Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema 9781441190437, 9781472535214, 9781628928686, 9781441136145

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Equivocal Subjects

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Equivocal Subjects Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema

Shelleen Greene

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Continuum International Publishing Group 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com © Shelleen Greene, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. EISBN: 978-1-4411-3614-5 A part of Chapter 3 has been previously published as “Il Mulatto: The Negotiation of Interracial Identity in the Italian Post-War Narrative Film,” in Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema, ed. Grace Russo Bullaro (Leicester: Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2010), 25–60. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greene, Shelleen. Equivocal subjects: between Italy and Africa—constructions of racial and national identity in the Italian cinema/by Shelleen Greene. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-9043-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4411-9043-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Racially mixed people in motion pictures. 2. Race in motion pictures. 3. Blacks in motion pictures. 4. Africa, North—In motion pictures. 5. Italy—In motion pictures. 6. Motion pictures—Social aspects—Italy. 7. Motion pictures—Political aspects—Italy. I. Title. PN1995.9.R23G84 2012 791.43’652905--dc23

2011038820

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the United States of America

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To Roma Webb-Greene and to the late Mr Albert Hollander

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Contents

List of Figures Filmography Acknowledgments Introduction

viii ix xi 1

Chapter 1: From “Making Italians” to Envisioning Postcolonial Italy

14

Chapter 2: Mixed-Race Relationships in the Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginary

50

Chapter 3: Negotiations of Mixed-Race Identity and Citizenship in the Postwar Cinema and Beyond

116

Chapter 4: Transatlantic Crossings: Representing Hierarchies of Whiteness in the Cinema of the Economic Miracle

185

Chapter 5: Zumurrud in her Camera: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Global South in Contemporary Italian Film

210

Conclusion

253

Notes Bibliography Index

266 289 301

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List of Figures

1.1 Maciste and Fulvius Axilla

32

1.2 Gerima at the Dogali monument, Piazzale dei Cinquecento, Rome

46

1.3 Gerima in the Piazzale dei Cinquecento with the descendants of those who fought at Dogali

47

2.1 Enrico and Elisabetta in the Rainbow Bar

89

3.1 Angelo

124

3.2 Catari and the image of the Black Madonna

142

3.3 A scenario for mixed-race unions in the Italian Republic

145

3.4 Making a case against racial integration

145

3.5 Lee evokes the Italian and African American encounters from Italian neorealist films

169

3.6 A bust of a “native” female marks Marcella’s racial “in-betweenness”

177

3.7 Racial performance as a means of questioning cinematic realism

178

4.1 Encounter between the Sicilian “immigrant” and the black American

197

C.1 The “survivor”

260

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Filmography

Adwa: An African Victory, directed by Haile Gerima (1999; Washington, DC: Mypheduh Films, 1999) VHS. Angelo, directed by Francesco De Robertis (1949; Italy and USA: Scalera Films S.p.a., 1951) Film. Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (Notes for an African Orestes), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1970; Bologna: Cineteca Bologna, 2009) DVD. L’assedio (Besieged), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (1998; New York, NY: New Line, 1999) DVD. Bianco e Nero, directed by Cristina Comencini (2008; Italy: 01 Distribution S.R.L., 2008) DVD. Cabiria, directed by Giovanni Pastrone (1914; New York, NY: Kino Video, 2000) DVD. Il Decamerone (The Decameron), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1970; Los Angeles, CA: MGM World Films, 2002) DVD. La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman), directed by Marco Ferreri (1963; Italy: Surf Video, 2011) DVD. Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1974; London: British Film Institute, 2001) DVD. fuori/outside, directed by Kym Ragusa (1997; New York, NY: Third World Newsreel) VHS. Il gattopardo (The Leopard), directed by Luchino Visconti (1963; New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2004) DVD. Gomorra (Gomorrah), directed by Matteo Garrone (2008; New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2009) DVD. Mafioso, directed by Alberto Lattuada (1963; Italy: Rialto Pictures, 2002) DVD. Miracle at St. Anna, directed by Spike Lee (2008; Los Angeles, CA: Touchstone, 2009) DVD. Il Mulatto, directed by Francesco De Robertis (1949; Italy: Scalera Films, S.p.a.) Film. Paisà (Paisan), directed by Roberto Rossellini (1946; New York, NY: The Criterion Collection: 2010) DVD. Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate), directed by Franco Brusati (1974; Fort Wayne, IN: Hen’s Tooth Video, 2002) DVD. La ragazza dalla pelle di luna (Moonskin), directed by Luigi Scattini (1972; Aquila Cinematografica – P.A.C.) VHS.

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Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom), directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1975; London: British Film Institute, 2001) DVD. Senza pietà (Without Pity), directed by Alberto Lattuada (1948; Italy: Cecchi Gori, 2009) DVD. Sotto la croce del sud (Under the Southern Cross), directed by Guido Brignone (1938; Italy: Consorzio Italiano Noleggiatori Filmi (CINF) and Esperia Film Distributing Col. Inc.) Film. Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill), directed by Giuliano Montaldo (1989; USA: Westlake, 2002) DVD. Violenza segreta (Secret Violence), directed by Giorgio Moser (1963; Italy: Globe International Film) Film. Western Union: small boats, directed by Isaac Julien (2007; London: Isaac Julien Studio, 2009) 35 mm, DVD Transfer.

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the generous support of many institutions, colleagues, advisors, and friends. When this project first began in 2004, the School of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, provided initial funding for research in the United States and Italy. In the United States, I benefited from the facilities and resources at the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC); the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library (New York, NY); the UCLA Film and Television Archives (Los Angeles, CA); and the Film Archives at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY). I also extend thanks to the archivists and librarians at the LUCE Institute (Rome), the State Archives (Rome), the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and Luigi Chiarini Library (Rome), the Cineteca di Bologna and Renzo Renzi Library (Bologna), the Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna), and the Archivio Nazionale Cinematografico della Resistenza (Turin) for their assistance with locating materials and films unavailable in the United States. I would also like to thank the PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, which encouraged the interdisciplinary approach of this project. Fatimah Tobing-Rony, Akira Lippit, and Jared Sexton provided guidance, pointed criticism, and encouragement throughout the writing and revision stages of this project. The Department of African American Studies and the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, also provided financial support in the form of research assistantships. In addition, I thank the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts, Office of the Dean, Department of Art and Design, Department of Film, the Center for International Education, and the UW-Milwaukee Graduate School for providing travel and research awards to present various stages of this project at conferences and to complete

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Acknowledgments

additional research at institutions in the United States and Italy. I also extend thanks to the University of Wisconsin Institute on Race and Ethnicity for providing a Faculty Diversity Award (Spring 2011) that gave me crucial time to complete the final research and revision stages of this project. I express particular gratitude to Enrico Diadarrio at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Rome), the librarians and archivists at Renzo Renzi Library and Cineteca di Bologna, and Roberto Chiesi of the Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini for their engaging discussions and insightful suggestions for the project. Of course, many friends, advisors, and colleagues have offered guidance, advice, and encouragement over the years. In particular, I wish to acknowledge Gilberto Blasini, Vicki Callahan, Nina Cartier, Dave Harris, Giordana Kaftan, William Keith, Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Beretta Smith-Shomade, Kathy-Ann Tan, Louise Zamparutti, Sandra Zito, Brian Schmidlin, Igor Solunskiy and the staff at the UW-Milwaukee Video and Multimedia Production department, and my colleagues in the Department of Film and the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I also want to express gratitude to friends that I’ve made in both the United States and Italy, including those who are no longer with us. Finally, I give special thanks to Roma Webb-Greene and the late Albert Hollander for their unflagging love and support.

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Introduction

As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, Italy is in the process of defining its “new” multiracial and multicultural society. The country’s history of emigration is often referenced to highlight its present status as a destination country, a position garnered within a three-decade period that saw the rise of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe within its national borders. Italy’s response to postindustrial migration is similar to that of other European Union countries contending with a highly competitive global economy that requires both skilled foreign workers and the cheap labor force provided by clandestine migrants. In Italy, the process of incorporating nonWestern European and nonwhite immigrants has entailed legislative reforms both to manage the influx of new populations and to curb illegal immigration to the country and other parts of the European Union. While Italy has attempted to embrace a multiracial paradigm for the incorporation of non-Western European immigrants and their descendants, it has also seen a xenophobic backlash against migrants, who are viewed as a threat to a racial homogeneity that, for many, is central to the definition of Italy and “Europe” as a whole. In particular, African migration via the shores of Sicily and southern Italy has not only prompted a reactionary response of increased border surveillance, detention facilities, and racial violence, but also a reevaluation of the relationship between Italy and Africa that extends beyond the most recent 30-year period of postindustrial migration from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, and other north and sub-Saharan African countries.1 Italy’s transition to a multiracial society can be seen in the April 2008 election of the country’s first parliamentary member from sub-Saharan Africa, Jean-Leonard Touadi, a university professor and journalist originally from the DP Congo. The same election, however, gave a third term to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and his center–right coalition, Forza Italia, whose political appeal draws upon the perceived connection between illegal immigration and increasing crime rates, and whose proposed reforms included prison sentences for illegal immigrants and

