https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4558-257X
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article examines how, in the second series of The White Lotus (2022), Sicily is portrayed as a backdrop for wealthy North Americans to live out touristic fantasies. This relies on a stereotypical portrayal of Sicily as a repository of ‘pre-modern’ gender roles and racial dynamics. The Sicilian setting facilitates the series' critique of white, male privilege. Although the series uses irony to satirize North American attitudes towards, and beliefs about Sicily, it ultimately ‘recycles’, however knowingly, familiar clichés about the island, particularly ones that recur in twentieth-century films. Thus, while at first glance The White Lotus appears to critique its characters' conception of Sicily as a Mediterranean playground or ‘an idealised space of tourism’ (Hom, p. 52), upon closer inspection the series is ultimately an extension of a long line of transnational portrayals of Sicily that rely on familiar stereotypes, made by and for English-speaking observers.
SOMMARIO
Questo saggio esamina come, nella seconda serie di The White Lotus (2022), la Sicilia fa da sfondo alle fantasie turistiche di ricchi nordamericani. Ciò si basa su una rappresentazione stereotipata della Sicilia come archivio di ruoli di genere e dinamiche razziali ‘premoderne'. L'ambientazione siciliana facilita la critica del privilegio bianco e maschile che la serie intende fare. Pur usando l'ironia per ridicolizzare atteggiamenti nordamericani nei confronti della Sicilia, la serie ‘ricicla' luoghi comuni sull'isola, particolarmente quelli che ricorrono nei film del Novecento. Così, mentre a prima vista The White Lotus sembra criticare l'idea che i suoi personaggi hanno della Sicilia come parco giochi mediterraneo, o come ‘spazio turistico idealizzato’ (Hom, p. 52), a ben vedere la serie si aggiunge alla lunga carrellata di rappresentazioni transnazionali della Sicilia basate su stereotipi familiari, realizzati da e per osservatori anglofoni.
PAROLE CHIAVE:
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Bianca Mafodda for her help researching the teste di moro myths and objects. Sean Wyer also thanks the Royal Anthropological Institute's Emslie Horniman Scholarship Fund and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, and Margaret Neil thanks the Economic and Social Research Council, St. Edmund Hall, at the University of Oxford, and the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, whose generous support enabled them to research and write this article. They are grateful to the journal editors and two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Ethics Approval
Approval by the Social Sciences and Humanities Interdivisional Research Ethics Committee (SSH IDREC) in accordance with the University of Oxford's procedures for research involving human participants, Research ethics reference: R76893/RE001
Approval for Human Research by the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects at the University of California, Berkeley, Protocol Number 2021-06-14429
Notes
1 The White Lotus, dir. by Mike White (HBO, 2022).
2 Marianna Giusti, ‘Fantasy Home: The Eerie Symbolism of The White Lotus's Sicilian palazzos’, The Financial Times, December 2022 <https://propertylistings.ft.com/propertynews/united-kingdom/7022-fantasy-home-the-eerie-symbolism-of-the-white-lotuss-sicilian-palazzos.html> [accessed 22 February 2023].
3 Livia Caligor, ‘The White Lotus Season 2: Unpacking the Symbolism of Those Head-Shaped Vases’, Architectural Digest, 11 December 2022 <https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-white-lotus-season-2-symbolism-vases> [accessed 22 February 2023].
4 Anna Kaplan, ‘The Meaning behind the Testa di Moro Head Statues in “The White Lotus”’, Today, 22 November 2022 <https://www.today.com/popculture/tv/white-lotus-head-statues-meaning-testa-di-moro-rcna58169> [accessed 22 February 2023].
5 L’Avventura, dir. by Michelangelo Antonioni (Janus Films, 1960).
6 Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, ‘Untimely Desires, Historical Efflorescence, and Italy in Call Me by Your Name’, Italian Culture, 37.1 (2019), p. 65. doi:10.1080/01614622.2019.1609220.
7 Sophie Gilbert, ‘The Awful Secret of Wealth Privilege’, The Atlantic, 16 July 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/white-lotus-rich-people-vacation-privilege/619450/> [accessed 11 July 2023]; Martin Robinson, ‘Toxic Masculinity Is Alive and Well and Staying at The White Lotus’, The Evening Standard, 13 December 2022 <https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/toxic-masculinity-in-the-white-lotus-theo-james-cameron-b1045444.html> [accessed 11 July 2023].
