Not straight from Italy: Seeking anti-national killjoys in Italian Studies

When, at a conference in my field, I am one of a handful of people whose research approach to Italian Studies is drawn from Queer Studies, I grapple with feelings of intellectual isolation. In those moments, the image that Pier Vittorio Tondelli (2006) used in opening Camere separate comes to mind. Leo, the novel's queer protagonist, is on a plane above the Alps at sunset gazing at a view both beautiful and unsettling. Looking out of the airplane window, he can only make out the outline of the mountain chain, its distinct shape impressing upon him and capturing his imagination. Immersed as it is in the melancholic hue of the evening sky, the landscape looks to Leo like an abstract painting framed by the oval shape of the oblò. The “abisso cobalto” (Tondelli, 2006: 7) he is staring at feels cold and distant, yet somewhat comforting in its orderly aloofness. When the light suddenly switches on, Leo sees his own face superimposed on the landscape and the previous order becomes jumbled, confusing, uncanny even—as if the shape of the natural world could not assimilate the lines, vectors, lights, and shadows that form the outline of Leo's queer self.

Like other fields in the Modern Languages, Italian Studies has attempted to fit within its own disciplinary design the subjectivities—queer, trans, and non-binary (Amin, 2022)—that have animated Queer Studies since the seminal publication of Judith Butler's (2006) Gender Trouble in 1990. Since the turn of the century, Queer Studies has moved towards an increasingly intersectional understanding of identity formation (Eng and Puar, 2020; Ferguson, 2003; Nash, 2019) that emphasizes the critique of normative familial, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and national communities (Boellstorff, 2005; Bond Stockton, 2009; Joseph, 2002; Puar, 2007; Stanley, 2021). Similarly, Italian Studies scholars have examined the representation of selves, bodies, and desires in both major and minor texts, showing that literature is a precious archive for the study of modern national identity and the place of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in its making (Duncan, 2020; Polizzi, 2022; Welch, 2014). Personally, I have had something of an obsession for the relationship between literature, identities, and the feeling of belonging—or not belonging—for quite some time. One of my most vivid memories of my own formazione intellettuale as an Italian high school student is beginning to understand when I was about 16 that the supposedly self-evident idea of “Italian literary history” was a very unstable thing, even as my school tried to make it look as firm and frozen as the chain of the Alps appeared to Leo from his airplane.

As I noticed the looming absence of prose or poetry about Italy's racisms and their imperial and colonial pasts in the national curriculum and—also—saw it glossing over dialects and the entrenched relationship between class, language, and literary taste, I remember pondering that the primary function of the national literary canon may well be to project an untenable national family romance thinly veiled under aesthetic preoccupations. Shortly before then, I had been the first person to come out as queer in my conservative late 1990s Northern Italian school and I felt rather alienated both in the classroom and socially. Perhaps for that reason, I mapped the glaring erasures in what I was taught in my Italian literature class—well-known stories about Italy's literary exceptionalism and a manifest national destiny—onto the exclusion I was experiencing firsthand. When much later, as a graduate student in Italian Studies in the United Kingdom, I read Sarah Ahmed's (2010) popular article “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness,” I recognized my teenage self in Ahmed's figure of the “killjoy”; someone who, beginning from everyday feelings of exclusion, forms their own minoritized critical horizon.

Drawing on Ahmed, I understand a queer killjoy to be an “affect alien” (Ahmed, 2010: 580) who sees much to disagree with in normative happy assemblies, which may include groups as disparate as a literature class, straight teens, cisgendered teachers, all-white writers reading lists, and national literary canons of great books. To this day, I see myself as a queer killjoy because I still find respite and intellectual purpose in asking how seemingly unrelated happy cultural objects can be brought together to form exclusionary national fictions, or to contest them. Indeed, in high school my two-fold disidentification with the cis-hetero social and the literature curriculum created in me an abiding desire to unpack the ways in which texts, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nation are held together. Today, I work in an Italian Studies department in a private college in the United States and, as a non-binary trans-identified scholar, I sometimes feel like I am treading the fault lines of the project of integrating queer theories to my discipline as it is currently practiced and taught in the country where I work. In those moments, I ask myself what a self-professed queer killjoy may do to rethink their discipline out of its many exclusionary fictions. I will begin answering that question by addressing another: what exactly is it about Italian Studies in the form it currently takes in American higher education that makes it so distant from those of us who see nations, literary texts, selves, bodies, desires, and, crucially, power as forming one inextricable cultural formation?

Calling all killjoys

My hunch is that the problem may begin with the whiteness and the cis maleness of the segment of the Italian literary canon that enjoys “world literary” status and is therefore imagined as one of the points of origin of Western literature. This kind of canonicity was transformed into the structuring principle of the field when the first departments of Italian Studies were established in universities across the United States, creating the subdivisions in literary historical periods we still work with, each organized around “great books” or writers that are imagined as having pulled their own era into the next via their path-breaking aesthetic innovations. Within Italian Studies in the United States in particular, this self-referential and teleological tale of national literary achievement is very rarely studied by asking how it has come to be and what particular social and cultural formations presided over its contested making. For this reason, the literary canon at the heart of Italian Studies appears as monolithic and timeless as the Alps Leo gazes at from his window seat, while there is, of course, nothing natural or inevitable about what we have come to collectively deem “beautiful” and universally “worth reading.” Instead, ascriptions of aesthetic value are socially and historically situated processes that have more to do with power, identity formation, nation- and empire-building, State projects around literacy, the expansion of cognitive markets and the accumulation of cultural capital, and other bids for cultural hegemony than with beauty, tradition, ingenuity, meaning, humanity, or any other edifying concept that some of the “founding fathers” of Italian Studies in the United States may have seen themselves as the protectors or preservers of.

But while the mainstream of Italian Studies in the United States may want to work further on denaturalizing the canon they work with, ¹ I am more interested in addressing scholars who like me think against the grain of canon formation. In carving out space for texts that do not fit in the major fictions about Italy, Italianists have often relied upon fixed epistemic categories such as “women's writing in Italy” (Cox, 2008) and “women in contemporary Italian cinema” (Di Bianco, 2023; Faleschini Lerner, 2022); “Italian homosexuality” (Duncan, 2006); and “migrant writers in Italy” (Parati, 2017). While this important work has complicated the stories we tell in Italian Studies, it runs the risks of unwittingly smuggling in—much like the national family romance of more canonic endeavors—a knowable social formation called “Italy” understood as a genuine community of writers, filmmakers, readers, and viewers; epistemically transparent Italians that, while more pluralistically imagined than before, are still contained within the borders of the nation and its tradition, as well as neatly divided up into men and women, straights and queers, and supposedly indigenous and migrant cultural producers and consumers. In this sense, an identarian model for the study of minority difference does not put pressure on the way in which we come to accept the supposed wholeness of a plethora of binaries that constitute modernity: male/female, hetero/homo, native/foreign, home/abroad, the nation and its supposedly self-evident outside.

To put precisely that kind of pressure on Italian Studies, Giulia Riccò and I (Bassi and Riccò, 2021) have proposed that we rethink it as no longer concerned with tracing the cultural history of the nation, but with the study of the large-scale discursive practices that are key to understanding how Italy came to cohere as a national designation. As an example, we suggested that three discursive formations of this kind that Italian Studies may further unpack via a transnational approach are “late State formation and its lingering language of belatedness, scattered hegemonies and supposedly pathological disunity; tourism and its language of longing, desire and capture; mass emigration and its language of colonialism, loss and gain, resettling and self-fashioning” (Bassi and Riccò, 2021). Italian Studies may become queerer once scholars collectively replace the Nation-State model with a focus on the transnational historical, social, and cultural processes that have created the multiple ideas of “Italy” and “Italian” circulating in the world. I claim this critical endeavor as queer not because it includes supposedly new identities into the invented cultural history of an imagined community; instead, what makes it queer is the “anti-national” (Wetters, 2019) drive to unpack, deconstruct, and, eventually, kill the joy that the Italian family romance has historically brought to only some readers, writers, dwellers, and travelers.