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DNA testing to verify blood relations for immigrants seeking to join family members already residing in the country. As the country’s center–right coalition negotiates its immigration policies with calls from the European Union for nondiscriminatory legislation, Italy’s current role in the maintenance of the “boundaries of Europe” can be evaluated in light of its geographic proximity to Africa, the country’s internal racial heterogeneity, and its colonial legacy in North and East Africa. These aspects of its history shed light on the country’s complex response to racial diversity domestically and internationally, from dealing with the plight of African migrants’ desperate and often fatal attempts to reach Europe by way of Sicily and southern Italy, to Berlusconi’s inimitable description of President Barack Obama as “young, handsome and tanned.” The recent election of Italy’s first black mayor, Sandy Cane (referred to as “Italy’s Obama” due to her mixed African American and Italian heritage), on an anti-immigration platform as candidate for the ethno-regionalist Northern League Party, further complicates an analysis of contemporary Italian racial politics. The Northern League’s assertion of the north’s ethnic and cultural difference from central and southern Italy, which has been used as a platform for northern secession, ironically calls attention to the ethnic and racial heterogeneity that the nation-state formation subsumes. While Cane’s inclusion within the Northern League speaks to the possible expansion of the criteria for Italian citizenship and national belonging, the party’s xenophobic policies toward nonwhite immigrants and southern Italians disavow a longer trajectory of contact and cultural hybridity that are necessary to understanding modern Italian identity formation. Central to understanding Italy’s role in contemporary debates regarding African immigration to the European Union is an investigation of the development of Italy’s racial consciousness and the ways in which racial ideologies are disseminated within the country. To this end, I examine Italy’s national cinema and its role in the construction and circulation of ideas of race and national belonging from the silent to the contemporary period. Equivocal Subjects argues that the processes of Italian racial and national identity formation can be understood through representations of African Italian mixed-race identity in the Italian cinema. My study poses three primary questions to the Italian national cinema: What role has the cinema played in the development and circulation of ideologies of race within the country? How does the representation of “mixed-race” identity—either through the interracial subject or the Italian national subject’s encounter with “blackness” at different moments within the history of the national cinema—mark shifts in conceptual

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paradigms of race and nation? How do these previous enactments of racial and national identity influence contemporary representations of non-Western European migration, Italian and European citizenship? By mixed-race, I speak primarily of persons who are of both Italian and African heritage, including those who emerged from Italy’s colonial enterprises in North and East Africa beginning in the nineteenth century, and persons of Italian and African American descent born during the World War II period. Although a country familiar with racial heterogeneity given its history of foreign invasions, including the Germanic and Asiatic invasions of Rome beginning in the fifth century and the Arab conquest of Sicily in the ninth century, racial mixture has also served as a metaphor for the internal division of Italy between north and south. After the completion of the Risorgimento, Italy’s nineteenth-century struggle for unification, the racial heterogeneity of the population came into question as the country sought to define itself as a modern European nation. The internal division of Italy into a literate, prosperous north and a “backward,” impoverished south is a historical formation that allowed for the development of analytics such as the “southern question,” the assemblage of discourses in the social sciences, medicine, and the humanities that sought to address the socioeconomic and political disparities between northern and southern Italy. Southern question discourses racialized the south by conflating the region with negative stereotypes associated with Africa and the Middle East. As the nation’s internal other, the south’s reformation and incorporation into the newly unified nationstate was central to the nation-building project. My study looks at mixed-race as a trope for the country’s negotiation of its internal racial heterogeneity that continues to the present day. The representations of mixed-race subjects in the Italian cinema not only mark shifts in the definition of “race” and “nation” that have circulated within the country since the late nineteenth century, but also reveal the failure of these categories to secure stable racial and national identities for a given historical period. One reason for a particular focus on Italy for this study is that due to its late unification process the country did not take part in the “scramble for Africa” until the 1880s, by which time other European countries had claimed the majority of the continent. Soon after national unification, Italy began its modern imperialist endeavors in North and East Africa, but when it finally did attempt colonial occupation of Ethiopia (Abyssinia), it initially suffered defeat (notably at the battle of Adwa in 1896), which not only derailed the country’s imperial ambitions but also demonstrated

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that an African country could successfully defeat a European power, thereby signaling the decline of the era of European imperialism. Despite the importance of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance to Western Europe, by the nineteenth century, Italy’s greatness was deemed in its past, and the entire country was seen as “southern,” a region that threatened to destabilize the boundaries that separate Europe from Africa and the Levant. In the context of nineteenth-century imperialism, Italy’s inability to fulfill its imperialist ambitions is also significant in that, according to Marxist scholar Étienne Balibar, Western imperialism allowed European nations to transfer borders (originally emerging with the transition from Christendom to Europe) and place Europe at the “center of the world,” thereby maintaining their hegemony while the colonies operated as “periphery” areas.2 However, Balibar comments: But one could say that in a certain sense it was never completely achieved—that is, the formation of independent, sovereign, unified, or homogeneous nation-states at the same time failed in a very large part of the world, or it was thrown into question, not only outside Europe but in certain parts of Europe itself. (emphasis added)3 Italy’s claim to nationhood status was in many ways tied to its ability to take part in Western imperialism. The failure to enlarge and sustain the “second Roman Empire” marks the country as one of the “periphery” areas described by Balibar. The cultural representations of the mixedrace body figure the country’s peripheral status. Peoples of African and African Italian mixed-race descent have appeared and been portrayed in Italian national cinema throughout its history, from the black American GI in neorealist films as performed by Dots M. Johnson in Paisà (Paisan, 1946) and John Kitzmiller in Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1947), the figures of modernist primitivism in the films of Frederico Fellini Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957), the alluring beauty of Eritrean Italian Zeudi Araya in La ragazza dalla pelle di luna (Moonskin, Luigi Scattini, 1974), the portrayals of contemporary African migration in Pummarò (Michele Placido, 1990), and Waalo Fendo (Where the Earth Freezes, Mohammed Soudani, 1999), to the recent vision of the African diaspora in Italy in Bianco e Nero (Cristina Comencini, 2008). Somewhat less apparent are figures of mixed-race identity such as Angelo Maggio in Francesco De Robertis’ postwar melodrama Il Mulatto (1949) and Italian Eritrean actress Inez Pelligrini in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974).

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Today, African Italians residing in Italy are primarily migrants from African nations formerly colonized by Italy and other European countries and Italian citizens born of African migrants who settled in the country or were brought to Italy at a very young age. Out of the documented immigrants currently residing in Italy, ranging between 6.5 and 7.2 percent of the population, only a small number are from north and sub-Saharan Africa.4 The recent political upheavals in north Africa, particularly in Libya, once part of the Italian East African empire, raise not only the memory of the Italian colonial presence in North and East Africa, but also serves as a reminder that within the last century, Italian citizens of African descent have resided in the country for decades prior to the wave of immigration that began in the mid-1970s.5 My examination of the Italian national cinema through the trope of racial mixture has been informed by several studies devoted to the representation of African immigrants in Italian visual culture, as well as analyses of the representation of the black body during Italy’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial campaigns and in the post–World War II period. A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from PostUnification to the Present (University of California Press, 2003) includes essays that explore how fascist colonial narratives set in Africa register anxieties regarding racial hierarchies and the relation between colony and metropole.6 These studies have brought attention to the presence of black subjects in Italian film, offering a historical context (Italian colonialism in North and East Africa, World War II) by which to examine these subjects and their possible signification in the Italian colonial imaginary. From Terrone to Extracommunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema (Troubador Press, 2010) examines the legacies of Italy’s racialized north/south division, exploring how the construction of the south and its populations as an internal racial “other” informs the reception and representation of nonwhite, non-Western immigrants to the peninsula in the present era. Equivocal Subjects also examines the changing signification of “blackness” in Italian visual culture from its modern colonial to postcolonial periods. As Karen Pinkus notes, the representation of the black body during the Liberal and fascist colonial eras was informed by earlier discourses of “blackness” that predate the nation’s modern colonial era. Pinkus writes: Of course, one finds many more images of the black body during the late thirties than at any other time, but to suggest that blackness

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springs fully grown into the consciousness of the Italian public is to ignore a long and complex iconography that dates back at least to romantic notions of savagery; to nineteenth-century sexology; and to a whole range of allied discourses.7 As seen in the popular literature, travel magazines, anthropological journals, commercial art design, and reoccurring types from marketing campaigns, “blackness” was operative in Italian visual culture from the late nineteenth century through the establishment of the L’Africa Italiana Orientale (the Italian East African Empire) under the fascist regime during the 1930s, and continues to manifest in fashion marketing advertisements that use types established during the fascist era. In an era of commodity multiculturalism, Italy has yet to come to terms with the historical legacy of its colonial past. Hence, contemporary images, such as seen in clothing designer Benetton’s controversial campaigns, are invested within, but not readily interpreted as arising from the economic and libidinal investment in the black body from preceding eras.8 Of particular relevance to my study is scholarship examining the representation of mixed-race subjects in Italian film, though there is little exclusively devoted to the topic. This may be due to a lack of distinction made between African and mixed-race subjects, but I suggest that the mixed-race subject is a unique and particularly effective identity through which to investigate ideologies of race and nation in Italy due to the above-mentioned factors of Italy’s north/south division, racial heterogeneity, and European citizenship.9 A national cinema, argued Andrew Higson, does not represent a homogeneous and stable geographical entity, but rather is a “history of crisis and conflict” in which the indigenous film product is impacted through its insertion and circulation within a global economy.10 Central to this is Higson’s reconsideration of the term national, asking what is entailed in the assignation of this term to a body of films. Rather than taking the concept of the nation as given and presumably understood by the constituents it would hail as national subjects, Higson writes: Cinema never simply reflects or expresses an already fully formed and homogeneous national culture and identity, as if it were the undeniable property of all national subjects; certainly, it privileges only a limited range of subject positions which thereby become naturalized or reproduced as the only legitimate positions of the national subject. But it needs also to be seen as actively working to construct subjectivity as well as simply expressing a pre-given identity.11

