Equivocal Subjects

Between Italy and Africa -- Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema

Shelleen Greene

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781472535214
• eBook ISBN: 9781441107442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Equivocal Subjects puts forth an innovative reading of the Italian national cinema.Shelleen Greeneargues that from the silent era to the present, the cinematic representation of the "mixed-race" or interracial subject has served as a means by which Italian racial and national identity have been negotiated and re-defined.She examinesItaly's colonial legacy, histories of immigration and emigration, and contemporary politics of multiculturalism through its cultural production, providing new insights into its traditional film canon. Analysingthe depiction of African Italian mixed-race subjects from the historical epics of the Italian silent "golden" era to the contemporary period, thisenlightening bookengages the history of Italian nationalism and colonialism through theories of subject formation, ideologies of race, and postcolonial theory. Greene's approach also provides a novel interpretation of recent developments surrounding Italy's status as a major passage for immigrants seeking to enter the European Union. This bookprovides an original theoretical approach to the Italian cinema that speaks to the nation's current political and social climate.

Chapter 1

From “Making Italians”
to Envisioning Postcolonial Italy

The silent historical epic Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) begins on the island of Sicily. The island’s geographical position between Italy and North Africa and centuries-long history of invasion and colonization have problematized its relation to and inclusion within the Italian national community. The modern Italian nation-state was unified in 1861 through a process of internal colonization by which the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia incorporated the southern peninsula and Sicily. However, even prior to national unification, the island was constructed as the liminal point of Italy, the location where the country seeks to erect borders and define itself as part of Europe. As its current status as a major point of entry for African immigrants attests, Sicily continues to trouble the boundaries between Europe and the African continent.

Sicily’s heterogeneity and enduring liminality in relation to peninsular Italian can be seen in the island today, which hosts one of the largest Tunisian communities outside of North Africa.¹ In their study of the two cities, La Goulette in Tunisia and Marzara del Vallo in Sicily, the Milan-based research collective Multiplicity documents interactions among fishermen, domestic workers, and temporary migrants whose movements between the two cities challenge sovereign borders that attempt to construct a strict demarcation between “Europe” and “Africa.” One commentator even states that Tunisia is “just like Europe” and should be considered for membership in the European Union.²

When Cabiria was released in 1914, Italy had ended its national unification process a little over 50 years prior. Viewed by northern Western European countries as the “south” of Europe entire, Italy’s newly established borders and nation-state status helped to construct a fictitious, homogeneous “Italian” population to distance the country from Africa and the Levant. Cabiria, the story of a Sicilian girl captured and enslaved in Carthage (present-day Tunisia), is read as a celebratory document that marks both the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification and the country’s conquest of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania (present-day Libya) in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12.

The film takes as its historical backdrop the struggle between Rome and Carthage, the North African city and mercantile empire established in the ninth century BC. During the first of the three Punic Wars (third and second centuries BC), Rome, still an expanding power, captured Sicily from the Carthaginians, and sought possession of Carthage’s lucrative Mediterranean trade routes.³ After the final conquest of Carthage in 146 BC, the city was rebuilt as the capital of the Roman province of Africa, and became the major agricultural center of the Roman Empire.⁴ Just as Rome captured Sicily from the North African city-state during the First Punic War, so the Italian south and Sicily were incorporated as part of the modern nation-state by the Italian north. Through Cabiria, Italy’s conquest of Libya is constructed as the recurrence of the ancient Punic War toward the destined fulfilment of the “second” Roman Empire. As a nationalist document, Cabiria also narrativizes the inextricable connection between internal and external colonialism in the founding of the Italian nation-state.

In this chapter, I approach Cabiria as a text that manifests anxieties surrounding the nation-building project and the construction of Italian racial and national identity during the country’s Liberal era (1876–1914). For this discussion, I turn to the character Maciste, a figure of racial ambiguity in the film. Cabiria marks the first appearance of Maciste, who would later become a popular strongman icon of the Italian cinema through a cycle of films released over the next two decades.⁵ First portrayed by Bartolomeo Pagano, a Turin dockworker originally from Genoa, Maciste remained a popular film icon, appearing as late as the 1950s and 1960s in the peplum films of the era.

