DOSSIÊ THE SOUTHS OF “THE WEST”: GEOCORPOGRAPHICAL ASSEMBLAGES OF PLANTS, COLONIALISM AND RACE IN SERGIO LEONE’S METAFIGURAL SPAGHETTI WESTERNS OS SULS DO “FAROESTE”: ASSEMBLAGENS GEO- CORPOGRÁFICAS DE PLANTAS, COLONIALISMO E RAÇA NOS SPAGHETTI WESTERNS METAFIGURAIS DE SERGIO LEONE Joseph Pugliese1

ABSTRACT:

Across many of the travelogues on the Italian South produced by northern European writers, both the prickly pear and the agave emerge as coextensive, in identitarian terms, with the South. Both the prickly pear and the agave are, in fact, plants indigenous to the Americas and they only made their way to the Italian South following the colonisation of the New World. In this essay, I examine the effaced history of colonial economies of occupation, plunder and commercial transport that underpins the existence of these two plants in the Italian South. I then proceed to examine the complex and interlayered systems of signification that, in turn, inscribe these plants in the context of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, I contend, must be read as metafigural KEYWORDS:allegories that bring into focus the complex entanglement of colonialism, race, civil war and contradictory identitarian politics.

Race,RESUMO: Colonialism, Italian South, Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone

agave Ao longo de vários relatosopúncia de viagens sobreagave o Sul italiano, produzidas por autores norte-europeus, a opúncia e a emergem como sinônimos identitários do Sul. Porém, tanto a quanto a são, de verdade, plantas oriundas das Américas, que só chegaram no Sul italiano depois da colonização do Novo Mundo. Neste trabalho, examino a história silenciada de economias coloniais de ocupação, pilhagem e transporte comercial que está por trás da presença dessasSpaghetti duas plantas Westerns no Sul italiano. Subsequentemente, analisoSpaghetti os complexosWesterns e multifacetados sistemas de significação que inscrevem essas plantas no contexto dos de Sergio Leone. Proponho que os de Sergio Leone devam ser lidos como alegorias metafigurais que chamam a atenção PARA a complexa interação entre colonialismo, raça, guerra civil e políticas identitáriasPALAVRAS-CHAVE: contraditórias. Spaghetti Westerns

Raça, Colonialismo, Sul da Itália, , Sergio Leone 1 Doutor em Estudos Anglísticos pela University of Sydney (1992). Diretor de Pesquisa do Departamento de Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies da Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. DOSSIÊ Vegetal Nodes Within an Imperial Network etrable barrier a hedge of closely planted cacti can be … R the prickly pear spikes are a eading through the vo- painful obstacle … But we ex- luminous travelogues tricated ourselves from this painful labyrinth (GOETHE, on the Italian South written 1970, pp. 279-289). by northern Europeans from From the eighteenth cen- the eighteenth to the twenti- tury onwards, both the agave eth centuries, I have been re- and the prickly pear become peatedly struck by references Opuntia ficus-indica iconic botanical symbols that to the presence of the prickly Agave americana visually identify the landscapes pear ( ) and of the South. In the paintings the agave ( ) as and prints produced by north- signature plants that marked ern European artists, photog- for the travellers the southern raphers and travellers, the fore- identity of the landscape: to grounded plants literally frame catch sight of either of these the the vistas of the South, precise- plants in the landscape was to South Italian Journey ly as they also graphically signal announce one’s entry into to the viewer its exuberant and . In his exotic vegetation (Figures 1 and (1786-1788), Goethe repeated- 2). This identitarian coexten- ly remarks on the presence of siveness of both the prickly pear the prickly pear in the southern and the agave with the South landscape. The plant embodies, has, indeed, been assumed by for Goethe, both the exoticness southern Italians themselves in of the South and its Orientalist the marketing and promotion impenetrability: As we neared Misterbianco of the South. Both plants have [Catania], cacti appeared in become commodified as mar- the hedges, but entire hedg- keting symbols that sell touris- es of these bizarre-shaped plants, each more beauti- tic fantasies of the South. ful than the last …When we tried to beat a downhill path for ourselves through the gardens into the town, we discovered what an impen-

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Figure 1. Thomas Brabazon Aylmer, Rock and Promontory of Scylla, Cal- abria. (Picture credit: Author)

Figure 2. Carlo Brogi, Contorni di Napoli, Positano, Piante di fichi d’India. (Picture credit: Public domain)

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Inscribing representations ward journey from the Ameri- of the agave and the prickly cas, across the Atlantic and into pear in terms of autochthonous the Mediterranean countries symbols of southern Italian of Portugal, Spain and thence identity is a foundational con- southern Italy. The Spanish tradiction. Both the prickly pear Empire supplies the propellant and the agave are, in fact, not that enables this eastward tra- native to the South; both plants jectory. After a series of wars are indigenous to the Americas of Spanish succession, in 1504 and they only made their way Spain assumed control of the to the Italian South following Italian South. For over two cen- the colonisation of the New turies, the South became one World. The entry of the prick- more colony of the Spanish ly pear into Europe has been Empire. Characterised by the tracked back to 1493, the year expansion and consolidation of that Christopher Columbus re- feudal structures of exploitative turned to Lisbon following his oppression, theLa twolunga centuries note del landfall on various islands of Viceregnoof Spanish imperial rule have the New World (CILENTANO. been termed: “ IT, 2017). The agave has been ” – the “long night of recorded as having been intro- viceregal rule” (PLACANICA,2 duced from the Americas into 1999, p. 195-235). Both the the countries of the Mediterra- prickly-pear and the agave, in nean in the sixteenth century other words, are inscribed by (DA VARI LETTERATI, 1822, p. the forces of a double colonial- 222). The seemingly autochtho- ism: the Spanish colonisation of nous and regional coordinates the Americas and the virtually of southern identity that are coterminous subsumption of embodied by these two plants the Italian South under Spanish need, in other words, to be his- rule. Both plants work to delin- torically situated and geopoliti- eate that geopolitical formation cally dispersed. Their entry into that I have elsewhere termed the Italian South traces an east- the “Mediterranean-Atlantic” 2 This and all other translations from the Italian are by the author. 14 Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017. DOSSIÊ

(PUGLIESE, 2008, p. 8). have undergone in the course of Situated within this histor- the cultural histories that have shaped them and that they have ical context, both plants emerge L’America nel Sud: Imperial as vegetal nodes in a vast net- andshaped Colonial in turn. Histories and work of imperial relations. The Spaghetti Westerns anthropocentric dogma of veg- etal life as immobile, because rooted to the earth, is here chal- The 1960s saw the efflores- lenged along a number of axes: cence in Italy of a genre of the botanical, political, mercantile, American Western that came to economic and aesthetic. The be termed the “Spaghetti West- spatio-temporal transmigra- ern.” In this essay, I will use the tion of the prickly-pear and aga- term “Spaghetti Western,” in ve eastward across the Atlantic contradistinction to the “Ita- and the lands of the Mediterra- lo-Western,” for the following nean proceeds to configure veg- political reasons: the genre of etal life as semiotically fluid and the Spaghetti Western is one discursively mobile. Reflecting that was largely developed by on the complex and mutating southern Italian directors and relations that bind humans to writers, and it was consciously plants, Michael Pollan notes pitched to southern audienc- that: “Witting or not, all these es in the home market of what characters have been actors in a was termed at the time as the coevolutionary drama, a dance “Roxy, Calabria” (FRAYLING, of human and plant desire that 2006, p. 63). The “Roxy, Cal- has left neither the plants nor abria,” furthermore, needs to be the people taking part in it un- situated within larger transna- changed” (2003, p. 261). Identi- tional configurations in order fying the prickly pear and agave to address its expansive dias- as co-actors in larger human poric dimensions. The “Roxy, dramas is what will enable me Calabria,” as placeholder for the to shed light on the semiotic South, extended its reach to key permutations that both plants population centres of south- ern migrants in places such as Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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Australia. Post-World War Two, Western,” I want to map the co- Australia, like the US, Canada extensiveness between the sig- and Germany, was a key desti- nifiers “spaghetti” and “South- nation for southern migrants erners”; this coextenisveness fleeing the chronic poverty of can be illuminated by offering the South. As a boy who grew a brief politico-semantic his- up in 1960s Sydney, I have vivid tory of pasta and the historical memories of watching Spaghet- coining of “macaroni eaters” ti Westerns at the Australian as a way of designating South- equivalent of the “Roxy, Cal- erners (MONTANARI, 2013, p. abria”: the Grosvenor Theatre, 44). From the eighteenth cen- Summer Hill, in Sydney’s In- tury onwards, Southerners ner West. Italian films, includ- were called “macaroni eaters.” ing Spaghetti Westerns, were The pasta eaters of Naples, for screened on a Saturday night to example, became tourist at- packed crowds of working class tractions. They would stage Southerners. The atmosphere spaghetti-eating performanc- in the Grosvenor Theatre was es in the streets of Naples for one of excitement, social ex- tourists lazzaroni (Figure 3). Tourists change and entertainment. would buy plates of spaghetti In keeping with the stratified for athe fistful of spaghetti (scoundrels) and interlayered histories of and street beggars who would, transnational and transcultur- , per- al relations that have inscribed form the public spectacle of eat- the South, the “Roxy, Calabria” ing the pasta with their hands, was, in other words, also a di- dramatically lifting the long asporic phenomenon that en- strands of spaghetti high up compassed southern audiences in the air and then consuming across the globe. them with extravagant flourish- In proceeding to articulate es, “much to the amusement of my reasons for retaining what, their on-looking benefactors” on the surface, appears to be (BRAUN, 2017). Tourists would a derogatory term, “Spaghetti photograph this spectacle or buy postcard souvenirs of these Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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public performances (Figure 4). torical freighting is exemplified As the photographs of the peri- by the following Risorgimento od make abundantly clear, the anecdote: When Garibaldi, in southern characters in these the course of his military cam- images staged choreographic paign of Italian unification,th performances of the spaghetlaz- entered Naples on 7 Novem- zaroniti-eating spectacle. The street ber 1860, he wroteapud to Cavour: stalls were viewed by the “The macaroni are cooked and and beggars as stage sets we will eat them” ( MON- within which they reflexively TANARI, 2013, p. 43). Through played their respective roles this culinary metaphor, Garibal- in a type of street theatre that di signalled that the South was has deep historical roots in the now ready to be consumed by Commedia dell’Arte tradition. its northern conqueror. The derogatory term “mac- aroni,” moreover, became a racial slur by which to name southern Italian immigrants in countries like Australia and the US. “Spaghetti,” thus, is a term that is politically and histori- cally freighted as a synonym for “the South.” This politico-his-

