The four essays in this special issue reconsider the location of Italian culture. They ask where this culture is today, how it has traveled, and what happens when we find it in places we’re not used to looking. What if, following Derek Duncan, we turn away from national borders and look instead at the haptic histories of Italian emigrants? What if we look for Italian culture, say, in Scottish towns? Or what if, with Jim Carter, we find this culture not outside but inside the factory gates, in the work of intellectuals employed by and dependent on, but also critical of, corporations? How is our understanding of Italian culture—or, for that matter, of culture more generally—changed by this encounter with a kind of intellectual production that is strictly inseparable from industrial capitalism? For their part, Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover ask: how might the location of queer desire in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name dislodge familiar accounts of “brand Italy” and “destination Italy”? Similarly committed to the work of defamiliarization, Stephanie Jed asks in her essay on Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi: in a novel traditionally read as a foundational contribution to national literary culture, can we find the remnants of a culture and a community that escape the nation form? Might Manzoni’s text bear the traces of transnational resistance and solidarity?
To these questions, we now add one of our own: What reframing and renewal of Italian Studies might result from these various attempts to resituate Italy and Italian culture? We have reframed the authors’ findings as questions in an effort to indicate the sense of exploration and open-ended possibility that their essays convey. Taken together, these interventions point to the limits of familiar methods in the field. They urge us to rethink accustomed ways of aligning national cultures and state territories (Duncan, Jed) or of assigning value to cultural objects (Carter, Galt and Schoonover). They encourage us to attend to the transnational dimensions of Italian national culture (Duncan, Jed, Galt and Schoonover), and they prompt us to consult new archives even as we revisit old debates (Duncan, Carter, Galt and Schoonover). They teach us to imagine alternative futures by returning to past, even apparently lapsed historical possibilities (Jed, Galt and Schoonover). In all of these ways and more, the essays collected here attest to the variety and ongoing vitality of Italian Studies. Even in a context of academic scarcity—of declining enrollments, precarious employment, and the defunding of departments and programs—they show how urgent work in the field remains. Even in an age of “sovereignist” political fantasy, they underscore the importance of scholarship that is supranational, intercultural, comparative, and interdisciplinary in the best sense.
It is a pleasure and a privilege to present this issue, our first as coeditors of Italian Culture. We warmly invite submissions from the Association’s members, whether these submissions take inspiration or distance from the essays published here. We look forward to the conversations and collaborations that these essays are sure to generate.