![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 essay aims to contribute to current debates about how to research and teach within the disciplinary frame of modern languages in light of the knowledge that recent patterns of global migration have made the conventional fusion of national territory and language untenable. The challenge is to reimagine histories of cultural practice and production critically in spite of the national frame that continues to shape our thinking. Starting from theoretical prompts by Doris Sommer and Okwui Enwezor, I suggest that contemporary curatorial practice offers one model for reworking how we practice Italian Studies in light of the decolonizing imperatives of work in diasporic, postcolonial, and transnational studies. Emphasizing a spatial model of cultural connectedness, I work with a notion of the haptic to investigate (as a kind of case study) how an encounter with the variegated traces of Italian culture in Scotland may lead researchers and students toward a pragmatic understanding of connectivity that does not depend on the blood lines of what Sommer calls “inherited frameworks.” I argue that contemporary curatorial practices revising both the optics and ownership of (Italian) culture can radically alter the presuppositions of our research and pedagogy.
Notes
1 For a discussion of the development of modern languages as a disciplinary area in different national contexts, see Smith and McLelland (Citation2018).
2 This essay is a contribution to a collective project funded by the UK government, Transnationalizing Modern Languages (2014–2017). See Burdett (Citation2018) for a succinct overview of the context in which the project was funded and its implications for modern languages in terms of research and pedagogical practice.
3 In the introduction to her English translation of Derrida’s Of Grammmatogy, Gayatri Spivak underscores the productive ambivalence of “under erasure” as a signifying practice: “to write a word, cross it out, and then print both word and deletion. (Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.)” (Citation1998, xiv). Her introduction has been highly influential in promoting the practice as a deconstructive critical option.
4 The risks of this revision include loss, or even a model of de-facement. It may indeed be necessary to read Italian (or any national) culture in the shadow of De Man’s suggestion (Citation1979) about the tentative status of autobiography as either genre or category in which the alignment of history and aesthetics is read as a “figuration” or “figure of reading.”
5 Mieke Bal (Citation2007) unpacks Art History’s investment in “provenance” as a measure of authenticity and hence value. As she demonstrates, this strategy has profound implications for any work carried out in the light of contemporary practices of migration.
6 “Drift” here is inflected by Debord’s notion of dérive but particularly the interpretation offered by Émilie Renard in a multivoiced theoretical essay in the exhibition catalogue for “Intense Proximity,” curated by Enwezor in Paris in 2012: “I interpret the dérive as a means of displacement by transitions, by shifts within discourse. So, I imagine the causal approach of someone who drifts, drawing in tow the traces of his own psychogeography […] This conversation attempts to expand the discursive network within a space that is at once shared and personal, on which as observer-participant I find a few distinguishing characteristics […] My desire to escape the order of dialectical reason […] demands that this discourse follow the combinations and dislocations of indecisive thought” (Enwezor et al. 2012, 51–52).
7 Maura Reilly uses the phrase “area studies” to refer to exhibitions curated to highlight the work of a particular under-represented identity category (race, sexuality, gender), pointing out the limitations of such categorization but also the potential benefits (Citation2018, 25–29).
8 In addition to the two essays mentioned, the issue also contains work on Italian Occitans, Welsh Italians, Italians in the Congo, and the use of Blackface in Italian cinema (as well as other related topics). This range offers clear evidence of the vibrancy of research in what is a broad and expanding field.
9 There is no room to reference the very comprehensive bibliography now available on these topics. I list the following only to give some sense of the variety and range: Bond (Citation2018), Choate (Citation2008), Fiore (Citation2017), Giuliani (Citation2019), Labanca (Citation2007), Lombardi-Diop and Giuliani (Citation2013), Lombardi-Diop and Romeo (Citation2012), Romeo (Citation2018), Spackman (Citation2017), Welch (Citation2016).
10 It needs to be stressed that to a large extent a common lexis is deployed in both articles and in this field of study more broadly. Indeed, in an earlier piece, Lombardi-Diop and Romeo write: “the postcolonial perspective emphasizes a transnational spatial continuity, in that it reinforces the idea of diasporic communities in Europe and around the world which share the common experience of colonization” (Citation2012, 3). For me, this alignment is very productive in underlining the proximity of the three key terms, while making intelligible how they operate over different axes of signification.