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Figure 3. Giorgio Sommer, Spaghetti Eaters, Naples, before 1886. (Picture credit: Public domain)

Figure 4. Carlo Brogi, Napoli, Maccheronaio napoletano: scena dal vero. (Picture credit: Public domain)

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By transposing this loaded good and evil. In what follows, politico-history of the term to my concern will be to situate the the context of the Spaghetti Spaghetti Western within the Western, “spaghetti” emerges complex locus of imperialism, as a charged signifier that colonialism and race that I delineates the epistemological argue 4 continues to supply the ground of “the South,” discursive infrastructure of the simultaneously as it resignifies genre. and revalorises the term as Due to lack of funds and a politico-aesthetic3 category the exigent practicalities of preoccupied with southern filming, the bulk of Spaghetti issues. Led by the likes of Westerns were shot either in directors such as Sergio Leone, Spain, in the Tabernas Desert Sergio Solimma and Sergio of Almeria, or in the Italian Corbucci, the new genre South, in places like Sardinia, developed its own stylistic in the village of San Salvatore di attributes, including a self- Cabras, and the Abruzzo region. reflexive play with the traditions These southern landscapes of the American Western, were seen convincingly to scenes of graphic and ritualised reproduce visions of Mexico, violence, choreographic and the US Southwest and the ceremonial showdowns, the border regions interlinking realpolitikrepresentation of key issues these two territories (BETTS, from the Global South, and a 1992, p. xi). Agaves and prickly take on the role of pear plants found in both the law, outlaws and regimes of (in) southern Italian and Spanish justice that generates grey areas landscapes are key actors in that, in Nietzschean terms, shift Spaghetti Westerns. They work the moral landscape beyond 3 Leone’s humorous ownershipOnce of the Upon “Spaghetti a Time inWestern” the West moniker is made visually manifest through a visual pun that he stages in the panoramic shot of Flagstone station in one scene at the very beginning of where, amongst an array of goods set down on the railway siding, sit two huge barrels stencilled in capital letters “OLIVE OIL” (cf. CUMBOW, 2008, p. 76). 4 For discussions on the representation of gender in Leone’s films, see Broughton (2016), Frayling (2012), Cumbow (2008), Landy (1996), Sarris (1968). Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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to transmute a Mediterranean field of European whiteness. landscape into a Mexico- Working in tandem with American one, imbuing the northern racialised imaginaries sites with the necessary aura of projected onto the South are the “authenticity.” A type of double regimes of colonial subjugation vision inscribes these plants. that were deployed by the North This double vision functions to in order to secure control of the problematise the very category South. The colonial annexation of “authenticity” through the of the South, secured through operations of the simulacrum. the violent process of The authenticity of the Mexico- Italian unification, was both American landscape is secured predicated and legitimated by through the nativised simulacra the construction of Southerners of agave and prickly pear. as racial inferiors of degenerate These complex processes African and Middle Eastern of transposition and recoding stock. I have discussed in detail can be amplified by turning our elsewhere the ensemble of attention to the use of southern racialising practices deployed Italian actors to play Mexicans by Northerners in order to in Spaghetti Westerns. In this demarcate Southerners as cinematic schema, Southerners racially other to the white are mobilised as racial European, and their consequent analogues in order to pass as transmutation into biocriminal their Mexican equivalents. The types that were congenitally facility of staging this move predisposed to violence and was enabled by the perceived criminality (PUGLIESE, 2007; isomorphism of phenotypical PUGLIESE, 2002). attributes between southern One can clearly see the Italians and Mexicans and instrumentalist rationality of the dense racialised histories this racio-criminal discourse that so insistently marked the at work, for example, in one of people of the South as outliers the reports written by Count within the circumscribed Alessandro Bianco di Saint-

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Guerra Jorioz, a military man, at the their intelligence. Here, in Cafona other words, there are no very height of the communal interests, no or War on Brigands, trading, no exchanges, no 1861-1865. This war, that I will affection, no fraternal love, no mutual admiration, but henceforth term as Italy’s Civil only hate and jealousy, lust War (for reasons that I explain for power and for vendettas; below), was fuelled by southern here envy, here all the most base and vile passions, all insurgencies that contested the the most loathsome vices, all imposition of northern rule on the most nefarious5 iniquities the South and the attendant loss of human nature (SAINT- JORIOZ, 2005, p. 341). of economic, linguistic, cultural and political autonomy. Italy’s The racially-charged term Civil War marked a concerted “Africa” was one repeatedly effort by the North to crush and deployed by northern eliminate any opposition to the Europeans in order to describe northern-dominated rule of a what they encountered in their so-called “unified” Italy, and travels through the South. thereby to establish the South The nineteenth-century Swiss as a dependent and subjugated writer and traveller, Charles colony. In the midst of this civil Didier, described inhabitants of war, Saint-Jorioz writes: the town of Monteleone (Vibo we are here in the midst of Valentia, Calabria), a town a a people that, even though few kilometres west of my Italian and born in Italy, appears to belong to the native village, as: “With large primitive tribes of Africa, to black eyes and white teeth, they the Noueri, the Dinkas, the had the air of small savages Malian of Pulo-Penango, and thus it is not appropriate … Surrounded by these semi- to speak of things that African peoples, I felt as though are not even accessible to I were in a quarter of Timbuctoo 5 “qui siamo fra una popolazione che, sebbene in Italia e nata Italiana, sembra appertenere alle tribù primitive dell’Africa, ai Noueri, ai Dinkas, ai Malesi di Pulo- Penango, epperciò non è d’uopo parlar qui di cose che non sono nemmeno accessibili alla loro intelligenza. Qui dunque non comuni interessi, non contrattazioni, non scambii, non affetto, non fraterno amore, non mutua stima, ma odio e livore, libidine di potere e vendetta; qui invidia, qui tutte le più base e vili passioni, tutti vizi i più ributtanti, tutte le più nefande nequizie dell’ umana natura.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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6 rather than in an Italian town” The continuity of this (DIDIER, 2008, p. 44). The racial violence is powerfullySalvatore racially-loaded signifier “Africa” Giulianocaptured in FrancescoSalvatore Rosi’s performed two mutually Giulianoextraordinary film, constitutive operations: on the (1962). In one hand, as Europe’s master , Rosi, a Neapolitan metaphor for everything director, maps the layered barbaric, primitive and complexities, complicities and uncivilised, it worked to secure contradictions that enmeshed for northern Italians their the famous bandit, Salvatore stake in the embodied capital Giuliano, in his campaigns of of whiteness and the power guerrilla warfare in Western and privileges that this racial Sicily post-World War Two. The category ensured; on the other power of Rosi’s film emerges hand, through the delineation from the fact that, aside from of a racialised disjunction a few professional actors, he between Northerners and drew on the local townsfolk Southerners, it worked to who had participated in these rationalise the military and historical events to re-enact paramilitary violence that their lived experiences – was unleashed on the South and their performances are following the foundationally both astute and visceral. The disjointed establishment of early scenes of the film show national unification. Saint- Giuliano’s guerrillas waging a Jorioz’ racialised description separatist war in order to secure of Southerners emerges from independence for Sicily. The a dense and stratified archive Italian Government responds that covers the gamut of by sending in the military. In epistemic violence: from clinical one scene of Rosi’s film, as the anthropological analyses to northern military falls prey to unbridled hate speech. the superior guerrilla tactics

6 “Con I grandi occhi neri e i denti bianchi, avevano l’aria di piccoli selvaggi … Circondato da questa popolazione semi-africana, mi sembrava di essere in un quartiere di Timbuctù piuttosto che in una città italiana.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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of Giuliano’s men, one of the opposition, screaming their soldiers reflects: “I survived a outrage at this act of injustice, war, only to get killed by savages and then fearlessly breaking like in this godforsaken wasteland. a wave against the armed and Why doesn’t Italy just give these mobilised soldiers that form a people their independence?” Salvatoremilitarised Giuliano cordon around the As the militarised campaign detained men of Montelepre. continues, the government ’s scenes of places Montelepre, Giuliano’s militarised violence, martial hometown, under martial law, the collective punishment law and instigates draconian of Southerners and the southern practices of collective campaigns of insurgency and punishment, rounding up all the resistance graphically echo men of the town, handcuffing Italy’s post-unification Civil them and placing them in chain War. gangs. Once thus secured, Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti and ready to be dispatched Westerns are unequivocally in to various prisons, one of the dialogue with this violent and prisoners shouts: “How long racist history. In an interview will we have to pay for the sin of with a fellow Southerner, Leone being born in Montelepre?”As declares: “I want to tell you that news spreads across the town I’m also a Meridionale, I’m the that the men of Montelepre are son of Neapolitan father, I’ve to be dispatched to a regime lived more of my life inapud Naples of collective punishment, Rosi than in Rome, even7 though I stages an intensely affecting was born in Rome” ( DI scene in which the women LELLA, 2009). of the town pour out of their The South/North divide homes and into the streets; as that inscribes so many facets they run towards their menfolk, of the Italian peninsula and they proceed to form a seething its islands did not fail to mark human river of impassioned the field of film studies. The 7 “le dico che sono meridionale anchi’io, sono figlio di padre napoletano, ho visssuto più a Napoli che a Roma, anche essendo nato a Roma.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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directors of Spaghetti Westerns on virtually every aspect of life were in the South and cinematically looked down upon by the transposes it to the Americas, Northern intelligentsia of the film world, not only because specifically to the US Southwest, of their training in ‘pulp’ its border regions andThe Mexico. Good, films … but also because as One of the most powerful a result of their training (or the Bad and the Ugly their ‘occupational ideology,’ scenes in Leone’s perhaps) they tended to (1966) make ‘pulp’ films themselves, is of a US southern town laid usually pitched at the home (Southern) market waste by the forces of the Civil (FRAYLING, 2006, 58). War. Leone has the camera pan As such, Christopher over a devastated landscape Frayling adds, these directors of incinerated and ransacked were viewed as not worthy of houses, of streets cloaked in being included in either serious the smoke of still-smouldering academic film criticism or fires. Everywhere that the histories of Italian film. Writing camera directs its gaze, there in 2006, he adds that “Sergio is only ruin. For me, this scene Leone’s films do not appear in vividly evokes what was left the standard serious histories in the aftermath of northern of the Italian cinema (or even of troops entering southern the Western) which have been Italian towns in the course written by Italian film critics” of Italy’s Civil War. Giuseppe (2006, p. 59). In what follows, Ferrari, a Milanese lawyer, I want to examine Leone’s films offers an eye-witness account in the context of Italy’s South/ of his entry into the southern North divide and its attendant town of Pontelandolfo, south of history of race, colonialism and Naples, following the massacre “Il Sangue a Fiumi”: Italy’s of the civilian population by the Civilcivil war. War and Its Rivers of Piedmontese troops in 1861: Blood I had to undertake a journey in order to verify a fact with my own eyes. But I can Leone takes the violent never begin to express the colonial history that impacted feelings that stirred in me Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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when confronted by that document the Piedmontese incinerated town.…To the right, to the left, the walls scorched-earth policies that had been hollowed out and were deployed in the course were blackened, they had of Italy’s Civil War (2007, p. set fire to the mounds of furniture on the ground floor 305). Once southern towns and the fire had devoured throughout Calabria, Molise, the roof; from the windows, Abruzzo and Basilicata had one saw the sky. Here and there I encountered piles of been captured by the northern rubble; it was impossible troops, they were invariably to go further; the buildings plundered and then set alight that had been shored up threatened8 to collapse at any (SCARPINO 2005, p. 40). In his moment (FERRARI, 2015, p. contemporary account of the 168). war, Giacinto De Sivo writes: This descriptionThe Good, isthe what Bad “The Piedmontese set fire to andis cinematically the Ugly. reproduced not one, not a hundred houses, in Leone’s but to entire towns, shooting As Blondie with impunity anyone they