Pars destruens: Killing the joy Italy brings to the world

As an Italian teacher in an American college, I am regularly confronted with both the joys and the forms of affect alienation that Italian Studies produces. A couple of years ago, a graduating Italian and biology double major at the university I work at (I will call her Maria in lieu of her real name) unabashedly told me that as a first-generation college student from a low-income immigrant background, she had started her studies with no interest whatsoever in the Humanities and a single focus on STEM. Looking back, Maria was amazed she was now graduating in Italian, since she had never thought of herself as good at languages. When she shared this, I was puzzled: Maria was the same student who often made references in class to having moved to the United States from Ecuador as a 12-year-old and having to learn English with little support from her teachers, then quickly becoming her mother's interpreter at the bank, at the supermarket checkout, and at her own school. How could a skilled bilingual not know she was good at languages? The distance that separated Maria and me in that moment of mutual blank stares may be more profound than meets the eye: she did not immediately imagine that her migrant positionality (and the language learning that did not take place in school or college) may produce institutionally valuable knowledge, while I did not instantly recognize the class and racial privilege that you need today in the United States to see yourself as having a “gift” for foreign languages and a fascination with another culture—or in Maria's particular case, to buy into the global version of the Italian family romance.

When it travels out of Italy, the national family romance may change, but the joy “Italy” is tasked with bringing abroad is likely to be just as exclusionary. For example, the color-blind gesture of inviting students to step into a foreign culture and delight in its exotic difference that I was initially surprised Maria did not respond to presupposes that our globally networked cultural moment may be easily cut up into discreet national cultures that some privileged cosmopolitan citizens are free to learn about, visit, and consume. Literary archives provide us with countless examples of killjoys who have refused this way of conceiving of the world and of themselves. However, our ability to access such archives is conditional upon abandoning the traditional approach that presumes that only literary texts written in Italian are proper objects of Italian Studies. In her poem “The Web One Weaves of Italy,” the queer American poet Marianne Moore (1994: 164) formulates an ironic takedown of the kind of delight and joy that Italy, the quintessential European tourist destination, has long been expected to bring:

The Web One Weaves of Italy

The poem is an example of the refusal of world-ready happy national objects that I am calling Italian scholars to model. In 1943, at a literature conference at Mount Holyoke College, Moore's fellow modernist Wallace Stevens introduced her to his friends Henry and Barbara Church, two wealthy New York-based patrons of the arts. In 1954, after Henry Church had suddenly died in 1947, Stevens suggested that Moore accompany the now-widowed Barbara Church on a trip to Italy. In her letter back to Stevens, Moore refused the invitation and wrote “The Web One Weaves of Italy” as a response (Schultze, 1996: 216). In the poem, she gently mocks the upper-class fascination with Italy's “authentic charms” exemplified by the “crossbow tournament at Gubbio,” “the Palio” in Siena, and “the mule-show” in Perugia. Indeed, the reasons for refusing the invitation may be encoded in the poem's detached tone—something of an ironically inflected affect alienation from the likely homogenous assemblies of wealthy, happy Euro-American tourists in the Umbrian and Tuscan towns.

Pars construens: Building transnational archives for Italian Studies

“The Web One Weaves of Italy” parodically echoes a New York Times article titled “Festivals and fairs for the tourist in Italy” (Goodman, 1954: 288), which was published shortly before Moore wrote her poem. For example, the phrase “very blasé” and the juxtaposition between the “what” and the “which” of Italy in the poem's first stanza are direct quotations from the article, which begins as follows:

The Italians, usually considered a poor people, are, in an important sense, the richest people in Europe – rich in their talent for having a good time. With their energy, exuberance, and enthusiasm they create events: spectacles, fairs, exhibitions more numerous, livelier and on the whole more interesting than those of any other country in Europe. In midsummer, only a very blasé man would know which way to turn. But in any season, the tourist's problem in Italy is never “What shall we do today?” but “Which one shall we go to?” Shall it be the International Ladies Baseball Tournament in the Alps (Bergamo), or the Rally of Motorcars and Blessing of Motor Vehicles on the occasion of the opening of the Holy Door at the Basilica of Collemaggio? Shall it be the Competition for Shop Windows at Savigliano, or the Competition for Illuminated Balconies at Caraglio? Or perhaps the Competition for Houses Decorated With Flowers at Reggio Emilia? Shall we, then, pass up the Exhibition of Artistically Laid Tables in Bologna? Have we time for the National Exhibition of Photography (Carrara), or the Exhibition of Italian Hat Fashions (Florence)? How about the National Submarine Hunting Contests off the now fashionable island of Ponza?