In a recent retrospective of the Maciste film cycle starring Pagano, curators Stella Dagna and Claudia Gianetto refer to Maciste as the “Numidian slave” of Cabiria’s protagonist, the Roman patrician Fulvius Axilla.⁶ His designation as “Numidian” makes him North African. It is the first and last Maciste screen appearance in which he is portrayed as a nonwhite, non-Italian national subject. In subsequent Maciste films starring Pagano, Maciste is portrayed as having a stable, “white” identity, as a defender of the nation, and as the model of a virile, Italian masculinity, an image later adopted by Benito Mussolini.⁷ As Giorgio Bertellini explains, “[Maciste’s] racial otherness is rapidly tamed not only ideologically—he appears fully integrated into Italian society—but also physically: his blackness is utterly erased.”⁸

Although not frequently mentioned in discussions of Cabiria or the Maciste icon, the film’s director, Giovanni Pastrone, originally conceived him as non-Italian. In a 1913 letter to the most prominent fin de siècle Italian writer of his day, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who penned the intertitles for Cabiria, Pastrone compliments D’Annunzio’s creation of the Maciste character, but adds that in the film the character will be of “another nationality.”⁹ In the second half of this brief note, Pastrone writes of a further change to the Maciste character: “I made him mulatto.”¹⁰ Pastrone’s note suggests that the status of “mulatto,” of mixed Italian and African descent, already designates the subject as non-Italian. With such brief commentary on the character, we cannot know the full extent of Pastrone’s intentions, or confirm Maciste’s racial and national identity in Cabiria. However, both Pastrone’s suggestion that the character of Maciste be a nonwhite, non-European subject, and that Maciste is performed by Pagano, a “white” Italian national subject, are both significant to my discussion. The character is not “white” European (neither Mediterranean nor Aryan), and was not conceived, at least by the director, as fully Italian. Pastrone’s statements are given further credence by Maciste’s physical appearance on screen; Pagano is cosmetically darkened to perform the role.

Based on the discussion above, we can begin considering how Maciste’s mixed-race status operates as a metaphor for Italian nation-state building and colonial expansionism during the Liberal era. The representation of raced subjects and racial hierarchy in the silent Italian historical epic film speaks to the connections between Liberal Italy’s nation-building project and its colonial endeavors in Africa. These constructions of national identity, based on the legacies of the ancient Roman Empire, were a means of imagining a unified Italian nation, one that, as Bertellini comments, covered over “deep internal tensions and divisions (for example the southern question and brigandage), mass emigration, repeated military defeats on international fronts, and weak cultural practices of mass politics and national bonding.”¹¹ Rather than looking at the transition from the “black” to the “white” Maciste, my study focuses on Cabiria’s mixed-race Maciste, as well as other cinematic representations of mixed-race subjects in the subsequent fascist and postwar periods. While Cabiria is a nationalist text, in its construction of Liberal Italy as the second Roman Empire, the film also expounds a racial discourse that seeks to reconcile the relation between the Italian south as internally colonized “other,” and the newly acquired North African territories. More than simply constructing “bad” Numidians, Cabiria points to Italy’s own racial ambiguity, both within its national borders and in relation to Western Europe and Africa.

As a mixed-race subject, Cabiria’s Maciste can be read as figuring the post-unification division of Italy into north and south, one that constructed the nation as composed of two racially distinct regions. Beginning in the mid-1870s, in order for the recently unified country to rationalize the persistent economic disparity between northern and southern Italy, the southern question emerged as a collection of discourses that constructed the nation as divided into two racially distinct regions. As Eliza Wong explains, southern question discourses “described a duality between northern and southern Italy and what was perceived as the social, economic, moral, cultural, and biological/racial inferiority of the south.”¹²

Introduced by Neapolitan writer Pasquali Villari, notably in his 1875 article “Lettere meridionali” (“Southern Letters”) for the Roman journal L’Opinione, the southern question, as circulated among northern academics, socialists, social scientists, intellectuals, and social reformers collectively known as meridionalisti (southernists), was an attempt to address and resolve the economic, political, and social problems of the Italian south. During the pre- and post-unification periods, the southern regions and Sicily were imagined as places of land-owning elites that ruled over farmer-peasants in a system similar to feudalism, as a land of brigandage, mafia, illiteracy, political corruption, and poverty. This south was juxtaposed to a more industrious, profitable, and morally superior north. In “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926), Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci provides insight into how southernist discourses were framed and deployed in the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that the negative depiction of the south served to divide the industrial workers of the north from joining with the agrarian southern laborers in order to prevent these two forces from overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Gramsci writes:

It is well known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in innumerable ways by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie among the masses of the North: the South is the ball and chain that prevents a more rapid progress in the civil development of Italy; Southerners are biologically inferior beings, either semi-barbarians or out and out barbarians by natural destiny; if the South is underdeveloped the fault does not lie with the capitalist system, or any other historical cause, but of the nature that has made Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric . . . The Socialist Party gave its blessing to all the “southernist” literature of the clique of writers of the so-called positivist school, such as Ferri, Sergi, Niceforo, Orano, and their lesser followers, who in articles, sketches, stories, novels, and books of impressions and memoirs, repeated the same tune in different form. Once again “science” was used to crush the wretched and abused, but this time it was dressed in the colours of Socialism, which claimed to be the science of the proletariat.¹³

