Abstract
My position on Italy, Italian studies, and the future of the discipline focuses on the method of two recent ‘turns’ in Italian studies, the postcolonial turn and the transnational turn, pertinent to the study of Italy and migrant mobility. It is my contention that the discipline, in its institutional discourse and material practices has promoted their relevance unevenly, and I will explain why and to what effects. I contend that these two critical perspectives, while they have been theorized by a great variety of scholars in Italy and across continental Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, and the United States, have not reached an equal status as legitimate fields within Italian studies. While a transnational approach to Italian literary criticism has gained tremendous currency, especially in the UK and now in the United States, the postcolonial, as a field of studies within italianistica, remains rather invisible, especially, but not only, in Italian academia (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2012; Mellino 2021). There are many points of convergence between these two approaches, yet I want to emphasize the imbalance of power in the dissemination of knowledge and institutional visibility of these two critical methods, an imbalance that is not simply epistemic, but involves a disparity in the allocation of institutional resources and money, in the existence of publishing venues, and in the creation of scholarships and of academic positions.
The transnational turn
A term born in the social sciences and concerned with individuals and civil society's movements across borders, transnationalism defines ‘the processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement’ (Schiller et al., 1992: 1) and how they ‘engage in complex activities across national borders that create, shape and potentially transform their identities.’ (p.4). First used to describe the process of financial globalization by which corporations built major financial operations in more than one country and developed a significant organizational presence in several countries simultaneously, the term was reclaimed by sociologists, anthropologists, and literary and cultural critics in order to study the mobility of people beyond the nation state. The neo-liberalist political origin of the transnational was quickly dismissed by a focus on the ways in which transmigrants produce and maintain multiple relations that span borders. An examination of how the transnational as a critical paradigm has remained anchored in its neo-liberal origin by being oblivious to the establishment of border regimes and new forms of cultural exploitation is beyond the scope of my essay. Suffice to say that within departments of comparative literature and foreign languages across Europe and the United States, the transnational approach has been celebrated as a new analytical paradigm for the study not only of migrant mobilities but also of cultural contact zones beyond national borders.
Picking up momentum coincidentally in the period before Brexit and continuing in the wake of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, the application of a transnational approach to teaching and writing within Italian Studies has contributed greatly to a series of innovations in the research methods and pedagogy of Italian language and culture, within and beyond the classroom. To begin with, it has surpassed previous methods such as ethnic studies, migration studies, and multiculturalist approaches in teaching migrations and letteratura migrante, approaches which were still based on the centrality of Italofonia and of Italy as the point of arrival. It has encouraged and promoted translingual and transcultural studies, placing the Italian language at the center of a network of global influences and trajectories. It has also contributed to making Italian American studies less of an exclusive ethnic studies field and more a way to study diasporic mobility, material culture, and transnational exchanges. It has also superseded elitist and Eurocentric models of literary analysis that have celebrated marketable works of European literature under the ambitious and misleading label of ‘world literature.’
Transdisciplinary in nature, in its attempt to revitalize a discipline in crisis–lagging behind in terms of student numbers and innovative research–and in line with the globalization of the market-oriented ‘made in Italy,’ the transnational approach to Italian studies, as I read it, has encouraged a devaluation of the national in favor of the global and a lessening of attention on the temporal in favor of the spatial. Moving away from the collective and identity politics in favor of the subjective and the individual, the transnational approach has shown a tendency, in my view, to celebrate hybridity in contrast to critical race studies. By focusing on borderless exchanges, citizen flexibility, cosmopolitanism, and border crossing, the transnational has diverted attention from border surveillance and citizenship rights. In short, while building its methodology on some of the key concepts of postcolonial criticism, the transnational turn has muted the political impact that postcolonial studies has had on the way we teach and research about Italy.
