Italy @ 150: The Discourse of the Nation at the Sesquicentennial (1861–2011)

Italian Culture devotes the first volume of its thirtieth issue to a reflection on the discourse of the nation prompted by the sesquicentennial anniversary of Italian unification on March 17 1861, the day when, in Turin, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies passed Law Decree 4671 proclaiming the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. Born from seven distinct States, each of them characterized by unique political and cultural traditions, but unified as a single monarchy under King Vittorio Emanuele II, the Italian nation is the focus of the inquiries of Massimo Baioni, Marie Orton, Mark Choate, and Giorgio Bertellini. These scholars, based in Italy and North America, utilize an interdisciplinary framework and, from the perspectives of history, literature, and cinema, analyze how contemporary cultural assessments of unification are reconstructing the nation’s distant and more recent past while evaluating the present and imagining the future.

Massimo Baioni’s “Un mito per gli italiani. Il Risorgimento tra ricerca storica e discorso pubblico” builds on an observation of Jacques Le Goff about the weight carried by the Risorgimento in Italy’s collective memory in order to revisit the public use of the Risorgimento from the Liberal monarchy and Fascism through the post-war democratic Republic. In his discussion, Baioni considers historiographic accounts but also commemorative sites and pedagogical practices and reveals how generations of political parties have sought legitimacy by establishing a relationship of continuity with the Risorgimento. Besides tracing the public use of Risorgimento and the politics of its memory, Baioni also examines the symbolic spaces of Risorgimento in their geographic dimensions (i.e., South versus North; center versus periphery) and location at the intersection of the public and private spheres of life.

As a consequence of post-World War II modernization, the centrality of the Risorgimento in public life receded, having to compete with other national memories and myths, including those of World War I, Fascism, and the Resistance. But, in the aftermath of the Tangentopoli scandals of the early 1990s, the Risorgimento again acquired center stage. The loss of the integrative authority of traditional parties, the rise of regionalist and secessionist groups (at least in their rhetoric) such as the Northern Leagues, and the end of the bipolarism of the Cold War sparked renewed attention to the processes of nation-building and state-formation first initiated in the Risorgimento. While much innovative scholarship in this area has emerged, Baioni also notes the presence of an anti-Italy polemic feeding into an “offensiva strumentale [...] contro il Risorgimento” on the part of the Northern Leagues but also of Catholic integralist groups, “quasi che il Risorgimento e l’Unità d’Italia siano stati una sorta di Tangentopoli ante litteram.”

The climate of political divisiveness and fragmentation of the 1990s has marked the 150th anniversary also. Baioni observes that Italian authorities did not organize any events comparable to the large-scale celebrations of 1911 and 1961, but a significantly large number of local commemorations took place on 17 March 2011, marked by the spontaneous participation of thousands of individuals who flooded the historical centers of many Italian towns and cities. In what Baioni characterizes as a “vissuta e policentrica partecipazione” to a sesquicentennial anniversary devoid of the official nationalist rhetoric, typical of state-sponsored initiatives, he locates a “reazione diffusa” to the vulgarity and squalor of Italian politics that signals disorientation but also the hope that Italians may “rifondare le ragioni dello stare insieme.”

An examination of a national investment at the grass roots level is at also at the center of Orton’s “Writing the Nation: Migration Literature and National Identity.” Orton’s essay opens with a description of the commemorative event that took place at the Tempio Adriano in Rome with a public reading of Alessandro Manzoni’s Promessi sposi, organized by the “G2,” as second-generation immigrants are called. The G2, as Orton explains, were born in Italy or arrived as young children; so “their cultural formation is Italian,” despite the fact that “under law 91/1992 they are denied citizenship.” In the G2’s reading of Manzoni Promessi sposi, one of the most canonical texts of Risorgimento nationalism, Orton locates a symbolic gesture that questions traditional “containers or indicators of national identity,” such as ethnic and territorial belonging. In addition, this performance of the novel interrogates the “assumption that national literature is the outgrowth of a fixed national identity.”

In Orton’s view the Italian literary canon is not only founded on ahistorical assumptions, but is predicated upon the exclusion of otherness and the construction of an identity tied to bounded, obsolete, and even untenable models of territorial belonging. She then illustrates how the literature of migrant writers undermines normative models of Italian identity through selected readings of recent works by writers Kossi Komla-Ebri, Cristina Ubax Ali Farah, Igiaba Scego, and Amara Lakhous. She concludes by observing how “the contemporary moment” of global transnational migratory flows is one where the rapidly growing corpus of migrant literature might finally “disabuse the reading public of the illusion of monolithic, unchanging italianità.”

Choate’s contribution, “Italy at Home and Abroad After 150 Years: The Legacy of Emigration and the Future of Italianità,” makes a similar case for the same disabusing of normative, illusory models and definitions of Italian national identity. Choate does so by arguing that the unification of the peninsula led not only to the forging of a modern nation out of seven distinct states (“Italy at Home”) but also to the birth of a global Italian nation. Choate’s main point is that the Italian diaspora, “the largest recorded international migration in world history,” rapidly evolved into a “transnational nationalism.” The migration of millions of Italian laborers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, recast as the emigrant colonizers and founders of a “Greater Italy Abroad,” was encouraged and sustained by a host of legislative measures and cultural initiatives. As a result, an Italian “Global Nation” was born from the emigration of subaltern classes whose frames of reference came to encompass both “Italy at Home” and their place of destination, be it Europe, North Africa, or the Americas. Choate proposes that a recovery of the memory of this “Global Nation” would allow for the rewriting of “the rules of Italian state formation,” which, in turn, might lead to a fruitful reconsideration of Mazzini’s incorrect assumptions that a nation is build upon one territory, language, economy and ethnicity. Moreover, it might enable Italy to forge “a more inclusive view of Italianità” capable of responding to present day immigration in ways other than border control, punishment, and surveillance.

