Abstract
Almost a decade ago, scholar of Italian literature Emma Bond authored the article that anticipated (with its title as well as its argument) the so-called “trans-national turn” in Italian studies (Bond, 2014). That turn has since taken many shapes: large research projects, book series, journal issues, conference panels, symposia, working groups, undergraduate and graduate courses, departmental name changes, tenure track jobs and lectureships. The success of Transnational Italian Studies in the UK and the USA (and to a much lesser extent in Italy) has to do with its ability to multiply the vantage points from which we may look at Italy and at Italian culture as objects of inquiry, thereby demanding that we also ask increasingly theoretical questions about what a nation and its culture really are, how they come into being, how they are perceived and represented. A transnational approach to Italian Studies asks us to take into account the violent histories of nationalism, colonialism, emigration, and migration that continue to inform national identity formation, as well as the (thus far) marginal characters in the disciplinary stories we tell, who nonetheless stand at the very center of that process. The increasing popularity of the term “transnational” within Italian Studies, however, also points towards possible risks, such as the potential for the label (now mostly spelled without Bond's hyphen) to be used in increasingly paradigmatic ways, creating homogenizing effects or promoting a new orthodoxy, while only gesturing towards surface changes rather than encouraging deeper transformation. This special issue of Forum Italicum investigates the changes brought about by the “transnational turn” in Italian Studies as well as their effects by taking stock of developments in the field and, at the same time, encouraging a set of critical conversations across transnational locales, time periods, and disciplinary boundaries. The intention is to mark a stage in the debate, rather than to map an established field or create the impression of a stable disciplinary formation.
In order to engage with the variety and diversity that characterize Transnational Italian Studies, this special issue is divided into four sections. The first three—“Methodology,” “Pedagogy,” and “Practices of Belonging”—are devoted to position statements highlighting the contributions that a transnational approach to Italian Studies brought or failed to bring to the discipline. In the first section, “Methodology,” we have invited contributions from scholars whose positions within the discipline differ (at times drastically), not just in terms of their institutional locations but also in their own stated disciplinary homes. Such a diverse array of perspectives shows that when we talk of the transnational we are not referring to an object, or even a set of objects, but to a theoretical approach, a set of questions and ways of seeing the world. In the second section, “Pedagogy,” we collect a series of crucial interventions in the classroom. These educational practices, we maintain, directly inform the field of Transnational Italian Studies as a whole. In other words, the question of how to teach Transnational Italian Studies leads to a series of theoretical inquiries, which ultimately shape the research produced within the discipline. In the third section, “Practices of Belonging,” we delve more deeply into the political stakes of a transnational approach to Italian Studies. By stressing the many ways in which the personal, the political, and the academic become enmeshed when thinking transnationally about Italy and its various formations across time and space, this section also sketches some future directions for the discipline.
Last but not least, the fourth section brings us back to the question of scholarship and methodology, by insisting on showing that transnational research does not require a transnational object or subject. The research articles in this final section of the special issue move in and out of what is geographically and politically understood as Italy, mirroring the dynamism and the tension subtending the transnational turn in Italian Studies. Some of the pieces analyze fixed literary objects firmly rooted within a specific Italian canon, while others disrupt that same canon by inserting cultural and literary products coming from elsewhere—an “elsewhere” marked by spatial or chronological difference, and which may well exist in a fraught relationship with what can be identified with the sign “Italy” (Bassi and Riccò, 2021).
Our introduction shares in and echoes the diversity and the tensions produced by the collective reading of the research articles. In what follows, we discuss three recent popular images rooted simultaneously in multiple (and multiply located or circulating) iconographies and ideas of Italy. In doing so, our aim is to flesh out how the transnational as a method and practice both defines Transnational Italian Studies and pushes us to continuously rethink our engagement with the field, within and beyond academia.
“Britaly”? Transnationalizing national images
On October 19, 2022, the day before then British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned, the Economist's cover read “Welcome to Britaly” (Economist, 2022). While this title on its own already confirms the necessary urgency of a transnational approach to Italian Studies, one that we understand as interrogating the multifarious operations of power that circulate within the sign “Italy,” it is the image that accompanied it that we see as crucial for understanding the use of the transnational as a method.