The transnational turn in Italian studies, posited as an interrogation in a seminal essay by Emma Bond (2014), is no longer a question today. It has become a reality, also in virtue of an institutional push stemming from the United Kingdom. In the period 2014–2017, the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded the Transnationalizing Modern Languages (n.d.) project that examined ‘forms of mobility that have defined the development of modern Italian culture and its interactions with other cultures across the globe’ (transnationalmodernlanguages.ac.uk). Engaging a large number of institutional partners, schools, and cultural associations, the scale of the project was unprecedented for the field. It presented itself in the language of a neo-liberal cultural industry in tune with policy makers with a clear, world-wide scale agenda. Despite its international dissemination, the project was based at five academic institutions, all operating within the United Kingdom: The University of Bristol, Queen Margaret University, Cardiff University, the University of Warwick, and the University of St Andrews. Its proponents all come from these five campuses. The amount of capital funds garnered for this series of transnational initiatives was impressive, being part of a larger project benefitting from over 20 million pounds of investment. The goal was ambitious and all-encompassing: to produce a global map of how Italian culture has worked in the last 150 years. Since then, presented as a scientific project aimed at fostering transcultural knowledge, the transnational has operated, in my view, like a project of cultural expansion from a metropolitan center (the United Kingdom) towards the rest of the world, with scholars traveling ‘on a grand tour’ to Australia, the Americas, and Africa in search for the vestiges of lost Italian mobilities among the ruins of the nation state. Ambitiously aiming at reshaping the whole discipline of modern languages, its expansion within Italian studies – through the creation of research teams, exhibitions, edited volumes, webpages, academic positions, and publishing series – has had the effect of a totalizing method. Its goal is to change the whole way in which we write and teach about Italy, the study of its old and new citizens, and the language and culture of its migrant communities. As a result, it has taken the lead in the present and future direction of the discipline, reinforcing once again the hegemony not only of the scholarship and the publishing industry in the English language, but also of academic institutions and research centers in the United Kingdom and the United States.
In 2014 Emma Bond, who has taken the lead as co-director, together with Derek Duncan, of the Transnational Italian Studies Series for Liverpool University Press, anticipated the transnational project with a seminal article titled ‘Towards a Trans-national Turn in Italian Studies?’ Here, Bond defines the ‘trans-national’ (programmatically kept hyphenated in order to maintain emphasis on the word ‘national’ included in the term) in terms of its ability to cross the confines of national boundaries, its emphasis on the flexibility of cultural identities and citizenship, and the opportunity of a syncretism and creolization of the cultural production it studies. Moving away from the Goethean model of Weltliteratur for its lack of engagement with real-life processes, advocating for a relationship of proximity and lived subjectivity, Bond sees Italy as contributing much to the transnational, given its position of subordination and its peripheral identity within Europe. Lamenting the limitations of a general ‘market-driven’ trend in Italian literary studies that attributes the quality of transnationality only to works of Italian literature that are easily translatable, and therefore appealing to a global market, Bond's essay mediates the passage from the postcolonial to the transnational by invoking the category of the ‘transcultural’ in order to emphasize the relationality and open-ended quality of the prefix ‘trans.’ Bond puts the study of mobility and culture in relation to other instances of bodily relations of proximity, such as in ‘trans-gender’ practices. The significance of the transnational for Italy, according to Bond, is indeed intrinsic to the country's ‘re-negotiation of a (post)colonial past at the very moment of an unprecedented im-migration flux’ (Bond, 2014: 422). For Bond, the oppositional force of trans-nationalism seems to reside in the corporeal indeterminacy of proximity and in the formation of subjectivity against binarism, especially in the negotiation of the local against the global (Bond, 2014: 422–423).
Bond's intervention outlined the possible links between the postcolonial and the transnational approaches within the discipline. In the same special issue of the journal Italian Studies, appearing alongside Bond's and other chapters dedicated to Italian cultural studies, Caterina Romeo and I published our ‘Manifesto of the Italian Postcolonial.’ In this 2014 essay, our position differed from the theorization of the transnational in Italian studies. We emphasized the need for a wealth of studies that, by adopting a postcolonial cultural lens, would be able to include emigration, colonization, intranational migrations, and contemporary immigration within the same continuum, yet also connecting ‘Italian colonial history with historical processes of racialization and contemporary racisms’ (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2014: 427). We called for the emergence, within Italian Studies, of an ‘engaged scholarship,’ ‘inclusive of the multiple processes of extraterritorial conquest, expansion, and migration,’ one that would consider ‘Italy's diasporic scattering and the dissemination of its political, social, and cultural models within but also beyond its national borders.’ (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2014: 429). Finally, we urged the end of the ostracism of postcolonial approaches and scholars engaged in race studies and gender studies, their marginalization and institutional isolation and the opening up of the discipline of italianistica, especially on Italian soil: ‘In conservative Italy,’ we said, ‘fighting the cultural de-legitimation of postcolonial studies is a necessary political battle to promote social and cultural change through the creation of larger models of inclusivity.’ (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2014: 433). What has happened since then? My argument here is that, since 2016, the transnational turn has made its own some of the progressive aspects of the postcolonial approach while also, simultaneously, muting the politically viable elements of the activism and scholarly endeavors engendered by a theory of postcoloniality. In order to explain how this happened, I will now examine another intervention in the debate on the present and future of Italian studies.