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Following Higson’s suggestion, I approach the Italian national cinema not only as an institution that disseminates ideas regarding the Italian “race” and the national subject, but as one that also participates in the construction of these identities. My study of the construction of Italian racial and national identities also incorporates the theoretical interventions made by studies in the cultural production of “whiteness” and attempts to denaturalize and make visible the category through examination of its status as a social, cultural, and political construct deployed for particular effects at a given historical moment. Central to my argument is the assertion that “white” is a contingent category for the various European identities it can define. Further, a group’s inclusion within the category must be continually reinforced. The category creates conditions that separate whites from nonwhites, and at the same time organizes “internal hierarchies of whiteness” that these groups continually negotiate.12 I argue that the representation of the mixed-race subject operates to resolve the ambivalence surrounding Italian racial identity at specific historical moments such as during the post-unification colonial endeavors, the fascist colonial period, and the establishment of the postwar Republic. Within the past two decades, Italy has also been examined through the lens of postcolonial theory, allowing not only a reconsideration of the country’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century external colonial endeavors— once considered a footnote or historical aberrance—but also a reconceptualization of Italian unification as the colonization of the south by the north. In terms of Italian colonization in Africa, this renewed interest also shows the extent to which the Italian colonial administration and policies were similar to that of other major European empires, particularly in the management of indigenous, settler, and mixed-race populations in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and other colonial territories. However, a full acknowledgment of the country’s colonial past is still emergent, and scholars have remarked upon Italy’s “historical amnesia” to account for the lack of scholarship that approaches Italy from a postcolonial perspective. As Miguel Mellino writes: “Rarely does one see attempts to trace or reflect on connections between the problems and approaches developed within postcolonial studies and the specific history of Italy, its cultural dialectics and struggles and internal politics.”13 The “postcolonial” is seen as applicable to only the major colonial powers such as Britain and France, and it is only within the last 15 years that translations of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Dipesh Chakrabarty have circulated within Italy.14 As one book title suggests, Italy is still imagined as “the least of the great powers” and consequently as not having enacted an expansive and coherent colonial policy in the manner

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of the larger European imperial countries. However, as I will discuss in later chapters, Italian colonialism was as methodical and brutal as that of the more extensive Western empires. I consider how the representation of mixed-race identity in the films under discussion speaks to the country’s enduring and unresolved colonial legacy. In my analysis of mixed-race subjects in Italian cinema, I draw on the work of Homi Bhabha who considers the notion of a destabilized colonial discourse that can serve to challenge the fixed identities such a discourse seeks to maintain. As Vetri Nathan argues, due to Italy’s geographical location, its history of immigration and emigration, internal and external migration, as well as its racialized north/south division, Bhabha’s work is particularly useful for examining processes of racial and national identity formation in Italy, a country that has been rendered: “. . . Europe’s historical internal Other . . . chronically ambivalent and permanently hybrid.”15 In “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Bhabha argues that within colonial discourse the stereotype, like the fetish object that staves off the threat of castration, allows for the recognition and disavowal of the other’s difference. Bhabha calls the stereotype a “discursive strategy” that embodies the notion of ambivalent fixity—stable and unchanging—yet characterized by “degeneracy and daemonic repetition.”16 Further, the stereotype constitutes a body of knowledge or what is “known” about the colonial subject, but also what remains unproven, what Bhabha calls the “probabilistic truth” of the other. The stereotype is “anxiously repeated,” creating an excess and ambivalence that marginalizes the colonial subject and serves as the basis of colonial power.17 However, the repetitive nature of this discourse also links it to mimicry, which entails patterns of repetition, excess, and failure within the process of signification.18 For Bhabha, it is where this “ambivalent identification” can occur that the colonial subject can undermine the objectifying discourse of the colonizer.19 I argue that the recurrence of the mixed-race figure operates in a similar fashion. In the films considered in this study, the interracial subject puts into question the stability of Italian racial and national identity, and are returned to and re-presented in an attempt to maintain racial boundaries. My study argues that another site of postcolonial consciousness within Italy can be found in the cinematic presentation of the mixed-race Italian citizen such as in Il Mulatto (1949/1951) and Arabian Nights (1974) and through the trope of racial mixture as seen in the southerner’s encounter with the African American in the cinema of the “economic miracle”

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(Mafioso, 1962). These representations are read as a means of working through the country’s colonial legacy, its postwar entrance into the Western economic bloc, and its ongoing unification process. Equivocal Subjects is also concerned with the rethinking of the European “nation” and its borders brought about by new patterns of migration that have emerged in the last 30 years. The Italian south can be considered what Étienne Balibar has described as a “peripheral zone” where “secular and religious cultures confront one another.”20 It is in these zones that the nation and its people are defined. The body of the mixed-race subject operates as a kind of border, an idea that is furthered by Balibar’s contention that Europe is and has always been “multiple,” neither pure nation-states nor unmixed population. Hence, the use of internal colonialism to deal with the threat of difference, such as in the case with the Italian south, creates “an insurmountable border for its own populations, who it will place indefinitely in the situation of the metics (free noncitizens or “half-breeds”) and it will reproduce its own impossibility.”21 The acknowledgment of racial heterogeneity as the result, not of the recent entrance of “illegals,” but rather, of centuries-long movement and contact among European, Middle Eastern, Asian, and African peoples in the space of the Mediterranean is what Iain Chambers suggests through his concept of an “uprooted geography.” He writes: An uprooted geography articulate[s] the diverse currents and complex nodes of both visible and invisible networks, rather than one that merely follows the horizontal axis of borders, barriers, and allegedly separated unities. This, of course, is to consider the Mediterranean before, between, and beyond the self-serving objectifying logic of European humanism, its modernity and its nationalism. It is to register, even if it cannot fully recover or remember, the interrogative complexity of a diversified and multilateral space.22 In a similar way, the “equivocal subjects” I trace throughout the Italian cinema can offer another trajectory for this rediscovered history of modern European identity formation.

Summary of Chapters Chapter 1 examines the role of the early silent historical epic film in disseminating ideologies of race and nation during the late Liberal

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period. The central figure of racial hybridity is Maciste, the strongman icon of Italian cinema who first appears in Cabiria, the 1914 historical epic that commemorated Italy’s victory in the Italo-Turkish war (1911–12). As the loyal slave of Roman patrician Fulvio Axilla, the Maciste role is performed in blackface (director Giovanni Pastrone referred to the character as a “mulatto”). We can see how the Maciste character collapses racial difference onto the Italian lower classes and the south, and further, serves in an instructional capacity, teaching the lower classes their place within the racial and economic hierarchy of Italy, as well as their role in the present and future colonial empire. But ultimately, the blackface performance fails in establishing a clear racial hierarchy between the Italians and their future colonial subjects in Africa. Rather, race is revealed as an arbitrary marker of difference, serving as a temporary and insufficient mechanism to maintain both racial and sexual normativity. The chapter then continues with a reconsideration of historical narrative undertaken in Haile Gerima’s 1999 documentary Adwa: An African Victory. Set in both Italy and Ethiopia, Gerima offers a translation and retelling of one of Italy’s first imperialist endeavors that challenges the triumphal metaphors of the second Roman Empire offered in Italian silent historical epics. Gerima’s film proposes that the writing of Italian colonial history remains unfinished, and further, the arguably yet-to-be-written history of postcolonial Italy has significant ramifications for African diasporic communities within the country. Gerima’s documentary also serves as a model for the work undertaken in this study, a return and reevaluation of the country’s complex relation to its racial heterogeneity and its status as a European nation as debated in its cultural production. This reevaluation of Italian colonialism in light of the country’s complex history of racial identity formation lays the contextual groundwork for the subsequent chapters that deal with the portrayal of African Italian mixed-race identity in Italian film. In Chapter 2, I examine the representation of interracial relationships within the Italian colonial and postcolonial imaginary, exploring the ways in which mixed-race relationships trace the shifting constructions of Italian racial and national identity as well as the country’s reckoning with its colonial legacy. I begin with a discussion of Mailù, the mixedrace protagonist in Guido Brignone’s fascist colonial melodrama, Sotto la croce del sud (Under the Southern Cross, 1938), and then turn to Giorgio Moser’s Violenza segreta (Secret Violence, 1963), one of the earliest expressions of an Italian postcolonial consciousness in film. In an interview, Moser describes his film as not only a direct response to Sotto la croce del

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sud, but also to fascist-era colonial narrative films. Although a moral condemnation of Italy’s role in the colonization of Africa, the film is reflective of a period in which the country, after a period of postwar recovery and entrance into the “First World” economic bloc, is only beginning to come to terms with its colonial legacy and the relation between the nation and its former colonial territories. This chapter concludes with a consideration of films from the 1960s to the present that use cross-racial desire as a platform for investigating the Italian postcolonial condition. Marco Ferreri’s La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman, 1964) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s L’assedio (Besieged, 1998) are films that have staged interracial relationships in order to reevaluate Italian colonialism. Heralded as the first mainstream Italian film to deal with interracial relationships, Cristina Comencini’s Bianco e Nero (2008) is one of the most recent films to reflect upon Italy’s colonial past by way of its representation of Italian multicultural society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Chapter 3 examines the representation of African Italian mixed-race subjects in Italian postwar narrative film. Francesco De Robertis’ Il Mulatto and its US distribution version Angelo (1949 and 1951 respectively) is a social problem narrative concerned with the birth of mixed-race children in Italy during World War II. Through a comparative reading of Il Mulatto and the selectively edited Angelo, I argue that this postwar narrative finds recourse for the ejection of the mixed-race Italian citizen through the US legal doctrine of “equal, but separate,” severing the child’s Italian maternity, and thereby deeming him non-Italian and foreign. Relegating the problem of the mixed-race subject to the United States, the mixed-race child is removed from the postwar Republic at the moment it reincorporates an indigenous southern identity into the national fold. The film accomplishes this displacement of the mixed-race Italian citizen and a reassertion of Italian national autonomy through the use of Italian neorealist conventions. Having defined and set the limits of Italian citizenship, the country then begins its transformation into a “First World” nation and eventual full entrance into the Western European economic bloc. I then turn to Spike Lee’s 2008 film, Miracle at St. Anna, an adaptation of James McBride’s novel of the same name. The story of the first African American combat troops in the Allied forces also returns us to the appearance of the African American GI in neorealist films such as Paisà (Paisan, Roberto Rosellini, 1946) and Senza pietà (Without Pity, Alberto Lattuada, 1948). Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna offers a revisionist history of World War II

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Italy by way of a return to and commentary upon Italian neorealism, a movement that will influence Lee’s oeuvre via Third World and the L.A. School of African and African American filmmakers. Finally, I return to the postwar era, mixed-race identity, and questions of national belonging through an analysis of Kym Ragusa’s fuori/outside (1997). Ragusa’s examination of her Italian and African American heritage will serve as a basis for interrogating alternate modes of identity formation outside of patriarchy, the nation-state, and hierarchies of race. In Chapter 4, I use the concept of whiteness to explore the representation of Italian racial and national identity formation in the commedia dell’italiana (comedy Italian-style) genre. In Alberto Lattuada’s 1962 film Mafioso, the trope of mixed-race offers insight into the nation’s cultural reflection on processes of subject and national identity formation. Mafioso represents Italy’s transition into the new global economy through the main character’s painful negotiation of his Sicilian roots and his adopted life in the north. I argue that Mafioso can be read as not only a narrative of geographical displacement due to transformations within the Italian economy, but also as a reckoning with racial identity on the level of the psyche, one that is approached by returning to the neorealist period—a formative moment for Italian cinema. Franco Brusati’s Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1974) explores the Italian immigrant experience in Switzerland. Like Mafioso, Bread and Chocolate interrogates Italian racial and national identity formation via the concept of whiteness. The main character attempts to challenge racial discrimination in Switzerland while resisting stereotypes of southern Italian identity as performed by his fellow displaced countrymen. Mingling the nostalgia and homesickness of the immigrant with a desire to surmount prejudice and take advantage of the economic and social advantages offered by the host country, Bread and Chocolate speaks to the difficult process of identity formation undergone by members of the Italian diaspora. Bread and Chocolate is a poignant reminder of the history of Italian emigration and of what Jennifer Guigliemo refers to as the racial “in-betweenness” of the Italian migrant, or the ability to occupy both a “white” and “nonwhite” racial identity, depending upon national context. The film was released just prior to the mid-1970s’ rise of nonWestern European immigrants and the country’s shift from a country of emigration to one of immigration. The fifth and final chapter explores the subproletariat body as represented in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974), the third film in his Trilogy of Life series. Pasolini documented the

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loss of the Italian subproletariat in his novels and films such as Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962). With the disappearance of diverso, or linguistic, cultural, and racial heterogeneity, Pasolini began first to look to the precapitalist past to reclaim a body that existed prior to its ruination in consumer society and second, to explore the Third World as a space that was not overtaken by the capitalist paradigm, retaining a revolutionary potential that could revitalize the West. Pasolini’s film adaptation of the Middle Eastern and African tales written between the tenth and fourteenth centuries combines both these explorations. Filmed partially in the former Italian East Africa, Arabian Nights evokes Italy’s colonial past through the selection of Inez Pelligrini, an actor/ model of Italo-Eritrean descent who plays the role of Zumurrud, a central character who begins the series of interwoven stories. The circulation of Pelligrini’s image in the film and the Italian press of the 1970s is a reemergence of the “Faccetta Nera,” a popular advertising icon used to sell coffee and chocolate products during the Liberal period. Although not explicitly stated in his theoretical writings or artistic productions, Pelligrini’s body and the history it evokes operates in tandem with Pasolini’s critique of the loss of diverso and the rise of neocapitalism. I argue that Pasolini attempts to challenge boundaries of race, gender, and class through the use of the free-indirect subjective, a mode of narration in which the author relates with a character by adopting their language (or in the case of film, the character’s gaze), offering a prophetic and visionary statement regarding Italy’s still unresolved relation to Africa, and the consequences this will have for the nations that comprise the European Union. As a means of reevaluating Pasolini’s filmic works and statements regarding the Third World and the rise of advanced global capitalism, I turn finally to Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008). An adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s muckraking exposé, the film offers a vision of Italy, particularly the Italian south, in the early-twenty-first-century era of global capitalism. Gomorrah imagines a “global south” that while not achieving the radical political awakening of the global subproletariat does reveal the complexity of immigration to Italy and its emerging multiracial society, raising ongoing questions regarding nation-state borders and citizenship that Pasolini approached decades earlier.

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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 Milanbased 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

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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

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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 mixedrace 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

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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

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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

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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 postunification 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

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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 the country’s acquisition of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania in the Italo-Turkish war, Cabiria also served as a narrative of redemption for the 1896 defeat and the reemergence of the destined second Roman Empire. The nationalist rhetoric of Cabiria suggests that national unification and external colonization remained inextricably linked during the late Liberal era. As metaphorically represented in Cabiria, by way of the mixed-race Maciste, external colonization of Africa helped resolve (albeit contingently and temporarily) the racial otherness of Italy’s southern populations as constructed through the north/south divide and southern question discourses. Through the colonial enterprise, Italian southerners could claim racial superiority over the nation’s African colonial subjects, yet remain in a subordinate relation to the north, which through unification, systemically exploited the south’s natural resources and disenfranchised agricultural laborers.22 The relation between the mixedrace Maciste and the Roman patrician Fulvius Axilla serves to reinforce stereotypes of northern superiority and southern subservience, putting forth models into which southern and northern Italian audiences could position themselves as subjects of the same nation.23 As opposed to the racial hierarchy of early silent cinema in the United States, which was influenced by the blackface minstrel tradition, Bartolomeo Pagano’s Maciste and the other “blackface” performances in the Italian silent historical epics can be read in relation to the racial schemas developed in the positivist sciences in Italy, primary among them being criminal anthropology. A body of literature in the medical and social sciences was devoted to establishing Italian racial identity in the immediate post-unification period. Exploring the mixed-race subject in Cabiria reveals the centrality of racial discourse in the conceptualization of the Italian national body. Through reference to the US early cinema, the first part of this chapter will examine how Cabiria as a cultural text participates in the conceptualization of racial and national identity in Liberal Italy, providing the basis for subsequent chapter discussions

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of representations of race and nation in the Italian cinema during the fascist, post–World War II, and contemporary eras. In the second half of this chapter, I turn to present-day postcolonial Italy in order to examine the legacies of Italian Liberal-era conceptualization of race and nation. I look at Haile Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory (1999), a documentary about the 1896 Italo-Abyssinian War that challenges the construction of Italian nation-state formation and modern colonial history as represented in films such as Cabiria. For Gerima, Italian unification and modern colonialism since the nineteenth century become departure points for writing a history of postcolonial Italy. In Adwa, the fissures of the incomplete unification process, particularly the attempt to enact a strict demarcation between “Italy” and “Africa,” are undermined to reveal the fictitious nature of homogeneous racial identity and the mythic construction of the “Italian” people. More significantly, this cultural text suggests the centuries-long presence of African diasporic subjects in the peninsula, a presence that has been suppressed in Italian (and European) historiography.

Cabiria: Constructing Racial and National Identity through the Historical Epic Film Set during the Second Punic War, third century BC, Cabiria tells the story of a young Sicilian girl of the landed aristocracy who is stolen from her home after an eruption of Mt Etna. Sold as a slave at Carthage for sacrifice to the god Moloch, Cabiria is rescued by the Roman patrician Fulvius Axilla and Maciste, his trusted slave. While escaping from the Carthaginian high priest Karthalo, Fulvius, Maciste, and Cabiria are separated. Fulvius escapes to defend Rome from the Carthaginian forces led by Hannibal; Maciste is imprisoned in Carthage; and Cabiria is placed in servitude under Queen Sophonisba, the daughter of Carthaginian King Hasdrubal and betrothed of Numidian King Massinissa. After surviving a battle at Syracuse, Fulvius goes to Sicily where he meets Cabiria’s parents and promises to return to Carthage and save their daughter. The film covers a 10-year period, during which time Rome, led by Scipio Africanus, battles Carthage. Hasdrubal betrays Massinissa by forging an alliance against the Romans with Syphax, King of Cirta, promising Syphax marriage to Sophonisba as a reward. In response, Massinissa forges an alliance with Rome. Meanwhile, Fulvius returns to Carthage as part of Scipio Africanus’ forces and reunites with Maciste to find Cabiria.

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While escaping Hasdrubal’s forces, Fulvius and Maciste meet the now adult Cabiria, who is known as Sophonisba’s servant Elissa. Sophonisba convinces Massinissa to betray Rome, but hearing of the impending betrayal Scipio Africanus demands that Massinissa turn over Sophonisba to the Romans as a war prize. Massinissa submits to Roman authority, and sends Maciste to deliver the news to Sophonisba with a vial of poison, granting her an honorable death. After giving Cabiria to Fulvius, Sophonisba commits suicide. Finally, Rome conquers Carthage and Fulvius returns to Rome with Maciste and Cabiria as his bride. During the Liberal period, the creation of a shared national identity was also assisted by romanità, or the establishment of a connection between the Roman Empire and Liberal Italy through the circulation of images and symbols of the ancient period.24 Maria Wyke writes, “The invented tradition of romanità contributed a sense of a common national history to a heterogeneous Italian population.”25 Cabiria, along with the numerous other “golden age” silent epics based upon ancient Roman history, took part in romanità as a means to legitimate Liberal Italy’s imperial ambitions.26 The historical epic film, as exemplified by Cabiria, was an aid to constructing a unified Italian national identity, serving as “a new form of popular university, capable of shaping the historical consciousness of their mass, largely illiterate audiences and transmitting to them the symbols of Italy’s recently constituted national identity.”27 In the US context, D. W. Griffith was perhaps the most prominent advocate of the use of film as an instructional tool for the construction of racial and national identity. Griffith and his supporters promoted Birth of a Nation (1915), and its celebration of the Ku Klux Klan as an accurate and transparent representation of the US Civil War and Reconstruction period.28 Griffith had viewed Cabiria, which influenced his production of Intolerance (1916), a multi-period epic depicting the consequences of bigotry and prejudice throughout the ages that was made as a response to the condemnation of Birth’s racist narrative. Cabiria and Birth of a Nation differ in terms of cinematic technique and ideological goals, but they both share an attempt to construct a national history and its citizens’ relation to the nation-building process. Even before the hegemony of narrative film, photographic and moving image technologies were used to visualize race and racial hierarchy. The racial ideology circulated in Birth constructs ante- and postbellum US unification as a racial project in which southern and northern whites join together to suppress the newly freed black population. The imagined

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repatriation to Africa of the former slaves and the marriage between the southern Ben Cameron and northern Elsie Stoneman locates the project of national unification in white endogamy, linking the future prosperity of the national body to the reproduction of the “pure” white subject. The precedents for the cinematic visualization of race and racial hierarchy in Griffith’s Birth can be traced to blackface minstrelsy, a performance of southern black racial identity first created by primarily Irish immigrants that began in the 1820s and became the first popular culture of the United States. Many of the stock characters of the minstrel show in the post–Civil War era, such as the black maid or Mammy, the submissive older black male or Uncle Tom, and the black rapist character, established the precedents for the depictions of black people in American cinema that arguably persist to the present day.29 However, a pre-cinematic model for the visual construction of US racial and national identity can be found in the representation of southern Italy in the picturesque tradition. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the picturesque became one of the most popular aesthetic modes for the visual representation of the Italian south, constructing the regional landscapes as both untamed nature as well as the symbol of the decline of Italy’s once great civilization.30 In his discussion of the picturesque in early American cinema, Giorgio Bertellini argues that during the late nineteenth century, with the rise of immigration to the United States from southern and eastern Europe, the picturesque was adopted as a means of representing the country’s increasingly complex racial composition. In particular, the picturesque landscape was used not only to represent differences among indigenous, Asian, and black populations, but also to make distinctions between white Anglo-Saxons and other European immigrants. Commenting on racial signification in early American cinema, Bertellini writes: “whiteness was not a single, one-dimensional realm of privilege. Instead, it exhibited a wide spectrum of internal, highly racialized taxonomies of individual racial types.”31 In the United States, there is a well-documented hierarchy of whiteness seen through the historical reception of Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants.32 The emergence of the post-unification southern question discourse and the racially constructed north/south division demonstrates that racial schemas of whiteness existed in the Italian national context, schemas that informed the reception of Italian immigrants in the United States. Along with the picturesque tradition, the Italian historical epics such as Cabiria provided precedents for the representation of hierarchies of whiteness in early American cinema.

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Emerging out of the context of Italian colonialism and nation-state formation, Cabiria not only makes racial distinctions between Italians and North Africans, but between northern and southern Italians. Birth of a Nation not only visualizes racial difference and its relation to the project of national unification, but also constructs a homogeneous white identity, one in which northern and southern Anglo-Saxon Americans join together to suppress former black slaves, and perhaps the greater threat, the “evil mulattos,” such as Senator Stoneman’s protégée Silas Lynch, who because of their mixed racial status, presume, even more than blacks, to usurp white supremacy. As a narrative of the US Civil War, Birth does not examine the hierarchy of whiteness because the narrative does not concern the arrival of southern and eastern European immigrants constructed as nonwhite in both their native and in the US context. Bertellini writes: As emblematic as The Birth is for a discussion of race in American cinema, however, its reliance on the dyadic framework of the “color line” does not make it exhaustive. Its “biracial” politics, to use a term that first appeared within the new “race consciousness” of the mid-1910s and was premised on the juxtaposition of black and white, overlooks non-color-coded forms of racial discrimination. A whole range of racial signifiers, in fact, were used to make the distinctiveness of European immigrants and Italians, in particular, with the complex and varying connotations of urban views of race at the opening of the twentieth century.33 While hierarchies of whiteness are not visualized in Birth, an awareness of different kinds of “white” European subjects is evident in one of Griffith’s later “racial tolerance” film, Broken Blossoms: The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919). Based on a short story from Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights (1917), a series of tales set in the once infamous lower-class Limehouse district of London, Broken Blossoms is about the relationship between a Chinese immigrant, Cheng Huan, and a young English girl, Lucy. In Griffith’s Blossoms, Huan (British actor Richard Barthelmess) immigrates to Great Britain as a missionary, bringing his Buddhist preachings (which are remarkably similar to Christian theology) to the Western world. However, Huan soon becomes disillusioned and corrupted by the sordid Limehouse district, and descends into opium addiction. The only light of hope appears in the form of a young girl (Lillian Gish), who is being abused by her drunken guardian, the Irishman Battling

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Burrows. After Burrows discovers the relationship, he beats the young girl to death. Upon finding the dead girl, Huan shoots and kills Burrows, then takes his own life. After Birth of a Nation was criticized for perpetuating racial hatred and violence against black Americans, Griffith first responded with Intolerance (1916) a film that illustrates the impact of prejudice and bigotry throughout the ages. As John Kuo Wei Tchen has argued, Griffith produced Intolerance as a defense of his own artistic vision, not to amend his position regarding race. Similarly, Broken Blossoms cannot be read as an anti-racist statement made to counteract the negative portrayals of Chinese immigrants in the midst of virulent anti-immigrant campaigns then taking place in both Great Britain and the United States; instead, it is aligned with Griffith’s Birth through the idea of film as the “great educator,” in this case, for lower-class and non-northern European whites. In this case, the film constructs the image of the proto-Christian Cheng Huan who stands in contrast to the lower-class whites that populate the Limehouse district, epitomized by the abusive Irish Battling Burrows. Directed mainly to the upper-middle class whites, Broken Blossoms sought to highlight the problem of “uncivilized” proletarian whites who were discrediting the white race.34 Cheng Huan, performed by a white British actor in yellowface, becomes the exemplar of proper conduct for lower-class whites: passive, subservient, and the protector of white womanhood. In a similar way, Cabiria’s Maciste, the mixed-race servant, operates as a cipher for debates regarding the incorporation of lower-class Sicilian and southern Italians into the newly formed nation-state. I refer to Maciste as a cipher—a code of sorts to understanding race and nation in Italy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—because in reviewing Cabiria, we can note two important qualifications: first, in the film, there are depictions of Sicilians, both lower-class land laborers and the land-owning aristocracy; and second, if the union between the Roman Fulvius Axilla and Cabiria can be read as a metaphor for the incorporation of Sicily to the Italian peninsula, then the film already imagines unification as a kind of white endogamy, at least between a Sicilian aristocrat and a Roman. If the Fulvius–Cabiria relationship is a metaphor for Italian unification, Maciste would be a redundant character, since this “unification” is already enacted through the Fulvius–Cabiria union. Maciste is similarly extraneous if viewed only as a symbol of Sicily and the Italian south’s racial ambiguity, since again, Cabiria offers fairly unflattering representations of lower-class Sicilians based on orientalist

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stereotypes. However, if analyzed in relation to processes of internal and external colonialism at this early period in the nation’s modern history, mixed-race Maciste reveals the paradoxes of the nation-building project, one which advocates a united Italy (including Sicily), yet simultaneously asserts the irresolvable difference of its southern populations. Cabiria’s Maciste can be read as negotiating various racial and color hierarchies within and without the nation-state: between the Italian north and south, between Italy and northern Western Europe, and between Italy and its African colonies.