(Clint Eastwood) and Tuco came across, sparing neither9 (Eli Wallach) wend their way the elderly nor the young” (DE through the destroyed southern SIVO [1861] 2002, pp. 16-17). town, the camera records One eyewitness describes smoking ruins, mounds of the massacre that was bombed masonry and blasted perpetrated by the northern timber, and homes with no troops in the town of roofs – their ransacked innards Casalduni and its subsequent exposed to the sky. Roberto incineration: the violence, he Martucci draws on historical concludes, was as if it were records of the period that inscribed by an “horizon of 8 “Io ho dovuto intraprendere un viaggio per verificare un fatto cogli occhi mie. Ma non potràmai esprimere i sentimenti che mi agitarono in presenza di quella città incendiata …A destra, a sinistra, le mura erano vuote e annerite, si era dato fuoco ai mobile ammucchiati nelle stanze terrene e la fiamma aveva divorato il tetto; dalle finestre vedevasi il cielo. Qua elà incontravasi un mucchio di sassi crollati; poi fu vietato progredire; gli edifizi puntellati minacciavano di cadere ad ogni istante.” 9 “I piemontese incendiarono non una, non cento case, ma intieri paesi, fucilarono impunemente chiunque venne loro alle mani, non risparmiando vecchi e fanciulli.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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11 apud extermination that knew no brigantesseawaited its victims. The limits” ( MARTUCCI 2007, photographs of the captured p. 294). A Piedmontese soldier worked to supply recounts the modus operandi the self-evident truths that of his battallion on entry into these women were “beasts or southern towns or villages: witches” (GUERRI, 2011, p. 170) “On entering a town, we that violated heteronormative immediately began to fire on gendered norms because of priests and men, whomever we brigantessetheir masculine dress and happenedapud upon, with the soldier10 conduct. The imprisoned thence beginning his plunder” appeared, Giordano ( MARTUCCI, 2007, 288). Bruno Guerri underscores, The Piedmontese soldiers’ as “Animals in cages; or, once regime of indiscriminate executed, abused 12 and nude, killing and plunder was as trophies of war” (2011, p. further compounded by the 170). As Marta Petrusewicz deployment of gendered has noted, these photographs violence that included the clearly referenced those of the sexual assault and rape of same period from across the southern women (GUERRI, Atlantic that showed Native 2011, p. 147, MARTUCCI, 2007, Americans as exotic, but-now p. 289, DE JACO, 2005, p. 169). vanquished, beasts (1998, p. brigantesse brigantessa The treatment that was inflicted 11). on the captured The , Michelina amplified the regime’s use De Cesare, was, after her of sexual violence in order capture, first tortured and then mark both the vanquishing of summarily executed without the enemy and to advertise, trial. Her corpse was stripped through its trophy photographs, naked and photographed. the crushing humiliation that Drawing on Suvendrini Perera’s 10 “Entrammo nel paese, subito abbiamobrigantesse incominciato a fucilare preti e uomini, quanti capitava, indi il soldato saccheggiava.” 11 For a detailed discussion of the in Italy’s Civil War, see also GUERRI, 2011, pp. 164-173 and PALOMBO, 2015, pp. 181-271. 12 “Animale in gabbia; o assassinata, seviziata e nuda, trofeo di guerra.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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brigantesse (2014) acute analysis of trophy photos of the slain and naked photographs in times of war, were sent into Marcello Messina and Teresa Di mass circulation, as were the Somma discuss how other images of dead brigands, Michelina De Cesare’s naked, through the newspapers of abused and scorned body is a powerful metaphor Milan and Turin, visually of Northern Italy’s confirming the North’s worst pillaging, exploitation, and prejudices with regard to domestication of the South terre ignote” … Femininity is deployed the barbaric hordes that in a specific way here, as inhabited the “ it symbolises territories, of the South. The South, after identities and consciences that need colonial all, was repeatedlyGazzetta framed di Torino as intervention in order to Italy’s internal Africa. In the conform to a patriarchal words of the nationalist model (2017, p. 8). (1861), “[The South] Is a bit like Africa for geographers: Remarking on how the un we know its boundaries but anthropologist Alfredo Niceforo popolo donna if we want to push our vision described Southerners as “ and our thought a bit further, ” (“a womanly what are we confronted by? people”), Messina and Di 13 apud Like the geographers in Africa, Somma (2017, p. 8) bring into unknown lands” ( focus how these photographs GUERRI, 2011, 79). Reflecting of racio-gendered violence on the photograph of Michelina worked to confirm the De Cesare and similar trophy hetero-patriarchal position images, Gigi Di Fiore suggests of Northerners in relation to that the image also signified the supine and vanquished contrary-wise to the intentions feminised body of the South, brigantesse of the Piedmontese regime:“The embodied in the trophy image, however, produced the photographs of the . opposite effect of that which Reproductions of the 13 “[Il Sud] È un po’ come l’Africa per i geografi: ne conosciamo i confine ma poi se vogliamo spingere un po’ più in là l’occhio e il pensiero, che cosa ci troviamo innanzi? Come I geografi nell’ Africa, le terre ignote.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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was probably intended by of the period, the Neapolitan whomever commissioned14 it: historian, Pasquale Villari, it evokes torture, derision, recriminates that, through the sexualbrigantesse abuses” (2008, p. legislation passed by the Italian 231). The photographs of the parliament “inrivers order ofto blooddestroy” slain and brigands theapud southern brigandage, we15 effectively somatise intersecting have let flow relations of power that find ( MARTUCCI, 2007, p. their literal embodiment in the 312. Emphasis added). Villari’s photographic emulsion that phrase powerfully evokes the captures their slain bodies. lexicon of colonial massacre Permanently stilled, as it were, and ethnic cleansing; his by the very photographic fixer charged phrase prefigures andused to stabilise the image, they Enoch Powell’s infamous remain at once as self-evident peroration on the necessity to polysemous in their impose draconian and racist significations; as such, they anti-immigrant policies in continue to gesture as revenant Britain in order to prevent the testimonies of violence, “rivers of blood” experienced subjection and the desire to by the United States in its own vanquish unruly bodies in Civil War. Giuseppe Ferrari, the locus of their own native in a sitting of th the Italian ground. parliament (20 November The graphic scenes of 1861), proposedcivil war that what indiscriminate violence and was unfolding in the South mass killing that inscribe was, in fact, a . In the Leone’s films echo the transcript of the parliamentary historically documented exchange, following Ferrari’s slaughter of southern civilians denunciation and naming of the by the Piedmontese invading atrocities perpetrated by the forces. In a revealing letter Northern forces as tantamount 14 “L’immagine ottiene però l’effetto opposto di quello probabilmente voluto da chi la commissionò: evoca torture, dileggi, abusi sessuali.” 15 “per distruggere il brigantaggio noi abbiamo fatto scorrere il sangue a fiumi.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

28 DOSSIÊ una guerra civile to “ ” (a civil South is powerfully portrayed war), the chamber erupts with in Leone’s films. He metapho- cries of denial: rises this regime through his Many voices: No! No! vision of the West: “I see the (Noises) Ferrari: […] But the representatives of the history of the West,” he notes Government have committed inapud one interview, “as really the grave acts in the southern reign of violence by violence” provinces, acts that place in doubt the very Constitution. ( FRAYLING, 2006, p. 135). There were twelve villages16 apud In attempting to gloss Leone’sDol- burnt… (Noises of dissent) uncompromising vision of the ( MARTUCCI, 2007, p. lars 323). West, as portrayed in the ’ trilogy, Frayling argues that Following the commence- this violence has its roots in the ment of the militarised cam- campanilismo South’s “amoral familism” and paign in the South and the in- its “ ” (2006, p. tensification of civil warfare, 191). The “emphasis on all this,” the Piedmontese regime de- Frayling concludes, “firmly lo- clared, in the summer of 1862, cates Leone’s rearrangement martial law over the entire re- of the ‘codes’ of the Western gion, including regions that had within the context of Southern no insurgent activity. A state Italian society” (2006, p. 191). of exception was imposed that Frayling here trundles out the suspended civil laws and rights racist clichés of the northern and that enabled arbitrary ar- ethnographer: the reductive rests, summary executions, campanilismo categories of “amoral familism” curfews, the prohibition of free and “ ” repro- movement, the censoring of the duce ahistorical stereotypes press and so on (MARTUCCI, of southern culture that fail to 2007, pp. 323-24). The regime address the layered racial and of arbitrary violence, and its colonial histories that continue attendant system of illegalities, to inscribe the South. Missing that was imposed upon the 16 “Molte voci: No! No! (Rumori)Ferrari: […] Ma i rappresentanti del Governo hanno intrapreso nelle provincie meridionale dei gravissimi atti, i quali mettono in dubbio la Costituzione stessa. Vi furono dodici villaggi incendiati… (Rumori di dissenso).” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