8 Rick Porter, ‘TV Ratings: “White Lotus” Scores Series High With Season 2 Finale’, The Hollywood Reporter, 12 December 2022 <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/white-lotus-season-2-finale-ratings-1235280742/> [accessed 22 February 2023].
9 Until the late eighteenth century, the Grand Tour ‘ended in Naples; any further south was considered Africa’; see Gaetana Marrone, ‘A Cinematic Grand Tour of Sicily: Irony, Memory and Metamorphic Desire from Goethe to Tornatore’, California Italian Studies, 1.1 (2010) <https://doi.org/10.5070/C311008872>.
10 The Godfather, dir. by Francis Ford Coppola (Paramount Pictures, 1972); The Godfather Part II, dir. by Francis Ford Coppola (Paramount Pictures, 1974).
11 Claudio Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59857-0>; Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy's Many Diasporas (London: Routledge, 2000); Giuliana Muscio, ‘Italians in Hollywood’, in Transnational Italian Studies, ed. by Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), pp. 145–59 <http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail.action?docID=7070225> [accessed 13 February 2023].
12 Call Me by Your Name, dir. by Luca Guadagnino (Sony Pictures Classics, 2017).
13 Galt and Schoonover, p. 68.
14 Stephanie Malia Hom, The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
15 Ivi, p. 15.
16 Ivi, p. 10.
17 ‘Abductions’, The White Lotus (HBO, 4 December 2022).
18 Fogu, p. 8.
19 Ibid., borrowing from Hom.
20 Fogu, p. 8.
21 ‘Ciao’, The White Lotus (HBO, 30 October 2022).
22 Nelson Moe, The View From Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 99.
23 E.g. John Brett, Mount Etna from Taormina, Sicily, c. 1870, oil on canvas, 111.5 × 153.2 cm, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield.
24 Derek Lawrence, ‘Exclusive: How the White Lotus Opening Credits Came to Life’, Vanity Fair, 9 December 2022 <https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/the-white-lotus-season-2-credits-explained> [accessed 22 February 2023].
25 Fogu, p. 18.
26 Moe; Jane Schneider, ‘Introduction: The Dynamics of Neo-orientalism in Italy (1848–1995)’, in Italy's “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country, ed. by Jane Schneider (Oxford: Berg, 1998), pp. 1–26.
27 E.g. Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, trans. by Paul Auster (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021 [1974]).
28 Germaine de Staël, Corinne: or Italy (1824), cited in Fogu, p. 18.
29 Agatha Palma, ‘The Migrant, The Mediterranean, and the Tourist: Figures of Belonging in Post-Austerity Palermo’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California Los Angeles, 2021), p. 36.
30 Fogu, p. 19.
31 Gregory Lucente, ‘“Because We Are Gods”: The Identity of Sicily and the Culture of Dependency in Verga's House by the Medlar Tree, Lampedusa's The Leopard, and Coppola's The Godfather (I–III)’, Italian Culture, 17.1 (1999), p. 1, doi:10.1179/itc.1999.17.1.1
32 John Lennon, ‘Dark Tourism’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology (2017), 2–41 <https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.212> [accessed 23 February 2023].
33 Hom, p. 52.
34 It is believed that the oldest Moor head vase currently in existence is at the Museum of Sicilian Ceramics in Caltagirone.
35 Laura Ingallinella, ‘Un-Mooring Race in Sicilian Folklore: The Tradition of “Testa di Moro”’, Medium, 17 January 2023 < https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/un-mooring-race-in-sicilian-folklore-the-tradition-of-testa-di-moro-878a9e8cbe20> [accessed 12 February 2023]; Antonino Ragona, La maiolica siciliana dalle origini all’Ottocento (Palermo: Sellerio, 1975).
36 Cf. Alessandra Di Maio, ‘Those Are Lasers That Were Their Eyes’, Palm Wine, August 2019 <http://www.palmwine.it/article/those-are-lasers-that-were-their-eyes> [accessed 12 February 2023].
