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Abstract
What sorts of images and narratives of cosmopolitanism are circulating in our cultural discourse? Stories and ideas based on experiences of migration, travel, and exile are considered in relation to the Italian city of Naples, to propose an example of “South-centric” cosmopolitanism. Two different journeys in the Mediterranean, as narrated by Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun and by Neapolitan film director Vincenzo Marra, engage with the experience of travel through stories that in opposite directions—the first from North Africa to Naples, and the second from Naples to North Africa—cross territories and lines of logic of Northern and Southern boundaries and deal with notions of belonging and homecoming.
Notes
1. Tahar Ben Jelloun, Il labirinto dei sentimenti [The Labyrinth of Feelings] (Napoli: Pironti, 2004), 74. The original French title is Labyrinthe des sentiments (Paris: Editions Stock, 1999). I refer here to the Italian translations of Ben Jelloun's works. All English translations from Italian and French are my own.
2. Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Identity. The Real Me. Post-Modernism and the Question of Identity, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: ICA, 1987), 44.
3. “Theme of World Habitat Day is ‘Cities, Magnets of Hope,’ but 1 Billion People Live in Slums, Secretary-General Says,” United Nations Information Center, Vienna http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2006/sgsm10621.html (accessed October 2, 2006). I use the expression South–South migration broadly referring to migration from Southern countries to other Southern countries. Economists usually refer to the phenomenon of South–South migration describing the inflows of people from other developing countries that developing countries experience and how this is reshaping global economy.
4. In Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), Graziella Parati offers a thorough account of the current discourse and practices of migration in Italy.
5. Giuliana Bruno's Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) provides a cultural history of the process of migration of Neapolitan culture to the United States through the films of Elvira Notari.
6. Giacomo Di Gennaro, Domenico Pizzuti, and Massimo Conte, “L'immigrazione extracomunitaria in Campania: risultati di una ricerca empirica in tre province,” Studi Emigrazione 33, no. 122 (1996): 223–71; Enrico Pugliese and Francesco Calvanese, La presenza straniera in Italia. Il caso della Campania (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1990).
7. Walter Benjamin, “Naples,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1979), 171. Benjamin was the first who described the city as porous in his short essay on Naples written in 1924 with Asja Lacis. He raised many of the controversial issues that are central to the analysis of contemporary Naples, as I argue in my Ph.D. dissertation, Art Under Vesuvius: Cultural Practices in Contemporary Naples (2003).
8. Walter Benjamin, review of Jakob Job, Neapel. Reisebilder und Skizzen, cited in Fabrizia Ramondino and Andreas Friedrich Müller, ed., Dadapolis: caleidoscopio napoletano [Dadapolis: Neapolitan Kaleidoscope] (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 89.
9. An ambivalent and often negative discourse around Southern Italy and the city of Naples has been present since the unification of the country. The reality of the South certainly provides material for this discourse. Today, however, it is the media that circulate and mediate a social understanding of this discourse and provide a problematic representation of the city of Naples. Public political discourse and debates are highlighting the changes in the city at a social and cultural level and how its position is evolving at the national level. For decades, the covers of national magazines and newspapers have shown images of Neapolitan urban decline and crisis. For instance, the city of Naples was the topic of Michele Santoro's popular show Annozero broadcast on Thursday September 21, 2006 at 9 p.m. on Raidue. The program elicited much public debate. The anchorman was accused by the mayor of Naples, Rosa Russo Iervolino, of feeding the same old moral panic about the city of Naples perpetuated by the media. References to the debate can be found in Eugenio Mazzarella, “In tv una Napoli deformata: «Annozero» di Santoro: il racconto del declino tra eccessi e verità,” Il Mattino, September 23, 2006; Luigi Roano, “Tra vedove e spacciatori sotto accusa la politica: Reportage dalle Vele di Scampia e interviste alle mogli dei detenuti,” Il Mattino, September 23, 2006; Corrado Castiglione, “Città violenta la prevenzione. Sicurezza ai Decumani, apre il commissariato,” Il Mattino, September 23, 2006; Leandro Del Gaudio, “Napoli violenta in tv: è scontro. Iervolino attacca Santoro e ringrazia Maroni. Il conduttore: non ha visto il programma,” Il Mattino, September 23, 2006; Luigi Roano, “Il sindaco attacca Santoro e ringrazia Maroni,” Il Mattino, September 23, 2006; Luigi Roano, “Iervolino: trasmissione indegna, Napoli è stata denigrata. La replica: abbiamo raccontato solo verità,” Il Mattino, September 23, 2006; Chiara Graziani, “Scorta per l'autore di Gomorra,” Il Mattino, October 17, 2006. The show lasted more than three hours and had an audience of over three and a half million people. It is available at http://www.annozero.rai.it for viewing via Internet. The availability of national state television programs and news via Internet allows Italians who live abroad to participate in the cultural debates of their home country.
10. Tahar Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri [The Poorhouse] (Milan: Einaudi, 1999). The original French title is L'Auberge des pauvres (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999).