29 DOSSIÊ apud from Frayling’s assessment of here” ( TETI, 2015, p. 287). the South/West interface, and Here, the layered histories that the critical transpositions that bind the Atlantic to the Medi- Leone stages in his films, is the terranean, as emblematised by colonial history of “the reign of the agave and prickly pear, are violence by violence” that so ef- discursively materialised. In fectively shaped the South. his analysis of the homologies In the historical accounts between the American West that document Italy’s Civil War, and the Italian South, Austin colonial analogues are repeat- Fisher coins a phrase that suc- edly called on in order to make cinctly encapsulates the nexus intelligible the scale of the vio- between the two: “Out West, lence. Specifically, the colonial Down South” (2014, p. 44). Gigi wars in both Mexico and the di Fiore, in his account of the American Southwest are in- Italian frontier wars, writes: It resembled the wild voked as historical templates. American West. The events Marzio Proto, a member of the had all the characteristics: pursuits with horses dead Italian parliament,th in a speech with fatigue, assaults delivered on 20 September on trains and convoys, 1861, argued that the “gov- obligatory military escorts in ernment of Piedmont wants to order to secure the safety of local dignitaries in17 the course treat the southernapud provinces as of their travels. (2005, p. Cortes or Pizzaro did in Peru 243) and in Mexico” ( MARTUC- The tactics deployed by CI, 2007, p. 294) In the ItalianIn- the southern insurgents in the dielexicon di là of” the period, the Amer- course of the Italian Civil War ican Indies were called theIndie “ were, moreover, seen to parallel di quaggiùand the provinces of the guerrilla-style warfare of the Italian South as the “ the Apache Indians (MARTUCCI, ” –“the Indies over 2007, p. 302). there, and the Indies down 17 “Somigliava al selvaggio West americano. Le vicende ne avevano tutte le caratteristiche: inseguimenti con cavalli morti per la fatica, assalti a treni e convogli, scorte militari obbligatorie per assicurare l’incolumità ai parenti dei notabali locali in viaggio.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

30 DOSSIÊ Leone’s Cinematic Terra Nullius and the ‘Insignification’ of Native sence of Indigenous18 people in Americans his Westerns. This critical la- cuna cuts across both Leone’s US and Mexican films and it ef- Leone, in his films, stages fectively works to reproduce a complex and resonant trans- settler-colonial vision in which positions of colonial history, Indigenous people have been war, geography and regimes of entirely eliminated from their racialisation. Situated within lands in both these contexts. In these politico-aesthetic move- his writings on both these re- ments of transposition, a new spective settler states, Jimmie intelligibility emerges in terms Durham points to the similari- of the significance of his coding ties and differences: “While the of the landscapes of Spain and US advertises itself as a ‘nation the Italian South as coextensive of immigrants,’ Mexico claims with the landscapes of Mexico that the battle between Cortez and the American Southwest. and the Aztecs ‘was neither a Palimpsestic histories of colo- victory nor a defeat, but the nialism, race and civil war vi- birth pains of a new race and a sually resonate in the course of new nation – Mexico’; nullify- the unfolding of his films. There ing the existence of hundreds is, however, a critical lacuna of ‘tribes’ who today still fight that marksOnce Leone’s Upon a vision Time ofin for enough land to stand on” thethese West colonial landscapes: aside (1993, p. 179). Durham, more- from his over, documents the genocid- , which I will presently al campaigns waged by the US discuss, there is a gaping ab- and Mexico against Yaquis and 18 There appear to be at least two other representationsFor of a Indigenous Few Dollars people More in Leone’s films, but both are questionable on the following grounds: it remains unclear whether the character El Indio (Spanish for “the DuckIndian”), You inSucker , is of Indigenous ancestry or whether his name is merely a nickname, as Leone offers no biographical information on his background; in , Juan Miranda, as he berates one of the passengers after the stagecoach has been assailed, says in the English dubbed version: “My mother she had the bloode mia ofmadre, the Aztecs,” puttana implying com’ era, he hasa te Indigenous ti avrebbe sputatoancestry. addosso However, in the original Italian version, he says something quite different that signals he has no Indigenous ancestry: “ ” (“And my mother, whore that she was, would have spat on you”). 31 Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017. DOSSIÊ

Apaches (1993, p. 174). The tra- the settler-colonial cinematic ditional lands of the Yaquis and frame. Reflecting on the colo- Apaches cut across and contin- nial history of US Westerns, Jim- ue to contest the cartographic mie DurhamShane writesHigh that Noon “In the boundaries of both settler na- last great wave of Hollywood tion-states. westerns – , , et By effacing the presence al – the hero and the settlers are of Indigenous peoples from the all by themselves on the end- less prairies. They cannot re- very lands in whichterra he setsnullius his films, Leone re-instantiates the member when they last had to colonial fiction of , kill ‘Indians.’”“Indians,” Durham in which the colonised lands ap- ironically concludes, have been completely “consumed” (1993, pear devoid of theirOnce traditional Upon a p. 176). The majority of Leone’s TimeIndigenous in the owners.West In his West- erns, aside from films continue this genocidal , Native Amer- legacy of the erasure of Native icans of the Southwest appear Americans from the screen. neither as noble savages nor In Leone’s Westerns, Na- as oppressed victims, following tive Americans’ enduring sur- the stereotypical dictates of US vival of attempted genocide by Westerns; rather, they fail to ap- the forces of settler-colonialism pear at all. The sweeping pan- can only be attested to in terms oramic visions of his simulacra of an invisibilised presence. In of the Southwest landscapes this way, Leone’s cinematic dis- are marked by this haunting course effectively reproduces absence. In filmic terms, the In- the hegemonic position of US digenous peoples of these lands settler culture. “Nothing could have been literally relegated to be more central to American re- the “space-off,” the space that ality,” writes Jimmie Durham, falls outside the scene of rep- than the relationships between Americans and resentation, that exiles from American Indians, yet those the space of the screen all that relationships are of course cannot be represented within the most invisible and the most lied about. The lies are Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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not simply a denial; they they are not living constitute a new world, the world in which American subjects but, rather, insignificant culture is located.in By invasion, cardboard figures lined up as murder, theft, complex denial, test-targets at the back of a gun alibi, and signification (DURHAM, 1993, p. 138.) shop. Disembodied of flesh and blood, constituted by inanimate I want to transpose material, they emerge as the Durham’s incisive analysis to quintessential exemplar of the Leone’s Westerns; specifically, I subaltern: they cannot speak want to elaborate on the complex or engage with the very violent and rich semiotics that accrue in settler-colonial history that is from his italicising of the prefix raging around them; rather, “in” in his term “ signification.” they stand as passive victims Through his semantico- stamped with the imprimatur typographic manipulation of of a target on their hearts this term, Durham establishes in order to serve as training the possibility for the word to fodder for settler gun practice. operate in a double register: Tuco aims his gun at the target- on the one hand, it signifies practice Indians, shoots and “insignificance” (that is, systematically decapitates all something that possesses no three; with one calculated jump meaning or consequence) on the rickety floorboards of and, on the other hand, it the shooting gallery, the one evidences the manner in which figure that remains standing a term that means “devoid in collapses to the ground. With of any significance” is always this last intervention, Native already inserted meaningful Americans are symbolically networks of signification that liquidated from the very locus enable it, paradoxically, to that they continue physically signify the very concept of to occupy and contest in order insignification. to secure both their livelihood Significantly, the only time The Good, the Bad and and unceded sovereignty. In Native Americans appear in the context of the film, this Leone’s final gesture of annihilation 33 Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017. DOSSIÊ nullius positions Native Americans as that he reproduces having effectively been reduced across the majority of his to a bullseye shooting target, Westerns and why his sweeping a colonial full stop that signals landscapes appear devoid of that they have been inexorably the Native Americans that vanquished. The collapse of the continue to occupy the very final Indigenous figure that had lands from which they have terra nullius been left standing signals the been cinematically effaced. triumph of Manifest Destiny This reading and its colonial systems of of Leone’s Westerns stands to conceptuality, within which Oncebe challenged Upon a Timeand complexified in the West Native Americans can only when transposed to his epic appear as a race doomed to be vanquished by the superior (1968). Native Americans do forces of settler colonialism. appear in this film in a number In Leone’s Westerns, of guises. A Native American settler campaigns of Indigenousa priori character is present in the genocide are extradiegetic: opening scene in the railway they are presented as station as Frank’s (Henry Fonda) narratives that establishnot henchmen wait for the arrival of the conditions of possibility Harmonica (Charles Bronson) for Native Americans The to in order to kill him. Broom in Good,appear the in his Bad films. and the As such, Ugly hand and sweeping the station when they do appear, as in floor, she is in the employ of the , railways. Throughout the scene, they can only be represented as she observes the henchmen’s as ontologically dead shooting threatening behaviour toward targets that evidence the the station master, she remains triumphant accomplishment impassive and silent. As the of settler genocide. Leone’s Native American character settler-genocidal vision of terratotal senses that a gunfight is about Indigenous extinction explains to transpire, she runs off and the troubling fiction of disappears into the distance,

34 Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017. DOSSIÊ

a cloud of dust trailing behind the East Coast to the Pacific and her andmise-en-scéne obscuring her into the violence and massacres that insignificance. Critically, this attended this settler teleology. opening will, as I In another scene, Frank will presently discuss, bookend and his boss, the railroad tycoon the closing shot of the film. Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti), are On Jill McBain’s (Claudia seen discussing how they can Cardinale) arrival at Flagstone acquire Sweetwater, the estate station, a number of Native where Morton wants to build Americans characters emerge his railway station and that, from the train, tellingly, from following their killing of the the cattle car. As they walk McBain family, is now in the down the plank on to the possession of Jill McBain. This platform, an overseer says to scene is set in a Navajo village them: “Get the lead out of your situated under the dramatic arses you Redskin warriors.” All overhang of an escarpment the Native American characters with sweeping views of the remain silent in the face of desert. As Frank and Morton this racial slur. It is one of the discuss their plans and as Frank few times in any of Leone’s physically assaults Morton, Westerns that, indirectly, the who is disabled, by knocking Indian Wars are referenced. away his crutches, the Native The fact that they are also American characters in the represented as characters with scene constitute mere backdrop neither dialogue nor voice props to the central action and with “lead in their arses” unfolding before them; they are signals that they are socially there only to supply folkloric and politically dead subjects colour to the serious matter in the landscape of inexorable being discussed by the white westward expansion; one of men. Once again, not one of the the key burdens of the film Native American characters is precisely the struggle by is given a voice or agency in settlers to push the railway from this scene in which we have

Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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the incongruous presence of to wait, before he kills the man two strangers who have left responsible for the death of his the train at the bottom of the brother.apud Since he is an Indian, valley and have climbed up to he already hates the white man” an Indigenous village in order ( FRAYLING, 2012, p. 274). to conduct their conversation The reason that Harmonica on how best to secure new pursues Frank throughout the land critical to the railway’s course of the film is because westward expansion. That the Frank killed Harmonica’s land that these two white men older brother by stringing want to acquire is Navajo land him up by a noose from an is rendered superfluous in the arch while his legs rested on narrative. “There are thousands Harmonica’s shoulders. Whilst of pictures of us,” says Elsie Mae in this position, Frank placed Clyapud Begay, a Navajo Elder, “but the eponymous instrument we never got to say anything” in Harmonica’s mouth. The ( LEWIS, 2010, p. 173). elder brother, in order to spare In this scene, the Indigenous his sibling any more trauma, subjects are represented as purposefully kicks his younger already a vanquished race brother to the ground and that can play no role in the thereby hangs himself. Leone unstoppable colonisation of adds: “He doesn’t talk much. Native American lands. He expresses his sadness with Once Upon the harmonica. His music is a a TimeI in come, the West finally, to an ambiguous crux in lament which comes from apuddeep : the fact that down. It is visceral – attached the lead character, Harmonica, is to an ancestral memory” ( apparently of Native American FRAYLING, 2012, p. 274). The and Mexican descent. In an reference to “ancestral memory” interview, Leone states that appears to signal that Leone Harmonica is “A half-breed who was marking the massacres of implacably pursues revenge. A Native Americans that ensued man who knows just how long from settler colonisation of Indigenous lands. Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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The troublingOnce ambiguity Upon a “An ancient race. Other Mortons Timethat inscribesin the West the character will be along, and they kill it of Harmonica in off.” Here Leone lapses back is generated into the mythos of the Native by an interplay of key factors. American as the “dying race,” Even as the lead character of as the “vanishing race” that Harmonica is presented by simply cannot survive the Leone as Indigenous, he is not teleological trajectory of settler played by a Native American, expansion, as emblematised and this is in keeping with the by Once the comingUpon a Time railway, in the across West dominant Hollywood practice Indigenous lands. Thus, even of the period. The character, as moreover, appears in the film as finally marks in an unequivocal largely deracinated and devoid manner the living presence and of any relational connection to agency of Native Americans, any Indigenous community. Is as represented by Harmonica, this because his community it simultaneously announces been massacred and he is the their inexorable demise and last survivor? Frayling seems disappearance. to suggest as much when he The closing scene of the says that Harmonica is “the film, with its elegiac theme, last descendent of ‘an ancient clinches the film’s Manifest race’” (2012, p. 274), even Destiny thesis. After Harmonica though there is no evidence in has shot dead Frank Morton, the film to suggest as much and, he is seen riding off into the in contradistinction to Leone’s distance on his horse, with the other films, Native Americans corpse of his friend, Cheyenne visibly appear in key scenes (Jason Robards), slung over a of the film. The freighted line horse that is trailing behind “ancient race” comes, in fact, Harmonica’s. The train steams from the exchange between into the station at Sweetwater Harmonica and Frank just that is under construction and before their duel. In the that is abuzz with the work of exchange, Harmonica remarks: Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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the railway gangs. As the film because unceded, sovereignty comes to a close, Harmonica, over their lands. Despite with the dead Cheyenne slung the film’s diegetic erasure over his trailing horse, is seen of Indigenous sovereignty, disappearing into the distance, the Navajo’s extradiegetic leaving behind all the material exercise of “hospitality in their signs of settler expansion – territories” at once attests to wagons, tools, lumber and so on and instantiates a living politics The Asymmetries and – that are set to project settlers Convergencesof Indigenous sovereignty. of Parallel Civil into the very West towards Wars which Harmonica rides. As the credits begin to role, Harmonica The becomes a mere vanishing point AmericanIn the South Introduction and the Italian to their edited collection, in the hazy distance:in he, and by Mezzogiorno definition, his people, have been reduced to “ significance” in , Enrico Dal Lago the wake of triumphant settler and Rick Halpern map the colonialism. This message, parallels that marked both the however, is unintentionally US and Italian Civil Wars: The most important historical undercut by the final line of the process which occurred film’s credits: “The producers in both countries was the are grateful to the Navajo Tribal formation of the nation- state. Both the USA and Italy Council for their hospitality in emerged as unified nations their territories in Arizona and in the course of the 1860s Utah.” In this closing moment, as a result of ideological and military conquests waged Leone’s eulogy on the vanished by the two norths against Native American comes undone. the two souths. It is no With this final credit, the Navajo accident that the most recent historiography in the USA literally have the last word on links the American Civil War the myth of the vanishing Indian to the contemporary national by embodying, in writing, their unifications in Europe … On the other hand, the most ontological presence in their recent Italian historiography homelands of Arizona and has been moving in the Utah and their undiminished, direction of re-evaluating the Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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importance of the experience economic conditions following of military confrontation and the memory of defeat Italian unification, they were in the North-South divide compelled to migrate in their during the process of Italian millions in a type of biopolitical Unification. In particular, the expression ‘civil war’ is ethnic cleansing. Following increasingly used by Italian unification, the Piedmontese historians in order to describe regime sacked the treasury of the military operations in which the Piedmontese army the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, fought against the brigands in stole critical infrastructure and southern Italy between 1861 imposed economic tariffs that and 1865 (DAL LAGO and HALPERN, 2002, p. 18). favoured the northern economy at the expense of the South’s Dal Lago and Halpern (cf. MARTUCCI, 2007, pp. 230- remark in passing on the 332). Those that remained differences between the in the South continued to be American and Italian Souths. subjugated to an exploitative In order to avoid the epistemic regime of “severe subordination violence of historical flattening, … in spite of their formal these critical differences need legal freedom as late as the to be elaborated. Africans were beginning of the twentieth violently captured by slave century” (BEVILACQUA, traders, forcefully removed 2002, p. 66). Critically, the from their homelands and foundational difference that placed in lethal modes of separates the American and transport across the Atlantic, Italian Civil Wars is that the with the resulting death of American Civil War was, at least 2 million captives; regardless of the problematic Africans were sold at auction economic and political agendas and thence placed under slave that inscribed the North’s regimes of systemic subjugation abolition of slavery military campaigns, about the and exploitation. Southern . This is a Italians were never forcefully non-negotiable difference that removed from the homelands; opens a disjunctive fault line rather, because of catastrophic between the two wars. Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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Leone’s historical erudi- or large landed estates that tion is evidenced by the fact tied southern Italian landless that, in contradistinction to Dal peasants to the “landowners by Lago and Halpern’s above-men- particularly usurious contracts” tioned claim that the move to (DAL LAGO 2002, p. 200). He understand the military con- then proceeds to articulate the frontation between the Italian parallel legacies left in the wake North and South in terms of of the conclusion of the respec- a civil war is a recent devel- tive civil wars, focusing on the opment, he well understood self-construction of both Norths that the historical actors who as “liberators” of “the southern were contemporaneous withcivil masses,” who were represent- warthe Italian war described and ed in the northern discourses named it precisely as a “as helpless victims longing for . Enea Pasolini, a lancer in help coming from the outside” the Piedmonteseuna army vera writingguerra (DAL LAGO 2002, p. 210). This civilein the 1860s, describes what is binary construction effectively unfolding as “ worked, Dal Lago argues, to cre- ,” a “true civil war” (PASO- ate “a history of dependency of LINI, 2005, p. 56). Gigi di Fiore the two souths upon the norths documents how the term “civil for social change and it contrib- war” entered the vocabulary of uted to northern discrimination the period precisely in order ac- against ex-slaves in the Ameri- curately to describe the milita- can South and against peasants rised Piedmontese campaigns in the Italian South” (DAL LAGO, that were being conducted in 2002, p. 210). the South (MARTUCCI, 2007, p. Dal Lago, however, then 219). Dal Lago, in his “Radical- proceeds to make the extraor- ism and Nationalism, 1830-60,” dinary claim that “the actual in the same volume, delineates shape that the discrimination the fundamental difference be- took was different, because of tween the regime of slaverylatifon- the non-existence of a racial fac- that subjugated African Ameri- tor in Italy” (DAL LAGO, 2002, p. cans and the system of Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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210). This is an untenable claim “language of the parliamentary that flies in the face of the his- debates on brigandage was im- torical evidence, and it is very bued with racialised terms, and much in keeping with the on- the language of pathology, of19 going elision by Italian histori- degeneration, of inferiority” ans of the crucial role that race (1998, p. 11). As a self-declared played in the process of Italian Meridionale, Leone was fully Unification and its subsequent cognisant of this entrenched Civil War. Vito Teti is one of the racialised history and he effec- few historians to document and tively embedded it representa- analyse the constitutive role tionally in his films. As I discuss of raceLa in Razza the constructionMaladetta The of in the closing section of this DamnedItalian identity. Race His landmark essay, many of the directors, text, ( scriptwriters and, crucially, the ), meticulously actors were also reflexive of The Good, The Bad and documents the insistent and of- this racial history. the Ugly ten rabid racialisation of South- In erners by the North throughout , Tuco embodies the the course of the nineteenth Southerner. In a rare move for and into the twentieth centu- Leone, unlike any of the other ries by such figures as Alfredo main characters in the film who Niceforo, Cesare Lombroso, remain largely blank in terms of Giuseppe Sergi and so on. The their biographies, he has Tuco work of these scholars, as Teti speak of his history of poverty demonstrates, established a and disenfranchisement. In an racist canon that effectively in- exchange between Tuco and fluenced northern politicians, Father Pablo Ramirez, Tuco doctors, psychiatrists, magis- says philosophically, “where we trates, anthropologists, jour- come from, if one did not want nalists and the larger domain to die of poverty, one became a of northern popular culture. As priest or a bandit.” In this pithy Marta Petrusewicz notes, the biography, Tuco encapsulates 19 “il linguaggio dei dibattiti parlamentari sul brigantaggio era impregnato di termini razziali, di malattia, di digenerazione, di inferiorità.” 41 Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017. DOSSIÊ