On a light blue background, Liz Truss, dressed up as Britannia, forcefully clasps a fork with spaghetti instead of the trident, while her other hand proudly holds a shield with a British flag that not only looks like a pizza, but whose colors have transformed into the red, white, and green of the Italian tricolore, representing, respectively, tomato sauce, cheese, and basil. When one moves to the actual content of the article, the editors quickly ease up on the idea of Britaly by saying that “[t]he comparison between the two countries is inexact” (Economist, 2022). Italy is, in their words, “far worse” than Britain. Nonetheless, Italy has “fully infected” Britain with respect to political instability, low growth, and poor productivity. They proceed to call for elections in a conclusive section titled “Spaghetti junction,” repurposing the nickname given to the Gravelly Hill Interchange in Birmingham to describe the political complexities Britain would be facing post Truss. While “holding elections has not resolved Italy's problem,” they seem more hopeful for Britain, where “political instability is a one-party disease.” The Italian ambassador to the UK wrote a letter to the Economist expressing outrage at the cover—more so than at the actual language of the article, which compares Italy to a virus that has infected Britain. For Inigo Lambertini, the image invokes the “oldest of stereotypes.” He reminds the editors that Italy is also a leading manufacturer in industries such as “aerospace, biotech, automotive [and] pharmaceutical” (Guardian, 2022). So Lambertini rightly criticizes the cover, but falls victim to another set of stereotypes, the ones that champion Italian excellency in industry and design. What is more, one can detect a hint of pride in his condemnation, insofar as he does acknowledge that “pasta and pizza are the most sought after food in the world.” As a result, he inadvertently reinforces those same stereotypes he set out to condemn.
So, what are we to make of this idea of Italy which simultaneously evokes backwardness and progress? One that betrays the shame of its past as a transnational provider of migrant labor, but also the pride of its more recent global “Made in Italy” brand? A transnational approach to Italian Studies tells us that the spaghetti and the pizza on the Economist's cover cannot be untied from the multiple histories of migration, colonialism, and neo-imperialism that inform the Italian nation-building process. A process which we see as in constant becoming, one that did not cease with the formal completion of the Unification process in 1871 but continued into the new century and the ventennio, then throughout the 20th century, and up to the present. It is not that a transnational method disregards the nation; quite the contrary. It instead reveals how signs like pasta and pizza have come to symbolize Italy: through a series of processes of migration, racialization, and recodification at various points of the 20th century. Before the Economist's “Britaly,” there was the infamous Der Spiegel cover of 1977, “Pistole auf spaghetti,” where a black pistol was laid upon a heaping plate of spaghetti on a checkered tablecloth, in front of a window with three bullet holes (Der Spiegel, 1977). The sensationalist title, “Urlaubsland ITALIEN: Entführung, Erpressung, Straßenraub” (“Destination Italy: Kidnapping, blackmail, street robberies”), filled in the gaps for those unsure of the image's meanings. In other words, the Economist's cover exists as part of a global network of circulation in which specific stereotyped images of Italy are constantly re-elaborated and re-worked according to the distinctive needs of each locality. The transnational circulation of the sign “Italy” across the Channel and its echoing back within the confines of the nation-state ensured that whoever saw the image of Britaly caught its references.
At the same time, a transnational methodology allows us to trace the various transformations of the key images which define the Italian “sign” and the historical forces (namely migration and colonialism) which fueled its circulation and its accruing of meaning. What Lambertini called the “oldest of stereotypes” has little to do with Italy understood as today's geopolitical reality. Pizza and spaghetti have become a stand-in for Italy in the diasporic realities of which Italian migrants have become an integral part across Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. Food historian Simone Cinotto has written in great detail about the ways in which the masses of Italians crossing the ocean shaped much of what the Italian food industry produced and exported at the turn of the 20th century. Durum wheat pasta—not fresh pasta, but the dry pasta you buy in stores today, such as spaghetti—became a staple Italian food among the Italian communities in North and South America first and only later returned to Italy (Cinotto, 2013: 5). The same could be said for pizza, which did not become a core food consumed across the Italian peninsula until after the Second World War and which continues to be closely associated with the specific locality of Naples. This kind of association perpetuates what film scholar Giuliana Muscio (2018: 3) called a “‘Neapolitan synecdoche’, that is, the experience of Italians as if they were all Neapolitans, or southerners” within the Italian diaspora in the USA. The culture of Southern Italy—despite its continued marginalization and racialization promoted by Northern Italy—has proven central to the creation of a white, Italian ethnic identity in North America. 1 Yet, the images triggered by Italy's diasporic history, as the “Britaly” case shows, do not stay fixed within the American context, but circulate in multiple, transnational directions, connecting several national imaginaries. The Economist's views and representations of Italy always involve a circulation which re-inscribes and re-writes not only the northern/southern intra-European divide but also, in the specific case of Italy, the imagery that comes back to Europe (to Italy and also to the UK) from Italy's own diaspora. When approaching the “Britaly” image with a transnational method, we uncover the multiple forces and issues that have informed and continue to inform the “oldest of stereotypes,” to use Lambertini's expression, about Italy.
