Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism in the Italian Diaspora
by Pasquale Verdicchio. Fairleigh. Madison: Dickinson University Press, 1997.

Pasquale Verdicchio is professor of Italian at the University of California at San Diego. He has translated numerous Italian writers into English. He has written extensively on Italian and American culture, as well as Italian American and Canadian Italian literature. He is the author of a collection of essays, Devils in Paradise (Guernica collected poems, The House Is Past (2000), in addition to numerous translations of Italian writers, including Antonio Porta, Pier Paolo Passolini, Mary Ardizzi, and was published this year by Guernica Editions. From 1994-1996 he was president of the Canadian Italian Writers Association. Born in Naples, Italy, Verdicchio immigrated to Canada at the age of twelve with his family and attended schools in Canada. He completed his graduate studies in Italian literature at UCLA.

Bound by Distance is a comprehensive work on the dialogue he believes is necessary between Italian and North American cultures. It is Verdicchio’s contention that both Italy and North America have not done enough to facilitate a discourse between the two countries over the influence and meaning of Italian immigration. Furthermore, Verdicchio contends that such a discourse can only deepen not only our understanding of immigration, but it will also aid reconciling Italy’s to its long-debated “Southern Question.”

For North American Italians opening the lines of discourse between their Italian past will bring them a better understanding of the complex cultural position that they occupy between Italy and North America. To borrow Verdicchio’s title, the “house” that North American Italians currently inhabit has a little if not totally misunderstood “past.”

As Verdicchio points out, Italy did not acknowledge the existence of the hundreds of foreign Italian colonies that had settle the world outside Italy until the late 1980s. Furthermore, Italy has never wished to confront the internal social and cultural problems that began that massive immigration of Southern Italians to North America and other parts of the globe.

It is widely understood that the mass immigration that occurred from the South was the manifestation of serious economic problems in the South. But even more important to Verdicchio, less widely understood, even by Italian Americans, is that the mass immigration that occurred was also the result of equally serious cultural problems in Italy. As Verdicchio points out, it is a telling historical fact that within a generation of the unification of Italy in 1870 and the overthrow of foreign domination that had lasted for centuries, millions of Southern Italians left their homeland. Why wasn’t’ this a time for rejoicing and hope for the long-suffering Southern Italian peasantry?

As Verdicchio points out in his opening chapter, “The South as Dissonant National Subject,” Southern Italians were not supportive of unification. After years of subjugation by foreign governments, the French and Spanish Bourbons chief among them, Southern peasants were not easily swayed by yet another hegemonic force that came from the North. As Verdicchio writes in the subsection of his chapter entitled, The Risorgimento and The Exclusive Nation: Unification as Colonial Subjugation, the southern peasantry had every reason to be suspicious of any northern invading army, even if it began in Sicily under the leadership of a liberator named Giuseppe Garibaldi. Verdicchio reminds us of the well-known saying, still relevant today in Italy, “Italy ends at Rome. Naples, Calabria, Sicily, and all the rest are part of Africa.”

In the remainder of the section, Verdicchio delves into great detail on the proposed reforms and other political shortcoming of the unification government that never ultimately delivered on its promises to the southern peasantry. He also explains that in its quest for a unified state and culture, the North has often overlooked the southern peasantry’s reasons for resisting to the unification of Italy. The notion of a unified, monocultural Italy, Verdicchio argues, is a myth that hides not only Italy’s true cultural diversity, but it also cloaks the cultural divisiveness and fundamental inequality that continues to exist today between the North and the impoverished South.

At the basis of the problem, as Verdicchio explains in another subsection of the same chapter entitled The Question of Race, the North held well-defined racists views against all southern Italians.

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Verdicchio writes that “Far more influential than post-Unification Southern resistance to annexation in the contemporary North/South debate have been the works of positivist anthropologists” who argued that Southern Italians were racially inferior to Northern Italians.

