoccupation with the fallacies of intimacy intrinsic in the labor exploitation of female domestic workers by Italian natives fails to render for the reader the meaning of the overall context in which this micro-history is embedded, ultimately diminishing the significance of Ghermandi’s novel for our understanding of Italy’s colonial history and postcolonial legacy.
While the thematic analysis and the myriad of connections may at times confuse the reader, the book’s innovative and highly creative architecture waves together an impressive proliferation of well-researched texts, critical references, and disciplinary perspectives. By so doing, Pre-occupied Spaces also redraws the cartography of Italian Studies within the Humanities, suggesting new ways to undo disciplinary and national boundaries. By conceiving cultural texts as “the presentation of concrete realities with socioeconomic purport, but also the representation, in the sense of invention and imagination, of new possibilities for the coexistence, creation, and exchange of ideas” (p. 14), Fiore points to the permeability and porosity of the study of Italian literature and culture in particular and the national literary traditions more generally, no longer understood as belonging to bounded nation-spaces, but as peninsular spaces, where approaches and methodologies mix and mutually support each others. Moreover, by making scholarship on space the theoretical lens of the volume, the author is able to use spatial theory as a unifying principle applicable to a variety of cultural texts, many of which have received little or no critical attention. As a result, specialists in the field of Postcolonial Studies, Diaspora Studies, Transnational Studies, and Migrant Studies will welcome such fresh outlook on unfamiliar works by way of familiar theoretical texts. Specialists in Italian Studies will find the book’s precise, well-documented, and extremely rich references of great use for educational and research purposes. The book also has a great potential to appeal to readers and specialists in the emerging field of Ocean (Atlantic) and Sea (Mediterranean) Literary Studies. Overall, Fiore’s critical approach displays a truly transnational and trans-disciplinary critical voice that has the merit of breaking disciplinary and geographical boundaries in unprecedented ways.