Abstract
The study of Italian political history is a privileged prism for the unfolding of alternative and sometimes competing modernities. The figurations of political thought and culture that emerged in twentieth-century Italy can be seen as a microcosm of Europe’s twentieth-century age of ideologies. To think about Italy less as a latecomer to modernity and more in terms of its composite Mediterranean and European specificities means to reopen its historical archive and reassess its history.
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Notes
- 1.
Karl D. Bracher, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, trans. E. Osers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984).
- 2.
Bruno Latour, Nous n'avons jamais été modernes: Essai d'anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991) [English translation: We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)].
- 3.
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Anthony Giddens; Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
- 4.
On how cultural anthropology has constantly made an effort to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices, see the classic work by Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
- 5.
Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996); Franco Cassano and Danilo Zolo L’alternativa mediterranea (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2007); Franco Cassano, Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean, trans. N. Bouchard and V. Ferme (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). See also Franco Cassano and Claudio Fogu, ‘Il pensiero meridiano oggi: intervista e dialoghi con Franco Cassano’, California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–14, http://escholarship.org/uc/ismrg_cisj?volume=1;issue=1 (last accessed: November 11, 2015).
- 6.
Manlio Graziano, The Failure of Italian Nationhood: The Geopolitics of a Trouble Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 7.
Jane Schneider (ed.), Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998); Jane and Peter Schneider, Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860–1980 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996).
- 8.
Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (New York: Academic Press, 1976); see also Jane Schneider, Peter Schneider and Edward Hansen, ‘Modernization and Development: The Role of Regional Elites and Non-corporate Groups in the European Mediterranean’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 14, no. 3 (1972): 328–50.
- 9.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
- 10.
Jane Schneider, ‘The Dynamics of Neo-orientalism in Italy (1848–1995)’, in Schneider, Italy’s, 1–23: 5.
- 11.
Manfred Pfister, ‘Introduction’, in The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italian of British Travellers: An Annotated Anthology, ed. M. Pfister (Amsterdam, Atlant: Rodopi, 1996), 1–21: 3; Maurizio Ascari,’ ‘Shifting Borders: The Lure of Italy and the Orient in the Writings of 18th and 19th Century British Travellers’, in Maurizio Ascari and Adriana Corrado (eds.), Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines (Amsterdam and New York: Rododi, 2006), 227–36: 227–8.
- 12.
Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkampfe (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010).
- 13.
See, for example, Stuart Woolf (ed.) L’Italia repubblicana vista da fuori (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), in which the red thread of the essays is Italy as an anomalous, weak, or incomplete democracy.
- 14.
John A. Agnew, ‘The Myth of Backward Italy in Modern Europe’, in Beverly Allen and Mary Russo (eds.), Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 23–42: 28.
- 15.
Cassano, Pensiero, 3.
- 16.
Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. J. Treyo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
- 17.
Arpad Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 2000; Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
- 18.
For this and other criticism see Alessandro Carrera’s discussion ‘Idola mediterranea’ at the roundtable Il mondo visto da Sud e “La prima volta.” Una conversazione con Franco Cassano, ed. Massimo Lollini, in California Italian Studies 4, no. 2 (2013): 9–14 http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wz6n8z1 (last accessed: November 23, 2015).
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Forlenza, R., Thomassen, B. (2016). What If We Were Never Modern?. In: Italian Modernities. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49212-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49212-8_10
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