Although the peninsular south and Sicily were constructed as liminal or non-European spaces prior to national unification, it is only after unification and the emergence of the southern question that the north/south division was formally examined as a problem of racial difference between the Italian northern and southern populations.¹⁴ Anthropologists such as Enrico Ferri, Cesare Lombroso, and Alfredo Niceforo attributed the economic, political, and social strife of the peninsular south and Sicily to the populations’ racial inferiority, placing them on level with peoples from Africa, Asia, and the Levant.¹⁵ In fact, the economic disparity between the two regions was exacerbated in the post-unification era by a central government that favored northern business interests. The north, because of its vicinity to European markets, became Italy’s industrial center, and government financial resources were directed toward economic development in these regions. The south suffered from a lack of government and industrial development, leaving it at an economic disadvantage in relation to the north, a disparity that in many ways still persists.¹⁶

Second, Cabiria’s mixed-race Maciste—a Numidian slave who becomes a hero for the Italian working classes by serving as a faithful servant to Roman Fulvius Axilla—speaks to the intrinsic relation between the internal colonization of the peninsular south and Sicily by the north, and the country’s external colonial enterprise in North and East Africa. Several scholars have argued that Italian unification can be read as a form of internal colonization, an occupation of the peninsula’s southern regions and Sicily (ruled by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) by the northern Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia.¹⁷ As Bouchard notes, after the 1861 unification, “the Savoy turned the Kingdom into a supplying base of natural resources and cheap human labor by way of a liberalized agenda that severely weakened the southern economy through trade blocks and tariff structures while impoverishing the peasantry in the erosion of collective land-use rights.”¹⁸ By the 1880s, internal colonization of the south and Sicily became an external colonization program in North and East Africa that sought to alleviate the economic and political exploitation that resulted from national “unification.”

Beginning in the 1880s, advocates for African colonization, among them Italy’s first Sicilian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, argued that the colonial enterprise offered new territories that would alleviate overpopulation and high unemployment in the south.¹⁹ In this manner, African colonization can be interpreted as a solution to the social, political, and economic crises stemming from the internal colonial occupation of the south and Sicily by the Italian north, including massive emigration to the Americas, other parts of Europe, and Africa, and anti-unification resistance, particularly in the form of brigandage. As Verdicchio explains:

In the final analysis . . . Crispi’s imperialist program was but an extension of the Piedmontese expansion into southern Italy. Unification, though not officially sanctioned as such, was nothing if not colonialist in nature. Resistance to it was represented as criminal and was therefore discounted as having no sociopolitical validity. Further, the annexation and repression of southern Italy belongs chronologically to a period of colonial expansion.²⁰

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Italy attempted and failed to establish itself as a European imperial power. Because Italy had just ended centuries of foreign domination and only recently established a unified kingdom, the financial and material resources were not available for a campaign that would serve Italian interests. Gramsci provides some insight into the colonialist impulse at this moment in the post-unification period:

Capitalist Europe, rich in resources and arrived at the point at which the rate of profit was beginning to reveal its tendency to fall, had a need to widen the area of expansion of its income-bearing investments; thus, after 1890, the great colonial empires were created. But the still immature Italy not only had no capital to export, but also had to have recourse to foreign capital for its own pressing needs. Hence there was lacking any real drive behind Italian imperialism, and it was substituted for by the strong popular passions of the peasants, blindly intent on possessing land.²¹

According to Gramsci, colonial expansionism further concealed the economic disparities between the north and south. Due to the promise of land, the people of the Italian south supported the colonial project overseas. The rush to stake a claim in the African continent was partly driven by Italy’s desire to become a European imperial power and the potential for economic gain, but also to alleviate internal problems caused by unification.

Although colonies were established in Somalia and Eritrea beginning in the 1880s, Italy’s imperial ambitions were stunted after their defeat in the 1896 Italo-Abyssinian war. Thus, along with celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of unification and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1:  From “Making Italians” to Envisioning Postcolonial Italy
• Chapter 2:  Mixed-Race Relationships in the Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginary
• Chapter 3:  Negotiations of Mixed-Race Identity and Citizenship in the Postwar Cinema and Beyond
• Chapter 4:  Transatlantic Crossings: Representing Hierarchies of Whiteness in the Cinema of the Economic Miracle
• Chapter 5:  Zumurrud in her Camera: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Global South in Contemporary Italian Film
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright