Timing, Memory and Disaster: Patriotic Narratives in the Aftermath of the Messina–Reggio Calabria Earthquake, 28 December 1908

Abstract

The earthquake that struck both coasts of the Straits of Messina on 28 December 1908 was probably the worst natural disaster in the history of the Italian peninsula. It was followed by an extraordinary movement of public grief and solidarity. These extremely widespread manifestations of patriotism in a country that is frequently thought to ‘lack’ national identity give cause to reflect on the way the notion of national identity is used in the Italian context and beyond. The article looks specifically at some of the contrasting ways in which timing and memory simultaneously became patriotic and controversial issues in the Italian press in the aftermath of the catastrophe. It does so through a sustained dialogue with the most influential thinker on nationalism, time and memory: Benedict Anderson. It emerges from the analysis that different constructions of timing and memory are an indicator of the social and political functions of patriotism, which offers ways to manage crisis situations like the earthquake, but at the same time covertly politicizes them.

Notes

Notes

[1] This kind of language is used constantly in, for example, L’Eco di Bergamo and in La Civiltà Cattolica.

[2] For a useful analysis of Anderson's thesis that situates him within both historical and recent trends in thinking about nationalism, see Spencer & Wollman (2002), especially pp. 37–40.

[3] It obviously goes far beyond the scope of this particular article to survey the vast field of nationalism studies. But it strikes me that a good deal of research in the area of nation and memory are still open to criticism on post-Andersonian grounds. One example is Spillman (1997), which frequently confuses the comparative study of national identities in the US and Australia with the comparative study of the US and Australia tout court. The comparative perspective, in other words, only serves to perpetuate the mistaken assumption that national identities actually exist. A question such as, ‘What are the differences and similarities between the national identities of the USA and Australia?’ presupposes far too much.

[4] The research will be take the form of a book to be published by Laterza for the centenary of the earthquake. Two extracts (Dickie 2000; 2002) have already appeared.

[5] For an acute review of the large body of anthropological literature on death, see Fabian (1991). Fabian focuses particularly on the problem of combining the culturally specific aspects of responses to death with the universal nature of the problem it so unavoidably constitutes.

[6] For very useful overall interpretations of Italian history from the turn of the century to the First World War, see Gentile (1977), Aquarone (1981) and Sabbatucci & Vidotto (1995). Each is commendable for avoiding the conceptual confusion and teleological thinking that often come with the terminology of ‘nation-building’.

[7] One recent and much-cited account of collective mourning that has little—arguably too little—to say about patriotism and either grief or memory is Winter (1995). Winter's argument is that the dead of the Great War were not mourned in the disjointed, decentred languages of modernism as has often been supposed, but through more traditional forms. But in mounting a powerful and convincing argument against the modernist thesis, Winter also takes down another target—albeit in an unargued and tangential way. That target is what he variously terms ‘the conventional shibboleths of patriotism’ (p. 2), ‘patriotic certainties’ (p. 17), ‘stylized official language’ (p. 30), a patriotic art that is ‘too unreal, too uplifting, too patriotic’ (p. 85), and ‘nationalist mysticism’ (p. 210), for example. Formulae like these represent something of a caricature of nationalism, one that Winter shares with some of both his ‘traditionalists’ and his ‘modernists’: he assumes that patriotism is nothing more powerful or subtle than the propagandistic myth-making it had become during the war. A similar point could be made about Winter's argument that, in the aftermath of the conflict, there was a common traditional language of mourning that traversed national boundaries, just as the experience of slaughter had been international. In putting forward this case against a narrow national focus in historical study, he tends to portray academic analyses of nationalism in war memorials (for example) as being about ‘carriers of political ideas’, ‘important symbols of national pride’, and expressions of ‘national aspirations, and destinies’ (p. 79). But nationalism is about much more than any of these restrictive formulations allow. The point is that, in the right circumstances, patriotism is a flexible and slippery enough set of discourses to inhabit all of the traditional forms of grief and mourning that are at the centre of his account. What else are the sense of ‘citizenship’ and ‘endebtedness’ (p. 95) he sees in First World War memorials than forms of national belonging, all the more powerful for being understated? And what more international language in which to address questions of grief and memory than that of patriotism?

[8] Banti (2000) examines the emergence of these motifs in Italian patriotism during the Risorgimento.