In an essay published in 2019, Derek Duncan (at the University of St Andrews) interrogated the directions of Italian Studies, highlighting as his critical point of departure ‘the decolonizing imperatives of work in diasporic, postcolonial and transnational studies’ (Duncan, 2019: 3). As one of the pioneering scholars to study the memory and legacy of Italian colonialism in Italian postcolonial cinema, literature, and material culture, Duncan's scholarly trajectory reflects the move from the postcolonial to the transnational. His impactful research brought to the fruitful cross-pollination, within Italian studies, of queer studies, cultural studies, and film studies from a postcolonial lens. Increasingly focused on Mediterranean diasporic narratives, Duncan's scholarly interests have now shifted, through a series of funded projects, from a concern with Italian postcoloniality, the colonial past, and corporeal postcolonial and resistant practices, to questions related to transnational modern Romance languages and Italian minor cultures. Interested in the research and pedagogy of cultural curatorial practice and production, Duncan's 2019 essay takes as case study the presence of Italian culture in Scotland. Against a spatial model of literary studies, predicated on ‘national normativity’ (Duncan, 2019: 5) and based on the homology of language to territory, Duncan's ‘new relationality’ proposes to keep Italy (and Italian studies) ‘under erasure,’ (Duncan, 2019: 6) that is, in a state of visible Derridean deconstruction. By differentiating the concept of the national from nationalism and wanting to maintain the former at the expense of the latter, keeping Italy under erasure for Duncan means reconfiguring its national culture paradigm while signaling the persistence of the national. Advocating for a project of a self-reflective positionality that acknowledges the place of ‘the teacher/researcher/student’ (Duncan, 2019: 6), Duncan's version of transnationalism aims at debunking ‘geopolitical normativity by raising discomforting questions about pre-existing investments in spatial and temporal hierarchies such as those that have dominated in the cultural organization of modern languages’ (Duncan, 2019: 5).
To this end, the second part of Duncan's article details his own biography and the experience in the classroom of studying the visible traces of vernacular practices by Italian immigrants in Scotland. The intent is to demonstrate, as he states, that ‘these vernacular practices are more varied and more material in their expression than the static Italian high, primarily literary, culture traditionally “curated” by departments of Italian Studies’ (Duncan, 2019: 10). This radically new and creative, student-centered curatorial project, as noble as it is, seems to implode in the face of a focus so narrowly local. The Italian presence in Scotland, as the students find out, goes back to successful generations of families rooted, precisely, in the pride of Italian inheritance, of communities that developed by assimilationist tactics (such as the change of the last name to accommodate native pronunciation), and of social aggregation based on national and language affiliation. Italian spaces in Scotland thrived around some of the most traditional and normative rituals of Italian institutions, such as the Catholic church, and the pride in ownership of Italian cultural practices such as food, also a source of business revenues for many.
All in all, concepts embedded in theories of transnationalism, such as diaspora, transculturation, cosmopolitanism, syncretism, mimicry, agentic and resistant subjectivity, contact zone, etc., come from postcolonial theory. Yet, as transnational scholars build on some of the most progressive ideas of postcolonial theory, they are often reluctant to acknowledge this genealogy. By so doing, they do what Duncan proposes to do for the national case of Italy: to put the political and progressive impact of postcolonial studies ‘under erasure,’ that is, maintain some of its language and concepts, but eliminate its critique of ideology and the link between class, gender, capitalism, and institutional racism. Moreover, in the effort to erase nationalism while keeping the ‘Italian’ (as in ‘Italian culture’) as an object of study, the unintended result is historical blurriness and the reification of Italian ethnicity as point of origin.
More broadly, by refocusing on the vernacular, the local, the micro, the borderless crossings transnational studies – if not attentive to the pitfalls of its own premise – runs the risk of jeopardizing the attentive and difficult work that has been done and continues to be done to open up the study of Italy to a macro political view of non-inheritance identities and locations, such as diasporic Italian Blackness. I am thinking of the important articulation of a Black diasporic condition in the Mediterranean and the fight for citizenship rights in works by Alessandra Di Maio, Gabriele Proglio, SA Smythe, and Camilla Hawthorne, and the struggles of white and Black Italians alike for racial justice against Italian white supremacism, border surveillance, and anti-Black violence by scholars and activists such as Sandro Mezzadra, Miguel Mellino, Gaia Giuliani, Angelica Pesarini, Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau, Espérance Hakazwimana Ripanti, Nadeesha Uyandoga, and others. Some of these works developed recently also in response to the persistent silencing of anti-Blackness and the violation of citizenship rights in Italy, a silencing that the transnational turn in academia, by veering away from the nation yet attaching itself to Italian inheritance, may contribute to maintain.
Commenting on the need to revisit the transnational approach to identity, Caterina Romeo recently stated the necessity to preserve a focus on identity politics, noting that:
it can be a strategic necessity to safeguard the rights of migrants and subsequent generations […]. The emphasis on fluid dynamics of identification rather than on static notions of national identity […] may obliterate the fact that among those who claim their right to shape an Italian national identity are subjects (born and) raised in Italy who are denied the right to citizenship. (Romeo, 2023: 15)
That seems a point well taken. By reconfiguring an entire discipline around past and present Italian mobility, the object of research returns to be the same old field of Italian white diasporic ethnicity, and therefore back to a rather outmoded and exclusivist model of scholarship on diasporic migrations in and around Italy. This approach feels limiting and it is certainly detrimental to a decolonization of the field, especially at a time when scholars of African descent are reclaiming recognition of the lived experience of Black Italians and a space in Italian scholarship and academia.
The second part of my essay will elucidate why I believe that moving beyond the geographic, political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries of the nation state sounds great and may be regarded as ideal, yet it runs the risk of throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water. By moving away from ‘the long shadow of the nation’ (Duncan, 2019: 6) and reifying global and local sites outside of Italy, transnational approaches tend to veer away from the real issues still plaguing Italy and its immigrant and second-generation citizens. I will now move to argue why Italian Studies needs a postcolonial approach to migration, mobility, and the nation state.
The term postcolonial has always had an oppositional, resistant nature, either as its open political stance against nationalism, colonization, white supremacy, or as working along identifying the limits and imbalances in a series of binary oppositions such as colonizer/colonized, metropole/center, Western/non-Western, and identitarian binary such as Same/Other, dominant/subaltern. Yet, postcolonial studies have also theorized the fragmented and hybrid nature of identity, moving its center of analysis from institutions and civil society to the formation of diasporic subjectivities. The tension between the global, universalizing reach of the (post)colonial condition of oppression, on the one hand, and the reality of local identities and subjectivities, on the other, often viewed as resistant and liberationist positionalities, is embedded in this field of studies. Postcolonialism, with its non-Western roots, was born as a process of liberation from a condition of colonial domination, a liberation that is both cultural and political, as it is subjective and rooted in collective practices.
One of the implicit criticisms to Italian postcolonial studies is their focus on the national paradigm, a focus that Italian transnational studies programmatically works to undo. Yet, this seems to be a misinterpretation of the postcolonial paradigm, at least according to the way it has been proposed in Italian studies. The Italian postcolonial was never articulated to delineate a field of studies limited to the borders of Italy. On the contrary, defined as a condition that ‘exceeds national borders,’ ‘the postcolonial perspective emphasizes a transnational spatial continuity, in that it reinforces the idea of diasporic communities in Europe and around the world which share the common experience of colonization’ (Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 2012: 2–3). By studying emigration, the Southern Question, and immigration as phenomena closely intertwined with the postcolonial condition, Italian postcolonial studies deliberately connect the Italian South, the Americas, the Italian migration settlements across the Mediterranean, the ex-colonies in Libya, the Aegean and the Horn of Africa under one critical lens, recognizing the communal colonial matrix of these locations in the makings of Italian nationalism and imperial mentality. Taking an in-depth historical approach and underlying the transnational nature of the newly unified nation-state, founded while projecting itself far beyond its territorial borders, the postcolonial approach understands that the dissemination of linguistic and cultural elements is a fundamental aspect of the concept of italianità, a concept that, as I understand it, cannot be deconstructed without an understanding of the politics and violence of its legacy, which is in turn at the root of today's postcolonial condition.