Several “scientist” constructed racial categories based on naturalistic Darwinian evolutionary theory in which Southern inferiority became an unquestioned “scientific fact.” One of the most often quoted books was Giuseppe Sergi’s Ari ed italici (Arians and Italics 1898). Sergi argues that Southerners are descendents of Africans and posits the theory that the two distinct Italic “races” are so different that unification of the Italian population would be impossible. He went on to argue that Northerners had even a greater affinity for culture and civilized behavior than Southerners. Sergi’s and his other supporters would only find their ideas complimented in the United States in Madison Grant’s The Decline of the Great Race (1916), which lead ultimately to the passage of the 1924 exclusion laws, passed to stop the flow of Southern European and Asian immigration to the United States.

These same pseudo-scientific racial theories would also appear later in both Hitler’s and Mussolini’s racial laws implemented in both Germany and Italy before and during World War II.

Though Verdicchio hastens to point out that some Italian intellectuals did come to the defense of Southerners at the time and have continued to do so over the decades since the war, their arguments have never been enough to eradicate from Italian culture this racist division between the North and the South. Northerners’ prejudice against Southerners remains even today the only truly indigenous form of racism that exists in Italy. As Verdicchio points out, it is an attitude that remains alive and well in the politics of Umberto Bossi and The Northern League which wants to divide Italy in half. The only possible exception is that Bossi wants Rome to be a part of the South.

In Chapter two, “The Subaltern Written/The Subaltern Writing: Standing Figuration of Southern Cultural Expression,” Verdicchio deals with the location of the Southerner in Italian culture. He discusses in detail the manifestations of racial stereotypes, especially Neapolitan, that persist in Italian culture today. He treats the question of how the subaltern peasant can find a way of speaking and becoming a contributor to “official” culture.

As Verdicchio points out, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his poetry, prose, and films, is one of the most important commentators on the exploitation of the subaltern subject in Italian culture, as well as in other colonized countries. Pasolini made a connection between the subaltern subject both within and without Italian society, between the cultural position of the southern Italian and the colonized in places such as Africa. Pasolini’s The Savage Father, (Guernica ), translated by Verdicchio, is an interrogation into the psychological and social effects of British colonization in Africa. Pasolini sees a connection between both internal and external forms of “colonization.”

In Chapter 3, “Bound By Distance: The Italian Immigrant as Decontexualized Subaltern,” Verdicchio gets closer to home and to the application of the commonality shared by all Italians, those who remain in Italy and those of us who, even generations removed, share with Italy from the Diaspora. As Verdicchio writes, “The impact of the massive movements of Italian emigration have yet to be fully recognized or assessed” by both the Italian government and scholars both in Italy and abroad. By implication, nor have immigrant and post-immigrant North American Italians assessed the continuing influence of those racial laws that marginalized them and their ancestors in Southern Italy. What influence does the cultural position—both economic and racial--that drove so many Southerners to abandon their homes still have on their position today in North America?

Verdicchio sees a common cultural bond that he argues continues to exist between Italy and not only Italian immigrants but their assimilated second and third generations descendants. In spite of the great success of Italian immigrants abroad, Italians still maintain that common prejudice against Italian emigrants. It is not hard to understand why. More than 85% of Italian immigrants were Southerners. Verdicchio points out “that certain dismissive attitudes are still very much at work in how emigrants are regarded” in the study of emigrant literature in Italy. Verdicchio argues that Italians, including Italian Americans, must acknowledge this fundamental problem in their marginalization in the historical process in both Italy and North America.

According to Verdicchio the cultural bridge between Italy and its “colonies,” as well as between the North and the South in Italy, is in the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Born in the impoverished region of Sardinia, Gramsci was among the first Italian writers to understand that fundamental cultural rift that divided the North from the South and to articulate the inherent racism that formed the Northerner’s view of the Southerner.