37 Giovanni Boccaccio writes a version in the fifth story of the fourth day of his Decameron (Decamerone), c. 1353.
38 John Keats reprises Boccaccio's story in his poem: ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ c. 1818 <https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/isabella-or-pot-basil-john-keats-1818> [accessed 22 February 2023].
39 Ingallinella.
40 Ibid.
41 Abraham D. Lavender and Roger Chapman, ‘Blackface’ in Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices <https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail.action?docID=501518.> [accessed 20 February 2023].
42 Fogu.
43 ‘Ciao’.
44 Jane Schneider, ‘Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies’, Ethnology 10.1 (1971), p. 21 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3772796>.
45 Ibid., p. 2. Schneider even defines the ‘Mediterranean’ as ‘all regions surrounding the sea in which great emphasis is placed on the chastity and virginity of women’.
46 John Peristiany, Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 10.
47 See Moe or Stefania Arcara, ‘Constructing the South: Sicily, Southern Italy and the Mediterranean in British Culture, 1773–1926’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 1998).
48 ‘Bull Elephants’, The White Lotus (HBO, 13 November 2022).
49 ‘Ciao’.
50 ‘Italian Dream’, The White Lotus (HBO, 6 November 2022).
51 ‘Ciao’.
52 ‘Bull Elephants’.
53 Schneider, ‘Of Vigilance and Virgins’, p. 11.
54 ‘In the Sandbox’, The White Lotus (HBO, 20 November 2022).
55 Pretty Woman, dir. by Garry Marshall (Touchstone Pictures, 1990).
56 Moulin Rouge!, dir. by Baz Luhrmann (Bazmark Productions, 2001).
57 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
58 See e.g. Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (In Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
59 John Hooper, The Italians (London: Penguin, 2015).
60 Guy D. Middleton, Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World: From the Paleolithic to the Byzantines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 209.
61 Di Maio.
62 Galt and Schoonover, p. 68.
63 Camilla Hawthorne, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Mediterranean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).
64 The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders and Citizenship, ed. by Gabriele Proglio and others (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
65 Ida Danewid, ‘White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History’, Third World Quarterly, 38.7 (2017), p. 1679 <https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1331123>.
66 See for instance Maurizio Albahari, Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Kitty Calavita, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ilaria Giglioli, ‘Producing Sicily as Europe: Migration, Colonialism and the Making of the Mediterranean Border between Italy and Tunisia’, Geopolitics, 22.2 (2017) 407–28. doi:10.1080/14650045.2016.1233529.
67 Jeffrey Cole and Sally Booth, Dirty Work: Immigrants in Domestic Service, Agriculture, and Prostitution in Sicily (Lanham, PA: Lexington Books, 2007).
68 ‘Ciao’.
69 Fogu; Gabaccia.
70 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
71 Sophie Gilbert, ‘The Erudite, Absurd White Lotus Finale’, The Atlantic, 12 December 2022 <https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/12/white-lotus-season-2-finale-literary-references/672438/> [accessed 3 February 2023].
72 ‘Italian Dream’, The White Lotus (HBO, 6 November 2022).
73 Lawrence.
74 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 89.
75 Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussnug, Postmodern Impegno: Impegno postmoderno (Oxford: Peter Lang Verlag, 2009).
76 Hutcheon, p. 97.
77 Ivi, p. 1f.
78 Ivi, p. 3.
79 See e.g. Fuocoammare, dir. by Gianfranco Rosi (01 Distribution, 2016).
80 A Bigger Splash, dir. by Luca Guadagnino (Studio Canal and Searchlight Pictures, 2015).
81 Hom, p. 10.
82 Schneider, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.
83 Millicent Marcus, ‘Caro Diario and the Cinematic Body of Nanni Moretti’, Italica, 73.2 (1996) <https://doi.org/10.2307/479365>.
84 Ivi, p. 242.
85 Liz Boulter, ‘“We’re Booked until April 2023”: The White Lotus Effect on Sicily's Glitziest Town’, The Guardian, 28 October 2022 <https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2022/oct/28/were-booked-until-april-2023-the-white-lotus-effect-on-sicilys-glitziest-town> [accessed 20 February 2023].
86 See Sonia Gambino, ‘Il Padrino nell’immagine turistica di Savoca’, “Il capitale culturale” Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage, O4 (2016) <https://doi.org/10.13138/2039-2362/1425>.