Both the Economist's cover and article re-deploy a familiar refrain about Italy's backwardness, degeneracy, and incapacity of keeping up with Western modernity. 2 The cover develops a set of stereotypes attached to a specific white working-class ethnic Italian identity, provoking both the ire and the pride of Lambertini. The article then hints at the possibility that Italy's backwardness can infect other, allegedly more advanced European countries such as Britain; however, the writers quickly reassure their readers by making clear that Britain, even at what might be its lowest point in decades, still fares better than Italy. The Economist wanted to instill the fear of an impending economic crisis among its readership and thus chose to turn its gaze towards Southern Europe, in the hopes of finding an example that would simultaneously prove that economic backwardness in Western Europe exists and reassure the public that such would not be Britain's fate. The fact that Italy was the chosen example—and not Spain or Greece for example—has precisely to do with the circulation of that “oldest of stereotypes” and its transnational implications across multiple locales. The Italian history of internal colonialism and the subsequent mass migration it triggered lie at the very basis of the image of “Britaly” and continuously inform perceptions of “Italy,” independently from the alleged excellence of its industry or from its economic success (or failure). The fact that despite the global achievements of the “Made in Italy” brand the Economist still chose Italy as the foil for Britain's crisis attests that much. To study the sign “Italy” transnationally, then, does not depoliticize the struggles and the violence that subtend it: quite the contrary.
Siamo tutti Paola?
The “Britaly” image we have analyzed above is, in fact, a superimposition of two distinct 19th-century symbols: Britannia and Italia turrita. In these two icons, the modern State—or perhaps the desire for it—is personified as a helmeted female warrior in Britain's case, and as the mournful mother of the nation in Italy's case. To draw attention to a supposed problem of national decline, then, the Economist's 21st-century mash-up of the two national symbols straightforwardly imagines contemporary Britain as a former epitome of national strength and power now turned concerningly weak and fragile. But national icons are malleable signs that can be engaged for projects beyond simply warning of an impending national crisis. In a much-cited study of Italian cinema, Millicent Marcus (2000) shows that while as an illustrated image Italia turrita may have lost traction after Italian Unification to eventually disappear in the 20th century, that same iconography reappears in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, albeit in encoded form. In several examples of auteur postwar cinema, the national symbol was superimposed on cinematic female characters to tell stories of wartime crisis and national rebirth after the conflict.
Following on from Marcus, rethinking fictional characters and public figures in contemporary culture as ever-shifting metaphors for the body politic helps us understand the vagaries of the sign “Italy.” And, when we couch the body politic metaphor transnationally, the vexed intersection of race, sex, and sexuality at which it has long lain comes to the fore. Take, for example, black queer Italian volleyball star Paola Egonu's debut on the mediated site of “Italian” identity formation par excellence: the Sanremo national song contest, which has been broadcast on RAI yearly since 1951, garnering huge audiences both in Italy and abroad. For her much-anticipated walk down the stairs of Teatro Ariston and onto the stage in February 2023, Egonu was wearing Armani's haute couture version of the Greek peplos (Raiplay, 2023b). Framing Egonu as a real-life classical monument implicitly suggests that she should be seen as part and parcel of that same idealized heritage and genus (to which, incidentally, Italia turrita with her flowing robes also belongs). The powerful snapshot of the sportswoman as a figure drawn from ancient myth highlights the individual body's capacity to stand in for a larger collectivity and demands that we think carefully about the ambiguities and contradictions in this seemingly inclusive mode of representation.