Between (Southern) Italy and Africa: Racial Typing and the Representation of Italian Southerners and North Africans in Cabiria The performance of nonwhite, African subjects can be seen in early Italian cinema, not only in the historical epics, but in film adaptations of theatrical or literary works brought to the screen that included the foreign or exotic nonwhite subject. Early Italian films set in Africa include narrative films in the vein of “exotic-orientalism” such as Kalida’a, la storia di una mummia (Kalida’a, the Story of a Mummy, Augusto Genina, 1918), a horror film about Egyptian mummies, as well as dramatizations of the Italian colonial experience in territories such as Italian Somalia (1885), Eritrea (acquired in 1891), and Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (1911–12). Narrative films set in the Italian colony of Eritrea include Alima (Gino Cerruti, 1921), the story of an ascaro, an Eritrean soldier whose reward for fighting with the Italian colonial forces is marriage to a tribal leader’s daughter; and Tiff Kebbi (Mario Camerini, 1928), a series of stories set in Tripolitania, which displays Italian colonial domination over the indigenous population and territories. Early narratives set in the Italian colonial territories also include films from the Maciste cycle, such as Maciste contro lo sceicco (Maciste Against the Sheik, Mario Camerini, 1927) and Maciste nella gabbia dei leoni (Maciste in the Mouth of the Lion, Guido Brignone, 1926).35 There are also early narrative films explicitly about mixed-race subjects set in the Italian African colonies. L’altra razza (The Other Race, Augusto Camerini, 1920) is a narrative about the interracial love affair between an Italian explorer and an African woman, who produce a mixed-race child, Atù. As an adult, Atù has a tragic love affair with another Italian explorer.36 In Myriam (Enrico Guazzoni, 1928), an Italian scientist falls

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in love with an Arab woman and they have a child. After some intrigue with Arab tribes in rebellion against the Italians, the couple reunites and departs for Italy.37 The existence of these films, along with documentaries and ethnographic films produced by companies such as Tripoli Film and Cines beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, demonstrates the importance of photographic and cinematographic technologies in bringing images of the Italian African colonies to the mainland, and constructing racial hierarchies for Italian national and colonial subjects. Italian silent narrative films set in Africa or the Levant cast actors of both African and Italian descent to portray major characters of African or mixed African Italian descent. Similar to practices in the US motion picture industry, racial hierarchies discouraged the close proximity of Italians and Africans on screen, especially if the narrative dealt with an interracial romance. If the film called for the portrayal of a significant African character, such as the Carthaginian general Hannibal, an Italian actor performed the role, disallowing the screen presence of an actual African shown defeating the Italian people. Both the historical epics and the narrative films set in Africa and the Levant depict these regions and their peoples in an orientalist mode, constructing an image of the nonWest that claims knowledge of the regions, defining them as fanciful and exotic locales for adventure and romance, and thereby providing justification for colonialism. By using racial performance to construct the African and Italian African subject on screen, including Maciste, the lighter complexioned Carthaginians, and the darker Numidians, the performances can also be read as analogous to blackface performance in the American cinema. Beyond its theatrical use to depict nonwhite persons, blackface performance in the Italian silent cinema does not have the same historical trajectory and context as early American cinema, particularly, the blackface minstrel tradition that began in the United States during the early-nineteenth-century antebellum era, a history of institutional slavery, and mid-nineteenth-century immigration that resulted in a diverse racial and ethnic population.38 However, there is a tradition of depicting African types in Italian popular theater, such as the Moor in Italian marionette performance, a reference to the ninth-century invasion of Sicily and the Italian peninsula. Also, in his discussion of blackface minstrelsy in the antebellum United States, Eric Lott calls attention to blackface minstrelsy’s antecedent in the popular theater art of commedia dell’arte that originated in Italy beginning in the sixteenth century. Lott writes that blackface minstrel performance “should rather be placed at the

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intersection of [US] slave culture and earlier blackface stage characters such as the Harlequin of the commedia dell’arte.”39 Harlequin (Arlecchino), the servant/slave character, is considered one of the predecessors of Jim Crow (earlier known as “Harlequin Jim Crow”), one of the earliest stock types of the US blackface minstrel show. Harlequin’s description as a type of “blackface” character derives from the use of a half-mask of dark leather that some scholars argue suggests black African features.40 While there is a tradition of African types and performance in Italian popular culture, in my attempt to examine how racial and national identity are constructed through performance, I turn to American blackface performance in my discussion of Maciste because of its use to construct and circulate representations of the nonwhite racial subject. Drawing upon Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the anxious repetition of the stereotype in colonial discourse, one based on an ambivalent desire and repulsion for the other, Eric Lott argues that blackface, more than a way to create, disseminate and thereby control the nonwhite body, becomes a means of examining a society’s lived experience of race. Speaking of blackface performance on the part of immigrant, ethnic white workingclass males in the United States during the antebellum era, Lott writes: I depart from most other writers on minstrelsy, who have based their analyses on racial aversion, in seeing the vagaries of racial desire as fundamental to minstrel-show mimicry. It was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure.41 In Cabiria, “blackface” performance does operate as a means to construct a negative image of North Africans as weak, dominated by emotions, and untrustworthy, which serves to legitimize Italian colonialism. However, as can be seen in scenes depicting the master-slave relation of Maciste and Fulvius Axilla, the Italian middle classes are also encouraged to take libidinal pleasure in the colonial enterprise. In addition, I suggest that Maciste, as cipher for Italian internal and external colonialism, as well as the country’s racialized north/south divide, operates not simply as a sign of Italian dominance over their African subjects. Rather, in the following sections, I argue that mixed-race Maciste—following Lott’s suggestion of racial performance as a sign of “panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure”—represents the failure of the colonial enterprise to resolve

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Italy’s racialized north/south divide in what is often read as a document of Italian colonial triumph. Read as a mixed-race subject, both Italian and African, Maciste serves as a temporary solution to the incorporation of the southern peninsula and Sicily into the nation proper. As discussed, external colonialism in Africa was used as a means of resolving the economic and social crises created by the internal colonization of the Italian south and Sicily in the post-unification era. The project of external colonialism was initiated to help resolve the economic disparity between the north and south and to help stop the loss of labor through emigration to other European countries and the Americas. However, with few exceptions—like Libya in 1911–12—external colonialism during the Liberal period was not wholly successful, and at times—as with the 1896 war with Ethiopia—disastrous. Reading Cabiria as a narrative about post-unification Italy, the film constructs a vision of the modern Italian nation-state as the second Roman Empire.42 Cabiria’s capture, 10-year enslavement in North Africa, rescue and marriage to a Roman nobleman, is symbolic of both national unification and the triumph of Italian colonialism in Africa. However, Cabiria also envisions an Italian national subject, or rather, subjects, that differed depending on region, language, and socio-economic class. Cabiria attempts to create an Italian nation into which all of the newly unified country’s citizens could feel a part, including its southern populations. As Carlo Celli argues, Cabiria was made to appeal to different economic classes, and can be read as a “hegemonic document” that illustrates dominant-subservient relations that serve to interpellate the Italian-viewing audience. Celli writes: The dominant socio-economic group, in this case the moneyed interests of the film’s producers at Itala, advocated themes that would indoctrinate subordinate groups (the spectators) in the power structure’s version of reality. In the case of Cabiria it is in the interests of the characters in the film, and the public that identifies with them, to promote and fight for the larger destiny of Roman/Italian colonialism and imperial aspirations.43 In addition to parallels of class hierarchies between ancient Rome and Liberal Italy, Cabiria also organizes racial hierarchies between Rome and Sicily, and Italy and Africa that serve to construct Liberal Italy’s internal north/south division and the country’s relation with its African colonies. Within the plot, the film’s first episode relates the events that

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will lead to Cabiria’s enslavement in North Africa, however, the first episode also stages the relationship between the Sicilian aristocracy and lower classes, a representation that constructs Sicily as superstitious and irresolute, leading to the loss of Cabiria and in need of the rational and heroic Rome to secure the success of the future empire. Thus the first episode visualizes the north/south divide, circulating a representation of Sicily that provides justification for both internal and external colonization. The relationship between the Sicilian land-laborer and landowner is illustrated in the first episode of Cabiria, where we are first introduced to Batto, Cabiria’s father. Batto’s role as landowner-patriarch is established as he returns home followed by laborers carrying the abundance from his fields. Batto is surrounded by signifiers of wealth, such as the open space of his palace atrium supported by wide marble columns, ornamental vases, and monumental statues. The architecture, a space that symbolically connotes power and nobility, is filled with Batto’s possessions, including his wife, servants, and harvest. In the opening scene, Batto enters his home and absently throws his cap and robe to a kneeling servant. He then enters center frame, where his role as patriarch is confirmed as he stands between the faithful wife and a group of sheepherders tending a small flock. While playing with his daughter, Cabiria, and comfortably surrounded by his wealth, Mt. Etna erupts and Batto, in a panic frenzy, begins offering sacrifice to appease the angry gods. During the tumult, Cabiria is separated from her parents. Cabiria’s nurse, Croessa, takes her young mistress and flees with a group of servants to an underground passage. The servants discover Batto’s treasury and begin to loot their master’s possessions. Scenes featuring the avaricious servants hoarding gold pieces are intercut with images of the erupting volcano and fleeing citizens, emphasizing the servants’ greed and disregard for property and circumstance. Although temporarily distracted, the group uses the underground passage to escape, and arrives at a seaside area to divide the stolen goods. Seeking further refuge, the servants happen upon a small boat. As they start boarding, a band of Abyssinian pirates ambush and slaughter most of the male servants and keep the survivors as prisoners, including Cabiria and Croessa. In the sequence, the relationship between master and servant is represented in moral terms. The somewhat arrogant and insensible Batto suffers a loss, albeit temporary, of his home and possessions. His incompetency as patriarch is highlighted when we see him surrounded by

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his servants, attempting to prevent the eruption by appeasing the gods with prayer and offerings of wine. His vanity and inability to separate from and adequately control his servants is punished with the theft of his possessions and destruction of property. The first episode reinforces stereotypes of the southern population as superstitious, primitive, and lacking rationality in the face of crisis. More significantly, Batto’s failure as a guardian leads to the loss of his daughter, Cabiria, who operates as a metaphor of Italian nationhood. The servants are also guilty of transgressing social and class boundaries, an act that results in their enslavement or death. The Sicilian landowner-patriarch Batto is later contrasted to the more principled Roman leader, Fulvius, who eventually saves Cabiria and returns her to Rome. Cabiria’s characterization of the Sicilian and Roman patriarchs indicate an awareness of differences within the viewing audience, particularly between northern and southern Italian viewers. If, as Celli suggests, Cabiria was to serve as a means to create a unified national identity through the imperial project, past and present, it does this by exploiting class as well as racial difference. The representation of Sicily in the film confirms the characterization of the south in southern question discourses as irrational, unmanageable, closer to the non-West than the northern peninsula, and ultimately in need of reform by the north/Rome. The first episode—the scenes in Batto’s household, the flight from the volcano, and Cabiria’s subsequent capture by the Carthaginians— presents a representation of southern incorporation into the national body, or rather, of constructing a vision of the nation that can reconcile the radical difference of the Italian south and Sicily, regions that because of their proximity to Africa and the Levant, threaten to undermine boundaries between the West and non-West. Along with the film’s rhetoric of internal and external colonial expansionism, race is also introduced as a means of resolving the problem of north/south unification, presented in the figure of mixed-race Maciste. Maciste makes his first appearance in the film’s second episode. Maciste is prominently displayed on screen, shown in the fore screen left, standing watch on a rocky cliff overlooking the sea. His master, Fulvius Axilla, in Carthage as a spy for Rome, is in the far screen right, consulting with an informant. Maciste is rotated and drawn across the screen, which he dominates with his massive stature (Figure 1.1). His physical presence is further enhanced by his dark complexion as his entire body is colored as part of his costume as the character of Numidian slave.

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Figure 1.1 Maciste and Fulvius Axilla (Cabiria, dir. Carmine Pastrone, 1914).

The difference between Maciste’s mixed racial identity and the other black African characters is significant in terms of the relation the film establishes between the internal colonization of the south and the African colonial campaigns of the Liberal era. Later in the film, dressed in a Roman cloth and leopard skin loincloth, Maciste is positioned as “mixed” and representative of dichotomies between Roman and African, north and south, or “civilized” and “primitive.” Angela Dalle Vacche identifies Maciste as a hybrid body who merges two tendencies of figural depiction in the Italian cinema: the monumental, sculptural form she associates with the Italian silent era, and the improvisational body found in the postwar cinema. While the body in the silent cinema takes from the opera an interest in macrohistory, or of history told by the dominant or elite classes, the postwar cinema is related to the microhistory of the individual and the subordinate, working classes.44 Placed within a narrative of the second Punic War, Maciste uses his physical strength to help the Roman Empire conquer North Africa. In this way, he partakes in the Roman triumph over North Africa, but nonetheless remains subservient to Rome. In Cabiria, Maciste, in his relation to both Rome and North Africa, becomes a model for the working classes, specifically southern Italians, offering a means by which the Italian lower classes can be part of the imperial conquest, asserting their superiority over the peoples of the colonized territories, while still remaining subordinate to the

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north/Rome. Maciste is contrasted to the North and East Africans in the film, including the Carthaginian priest Karthalo, princess Sophonisba, and the Numidian king Massinissa. The Carthaginians are for the most part rendered as morally weak, affected by passion and superstition, like the Sicilians in the first episode, and that weakness helps justify the Roman/Italian conquest. This portrayal of North Africans can be read in relation to the work of Cesare Lombroso and his school of criminal anthropology. The work of Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) emerged in the latenineteenth-century era of positivism. As opposed to the classical school that emphasized rationality and free will as the source of understanding human behavior, the positivists believed that knowledge came from the direct observation and study of nature.45 The positivists deemphasized speculative philosophy in favor of strict empiricism, in which moving through the three stages of knowledge acquisition, beginning with religion, and followed by “abstract” metaphysics, the highest stage achieved is the “positive” in which “the human mind attempts to discover, by combining reason and observation, the laws of phenomena.”46 In accordance with the positivist method, Lombroso’s major innovation was to move from an emphasis on the criminal act to the study of the criminal. Criminal anthropology sought to discover and catalog signs and traces on the body that would indicate the potential for deviant behavior. According to the theory, criminal anthropological methods could identify and isolate criminals before any legal infraction was committed.47 Lombroso also incorporated the study of physiognomy, a field of medicine developed as early as the sixteenth century, which claimed there are connections between physical attributes and moral character. The work of Charles Darwin was also of great importance to Lombroso’s study of criminality in the mezzogiorno. Darwin’s theory of evolution, along with the pseudo-science of phrenology, aided Lombroso’s postulation that the born criminal was a “throwback” or a type that displayed regressive traits of a more primitive stage of human development.48 In his published study, Criminal Man (1876), Lombroso set forth his theory of atavism, which he used to “describe the appearance of organisms resembling ancestral (prehuman) forms of life.”49 He defined three related evolutionary stages for studying the criminal type: the primitive (premodern man), the savage (modern representatives of primitive man, by which Lombroso referred to nonwhite peoples), and the criminal (modern man with regressive traits of primitive man). In this schema, the Italian criminal is closest to the savage. Prior to developing the tenets

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of criminal anthropology, Lombroso published The White Man and the Man of Color (1871), a study on the “origins and varieties of the human races,” which presented physical evidence such as detailed cranial and epidermal analyses, supplemented by a body of knowledge of the culture and environment of various non-European cultures. After establishing anatomical differences among the races, Lombroso described the moral temperament and intellectual capabilities inherent in each race. An early commentator writes: Even before he had done much work with criminals he had lectured at Pavia on “the white man and the colored man,” developing those concepts of racial differences which were later to become integral parts of his theory of atavism. The “savage” was to him the modern representative of an evolutionary stage, which the white man had already left behind.50 Having adopted a racial hierarchy with Aryans at the top and descending to black Africans, Lombroso projected this schema onto post-unification Italy as a solution to the southern question. The Italian southern populations were prone to criminality, poverty, and intellectual and economic underdevelopment because they were throwbacks to an earlier stage of human evolution—not at the level of black African—but not as advanced as the more Aryan northern Italian populations. Having rationalized southern underdevelopment as a result of atavism, the “reform” of the south would entail identification of criminal types and population management rather than confronting north Italy’s economic and political exploitation of the south. Like other intellectuals of the period, Lombroso was a member of the Italian Socialist Party, and promoted the tenets of socialism as a more humane manner by which to eradicate social ills. Lombroso was also Jewish and his work responded to turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism that began to identify Jews in terms of race rather than religion.51 Mary Gibson observes that because of his own precarious position, his writings “often exhibited a tension between the biological determinism of racial analysis and a naïve but often sincere desire for social reform and progress.”52 And although his contemporaries and followers placed more weight on economic and social environmental factors as variables that contributed to criminal activity, Lombroso and the positivist criminologists ultimately fell back upon race as a decisive cause of crime. The stereotypes of the Italian south developed in southernist debates and criminal anthropology are projected onto North Africa in a manner

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that speaks to the reciprocal use of racial ideologies in processes of nation-state formation and external colonization. Discourses of race, the nation-state, and empire building coalesce in Cabiria’s representation of the relations between Fulvius, Maciste, and the North Africans. After their introductory scene, Fulvius and Maciste complete their reconnaissance, they take rest at the Striped Monkey inn, where we are introduced to an important minor character, the innkeeper Bordastoret. The character appears in the center screen, framed by the door of the front entrance of the inn. Bordastoret is an elderly man, short, spindly and frail, with a sharp goatee and white hair. On either side of the door are inscriptions and an image of the animal from which the inn takes its name, suggesting a parallel between Bordastoret and monkeys. Bordastoret walks toward and addresses the camera, as though greeting a future patron. He appears as a type found in physical studies of the criminal that were conducted by Lombroso and his followers, which through drawings and photographs compared the “criminal” skull shape and facial physiognomy to that of black Africans or primates. The image of the striped monkey supports a logic of pseudo-scientific study in which reports from distant locales are rendered through an “exotic” imaginary. It is within this context, between empirical observation and fiction, that Bordastoret enters the narrative. Throughout Cabiria, Bordastoret’s action in the film suggests his innate deviancy, underscored by his earlier physiognomic representation as a criminal type. After Fulvius and Maciste rescue Cabiria from sacrifice, they take refuge in the Striped Monkey, but not before beating Bordastoret into submission for betraying them to the high priest Karthalo. The Bordastoret story line ends after Fulvius returns to Carthage after 10 years to retrieve his servant and rescue Cabiria. Fulvius finds Bordastoret and demands that he lead him to Maciste. Upon finding Maciste, Fulvius returns with him to the Striped Monkey whereupon seeing the giant slave, Bordastoret is frightened into a heart attack and dies. In the end, Bordastoret is shown to be criminally inclined, morally inferior, and cowardly, the antithesis of the “good” servant Maciste. The case of Bordastoret, where the North African is constructed as a criminal type through the film’s recourse to the visual rhetoric of criminal anthropology, raises the issue of the division between race and skin tone that will be raised in this study’s subsequent discussions of the “racial in-betweenness” of southern Italians, or the ability of southern Italians to register as both “white” and “nonwhite” within a given national and historical context. In this study, I refer to a definition of “race” that