11. Marco Tullio Giordana's 2005 film Quando sei nato non puoi pi[ugrave] nasconderti (Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide) deals with issues that are very similar to the ones addressed in Tornando a casa.
12. Nomadology is a construction of Deleuze and Guattari's “counter-philosophy,” that can serve as a contemporary theoretical practice to challenge static (or sedentary) ways of thinking and to promote the value and freedom of movement, cultural difference, and collaboration. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). German philosopher Vilèm Flusser has also written on nomadology and emigration in The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
13. David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 3.
14. Giorgio Bocca's book Napoli siamo noi: il dramma di una città nell'indifferenza dell'Italia [We are Naples: The Drama of a City Amidst Italy's Indifference] (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2006) and Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah (New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2007)—the title of Saviano's book is a pun that equates the Italian word camorra, Neapolitan based mafia, with the sinful Biblical city, Gomorrah—have both created controversy and public debate in Italy. They have denounced the rise in criminality and the poor quality of life in the degraded areas of the city of Naples, criticizing the indifference of the authorities. Roberto Saviano was repeatedly threatened by the camorra after the publication of his book in April 2006. Interior Minister Giuliano Amato intervened in October 2006 and gave police protection to the twenty-eight years old writer. See Graziani. The film based on the book won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008.
15. The UNESCO project “Multicultural Policies and Modes of Citizenship in European Cities” provides a list of city templates on the basic information of ethnic minorities in each city. Only three Italian cities are included: Rome, Turin, and Milan. At this time, data about Naples are unavailable. http://www.unesco.org/most/p97city.htm (accessed June 6, 2007).
16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of the Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 402.
17. Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), 2.
18. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, cited in Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (2000): 5.
19. As shown in Vincenzo Marra's film, the Italian government does not offer asylum to refugees and migrants who arrive by boat to the Italian territory. Since October 2003, these people are kept in camps, CPT or Centri di permanenza temporanea (Centers for Temporary Residence), financed by the Italian government, until their deportation. Since 1998, there have been centers on the Italian mainland and on the island of Sicily to block the transit from North African countries, and in the region of Apulia for the detention of refugees coming from Albania to Italy across the Adriatic Sea. Atrocities are committed in these camps as documented in Lager italiani (Milan: Rizzoli, 2006) by Marco Rovelli, a heartbreaking collection of stories narrated by clandestine immigrants who have been kept in these camps, and in Mamadou va a morire. La strage dei clandestini nel Mediterraneo (Rome: Infinito Edizioni, 2007) by Gabriele Del Grande. In Parma, the Associazione Le Giraffe has made a courageous documentary, Schiuma, una storia vera (2007). Amnesty International has also produced a documentary on the children kept in these camps, entitled Fine del viaggio (2006). A large amount of refugees die or commit suicide in these camps before they are deported to their own countries were they face the likelihood of retribution. Thousands of refugees perish on European Union borders, drowning in the Mediterranean in various incidents, on hopelessly overloaded boats. On an almost daily basis, refugees die unnoticed on the outer borders of Europe or in the deportation centers of the European Union. They are anonymous victims who remain unidentified and whose identities go unrecorded.
20. Because of space constraints, I have privileged here the discussion of questions of personal and collective identity formation and of the impact of space and movement on contemporary subjectivities over the complexities of the literary and visual languages used by each artist.
21. Tahar Ben Jelloun is the most translated, read, and studied Arab writer in the world and a leading figure in post-colonial literature in France. He has written a series of works based on his journey in Naples and Southern Italy: the already mentioned, L'Auberge des pauvres and Labyrinthe des sentiments in 1999, and an earlier work L'Ange aveugle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992) published in Italian as Dove lo stato non c’è (Milan: Einaudi, 1991). It has been published in English as State of Absence (London: Quartet Books, 1994).
22. Chambers, 3.
23. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 8.
24. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 6.
25. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 8.
26. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 11.
27. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 3.
28. Ben Jelloun began to write prose in 1970. The publication of his first novel Harrouda in 1973 was saluted in France and Morocco as a major literary event. In 1987 he received the Goncourt Price with the novel La Nuit sacrée. His recent book, Le Racisme expliqué à ma fille, published in 1998, became a great success in Europe and was translated into several languages.
29. In an interview with Pierre Maury, he says: “I started writing poetry. Perhaps because I felt impatient to get going. When you are a witness to revolting things, you don't have time to write a novel. It was never my ambition to become a writer; that sort of idea never entered my mind when I was a boy.... It was the events of March 1965 in Rabat and Casablanca that upset me and traumatized me. I was twenty, I was witnessing a social revolution and for the first time experienced a fear of violence. Such things leave their mark, and I wanted to express my feelings about them.” See Pierre Maury, “Tahar Ben Jelloun Talks to Pierre Maury,” Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature 8 (2000): 16.
30. Rebecca Hopkins, “Tahar Ben Jelloun's ‘Petit Tour’ of Orientalism and the Italian South,” in Le Mezzogiorno des écrivains européens/Europeans Writing the Mezzogiorno, ed. Béatrice Bijon, Yves Clavaron and Bernard Dieterle (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l'Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006), 249.
31. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 12.
32. As I argue in my Ph.D. dissertation, Neapolitan born writer Peppe Lanzetta has given a new voice to the Italian South. He has written about this “other” Naples reconfiguring the past accounts—the stereotypical, or “over-represented” image of the city—with a contaminated and “never-represented” one. Writing from the perspective of the downtrodden, he has rejected the previous accounts and descriptions of the city—the “partial” view of Naples from the perspective of the privileged aristocracy living in the splendid settings of areas such as Posillipo and Marechiaro. In his words: “I have never known you. For me you have been rage, pain, poison, an open sewer, the clap, syphilis, a lump, an earthquake and desperation. I do not know about Posillipo, Palazzo donn'Anna, Via Manzoni, Villanova and Via Petrarca. I do not know about your contracts, about your bank, about the curia. I do not know about your private and exclusive clubs, about your dandies and your rich boys. I do not know about Capri. My dear Naples, from where I live, I cannot see Capri. We are filthy, angry, badly cleaned, always in search of something, of money, of jobs, of houses, of women to get pregnant. We are your blacks, your people from Calabria, Abbruzzo, and Sicily. You are Germany and we are the Turkish.” Peppe Lanzetta, Figli di un Bronx minore [Children of a Lesser Bronx] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), 78.
33. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 4.
34. Giuseppe Galasso, ed., Benedetto Croce. Un paradiso abitato da diavoli [Benedetto Croce. A Paradise Inhabited by Devils] (Milan: Adelphi, 2006), 11.
35. Ben Jelloun cited in Fabrizia Ramondino and Andreas Friedrich Müller, 14.
36. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 186.
37. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 37.
38. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 212.
39. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 214.
40. Julia Kristeva cited in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 296.
41. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 363.
42. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 115.
43. Giuliana Bruno, “City Views: The Voyage of Film Images,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (London: Routledge, 1997), 46.
44. Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism Through Italian Diaspora (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 51.
45. Marra's film was followed in the same year by the documentary Estranei alla massa (Outsiders to the Crowd) and in 2003 by the documentary Paesaggio a sud (Southern Landscape), then in 2004 by Vento di terra (Land Wind), in 2006 by the documentary L'udienza è aperta (The Session is Open), and finally in 2007 with L'ora di punta (The Rush Hour) which was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
46. The similar story and the use of Neapolitan dialect and of non-professional actors inevitably create a connection with the bare and penetrating images of Luchino Visconti's 1957 neorealist masterpiece The Earth Trembles.
47. Ben Jelloun, L'albergo dei poveri, 212.
48. Said, 357.
49. Said, 360.
50. Shoes have a highly symbolic value especially in Italian culture. They are related to class and affluence. Being barefoot, Franco becomes a figura Christi, a suggestive Christological figure.
51. Iain Chambers, “Off the Map: A Mediterranean Journey,” Comparative Literature Studies 42.4 (2005): 317.
52. I am referring again to the debates that were generated by Santoro's program Annozero, Bocca's and Saviano's books and by the press. Subsonica, a widely known rock band from Turin, dedicated the song “Piombo” (Lead), from their last album L'Eclissi [The Eclipse] (2007), to Roberto Saviano and his Gomorrah. They say: “Saviano breaks through the silence with art and with the courage of someone who challenges the darkness, denouncing the reality. It's important to give him a hand, against the mafia of the South and of the North.” Subsonica, “«Piombo» in difesa di Saviano,” Il Mattino, December 1, 2007.
53. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1.
54. Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 93.
55. Kuan-Hsing Chen, “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 488.
56. Kuan-Hsing Chen, 502. Autobiography is something we carry around within ourselves: it is what Stuart Hall defines as the “many burdens of representation” we try to absolve by undertaking certain theoretical work in an effort to seize the “authority of authenticity” (262). See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. I want to take a position in relation to this article. I speak as an Italian-born academic (Tuscany), whose heritage is from Southern Italy (the province of Salerno in the region of Campania) and Italian American, and who has herself migrated to another country, the United States. This article is part of a larger book project that is a revision of my Ph.D. dissertation and is an attempt to make sense of a personal journey that began during my years at the Università degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale in Naples when I experienced the city of Naples as a citizen. Although this might seem like an arbitrary disciplinary choice, it is instead part of an ongoing dialogue between the observer and the observed. In privileging the analysis of the city of Naples, I am trying to theorize certain cultural and social facts that I have witnessed and experienced and that still live with me and through me as a cultural legacy. The South, represented here by the city of Naples, is the source of inspiration. In a very simplistic way, I write for the South and from the perspective of the South. Given the closeness with the topic, I am acting almost like a fieldworker engaged in participant observation, as I believe in the anthropological assumption, as stated by Thomas Belmonte, that, while observing, “a stance of pure objectivity (eliminating the self) is as destructive to communication as is a stance of pure subjectivity (eliminating the other).” See Belmonte, The Broken Fountain (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), x.
57. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1.