11 Anti-Semitism in Italy has not always found a place in postcolonial critique. For an important corrective, see Bassi (Citation2011).
12 Chambers points to “rural poverty” more generally as a marker of the “South”, and pertinently for my argument cites Scotland as one of its locations (Citation2017, 28).
13 As a modern linguist, Mignolo pays particular attention to language and the modalities of movement between languages as constitutive of knowledge. This makes his work of critical interest to our discipline in “today’s world” (See especially Citation2012, 217–249).
14 There is a lot to be said about the rhetorical overdetermination of Lampedusa in current debates around migration to Italy. For a wide-ranging and acute analysis of this, see Colombini (Citation2018).
15 All but one of the images in this essay were produced by the students who followed my Honours module “Emigrant Nation” in 2018. As this was a collective effort, images are not individually credited. I would like to thank Finlay Dick, Madeleine Evison, Alex Millar, Grace Reid and Caitlin Speirs for the ongoing quality of their commitment and enthusiasm as well as for their pictures and stories.
16 The idea of the haptic I work with here clearly has echoes of Laura Marks’s “haptic visuality,” applied to intercultural cinema and its engagement with materiality and cultural memory. She argues that the “haptic” erodes the distance associated with more conventional regimes of seeing and knowledge production (Citation1999).
17 Although Italian migration to the UK has been culturally very significant, its moderate numerical dimensions mean that it is barely merits a mention let alone individual analysis in Bevilacqua et al.’s otherwise comprehensive volume (Citation2009).
18 A recent article by Jennifer Burns on transnational Italian literature clarifies and reinforces my own methodology with its emphasis on quotidian practice rather than identity across national cultural formations. She writes that her “focus is not on concepts of identity nor identity politics, but rather on everyday practices of awareness, enactment, and expression of self, asking not who are the subjects constructed in transnational stories but what do they do and how do they live an experience of subjectivity which speaks to plural models, values, and locations” (Citation2018, 1). She goes on to make explicit the value of the “transnational” in challenging “directly the methodological nationalism which often sticks to research in literary and cultural studies” (3).
19 Sommer’s ongoing project “Cultural Agents” explicitly combines creativity and civic action: https://www.culturalagents.org/.
20 Both of these structures are mentioned by Pearson (Citation2016), who observes the pervasive presence of an Italianate architectural style in British industrial building of the period, but doesn’t draw any critical inference from this.
21 The retirement of Giulio Dora and the closure of the chip shop in June 2018 was covered in the local press. Describing the closure of the “iconic” chip shop as the “end of an era,” coverage reflected a wave of nostalgia and affection for what was considered a local institution. Evening Telegraph, June 23 2018.
22 “Capture” is intended to provide an echo of Rey Chow’s work and her dissection of the unpredictable energies of “captivation” before a work of art. Germane to my argument is also her notion of “entanglement” as a measure for identifying difficult proximities, or “the fuzzing-up of conventional classificatory categories due to the collapse of neatly maintained epistemic borders” (Citation2012, 10). In essence, this is what my project is about.
23 The type of Italian ice cream most commonly made was a version of what I later came to know as fior di latte, and was quite different in taste and texture from other ice cream available.
24 Wendy Ugolini emphasizes the sectarian dimension of the disturbances, which have been underplayed by other historians. See Ugolini (Citation2011, esp. 118–143).
25 In her recent memoir, Anne Pia, whose grandfather drowned on the Arandora Star, gives an astonishing account of the delayed temporality of trauma in the wake of the sinking, which registered in her totally unexpectedly many years after the event at a screening of the film Titanic (Citation2017, 38–39). Both Colpi (Citation1991) and Ugolini (Citation2011) explore the sinking and its subsequent effects. See Balestracci’s bilingual volume (Citation2008) for a full account.
26 This is not simply a presentist venture. David Wallace’s work is an outstanding instance of the transformative effect of the postcolonial gaze on conventional understandings of spatial and temporal relations during the Middle Ages (Citation2004, Citation2016).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Derek Duncan
Derek Duncan is Professor of Italian at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on issues of gender and sexuality in Italian culture, and on questions of postcolonial and colonial cultural history. His current research focuses on Italian transnational emigration, and on creative practice as a mode of academic research. He is joint editor of the very successful book series Transnational Italian Cultures (Liverpool University Press).