To this end, we briefly return to a foundational text in postcolonial Italian Studies on the racialization of women's bodies in Italian visual cultures: Sandra Ponzanesi's (2004) “Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices.” Ponzanesi examines the racist visual economy of hypersexualized images of black women in advertisements, magazines, and popular fiction in 21st-century Italy; she argues that even long after the official end of the Italian colonial occupation of East Africa, the figuration of the Black Venus—simultaneously a mode of racialized and gendered representation and a metaphor for the African continent that cast it as a prey for the colonizing white male nation to capture—“reappears with virtually the identical connotation it had in the colonialist period” (Ponzanesi, 2004: 177). The article focuses specifically on the overlaps between the circulation of sexually titillating images of black women on postcards and other cultural artifacts in Fascist Italy (which contributed to building consensus for Italy's colonial wars; Forgacs, 2014), and that in Italian mass-mediated culture in the early 2000s. While the study initially contextualizes the Italian colonial imagination in a wider modern European archive of Orientalist visual texts, the case studies limit themselves to Fascist racism and the impact it had on 21st-century Italian racism. In this way, rather than focusing on “particular historical forms of racism” (Hall, 2021) and their global translations, Ponzanesi's seminal contribution to Italian postcolonial studies adopts an approach to postcoloniality that examines a specific national culture in isolation, running the risk, in this case, of portraying contemporary Italy as an anomaly—the exceptional racist residue in an otherwise “postracial” Euro-American media landscape.
To expand on Ponzanesi's work on racial formations and Marcus's iconographic study of Italia turrita, we can return now to the transnational assemblage of meanings that undergirded Paola Egonu's appearance during the 2023 Sanremo Music Festival and her semiotic resignification as a stand-in for the national body politic. This image may initially strike us as the polar opposite of both the “Britaly” illustration we have examined above and the racist reemergence of the Black Venus figure that Ponzanesi critiques in her analysis. While “Britaly” draws on a transnational archive of negative Italian stereotypes to make a point about British national decline, the image of Egonu wearing high Italian fashion inspired by classical antiquity seems to draw on a series of positive stereotypes globally associated with the ancient Mediterranean—“the cradle of civilization,” athleticism, statuesque embodiment, and even, perhaps, pre-modern sexual freedom—in order to stake a claim for a specifically “Made in Italy” vision of an inclusive, multiracial, cosmopolitan aesthetics and future. In this sense, Egonu's prime-time TV appearance also seems a world away from the now 20-year-old advertisements centered upon the figure of the Black Venus discussed by Ponzanesi. The iconic image of the volleyball player walking down the stairs of Teatro Ariston is, rather, reminiscent of Black Athena—a representational trope that emerged from research on ancient Mediterranean history (Bernal, 1987). As Scott and Paprocki (2023) show in a recent article, Bernal's academic argument according to which figures like pagan deities and other mythical characters that Western historiography associates with ancient Greece actually originated in Africa (in Egypt in particular) has recently crystallized into a set of highly recognizable “feel-good” representations in contemporary US media. Like other mainstream representations of marginalized racial identities, these rewritings are refigured as contemporary characters and are often “recast as visible, neoliberal subjects of potential value, with a […] generalized sense of positivity, possibility, belief in capitalist futurity, and commitment to self-work” (Kanai and Gill, 2021: 24).
Placing the image we are seeking here to unpack in context helps us better understand the multiple cultural references it draws from: Paola Egonu's participation in the Sanremo Music Festival was presented as the epilogue of a previous, highly emotional mediated moment. In October 2022, during the Italy vs Holland Volleyball World Cup game, Egonu heard a racist fan shouting from the bleachers questioning her right to play for the Italian national team. After the game, she talked openly about her frustration and revealed that she was thinking of quitting the nazionale. In the aftermath of the racist attack at the 2022 World Cup game, the solidarity Egonu received from white Italians followed the familiar colorblind formula “We are all X,” generating the Instagram hashtags “siamotuttipaolaegonu” and “siamotuttipaola.” 3 These shows of solidarity happened solely on social media and may be seen as part of a drawn-out wave of what Angelica Pesarini (2020) powerfully terms “performative antiracism,” which she sees as exploding among white Italians in the immediate aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by white policeman Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. As Pesarini explains, enthused by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in cities across the USA and Europe, white Italians participated en masse in demonstrations against racist violence, in support of Black people, but only when the racism came from another place—the USA in this case. By contrast, they failed to protest police brutality against black people and the several other forms of racist violence that had taken place in Italy from 2018 to 2020. In this sense, performative antiracism may register a positive affective orientation towards an abstract notion of “global blackness” and towards social movements that are endowed with urban, cosmopolitan appeal. Crucially however—Pesarini argues—it does not translate into action against racism in the “here and now” or into questioning one's own complicity or implication in racist systems.