the options available to the confronted by the squalor and Southerner post-unified Italy. In misery in which the prisoners the film, Betterville, the prison- were held, made no moves to er of war concentration camp, disguise his profound contempt emerges as a metaphor for the for the southern prisoners of concentration camps to which war: he describedapud them as little southern prisoners of war were more than “dregs” and a “herd dispatched following their cap- of carrion” ( MARTUCCI, ture by northern forces. The 2007, p. 215). then-Minister of War, Manfredo The most infamous of these Fanti, estimated that there were camps was Fenestrelle (cf. IZZO, about “30,000 or 40,000 pris- 1998, pp. 73-89). Francesco oners of war” thatapud were now Proto Carafa, a politician of the under the aegis of the Pied- period, denounced the condi- montese military ( MAR- tions of these camps in the Ital- TUCCI, 2007, 215). The Pied- ian parliament: montese regime constructed a They [the prisoners of war] are treated worse than vast carceral archipelago that convicts. What crime have extended across the peninsula they committed, compelling and that was defined by puni- the Piedmontese Government to explain why it has indulged tive regimes of torture and the in such cruelty? Why has it deprivation of the most elemen- tortured with starvation and tary needs (ANGNOLI, 2005, immobilisationapud and prison20 men born in Italy like us? 12). The southern prisoners of ( IZZO, 2005, p. 89). war were effectively framed by Leone’s powerful evocation classist and racist categories The Good, The Bad of the Piedmontese prisoner of that worked to legitimate the and The Ugly war camps in imposition of these punitive works to stage a carceral regimes (MARTUCCI, resonant crossover between the 2007, p. 203). General La Mar- Italian and the American Civil mora, charged with inspecting Wars. An Italian newspaper these concentration camps and ? 20 “Sono essi trattati peggio che i galeotti. Qual delitto hanno commesso eglino, perchè il governo piemontese abbia a spiegar tanto lusso di crudeltà Perchè abbia a torturare Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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of the period (1861), in an Scarpino sardonically remarks, impassioned denunciation of “The children of the brigands the appalling conditions within themselves took care 21 to ‘self- which southern prisoners deport,’ by emigrating” (2005, were held, clearly referenced p. 156). Through the process the African American brethren of the Southerners’ “self- across the Atlantic and the deportation,” I would add, the then-unfolding US Civil War North’sterroni racialised chickens when it declared that Italy’s came home to roost, as millions southernpeggio cheprisoners non si fawere coi beingnegri of were compelled to schiavitreated as badapud as Black slaves migrate to northern cities in (“ order to escape the grinding ”) ( MARTUCCI, poverty and unemployment 2007, p. 219). of the South, a region virtually The contempt felt by the untouched by Italy’s post- Piedmontese government war “economic miracle.” toward the southern prisoners Lee Broughton locates the of war is best illustrated by emergence of Spaghetti the fact that it considered the Westerns at this historical option of ethnically cleansing juncture: Around three million the newly-formed nation of Southern Italians had been its unreconstructible human forced to migrate North in detritus by deporting the search of work during the 1950s and the rude reception prisoners of war either to the that these dark-skinned Portuguese colonies in India or Southerners received in the British colony of Australia Northern cities – and the poverty-stricken conditions (SCARPINO, 2005, p. 155). that they had to endure – Here the lines of colonialism, resulted in the longstanding empire and race intersect and economic, cultural and racial tensions that had proceed to amplify themselves traditionally existed between across transnational and the North and the South of geopolitical axes. As Salvatore Italy becoming the subject con la fame e con l’inerzia e la prigione uomini nati in Italia come noi?” 21 “A ‘deportarsi’ i figli dei briganti avrebbo poi provveduto da soli, con l’emigrazione.” 43 Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017. DOSSIÊ

of growing public discourse. Angel Eye’s henchmen, whilst The Italian Western was born out of this historical moment held captive in the prisoner (BROUGHTON, 2016, p. 84). of war camp, is performed to It was in this period that Ennio Morricone’s haunting Southerners living in the ballad “The story of a soldier.” The music, as a sign of North’safricano cities would be racially civilisational culture, is what categorisedmarocchino by Northerners as “‘ ’ [African] and accompanies the physical ‘ ’ [Moroccan]” violation and trauma of Tuco, (BROUGHTON, 2016, p. 84), as embodiment of the South. even as Southerners effectively Leone thereby opens a violent worked under exploitative disjunction between the North’s and squalid conditions, doing claims to civilisational culture the jobs that Northerners saw and its deployment in the as beneath them. Broughton South of campaigns of torture underscores how Spaghetti and massacre that included Westerns increasingly assumed decapitating their southern the dimensions of political victims and displaying their allegories that addressed the heads on stakes in town squares tensions and crises of the and crossroads as symbols period. The Southernisation of deterrence.apud “Politics,” says of the Western not only Leone, “are never absent from encompassed political, racial my films” ( FRAYLING, and economic concerns, it also 2012, p. 306); neither, I would extended to the very aesthetics add, is history. The graphic of the genre, including the use display of executed and of “traditional Sicilian folk mutilated bodies that inscribes Leone’s civic landscapes instruments”Pupari (BONDANELLA, 1983, p. 256) and elements of references this historical the or Sicilian puppet practice. The mutilated theatre (FRAYLING, 2006, p. corpses of Southerners 131). were, in the manner of the The torture of Tuco by lynching photographs of the American South, photographed 44 Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017. DOSSIÊ

by a squadron of mobile component whose members photographers employed by are supposed to watch the the Piedmontese military. They violence as entertainment and were expected to be on call and social leisure, and a subaltern, to make rapid entries into the racialised component, whose militarised zones of operation members are terrorised by in order to photograph both the violence” (MESSINA & DI southern captivescartes and de corpses. vistes SOMMA, 2017, p. 4). These photographers mass- The photographs of tor- produced tured and executed Southern- of their southern subjects, ers were also incorporated both dead and alive, that into the racialised studies of were sent into circulation as criminal anthropologists, such symbolic trophies and macabre as Cesare Lombroso, supplying souvenirs that self-evidenced further positivistic evidence of the subhuman status of their the biocriminal status of South- quarry. These photographs erners. Their corpses were were a huge commercial dismembered and their skulls success and they contributed were sent to be “examined, to the spread, amongst the measured, sectioned and stud- good northern bourgeoisie, ied with attention by military of a visual imaginary that medics, followers of Lombro- confirmed their prejudices of so’s theories” (DI FIORE, 2008, Southerners as the worst of the p. 228). Having examined the worst (DI FIORE, 2008, p. 230). skull of an executed Southerner, Drawing on the work of Perera the brigand Vilella, Lombroso (2014), Messina and Di Somma writes: articulate the manner in which Looking at that cranium, I seemed to have a moment of these trophy photographs illumination on the question worked to establish disjunctive of the nature of the criminal; and asymmetrical regimes he is an active being that reproduces in his person of spectatorship and the ferocious instincts of violence: “the public is … primitive humanity and of the divided between a dominant Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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inferior animals … the love very dirt beneath one’s feet be- of orgies, the irrepressible cafoni hunger for evil in itself, the cause they are uncivilised and desire to not only extinguish savage . Emerging from the life of his victims, but also the desert landscape, Juan man- to mutilate theapud corpse, to rip apart the 22 flesh and to drink ages to flag down a luxurious its blood. ( DI FIORE, stagecoach carrying a number 2008, p. 228) of haute bourgeois passengers. Lombroso’s hantasmagori- The coach driver agrees to give cal picture of the depravedDuck, and You him a lift as a way of perform- Sucker,bestial Southerner is satirically ing a joke by placing a filthy and realised in Leone’s Once savage cat amongst the refined Upon a alsoTime known … The by Revolution the more pigeons. accurately political title of On his entry into the lux- uriously appointed coach, the (1971). In the opening scene of first thing all the passengers the film, the first thing Leone’s ter- ronedo is focus on Juan’s grime-cov- camera focuses on when it turns ered feet: to their horror, a to reveal the character of Juan has literally entered their Miranda (Rod Steiger), a Mexi- inner-sanctum. In a mocking can bandit, are his dust-covered gesture aimed at accommodat- feet. The camera then proceeds ing their civil protocols, Juan to hover over Juan’s feet, as he immediately removes a pair of slowly scrapes them through sandals from his jacket’s pock- the dirt. Leone here establishes et and proceeds to wear them a visual pun that will be ampli- before he moves any further. fied in the coming scenes. Juan’s Juan’s entry causes expressions dirt-covered feet stand as the of disgust and consternation. visual metonymterroni for northern He is then spoken to by one of Italians’ racial slurring of South- the passengers as if he were a erners as , that is, as the child. One passenger duly di- 22 “Vedendo quel cranio, mi sembrò di avere un’illuminazione sul problema della natura del criminale; un essere attivo che reproduce nella sua persona gli istinti feroci dell’unmanità primitiva e degli animali inferiori … l’amore per le orge, la brama irresistibile per il male in sé, il desiderio di spengnere non solo la vita della vittima ma anche di mutilare il cadavere, di squarciare la sua carne e di bere il suo sangue.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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rects him to pull out a small back in the US, “we call them seat from the wall at the back of ‘niggers,’” and then philosophi- the cabin and paternalistically cally reflects that “Every coun- says to Juan: “Now just sit down try has got its own plague. Just and be quiet like a good little like them niggers we got back boy.” Thus begins a chorus of home.” The woman passenger classist and racist abuse from a exclaims that “They are all pro- selection of characters that rep- miscuous. All sleeping in the resent the pillars of upper-class same room … like rats in a sew- society, including a landowner, er.” “Just like animals, because a cardinal, a US businessman that’s what they are,” remarks from the Deep South and so another. Leone here evidences on. As each passenger begins the operations of the biopo- to voice their abuse of Juan and litical caesura that effectively what he embodies, Leone stag- divides the human from the es a choreography of close-ups nonhuman animal, thereby po- that juxtaposes a series of mas- sitioning the nonhuman animal ticating, grimacing and contort- subject as object and as a lower ed mouths that, in turn, effec- form of biological life (cf. PUG- tively reduces the characters LIESE, 2013, pp. 32-46). to a grotesque chorus of vora- All the racist and classist cious orifices, thereby under- slurs voiced against Juan ex- scoring their parasitical status actlyterroni echo those that northern in relation to the all the classes Italians have deployed against beneath them from which they the . Nowhere is this per- draw their wealth and status. haps best encapsulated than in One passenger spits out that the rant by Count Alessandro the likes of the world’s Juans Bianco di Saint-Jorioz, who was are “Animals, that’s what they writing in the context of the are, animals.” The priest chimes Italian Civil War. In his writings in with: “Personally, I consid- (1860-1863), he offers this can- er them unfortunate brutes.” did overview of Southerners: The white businessman from The almost complete absence of a moral sense, the lacking the Deep South remarks that Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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of any elementary knowledge had to be deployed in order to of the dictates of honour, of probity, of modesty; the secure this civilising mission. disorderliness of dress; the On the other hand, he stages immorality in everything in this same scene a caustic and everyone; the robbery, the embezzling, the strikes commentary on the very and the bad faith in the contemporary scene of race- articles of law; everything, class conflict that was unfolding in sum, that is obscene and should be rejected by human terroniin the North’s metropolises with society is found diffused and its large migrant populations of “Questo è il Messico”: The reproduced in grand copies . amidst this miserable people. Class-Race Nexus of the … His [the Southerner’s] Borgate’s Spaghetti Western senses are dumb, his mind Actors is uncultivated, unknown are the dictates of good and23 evil, he is an animal, a brute (SAINT-JORIOZ, 2005, pp. The race-class nexus that 340-343). Leone has Mexican characters Leone, in the stage coach like Juan or Tuco embody in his scene, works in a double films was, indeed, a felt political register: On the one hand, experience for many of the he establishes a network of southern and Roman working- relations that extends back to class actors that were employed the violence of the Italian Civil to play MexicansL’America in Spaghetti a Roma War and that large archive Westerns. In a largely-forgotten of racist, anti-southern texts documentary, that effectively established (1998), the politics of these the instrumentalist-rationalist actors comes clearly through template that would legitimate during the interviews with the the need for the colonial director, Gianfranco Pannone. annexation of the South and the These little-known actors lived enormity of the violence that in the outer suburbs of Rome, 23 “la mancanza di senso morale pressoché totale, la nessuna elementare conoscenza dei dettami d’onore, di probita, di pudore; la sregolatezza nei costume; l’immoralità in tutto e in tutti … la rapina, il malversare, lo sciopero e la malafede fatti articoli di legge; tutto insomma ciò che vi è di lado ed di riprovere nella umana Società si trova in gran copia diffuso e penetrato in queste misere popolazioni.… I suoi sensi sono muti, la sua Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