Not only does Gramsci help us to understand the “Southern Question” internally in Italy, he helps us to understand its component and related part: “the Italian immigrant as decontexualized subaltern” in the broader scope of Italian and North American Italian culture. As subaltern subjects, Italians as ethnics in both Canada and America share a similar role in the national cultures as the Southerner does today in Italy.

Verdicchio would even argue that they share this position even in their more advanced stages of cultural and economic assimilation. This is manifest in Verdicchio’s view by North American Italians’ their lack of identity with Italian culture and their lack of identity as North American Italians within their host countries, Canada and America. As Verdicchio points out, wherever they may live, in Italy or North America, “Southern Italians have always straddled the categories of white and nonwhite, a situation that served the racist purposes of the nationalist movements in Italy as well as those of the ethnic purists in the U.S. and Canada.”

As Gramsci points out, the South as a colonized region never developed an indigenous intellectual class that could articulate its position historically in Italian culture. Similarly, it has taken North American Italians more than three generations to create that intellectual class need to reposition them in both Canadian and American cultures. While obvious stereotypes abound, North American Italians have watched in both frustration and silence.

Verdicchio goes on to give examples of the untenable position of North American Italians, from their absence in the bipolar British/French conflict in Canada, to their categorization as “white” in the Black/White racial polarity in America exemplified in the films of Spike Lee.

However, Verdicchio rightly believes that such a simplistic bipolar definition of culture and race is masking of the true complexity and diversity of North American Italian subjectivity. For example, in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, regardless of what may have been Lee’s intention in the film, Verdicchio believes that there are “various crossover relationships within the film” that challenge the simplistic, stereotypical black/white dichotomy on the surface of the film.

As the cultural and historical products of their subaltern peasant heritage, Italian American men share a greater affinity with their supposed black antagonists in the film. Verdicchio argues that this is a cultural position that Lee refuses to grant, at least consciously, to his Italian American subjects in the film. By implication, of course, Verdicchio is arguing that Italian American, confused about their own “racial” history in both Italy and North America, readily accept Lee’s obliteration of their historical position as the subaltern subjects of both racial and cultural inferiority.

In the final chapter, “A New Way of Being Gramscian,” Verdicchio analyses how Gramsci’s theories, undeveloped as they are in his scattered writing, can help to see through the cultural facades that both racism and consumerism create in modern society, in both Italy and North America. Referring again to both Gramsci and also Pasolini, Verdicchio argues that folklore, for example, is not an inferior cultural expression, but the legitimate cultural expression of subaltern people. Since historically they have been denied the creation of an intellectual class, their voice must be understood in its various manifestations and injected into any national discourse over culture.

Verdicchio analyses recent manifestations of popular, folk culture in the international hip-hop rap phenomenon that has been a factor in youth dialect bands in Italy. On another level, He also goes on to discuss in detail many Canadian and American Italian writers who address, not the separation between black and white or the simplistic bipolar Canadian cultural war between the French and British, but the connections that we share culturally and socially.

Verdicchio’s work is one of he most important studies that has been published on Italian emigration and North American Italian culture in recent years. The work challenges stereotypical, racist notions about Southern Italians. He demonstrates how these same racist attitudes have influence not only the status of all Italians, including their off spring, in both Canada and America. His work aids in defining that Italian cultural self in its relationship historically to Italy and in its reconstruction in North America. Most important of all, he challenges convincingly the boundaries that separate ethnic groups both nationally and internationally and demonstrates that Italians in the Diaspora and Italians in Italy are, indeed, bound by distanced.

Prof. Ken Scambray, a correspondent for I’Italo-Americano for over twenty years, teaches North American Italian literature at the University of La Verne. He is the author of A Varied Harvest: The Life and Works of Henry Blake Fuller (Univ. Pittsburgh Press) and The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada (Guernica Editions), Surface Roots, (Guernica), and Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press). He is co-founder of Italian American Writers of Southern California.

 

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