A few months after the aggression at the Volleyball World Cup game described above, in the climax of her televised monologue during the Sanremo Music Festival, Egonu said “amo l’Italia, vesto con orgoglio la maglia Azzurra, che per me è la più bella del mondo” (Raiplay, 2023a). While there may be some truth to Egonu's feelings towards Italy (after all, as an athlete she made enormous sacrifices to play for the national team), her speech was also meant to reassure TV audiences of her ongoing commitment to the nation after the previous fallout. Yet in this way, the burden of showing that Italy as a whole—as per the trite metaphor that compares national sports teams to the polity 4 —can be a better, more inclusive formation, and thus also the responsibility for moving beyond racism was placed entirely on Egonu as a black personality. The incisiveness of Egonu's Sanremo monologue as a two-fold moment of revitalization of the “Made in Italy” logo and of national reconciliation after a racist incident is, of course, predicated on her exceptional status as a celebrity, as well as on her audience's fluency in a neoliberal language that sees civil society as a “team-building exercise,” creating a slippage between the figuration of the sports team and that of the corporate boardroom.
Even though Egonu's prime-time appearance during the Sanremo song contest functioned as a mediated moment of national reconciliation in the way we have described, it is the global purchase of this seemingly positive representation that should give us further pause, especially since the festival has long been presented as a spectacle of Italianness for national and international audiences alike. The Armani dress Egonu wore may have worked to insert “blackness into the story of ‘Made in Italy’ and advocate[…] for a more cosmopolitan and open-ended understanding of Italianness,” furthering (and simultaneously appropriating) similar efforts by black-owned small businesses in Italy (Hawthorne, 2022: 65), but it can also be seen as a version of a problematic recent corporate marketing strategy in which “feminism, queer pride and antiracism are curiously associated with desirable trends and the circulation of normative affective orientations towards capitalism” (Kanai and Gill, 2021: 11). Some commentators have cast this strategy as part of a particular historical form of racial capitalism (Kanai and Gill, 2021). While Marcus's “The Italian Body Politic Is a Woman” focuses exclusively on the white female bodies of canonized Italian films and Ponzanesi's “Beyond Black Venus” understands black representation as developing chiefly out of the reified and seemingly transhistorical relationship between the former colonizer and colonized, the transnational method we are proposing here asks how large-scale contemporary social and cultural formations mediate the reenactment of the colonial archive's racial imaginaries in the present.
What was being staged at the Sanremo Music Festival seems to be an attempt at national reconciliation that spoke the contemporary language of “nonredistributive antiracism” (Melamed, 2011: 4), a concept akin to Pesarini's performative antiracism. As observed by Melamed, mainstream, official, and institutional antiracist stories may only attach to exceptional individuals, like Egonu. If the slogan “We are all Paola” failed to distribute responsibility for racism among white people and white institutions, the imagined positive effects of Egonu's body being reframed as the symbol of the nation did not necessarily trickle down to black constituencies either. A transnational approach to national iconicity like the one we seek to model here helps us focus on the way in which a seemingly “Afrocentric” discourse about the Mediterranean can reinscribe Italian expansionist designs. As Camilla Hawthorne (2022: 86) argues, “Mediterraneanism is […] not an entirely ‘innocent’ reworking of Italianness” since “Italy's position in the Mediterranean has been vaunted by politicians and intellectuals as a legitimation for colonial expansion, and more recently has been used to promote advantageous Italian economic investment in Africa.” The recent media moment we have discussed here reminds us that the contemporary afterlife of Italian nationalism and colonialism must be read up against Italy's folding into larger neo-imperial Western formations and their evolution since the second half of the 20th century, even when that afterlife speaks in a seeming antiracist Euro-American grammar of diversity and inclusion. When the conditions of possibility for the staging of ostensibly national moments of racial reconciliation are eminently transnational, examining the suturing of the national to the transnational in cultural texts is indispensable to attending to the complex politics of our postcolonial moment.
Open to what?