Even though the essays by Baioni, Choate, and Orton originate from different disciplinary fields of inquiry, they impart the urgency of addressing the many challenges facing contemporary Italy. In a similar vein, Giorgio Bertellini’s examination of Italian national cinema provides an example of how a growing sense of discontent and malaise might finally be leading Italian culture to an open confrontation with the nation’s political and social institutions. In his account of contemporary Italian cinema from the 1990s to the present, Bertellini examines a corpus of films that, unlike the “insular” and self-referential cinematic production of previous decades, critically examines the national space, which Bertellini views in the terms articulated by Settis’s Paesaggio Costituzione Cemento: a “natural living site” seen also in its anthropological dimension of “civic and ethical patrimony.” Bertellini argues that recent films by directors such as Luchetti, D’Altri, Virzì, Venier, Martone, Guadagnino, Cupellini, and Guzzanti cast into high relief the dampening of “any sense of public utilitas” by an alliance of private business and government. These directors narrate how the corporate, opportunistic logic of an unbridled neo-liberalism has reached new heights under Berlusconi, and is systematically destroying the national space. Even natural catastrophes, such as the earthquake that destroyed L’Aquila, are being turned into new opportunities for shameless speculation. When the blatant abuse of a national space is also articulated in its anthropological dimension, audiences see how a state robs citizens of civil and even human rights by excluding them from decision-making processes while depriving them of the means to lead the dignified life that only “honest and creative employment” can afford. Nevertheless, it is precisely through a cinematic work that courageously screens the many facets of the deterioration of the nation’s fabric, that a much-needed “civic engagement with our natural and cultural space” might begin and, with it, the possibility of imagining a future.

The contributions of Baioni, Orton, Choate, and Bertellini underscore how the discourse of the Italian nation, prompted by the sesquicentennial anniversary of unification, voices concern, anxiety, and discontent over the many unresolved questions and issues that have plagued the nation-state ever since its creation in 1861. While some of these questions and issues have a long history (e.g. weak political and civic institutions, deep regional divides, periodic return of right-wing political actors and of secessionist, autonomist forces, etc.), in the course of the last few decades, their gravity has deepened. The transformation of Italy into an emigrant destination has clashed with a juridical system more interested in sounding alarmist calls than in integrating the migrants with a native population on the path of demographic decline. A structurally weak national labor market has been decimated by offshoring along with a frontal attack on labor rights and long-standing tenets of the welfare safety net. A frighteningly high level of unemployment, especially among the young, women, and intellectuals (many of whom have taken to emigration), is exacerbated by an educational system that not only remains well below European standards but whose graduation rates are rapidly declining. Scandals, corruptions, and distortions of basic principles of democracy shake the country on a daily basis, as do the prosperous activities of organized crime, while a fiscal and debt crisis possibly too large for a European bail-out looms ahead. Against this background, years of opportunistic and unconscionable building practices are magnifying the effects of climate change on the environment, causing events of such catastrophic proportions as to threaten the very survival of the natural patrimony and the cultural heritages of all the Italian regions. The deepening of long-unresolved questions and issues caused by these recent developments leave many commentators wondering about what lies ahead for a nation whose birth we celebrate this year.

And yet, as the contributors to this special issue of Italian Culture indicate, the sesquicentennial has also provided the occasion for a cultural activity from below that takes courageous stock of the state of the nation’s civic, anthropological, and environmental reality expropriated, so to speak, for too long by the egoistic interests of politicians and business people while an increasingly complacent, disaffected, and individualistic society of consumers passively looks on.

My hope is that this emerging cultural work is the necessary premise for charting a new course and the rebuilding of a collective future from the ruins of a national present that has lost its ethical and civic compass.

As the 150th celebrations draw to an end and this issue of Italian Culture goes to press in late 2011, something momentous has just taken place: Berlusconi lost his majority in the lower-house Chamber of Deputies and was forced to resign. On November 16, a new government was formed by former European commissioner Mario Monti. Uncertainties over the ability of this new executive to pass legislation at a time when Berlusconi still controls the upper chamber of Parliament and can mobilize his vast media empire to shape public opinion, coupled with the challenging reforms and serious austerity measures mandated by the European Union and the Central Bank to avoid a financial collapse — not just for Italy but for the entire euro zone — make predictions concerning the success of Mario Monti and his team sheer speculation. Yet, the spontaneous celebrations that greeted Berlusconi’s ignominious exit from a side door of Palazzo Chigi indicate widespread feelings of collective relief for what seems to be the end of a Ventennio that culminated in eight and half years of a shameful and unfit leadership. Hopefully, this euphoria will soon channel into mature practices of participatory, inclusive, and responsible citizenship and Italians, natives and immigrants alike, will begin to rethink together the meaning, role, and future of the Italian nation within the complex global landscape of the twenty-first century.