48 DOSSIÊ borgate terroni terroni in the , marginalised For the , this was in spaces populated by , fact the case: they had lost the sub-proletariat, sex workers battle in the Italian Civil War and queers. One of the terms and were reduced to exiles who used by the dominant culture had to flee their own lands due to describe these marginalised to the infrastructural poverty spaces exposes the complex and disenfranchisement that imbrication of race, colonialism had been imposed by the and exclusionvillaggi from abissini the” North on the South; they were civic culture of hegemonicapud refugees in the very country to Italianness: “‘ whom they apparently owed (‘Abyssinian villages’)” ( allegiance and that had, in FORGACS, 2014, p. 32). Here name only, officially designated Italy’s colonial outposts in North them as “Italian citizens.” The Africa, specifically, Abyssinia, non-white nomenclatural are symbolically imported back terms,borgate “Abyssinian villages” and into its metropolises precisely in “Koreas,” deployed to describe order to demarcate the internal the , work to construct borders of racialised otherness.borgate racialised geographies that are Yet another term deployed to internal to the nation, even as name the marginalised they symbolically demarcate was and excise these same spaces “coree” (“Koreas”), a term from the corpus of the Italian that emerged shortly after the Korean War of 1950- nation. Simultaneously, these 1953 and that apparently was non-white terms evidence the derived from the fact that the racialising operations through established residents of the surrounding areas saw the which northern Italians sought migrants, most of whom were to secure and consolidate from poor areas of southern their purchase on whiteness or northeast Italy or from Yugoslavia, as “like exiles, and, tautologically, on their refugees, like people who had borgateEuropeanness. As I discuss lost a war” (FORGACS, 2014, below, the residents of the p. 32). were reflexive of these mente incolta, ignoti i dettami del bene e del male, è un animale, un bruto.” Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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apud racialising operations and, in declares: “This is Mexico!” clear gestures of solidarity, ( PANNONE, 1998). In they defiantly embraced and this instant, Spoletini names celebrated their collective the geocorpographical relation affiliation with those racially that inextricably ties a cluster borgata designated as outcasts. of subalternised people under As he films in the one sign, “Mexico” – a sign that of Mandrione, situated on binds cinematic fictions with Rome’s outskirts and that once the embodied and lived realities had a film studio that rivalled of struggle, institutionalised Cinecittà, Pannone narrates: disenfranchisement, classism, “Mandrione is the other face racism and colonialism across24 of the economic miracle. Drop- different geopolitical spaces. outs from the economic miracle In the course of the lived here. Migrants from the interview, Spoletini says: “I felt South and Rome’s underclass … more Mexican than American, people who struggled to make because the Mexicans were ends meet” (PANNONE, 1998). always mistreated, they were One of the interviewed a people that was always Spaghetti Western actors, harassed by the Americans (…) it is a political question. I Guglielmo Spoletini, says:borgate “The only played an American a few worldborgate of the Mexicans has been transferred amidst our . times, because my sympathy The are populated with lay with this people who were poor and who were subjected real Mexicans becauseborgate these people continue to struggle to so many harassments” (PANNONE 1998). Spoletini across all of Rome’s apud. Mexico is all around us and further elaborates his political Rome sits in the middle” ( vision in the context of the PANNONE, 1998). roles he played in Spaghetti borgata As he walks through the Westerns: “The Mexicans are streets of the , Spoletini like Indians: they always lose. They’ve always fought to win 24 For a discussion of the term “geocorpography,” see Pugliese (2007). Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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apud their freedom. The Indians by southern Italian peasants, are still suffering. Whenever we’d have been stopped” ( Requiescant I played a Mexican, I felt I was PANNONE 1998). really fighting for something” is a wonder- (PANNONE, 1998). The fully subversive film on many impassioned manner in which levels, not the least in Lizzani’s political affect was embodied choice to have the director Pier in these actors’ performances Paolo Pasolini – openly and, for is powerfully evidenced by the the period, notoriously gay – words of Tomas Milian, the play a pious priest who simul- Cuban actor who was a staple taneously advocates liberation in so many Spaghetti Westerns: theology and revolution. Pasoli- The fact that I was a Latino made me love my characters ni, in true drag fashion, crosses even more, because I always the costumes of peasant, priest had inside my head:The ‘YouBig and revolutionary in order to Gundownson of a bitch’ … Towers (a white character in queer the heteronormativeborgate ) the bounty killer, macho characters of tradition- Towers the Anglo, and how al Westerns. Rome’s he racistically greets me in a certain way, so that fed my would, of course, give birth to anger (GREGORY 2005). so many of Pasolini’s charac- Requiescant Carlo Lizzani, the director ters and they would provide the locations for a number of his of (1967), set in the Leone’s Metafigural time of the Mexican Revolution, Allegoriesfilms. draws attention to how many directors were compelled to cast their political stories in I commenced this essay allegorical mode because a by tracing a brief historical itinerary of the agave and prickly regime of “censorshipRequiescant was imposed by the market. If pear in the context of Italian instead of making , South. Tracking the imperial, which was a metaphor for colonial, racial and geopolitical revolutionary aspirations, we’d histories that have inscribed made a film on an uprising these plants, I then proceeded to Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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establish points of connection of the West’s multiple Souths, between the different Souths they emerge as vegetal nodes that are bound in topological of distributed cognition that relations that extend from the embody histories that, for me, Americas across to the lands would otherwise have remained of the Mediterranean. As I invisibilised and unspeakable. remarked in the opening pages As epistemological agents, they of this essay, these relations delineate a complex discursive establish the geopolitical network that establishes lines formation that I have termed of relations that encompass the “Mediterranean-Atlantic” multiple levels of imperial (PUGLIESE, 2008, p. 8). My power and colonial violence, entry into these histories including Spanish, Anglo- of parallelism, intersection, American and Piedmontese- rupture and differentiation Italian. Discursively, they effect was literally enabled by my a topological enfolding of reflection on the existence of various Indies (both American the agave and prickly pear in and southern Italian), parallel the land of my birth, Calabria, civil wars (USterroni and Italian) and and their inscriptive status as subaltern subjects (Native nativised imports. As nativised Americans, , Mexicans), imports, these two plants mark even as they mark, through a domain of signification that their dis/placements and references, always already, the celluloid virtualities, the multiple Souths of the West and fault lines of rupture and their intersecting, differential incommensurable difference and colliding histories. that inscribe the subjects These plants have enabled of these geocorpographical me to excavate and trace the assemblages. complex historical layers and In questioning my re- intertwined politico-historical evaluation and valorisation of relations that I have discussed these two plants, one might in the course of this essay. As argue that the agave and prickly actors in the various dramas Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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pear are mere bit players in in terms of their signifying Spaghetti Westerns and that, as status. On the one hand, they such, they can be dismissively stand as vegetal literalities that relegated to the marginalised self-represent the signifiers domain of accessories that are “agave” and “prickly pear” and eccentric to the field. Yet, it is the the doubly resonant signified: very fact that these two plants “plants of the Americas’ Souths.” occupy, in deconstructive terms, In the wake of 1492 and the “a corner whose eccentricity imperial and colonial histories assures the solid concentration that this historical moment of the system, participating unleashed, the polyvocality that in the construction of what these plants now speak cannot it at the same time threatens be categorically isolated and to deconstruct” (DERRIDA, divided. This polyvocality is 1989, p. 73). As I demonstrate what establishes the conditions below, as mere mise-en-scéne bit players of possibility for the emergence whose roles are confined to the of the allegoricalof mode. As actors literal edges of a in thein landscapes of a South – for example, the agavesFor that a that is at once the Americas Fewliterally Dollars populate More the corners and the Mediterranean, they of the final shoot-out in set the stage for the possibility – the agaves of the ruse of ‘authentic’ visions assure the construction of the of the US Southwest and Mexico representational system of a to be realised – simultaneously Mexican border village (Agua as they work to allegorise, for Caliente) that, at the same time, example, the racial and colonial through their very Spanish history of the Italian South. location (Los Albaricoques, The extraordinary power of Almeria), they deconstruct. Leone’s films resides, I contend, The agave and prickly in his ability to magnetise pears that populate Spaghetti the tensions, similarities and Westerns must be seen as at differences that result from once denotative and connotative this topological formation of polyvocality, intersection, Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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difference and aporia. His also need to be seen as films compel the viewer to metafigural, and this is perhapsOnce ask: Which South of the West Uponmost memorablya Time inemblematised the West is being represented? Which in the opening scene of Southerner is speaking? Which . history of the South is being Leone, at one point, positions addressed? The impossibility Frank’s henchmen inside the of supplying either/or answers railway station in a setting to these questions underscores that unequivocallyLas Meninas evokes and the deconstructive power of plays with Velázquez’ famousLas the allegorical mode when it Meninaspainting (1656). is operating at the metafigural Leone made a close study of level. The palimpsestic and during his repeated metafigural dimensions that visits to the Prado Museum inscribe Leone’s work, and that when he was filming in Spain. make it impossible to isolate and He viewed the painting, in his demarcate categoricalThe borders, Good, words, “as much about the theis perhaps Bad and bestthe Ugly illustrated by process of image-making as it the manner in which was about its ostensible subject is at once matter.” He underscores how he about the American Civil War, saw the “painting as parable” the Italian Civil War and, by that influenced him in terms of geocorpographical definition, its representation of outsiders, the Spanish Civil War – the film including “the beggars, the was shot largely in Spain, with infirm, the apud dwarfs,” and its the anti-Franco, pro-Republican extraordinary metavisual town of Almeria serving as one qualities ( FRAYLING, of the key filming locations. 2012 p. 233). As in Velázquez’ Leone’s films have Baroque painting, the figures been celebrated for their in the railway station are metacinematic qualities and situated in a complex interplay their rich layers of intertextual of perspective, interlayered citations. His films, however, frames, foreground and depth, light and darkness, illumination Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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and obscurity, mirrors and topology sets in disarray the reflections, and multiple gazes. seemingly fixed points of the Encapsulated in this scene of the compass and it enables the film are Leone’s signature visual emergence of geographical tropes and, simultaneously, the coordinates that conjoin the metafigural forces that inscribe West to its many Souths and his work. that superimpose spatio- Leone’s Westerns are temporal configurations that metafigural precisely because defy categorical delimitations. they establish, in Paul De Leone’s tropic transpositions Man’s terms, allegories “of a and metafigural re-citations figure (for example, metaphor) destabilise univocal meanings. which relapses into the figure It is precisely because Leone’s it deconstructs” (1979, p. 275). West is, in his filmic hands, In contradistinction to the ineluctably other to itself that the West’s many Souths come canonical US Westerns, whereis” References the West is presumed to be self- into filmic being. identical to25 itself (the West “ I lager dei Savoia the West), in Leone’s films the AGNOLI, F. M. Prefazione. In IZZIO, West emerges as an allegorical F. : Storia infame del Risorgimento nei campi di figure that can be neither self- concentramento per meridionali. identical nor autotelic as it is Napoli: Controcorrente, 2005, p. bound by an inextricable system 7-23. Spaghetti Westerns of topological, differential and BETTS, T. Foreword. In WEISSER, aporetic relations; as such, T., : The it relapses into the figure it Good, the Bad and the Violent: deconstructs: in other words, A Comprehensive, Illustrated the West, in Leone’s films, is Filmography of 558 Eurowesterns always already its Other/Wests/ and Their Personnel, 1961-1977. Souths. Here a deconstructive Jefferson, North Carolina and