In Spring 2023, as we were writing this introduction, the Italian far-right Government led by Giorgia Meloni was engaged in promoting its own take on the image of Italy, both within and outside the borders of the nation. Charged with producing a brand new public campaign, the Turin-based Armando Testa advertising agency came up with a catchphrase, an Instagram account, a website, and a video which instantly attracted baffled reactions and widespread condemnation—both in Italy and elsewhere. The campaign, launched under the slogan “Open to meraviglia,” was swiftly derided for the triteness of its images, as well as for a series of mistakes and imprecisions: from the unchecked use of automatic translation producing risible errors when dealing with toponyms such as Prato or Camerino, to the inclusion of footage shot in Slovenia (rather than Italy) and foregrounding Slovenian (rather than Italian) wine. In spite of such surreal (comical, self-defeating …) mistakes, and whether we buy or not the subsequent assertion by the Armando Testa agency that what was released was only a prototype aimed at provoking debate or testing the audience's reactions, the set of images mobilized by the campaign is in fact much more than simply laughable—and so are the implications of its cross-referencing glances, its multiple addresses and addressees. 5
At the heart of the promotional campaign are a series of highly recognizable images, re-framed as icons of “Made in Italy” and of Italian hospitality. Of course, the pasta and pizza of the Economist's cover also appear among these images, now re-inscribed as symbols of hospitality, tokens of the good life, and part of the “meraviglia” one might experience visiting the bel paese, thus hinting at the mutability of signs as they circulate globally. As in our previous examples, however, in this case too Italy and “Italianness” are primarily—yet equivocally—associated with feminized images, although this time, unlike in the case of Egonu's appearance on the Sanremo Music Festival stage, the choice falls on noticeably and irrevocably white, heteronormative, female bodies. And here too, reading such images through a transnational lens helps us to untangle the political message that is being vehicled through the “Italy” sign: a message which is as exclusionary as it is contradictory, as jingoistic in its nationalist stance as it is global in its neoliberal embrace.
The video that forms the centerpiece of the promotion is a game of two halves: the first is a paean to Italy as a tourist destination, the second an equally enthusiastic celebration of “Italian culture” and of the country's “excellent” products.
6
The second part is the one which drew most of the immediate criticism, mainly for its blatant exploitation of the globally recognizable image of Botticelli's Venus. The rationale for the choice is given explicitly in the voiceover: what was needed, the male voice tells us, was: un testimonial all’altezza, qualcuno di molto moderno ma con una grande storia alle spalle. Magari una virtual influencer contemporanea, ma che fosse anche un’icona dell’Italia nel mondo, riconoscibile da tutti attraverso un semplice sguardo e il segno inconfondibile dei suoi capelli.
What we encounter here is a different Venus from the version embodied by Egonu: a blonde, coquettish digitalization of Botticelli's idealized female body which—coincidentally yet significantly—closely resembles another of the female presenters and models of femininity showcased on the Teatro Ariston stage during the 2023 Sanremo Music Festival: Italy's most famous influencer, Chiara Ferragni. 7 The Venus-Ferragni of the “Open to meraviglia” campaign is a highly marketable and market-conscious (if rather obvious) construction. Evidently modeled on a Barbie doll, adorned (like Barbie) with a rotating collection of trendy outfits, and endowed with a girlish voice, this 30-something (“Ho 30 anni … OK, qualcosina di più per la verità”) garners “likes” and heart emojis on hypothetical social media pages while touring Italy to showcase “i nostri luoghi meravigliosi e tutte le nostre eccellenze”—including, notably, a peekaboo glance at Michelangelo's David, aka Venus's male counterpart. Venus and David: two idealized white bodies that are sexualized, reduced to their parts, and sold on the global tourist market as classic yet titillating, classy yet dirt-cheap personifications of the “Italian genius” and of its position at the center of the Western canon. This is Venus in pieces, both physically and intellectually: reduced, at one point, to a mosaic of its own body's details, but also reducing “Italianness” to a tricolor band holding back her “iconic” hair, as well as to a sequence of predictable loci forming her background—Florence, Rome, the Cinque Terre … And, always, the blue waters of the Mediterranean.
The cheap aesthetics and facile stereotypical imagery of the second half of the video are more than matched in the first. Here, however, the ambiguity of the campaign's message and its moral as well as historical bankruptcy are, if anything, even more in evidence. In the first minute of “Open to meraviglia,” we see Italy's geographic contour from space, hear about the country's record number of UNESCO World Heritage sites, and encounter the central idea of the campaign: Italy is “braccia che si spalancano,” “una porta aperta sulla meraviglia.” An explanation follows: “È questo in fondo che noi italiani sappiamo fare meglio: meravigliarci sempre per meravigliare gli altri.” Hence the chosen logo: “Una bandiera che si spalanca dando il benvenuto al mondo intero.” Here, too, the voiceover is accompanied by recognizable images of tourist attractions, but it is the human presence within those images and locations which is particularly significant, as is the tension between what we see, what we hear, and what we know. The key question—the one we are not meant to ask and yet the one we should not avoid—is who is “we” here? That is: who is the campaign addressing? Who is it wooing? And who is it excluding?