In the New York Times article and in “The Web One Weaves of Italy,” we catch a glimpse of a forming global idea of postwar Italy. In fact, reading the two texts together means looking at transnational processes of postwar reconstruction and modernization from a particular vantage point. In the newspaper article and in the poem that parodically responds to it, Italy is a laboratory in which heritage, folklore, and local specificity are transformed into a modern allegorical mythology: a palimpsest collating together figural pasts and futures (e.g. the “Blessing of Motor Vehicles on the occasion of the opening of the Holy Door at the Basilica of Collemaggio”); an engine of uneven economic progress; and a strategy of accumulation of a particular kind of highly affective soft power.

Refusing the joy Italy offers does not mean pausing one's critical engagement with it. Instead of weaving the web of Italy, Italian Studies may tear it apart, making the discipline the careful dissection of every thread. The goal of the tearing is transforming Italian Studies into an interdisciplinary field that asks what historical formations have turned Italy into the assemblage of myths it circulates around the world as and, crucially, with what consequences. When presenting Italian Studies in this way to students, there are many archives we can draw on that foreground the intersecting vectors of nation, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race. For example, Una donna—Sibilla Aleramo's (2003) now-canonical first-wave feminist memoir—can be read together with the obscure Fourteen Months Abroad: A Simple Record of a Foreign Trip, a travel journal written by the white American tourist Julia Hedges Potwin (1911) during her 1898 trip to Italy with her husband. In the classroom, the two texts make a phenomenal pairing because while the belated, accelerated, contradictory, and uneven modernization of the 1880s was the reason Italy felt like a stifling misogynistic trap to Aleramo, the Italian mix of “progress” and “backwardness” was a source of awe to the American Italophile. Interestingly, Italy also provided Potwin with an unprecedented sense of freedom from the patriarchal restrictions she experienced in the United States. As one woman's oppressive home turns into another woman's joyful escape route, students will likely ask important questions about what global transformations produced such a striking change in the very idea of Italy. Finally, in an archive of African American history put together by Howard College librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley, ² we meet a rather exceptional Italophile: Sarah Parker Remond, the black abolitionist who in 1866 migrated to Italy to study in the prestigious medical school of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Remond's love for Italy began when she met Giuseppe Mazzini in London during her anti-slavery lecture tour across Britain that began in 1858. When she met Mazzini, Remond began to look at Italian unification as a key modern struggle (Salenius, 2016).

Wesley's archive of recovered documents about Remond can be read against La linea del colore, a 2020 novel in which the Italian author of African descent Igiaba Scego created a fictional character of a 19th-century African American queer immigrant in Italy, loosely based on Remond and Remond's friend, the sculpturer Edmonia Lewis. In La linea del colore, Scego (2020) imagines this fictional character witnessing—from her location as a black American Italophile living in Italy—the Italian occupation of Eritrea in the late 1880s. Through this archive that crosses textual genres and disciplinary boundaries, an upper-level seminar could discuss the global politics of Italian late State formation and Italian colonialism in East Africa together, by asking how three differently located women of color—Remond, Wesley, and Scego—came to gaze at each other wantingly and inquisitively as they looked at Italy excitedly and critically. Once again, the joy recently unified Italy may have brought to Remond (and to Wesley, vicariously) gets complicated by Scego's contemporary fictional rewriting of the historical archive. As that joy comes apart, it reveals a complex layering of histories and legacies of transatlantic slavery, travel, migration, belated nation formation, nationalism, and colonialism. The wealth of scholarship on transnational Italian studies that this special issue critically reconsiders allows us to construct archives in which Italy is presented as a contested family romance coming together as it travels and moves. Rethinking Italy as a global archival object in this way could transform Italian Studies departments in the United States into interdisciplinary laboratories in which scholars are busy undoing the web of Italy, the national family romance, and the exclusionary joys these bring, thereby making Italian Studies a queerer site of transnational critique.