25 This shifts in the late 1960s, following in the wake of the rise of the Native American Red Power movement and the US massacres perpetrated in the Vietnam War, with the West also assuming, in a number of US films, the allegorical mode in order to comment on these significant socio-political events (cf. ROLLINS & O’CONNOR, 2003). Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

55 DOSSIÊ italiana o sia giornale di letteratura, scienze ed arti. London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1992, pp. xi-xiii. BEVILACQUA, P. Peter Kochin’s Milano: Imperiale Regia Stamperia, ‘American South’ and the Italian 1822. Mezzogiorno: Some Questions DAL LAGO, E. and HALPERN, R. about Comparative History. In Two Case Studies in Comparative The American South and the DAL LAGO, E. and HALPERN, R., History: The American South Italian Mezzogiorno and the Italian Mezzogiorno. In The American South and the : Essays in DAL LAGO, E. and HALPERN, R., Italian Mezzogiorno Comparative History. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002, pp. : Essays in Italian Cinema: 60-72. Comparative History. Basingstoke BONDANELLA, P. and New York: Palgrave, 2002, pp. From Neorealism to the Present. 3-25. London: Continuum, 1983. DAL LAGO, E. Two Great Migrations: BRAUN, A. Eating Spaghetti by American and Italian Southerners Atlas Obscura the Fistful Was Once a Neapolitan in Comparative Perspective. In The American South and the Street Spectacle. , DAL LAGO, E. and HALPERN, R., Italian Mezzogiorno: 8 May, 2017. http://www. atlasobscura.com/articles/ Essays in Euro-Western: spaghetti-eaten-by-hand-naples. Comparative History. Basingstoke BROUGHTON, L. and New York: Palgrave, 2002, pp. Allegories of Reading Re-framing Gender, Race and the 197-214. ‘Other’ in Film. London and New DE MAN, P. : York. I. B. Tauris, 2016. Figural Language in Rousseau, CILENTANO.IT. Opuntia ficus- Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust. New Notizie e manifestazioni indica: il fico d’india. Cilentano. Haven and London: Yale University dal Cilento e dall’Italia L’Italia e il suo IT: Press, 1979. dramma politico nel 1861 . 2017. DE SIVO, G. http://ilcilento.altervista.org/ . Memoires for Paul blog/opuntia-ficus-indica-il-fico- Napoli: Editoriale Il Giglio, 2002. The Films of de Man dindia/ DERRIDA, J. Sergio Leone CUMBOW, R. C. . New York: Columbia Controstoria . Lanham, Marylands: University Press, 1989. Biblioteca dell’unità d’Italia Scarecrow Press, Inc, 2008. DI FIORE, G. DA VARI LETTERATI. : Fatti e misfatti Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

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del Risorgimento. Milan: Rizzoli, Antistoria del Risorgimento e Viaggio in Calabria 2008. del brigantaggio. Milano: Oscar Lager dei Savoia: DIDIER, C. . Mondadori, 2011. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, IZZO, F. I Storia A Certain Lack of 2008. infame del Risorgimento nei campi Coherence: DURHAM, J. di concentramento per meridionali. Cinematic Uses of the Writings on Art and Napoli: Controcorrente, 2005. Past. Cultural Politics. London: Kala LANDY, M. Press, 1993. Minneapolis and London: FERRARI, G. Un deputato in University of Minnesota Press, Il Brigantaggio Navajo Talking Picture: Pontelandolfo distrutta. In 1996. Meridionale DE JACO, A., LEWIS, R. : Cronaca inedita Cinema on Native Ground. Lincoln dell’Unità d’Italia. Roma: Editori and London: University of Radical Frontiers in L’Invenzione Riuniti, 2005, pp. 168-70. Nebraska Press, 2012. the Spaghetti Western: dell’Italia Unita: FISHER, A. MARTUCCI, R. Politics, 1855-1864. Violence and Popular Italian Milan: Sansoni, 2007. Cinema. London and New York: I. MESSINA, M. and DI SOMMA, T. Italy’s Margins: B. Tauris, 2014. Unified Italy, Southern Women FORGACS, D. and Sexual Violence: Situating Social Exclusion and Nation the Sexual Assault TV ‘Prank” Formation since 1861. Cambridge: Against Emma Marrone Within Sergio Leone: Tropos, Cambridge University Press, 2014. the Dynamics of Contemporary Comunicação, Sociedade e FRAYLING, C. Italy as a Scopic Regime, Cultura Something to Do with Death. Minneapolis: University of , vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. Spaghetti Westerns: Italian Identity Minnesota Press, 2012. 1-18. in the Kitchen, or Food and FRAYLING, C. MONTANARI, M. the Nation Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: I. B. . New York: Columbia Italian Journeys, . The Racial Camp Tauris, 2006. University Press, 2013. 1786-1788 and the Production of the GOETHE, J. W. PALOMBO, L Political Citizen, . London: Penguin, Il sangue del sud: 1970 [1816]. PhD Thesis, GUERRI, G. B. Macquarie University, 2015, pp. Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

57 DOSSIÊ Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, 181-271. PASOLINI, E. Immondezzaio vol. 3, no. Il Brigantaggio Meridionale: fisico e morale. In DE JACO, A., 1, 2007, http://www.acrawsa.org. au/. Cronaca inedita dell’Unità d’Italia. PUGLIESE, J. White Historicide and Australian Humanities Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2005, pp. the Returns of the Souths of the Review 56. South. PERERA, S. Dead Exposures: , vol. 42, 2007, http:// Trophy Bodies and Violent www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/ Borderlands Visibilities of the Nonhuman, archive/Issue-August-2007/ , vol. 13, no. 1, 2014, Pugliese.html. Come il Issues pp. 1-26. PUGLIESE, J. In the Ruins of Meridionale divenne una in Travel Writing: PETRUSEWICZ, M. Diaspora. In SIEGEL, K., Questione: Empire, Rappresentazioni del Spectacle, and Displacement. New Sud prima e dopo il Quarantotto. York: Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 229- Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino 244. Storia della Hollywood’s Indian: Editore, 1998. ROLLINS, P. C. and O’CONNOR, Calabria: PLACANICA, A. J. E. The Dall’antichità ai giorni Portrayal of the Native American nostri. Roma: Donzelli editore, in Film.Lexington: University The Botany of Desire: 1999. Press of Kentucky, 2003. POLLAN, M. SAINT-JORIOZ, A. B. Un militare Il Brigantaggio Meridionale: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. si guarda intorno. In DE JACO, A., State Violence and London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Execution of Law: PUGLIESE, J. Cronaca inedita dell’Unità d’Italia. Torture, Black Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2005, pp. Sites, Drones. Abingdon and New 340-43. Village Voice, York: Routledge, 2013. SARRIS, A. Spaghetti and La guerra PUGLIESE, J. Whiteness and the Sagebrush. vol. 19, cafona, extracommunitari . La guerra ‘cafona’: Blackening of Italy: no. 26, September 1968. Portal and SCARPINO, S Provisional Street Justice, , Il brigantaggio meridionale contro vol. 5, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-35. lo Stato unitario. Milano: Boroli Australian Critical La Razza Maledetta: PUGLIESE, J. Geocorpographies Editore, 2005. of Torture. TETI, V. Muiraquitã, UFAC, ISSN 2525-5924, v. 5, n. 2, 2017.

58 DOSSIÊ The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Origini del pregiudizio LEONE, S., dir. Once Upon a Time antimeridionale. Roma: Manifesto , 1966. Terra Inquieta: in the West, Libri, 1993. LEONE, S., dir. Duck, You Sucker TETI, V. Per 1968. un’antropologia dell’erranza LEONE, S., dir. , Requiescant meridionale. Soveria Mannelli: 1971. Filmography Rubbettino, 2015. LIZZANI, C., dir. , The Spaghetti L’America a 1967. West Roma GREGORY, D., dir. PANNONE, G., dir. A Fistful of Dollars , 2005. , 1998. LEONE, S., dir. , For a Few Dollars 1964. Data de recebimento: 05/12/2017 More LEONE, S., dir. Data de aceite: 30/12/2017 , 1965

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