Postcolonial studies have opened a truly global debate on the links between different areas of the world connected by the experience of imperialism and neo-liberal exploitation, showing the connection between contact zones. Moreover, one of the central points of postcolonial criticism has been precisely to celebrate heterogeneity through the rescuing of local, subaltern subjectivities against the homogeneity of Italian and Western modernity. Deconstructing capitalist modernity has meant de-centering critical attention from Europe to the dispersed peripheries of the world, emphasizing the globality of colonialism and its transcultural nature, away from the nation state and its ethnic absolutism. Learning from Stuart Hall, Lidia Curti, Iain Chambers, Sandro Mezzadra, and Miguel Mellino the important lesson of a critique of capitalism, the nation-state and its essentialist notion of gender and racial polarization, the Italian postcolonial has made Italy and the Mediterranean its central focus, re-appropriating a discipline entrenched within the hegemony of area and national studies.
Finally, in Italy, the consolidation of a shared postcolonial memory has been possible also in virtue of the emergence of literary works by writers and intellectuals with a mixed and diasporic background, located both in Italy and in the Horn of Africa (Gabriella Ghermandi, Ubax Ali Farah, Igiaba Scego, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, and others), and artists like Dawit Petros, Dagmawi Yimer, Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos. Historians of Italian colonialism and postcolonial scholars, such as Angelo Del Boca, Nicola Labanca, Alessandro Triulzi, Giulia Barrera, Barbara Sòrgoni, Anna Curcio, Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh and others, have placed the fragility of Italian racial identity at the center of the debate on the coloniality of national identity. In an effort to counteract historiographical oblivion and revisionism, the Italian postcolonial debate on race has initiated the decolonization of Italian studies and rigorous scrutiny of white Italian subjectivity.
Today, Italy's relationship to the colonial past is different from what it was 30 years ago, that is, at the beginning of the 1990s (Mellino 2022). Thanks to the work of historians, writers, artists, activists, translators and scholars in various fields, including but not limited to literary criticism, the Italian colonial archive has been opened. We have no excuses today, and we cannot fake ignorance or innocence. A debate has finally emerged about Italy's colonial past and the postcolonial politics of memory. Let's not forget that postcolonial studies arrived in Italy at the moment when the peninsula was dealing with racial violence against Roma, and Black and Brown immigrants from the Global South and the ex-colonies in Africa. It has tried to respond to real social conflicts and the violent opposition by Italian politicians and the Italian state to mobility and multiculturalism.
These issues are still with us. Fascist ideology is more alive than ever, while Italian white supremacism seeks impunity by denying the racist motivations behind everyday harassment and violent assaults and assassination of Black and Brown people in Italy. In its decolonial inflection, Italian postcolonial theory is still offering critical and theoretical ammunition for important, grassroots movements for migrant labor and housing rights, for Black feminist and transgender rights mobilization, and for the fight for citizenship rights and racial justice. This activist, ‘from below’, origin of Italian postcolonial studies can hardly be extended to the transnational approach, which originates straightforwardly and programmatically in academic institutions in the United Kingdom and extends to the United States as an Anglophone, hegemonic field of studies.
While I welcome the decentralizing efforts of transnational studies away from essentialist notions of Italian culture, I see a tendency to de-politicize the debate on racism and coloniality through celebratory formulas that refashion postcolonial terminology through marketable, empty signifiers celebrating cultures beyond borders, hybridity, and transculturation. We should be wary of and use such words critically. While they sound very nice in our papers and on the pages of slick webpages, or in academic policy statements, in their celebratory and innovative euphoria, they run the risk of hiding the real, unsolved issues. Those of us within transnational and postcolonial studies should join forces in teaching and writing about racism and the memory and legacy of the colonial past. We should join forces in denouncing the continual denial of the persistence in contemporary Italy of neo-Fascist nationalism, antisemitism and anti-Black racism, and the growing dissemination of white supremacist ideology. We should continue to resist easy celebratory formulas in favor of rigorous criticism and mobilization against such urgent ‘national’ matters as citizenship rights, white privilege, social and labor segregation, and anti-black violence in Italy.