As a campaign destined to promote Italy as a tourist destination, “Open to meraviglia” has a predominantly international target (though of course internal tourism is also an important market). This is confirmed by the choice of a slogan that makes use of English as its predominant, structuring language (“Open to …”), combining it with an Italian word that is sufficiently recognizable for an Anglophone (but also Hispanophone, Francophone …) audience to appreciate its “authentic” Italian flavor without feeling lost or alienated. 8 Yet the “noi” heard in the video and frequently encountered in the pages of the website addresses not the (potential, in pectore) foreign tourist but Italians themselves, reminding them of their presumably superior sense of aesthetics (their ability to experience “meraviglia”) and also of their shared vocation to hospitality (their collective welcoming gesture addressing the world, inviting others to experience the “meraviglia” as well). The images, however, tell an at least partly different story. As the camera moves from landscapes to monuments, we get a glimpse of groups of happy holidaymakers. All are young and beautiful. All are white. Is this “noi”, “we the Italians”? Or is this “il mondo,” those whom Italians are “welcoming”? Then, just as the voiceover gets to the word “altri,” we see three young women taking a selfie. The screen quickly splits into a composite of nine images, all portraying people taking pictures of themselves as they are experiencing Italy's “meraviglie” at first hand. The mosaic leaves no doubt: these are definitely tourists. They are still beautiful and (mostly) young. But here, as the word “altri” tolls the knell for any inclusive notion of what it means to be Italian, for the first time we see brown skin and other markers of visible “non-white” ethnicity. The effect is breathtaking: once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The game of inclusion and exclusion played out between words and images makes it clear that there is no place for blackness within the nation. Just as “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack,” 9 so the tricolore only truly belongs in the hair of Venus/Ferragni, the “influencer” who is just about to be introduced as the protagonist of the rest of the video and the mascot of the campaign.
The racial economy of the video has further layers. Excluded as Italians, those marked as visible “others” are nevertheless welcome—if they are beautiful, preferably young, and, most of all, affluent tourists. Italy is a destination country, it is hospitable, welcoming, open—as long as that means open for business and as long as “hospitality” is understood only as part of the “hospitality industry” and is sold at a price established on the world tourist market, as part of a highly regulated exchange of goods and services. Those who do not fit this narrative are entirely and irrevocably excluded. One further human figure is displayed in this first part of the video. It appears at a climactic moment and it is, once again, a female personification of the nation. To accompany the rhetorical description of Italy's opening arms, the producers of the video have chosen to show a young woman, seen from behind as she opens a door looking out onto the Mediterranean. She is white, has long dark hair, wears a simple flowing white shirt, and walks purposefully forward as she steps out to embrace the blue sky, the blue water ahead. She is Italy. She is the “girl next door,” with her Mediterranean beauty. She is an everyday goddess, perhaps even another Venus. And she is welcoming. There is a horrifying, inexcusable irony in that image, accompanied by those words. “Open to meraviglia.” “Una porta aperta.” “Braccia che si spalancano.” The video was released in April 2023, only weeks after one of the worst recent tragedies of the “Mediterranean passage,” when more than 90 people died at sea on the coast of Calabria, close to Steccato di Cutro. A tragedy marked, like too many others, by the culpable neglect (or worse) of the Italian government, whose politics is much more closely identified with the so-called “porti chiusi” strategy 10 than with any notions or practices of hospitality.
With its glaring lacunae, its willful omissions, its hopefully inadvertent and yet monstrous (i.e. wrong, inhuman, abominable …) ironies, the “Open to meraviglia” campaign displays a racist logic which is firmly based in a transnational economy of inclusion/exclusion and, at the same time, is perfectly capable of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable “blackness,” acceptable and unacceptable “otherness”—as long as the (personified) body of the nation remains untouched. “We the Italians” will open the door and welcome the affluent tourist with open arms, just as we close our harbors to the economic migrant, the asylum seeker, the refugee. This is where the ambiguous address of the campaign performs its true sleight of hand and where we, the authors of these pages, feel directly interpellated by the video's rhetoric. While pretending to talk to (desirable) others about us, “Open to meraviglia” is in fact speaking to us about how we see, or would like to see, ourselves. If we accept the campaign's message at face value, identifying with its “noi italiani,” we embrace the feel-good factor it is meant to produce for “normative” Italians living in Italy and also, as in our case, for those who are part of a global Italian diaspora whose collective sense of identity remains largely posited on and situated within that normative model: still aligned with the notion of an Italian genius and an Italian exceptionality, with “meraviglia” and hospitality, and with—why not—the resilient myth of “Italiani brava gente.” And still white, of course. To all this, the campaign adds a distinctly neoliberal spin, accentuating the (our?) willingness to perform acceptable versions of “Italianità” for acceptably diverse customers. Is this the real meaning of “Made in Italy,” today, once we re-read that label in its transnational context? But what if we do not want just to “feel good” about it all? What if we refuse—as scholars, teachers, members of our communities—to be ambassadors of that product?
