Emigration in Italian Nation Identity Construction from Postwar To
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Spaesati d’Italia: Emigration in Italian National Identity Construction from Postwar to Economic Miracle By Fabiana Woodfin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mia Fuller, Chair Professor Barbara Spackman Professor Gene Irschick Spring 2011 1 Abstract Spaesati d’Italia: Emigration in Italian National Identity Construction from Postwar to Economic Miracle by Fabiana Woodfin Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Mia Fuller, Chair Since the founding of the Italian nation in 1861, mass emigration has played a crucial role in the construction of a national identity among a population historically divided by regional, ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences. In the aftermath of the Second World War, emigration continued to fulfill a vital function in Italy’s national redefinition. In material terms, it enabled Italy to rebuild a devastated political and economic framework in a manner that allowed old power blocs to evade the restructuring of traditional relations of production. Yet emigration proved equally essential for redrawing the cognitive map of the nation, laying out the new ideological terrain upon which material reconstruction was to take place. In the ideological vacuum that followed the collapse of Fascism and the nation’s loss of foreign colonies, postwar emigration narratives proved fundamental for carrying out a project of collective redemption that cleansed Italians from the stain of Fascism while restoring the colonial imaginary that had traditionally governed the nation’s relationship with its South. By supplying at once absolution for past sins and an archaic internal Other against which the new nation could measure itself, postwar representations of emigration helped pave the way for Italy’s transformation into a “modern,” post- Fascist democracy, a founder of the European Union, and one of the world’s leading economies. This dissertation examines emigration narratives produced in literary and filmic texts spanning from 1945 to 1964 in works by key figures of Italian postwar culture such as Carlo Levi, Ignazio Silone, Rocco Scotellaro, Mario Soldati, Aldo Fabrizi, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. By examining shifting forms of interdiction that placed migrant Others outside the moral, spatial and temporal boundaries of the nation, this research aims to illustrate how the emigrants’ textual presence gave shape and meaning to the new nation, bringing into focus the contours of a new republic emerging from the ashes of Fascism. i TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………… iii 1. IMMURING THE COLONY IN CARLO LEVI’S CRISTO SI È FERMATO A EBOLI …………………………………………. 1 Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli Carlo Levi and Ignazio Silone Carlo Levi and Rocco Scotellaro Conclusion 2. THE WAY WE NEVER WERE: FASCISM AND ABSOLUTION IN NEOREALIST EMIGRATION NARRATIVES ……….……………… 35 The “Solution” of Emigration The Privileged Sphere of Cinema Defining Neorealism Neorealism and the Redemptive Mission Mario Soldati’s Fuga in Francia (1948) Aldo Fabrizi’s Emigrantes (1949) Conclusion 3. LA FABBRICA DI ITALIANI: ECONOMIC MIRACLE, INTERNAL MIGRATION, AND NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION ………………... 59 The Economic “Miracle” Internal Migration ii The Nation and the Internal Other Milano, Corea / Milano, Italia From Clan to Nation: Fofi’s L’immigrazione Meridionale a Torino Cinematic Representations of the Miracle Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli and the Gramscian Alliance Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone and the Genocide of the Subproletariat Conclusion 4. CONCLUDING REMARKS ………………………………………………. 95 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………… 101 iii INTRODUCTION Criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso once observed that “emigration is the only resource that allows us to sadly govern Italy.”1 This confession, which appeared in the 1898 edition of In Calabria, formed a strident contrast with Lombroso’s negligible treatment of emigration in the original 1862 text, where emigration was barely mentioned, and only as evidence of the South’s deviance with respect to the rest of the nation. Lombroso’s about-face on the importance of emigration in Italian national affairs provides an insight into the increasingly powerful role that emigration came to play in shaping the Italian national imaginary after the formation of Italy as a nation-state in 1861. Emigration did indeed prove essential for “governing” Italy, as Lombroso claimed, but in a double sense, for while it constituted a major factor guiding the nation’s political and economic choices for over a century, it also, and perhaps especially, provided the sort of figurative material that “governed” how the Italian nation was imagined at home and abroad. In 2003, Donna Gabaccia wrote that “without Italians, or an Italian nation, it is difficult to write with much confidence about an Italian diaspora.”2 While her claim intended, quite justifiably, to shed light on the problem of searching for a unified, homogenous diaspora in Italian emigration history, the aim of my research originates from the reversal of this perspective, setting out to illustrate how without an Italian diaspora it would have been difficult to speak of Italians or of an Italian nation, since the representation of emigration has been one of the major grounds upon which the Italian nation has been articulated. The important ideological function served by emigration narratives is not surprising, given that the phenomenon of mass emigration has been so fundamental an aspect of modern Italian culture and society. Historically, Italian emigration has exceeded that of any other country in recorded world history, including that of Britain and China.3 Between 1876 and 1988, 27 million Italians emigrated – a staggering number if one 1 Cesare Lombroso, In Calabria (Sala Bolognese: A. Forni, 1898), 166. 2 Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1. 3 Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1. See also Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Italian Diaspora, 1876-1976,” in The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, ed. Robin Cohen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114-122. iv considers that this was the entire population of Italy in 1871 and half of its current population.4 If we consider the additional 4 to 9 million5 who migrated internally, from southern to northern Italy, during the 1950s and 1960s, post-World War II emigration alone constitutes approximately 40% of the Italian emigration phenomenon. Yet scholarly attention has tended to privilege the turn-of-the-century period6, a limit which in part explains why it is la grande emigrazione (“the great emigration”) that remains so dominant in Italian recollection while the far more recent experience remains much more elusive in collective memory. The tendency to ignore or minimize the extreme recentness of the phenomenon springs from the long-standing view, in Italy, of emigration as an affront to national pride, a belief with roots sinking back to the beginnings of mass emigration – and of the nation itself – in Italian history. On the one hand, emigration was perceived as a necessary evil, an ideal “release valve” that allowed Italy to eschew the threat of social unrest posed by chronic unemployment and poverty, especially in the South. This position was embodied by Francesco Saverio Nitti, a southern economist, journalist and politician. Nitti’s first text, written in 1888, when he was twenty years old, synthesized the pro-emigrationist viewpoint, arguing that to suppress or limit emigration was cruel and unjust, since the poverty of the South relegated it to a sad and fatal alternative: o emigranti o briganti (“either emigrants or brigands”).7 On the other hand, mass emigration also provoked feelings of enormous embarrassment. For the leaders of a young nation struggling to project an image of economic and colonial prowess on par with other European powers, mass emigration provided rather damning evidence of a pre- industrial economy, eliciting the dictum, so offensive to the colonial ambitions of the Liberal and Fascist states, that Italian emigration constituted a form of colonialismo straccione (“beggar colonialism”). This position, which guided Italian emigration policy until the end of the Second World War, was upheld by nationalists like the writer and politician Enrico Corradini and the poet Giovanni Pascoli, both of whom argued for the necessity to turn Italy’s emigrant masses, scattered across the globe, into a colonizing force in Africa.8 4 Antonio Golini and Flavia Amato “Uno sguardo a un secolo e mezzo di emigrazione italiana,” in Storia dell’emigrazione italiana I, eds. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina de Clementi, and Emilio Franzina (Roma: Donzelli, 2001), 50. These official figures should be approached with some caution, however, as they do not account for clandestine emigration, and are thus conservative, at best. 5 Figures vary according to whether they reflect only “official” changes of residence, which were far fewer than “illegal” internal migrations due to a Fascist anti-urbanization law that remained in effect until the 1960s, as discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. 6 See for instance Ercole Sori, L’emigrazione italiana dall’Unità alla seconda guerra mondiale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984); Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many