Going the distance: The transnational as method
Britaly on the cover of the Economist. Paola Egonu on the stage of Teatro Ariston. A blonde and a dark-haired Venus at the heart of a (failed) promotional campaign. We have chosen three figurations of Italy, three distinct symbols which nevertheless share the common trait of being mediated by the public use of the female body. Our three examples also instantiate three classic perspectives, three types of gaze that continuously shape and reshape the sign “Italy,” its associations and its circulation. First, the travel writing tradition that started with the Grand Tour, with its ambiguous external figurations of Italy as both desirable and reviled, a point of origin and a reminder of decadence, a specter of failed modernity and a perpetual source of authenticity. In today's re-readings of that vision, as Italia turrita meets Britannia via the re-interpretations associated with Italy's diasporic history, we are left with a mix of the myth of the “spaghetti eater” and that of the donna crisi. Second, the internal gaze, trained upon the contemporary nation for the benefit of its own audience, yet broadcast globally and building on globally circulating symbols: Black Athena, the athlete as national hero and cultural diplomat, tasked with rewriting Italianness into a palatable, world-ready version of Mediterraneanism. In this case, what we get is an attempt at reconciliation through selective assimilation, offering the illusion of redemption without responsibility or redistributive justice. And finally, Venus-in-pieces: the empty, reified personification of Italian hospitality as a good to be sold on the global market, yet first offered to Italians themselves as a token of their exceptionality—for which, surely, they (we) should all be grateful, as it will help to forget a multitude of sins against those who continue to be excluded, those who are left, literally, to drown.
Three different kinds of gaze, then, yet all enmeshed within and inscribed with transnational signifiers, and all rendered more readable through a transnational approach. For us, the usefulness of that approach is, precisely, in its suppleness, its flexibility. Yet it is worth repeating it here: as we put together this special issue, a decade into the efforts to define Transnational Italian Studies, its methods and its practices, some of the key questions we are asking ourselves are about the effectiveness of this “turn” as well as its inherent risks. How do we keep “the transnational” from becoming an empty label or a normative (therefore restrictive) model? How do we exorcize its “global” vocation, maintaining the tension between “trans” and “national” (Bond, 2014), with its productive instability? How do we keep it political, at its heart, avoiding full domestication within increasingly institutional(ized) contexts? As James Clifford wrote on the threshold of the new millennium, “all translation terms used in global comparisons […] get us some distance and fall apart” (Clifford, 1997: 39; emphasis in original). He was talking of “‘travel’,” as well as other terms “carrying the inextinguishable taint of location.” Terms “like ‘culture’, ‘art’, ‘society’, ‘peasant’, ‘mode of production’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘modernity’, ‘ethnography’” (Clifford, 1997: 39). “Transnational” is another such translation term, carrying its own taint of location, both in time and place—but at least it has the capacity to take us some distance. In this introduction, starting from three recent instantiations of the complex assembling and disassembling of notions and representations of Italy, their circulation, their mediation and remediation, we have tried to test precisely that capacity. This interpretive effort, however, is not the ultimate goal of a transnational methodology. Edward Said (1993: xxix) described writing “as a corrective, as a patient alternative, as a frankly exploratory possibility” set against “uncritical and unthinking forms of education and thought,” reminding us that “the Utopian space still provided by the university […] must remain a place where such vital issues are investigated, discussed, reflected on.” There is a worldliness to the labor of knowledge and interpretation, to the work of translation and mediation. It is a worldliness which is part of our professional practices (as researchers, teachers, editors …) but also of our personal and collective political engagement. We hope these pages, and the ones that follow, are a step in that direction. They were certainly written with that intention.