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corresponds to the rise of the modern nation-state, as a group of people with shared biological traits that populate a bounded, sovereign territory, such as the “Italian” race. Through this chapter, I’ve argued that among his several significations, the mixed-race Maciste represents the working classes, particularly southern Italian laborers who are hailed as Italian national subjects through participation in the colonial enterprise, but also remain in a subservient position relative to Rome/north Italy, a position that is established in terms of racial hierarchy through the post-unification north/south division and connoted by Pagano’s racial performance. In terms of color, mixed-race Maciste stands in for southern Italians, who although viewed as a racial other within Italy and Europe, have a complexion and skin tone that is lighter than most North and Sub-Saharan Africans. Although Maciste is darker than Bordastoret, Maciste’s dark complexion does not connote evil or deviancy, or place him lower on the racial hierarchy than Bordastoret. In Cabiria, the antagonists are mostly the lighter-toned North Africans, such as Karthalo, the high priest who attempts to sacrifice Cabiria, and the princess Sophonisba, who leads the Numidian king Massinissa, to betray the Roman Empire. The depiction of these characters is likely typed to Italy’s seizure of Libyan territories in the 1911–12 conflict, and a desire to depict the defeated peoples as morally weak, affected by passion and superstition. Yet, in terms of racial representation in Cabiria, there is no automatic correspondence between race and color (mixed-race Maciste can “stand” for the Italian lower-class southerner), and more significantly, a dark complexion does not necessarily signify deviancy or a lower position on a racial hierarchy. The slippage between race and color suggests that “blackness” was not conceived as inherently deviant, and that a perceptibly “white” subject could be relegated to “nonwhite” status. This notion of race and color corresponds to theories of hierarchies of whiteness, in which subordinate “white” subjects can be rendered nonwhite depending on national or historical contexts. In terms of representations of race and nation in Cabiria, the nonwhite status of southern Italians must be reconciled to the nation proper in order to establish Italy’s status as a Western European imperial power. In the following sections, I turn to the representation of North Africans in Cabiria, particularly Sophonisba, to examine the ways in which “Africa” as a site for Italian colonial domination, but also immigration, further complicates the clear division between Italy and Africa that the film attempts to construct through its celebration of ancient Roman and Liberal Italy’s colonial enterprise.

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The Carthaginian princess’ ambiguous position within the narrative, as both castration threat and opposition to bourgeois values, is mirrored in other modern art movements in Italy during the period, which also raises questions regarding the boundaries of national, racial, and sexual identities. In particular, F. T. Marinetti, the founder of the Italian Futurist Movement, attempts to resolve racial and castration anxiety in his 1910 novel, Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel. Marinetti’s text is another cultural artifact that circulated during the same period as Cabiria and uses the site of “Africa” to resolve anxieties regarding boundaries of nation and race.53 Marinetti’s novel begins with a triumphant Mafarka, who has garnered “six thousand negroes and four thousand negresses.” Their status as property is accentuated by their inclusion with territories and other acquired goods from the defeated armies: machine guns, rifles, rum, camels, etc. Throughout the opening chapter, the black body is recycled and put to use as “liquid manure.”54 Although the body can no longer be used for labor, it has regenerative use as “fertilizer.” In this instance, the black body is not a fixed, stable entity, but rather a flexible commodity, which can be manipulated to the conqueror’s agricultural, military, and industrial needs. Here, Marinetti’s narrative is closely aligned with the colonial project to transform the colonized people into material resources to increase the wealth of the colonizer. Arguably, Fulvius’ attachment to his slave Maciste is because he serves as this kind of valuable resource. Throughout Cabiria, Maciste is shown saving the lives of Fulvius and Cabiria, defeating Fulvius’ enemies, and acting as an interlocutor between the Romans and North Africans. That within the plot, Fulvius returns to retrieve Maciste after 10 years, evidences the investment in and value of the colonial enterprise (both internal and external), which arguably is also an investment in and desire to possess a “black” body, in this instance, mixed-race Maciste. Marinetti contrasts the non-Western Arab identity of his protagonist with that of black Africans and of the European male, creating a new hero of the avant-garde imaginary. In terms of gender, what Mafarka shares with Cabiria is a nationalist ideology that links the nation-building project to African colonialism. In addition, both the novel and the film imagine the African continent as a female. In Cabiria, “Africa” appears either in the guise of Sophonisba, or the terrifying female deities in the film, including Mt Etna and Moloch. Sophonisba (performed by Italian actress Italia Almirante-Manzini) is one of the four major North African characters in Cabiria. She is

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introduced after Fulvius and Maciste save Cabiria and make their escape from Karthalo and his soldiers. While Fulvius escapes to defend Rome from the approaching forces of Hannibal, Maciste flees to the palace of King Hasdrubal, where before being taken prisoner, he meets Sophonisba and asks the princess to hide Cabiria in her palace. Sophonisba can be read as a type emerging from Italian decadentism, a late-nineteenthcentury modernist movement in which bourgeois morality and materialism were rejected in favor of aesthetics.55 Decadentism as a means to convey the historical decline of a nation is also appropriate in terms of reading the character within the context of Cabiria. Celli notes that Sophonisba’s death by suicide “symbolizes the disappearance of an entire civilization,” in the case of Carthage.56 However, this historical death is also applicable to Italy, which having enjoyed two periods of historical prominence—the age of Imperial Rome and the Renaissance—was later reduced in international significance.57 Since it was presumed that eras of decadence occur in cycles, Sophonisba’s death, along with the survival of Cabiria and her subsequent marriage to Fulvius, symbolizes a rebirth of the Roman Empire in the modern period. Sophonisba also falls firmly within the realm of the diva, a female icon of the silent cinema characterized by transgressive sexuality and violence. Throughout the film, Sophonisba is portrayed in an orientalist mise-en-scene complete with servants, exotic jewelry, and tapestry patterns and other items of excess luxury. In her first scene, Sophonisba appears in her palace, caressing a tiger as she heaves passionately, staring deep into the camera. Her passionate, doomed romance with Massinissa and her thwarted betrayal of the Roman Empire make her a force within the narrative that is opposed to the patriarchal authority of not only Rome but also Carthage, ruled by her father, King Hasdrubal, and Karthalo. In Cabiria, Sophonisba is abandoned by her lover Massinissa and sacrifices herself to the god/goddess Moloch. Moloch is the image of the monstrous mother, the sharp jaws of her flaming mouth symbolizing castration by the devouring vagina. The deity comes to represent all of Africa in its irreconcilable otherness both in terms of race and gender. As the goddess who demands child sacrifice, Moloch is also represented as the source of white infanticide. In Cabiria, Moloch is paralleled to another force that cannot be assimilated within the logic of the symbolic, the ferocious Mt Etna, which, as shown in our earlier discussion of Batto in episode one, is treated as an earth deity that must also be appeased. Cabiria is rescued from sacrifice to both Mt Etna and Moloch on three occasions and these deities are appeased only when Sophonisba gives

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her life in Cabiria’s stead. Sophonisba’s suicide in Cabiria is a departure from the traditional narrative of this figure whose literary depiction originates in antiquity. Carlo Celli writes, The Cabiria Sophonisba is different from previous versions because of her function in the plot. Carthage is brought to ruin because Cabiria, who found sanctuary in Sophonisba’s household, was not sacrificed to Moloch . . . By sacrificing herself Sophonisba not only saves her honor but she also placates Moloch’s demands for a victim . . . After Sophonisba commits suicide, equilibrium returns, the wars end, and Fulvio and Cabiria are able to marry.58 Having Sophonisba sacrifice herself to Moloch is a representation of the mother-goddess consuming herself, or at least the monstrous feminine being turned upon itself. The annihilation of the transgressive feminine in Cabiria is similar to her destruction in Marinetti’s narrative and within nationalist projects as a whole. Cabiria as nationalist propaganda not only delineates the role of the Italian lower classes, but also that of the Italian bourgeoisie. Fulvius Axilla is the character that aligns most closely to the Italian middle classes. Although Fulvius is described as a patrician, he answers to higher Roman authorities such as Scipio Africanus. In relation to the true Roman hero Africanus, Fulvius takes on a kind of managerial role in terms of his relation to Maciste. Nevertheless, watching Fulvius on screen, he seems less than “noble.” In contrast to Maciste, Fulvius is bellicose, slightly overweight, and fragile as demonstrated in a scene depicting the siege of Cirta, when Fulvius faints from exhaustion and must be carried across the desert by Maciste. In other scenes, including those with the general Scipio Africanus, Fulvius comes off as a sincere, doting follower rather than a leader. Fulvius operates within the narrative as an example to the Italian bourgeoisie and upper classes as to their position and duties within the newly unified country. Through the following scene analysis, I wish to argue that the Italian middle classes mediate their racial identity through a libidinal investment in the colonial enterprise. After King Massinissa conquers Cirta, he reunites with and marries Sophonisba in a betrayal of Rome. Maciste and Fulvius are imprisoned in the palace of Hasdrubal and unbeknown to them are waited upon by Cabiria, known as the slave girl Elissa. The encounter of Fulvius and Cabiria is a brief scene in which he kisses her hand in thanks for a serving of water. After this scene however, Cabiria and Fulvius are not shown

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together romantically on screen until the final scenes of the film; rather, Maciste mediates the relationship between the two. After Fulvius and Maciste escape prison, they attempt to remove Cabiria from the palace. However, they are separated, and Fulvius and Maciste hide in a food and wine cellar. Fulvius draws an image of himself in the heteronormative act of courtship with Cabiria. Then, for amusement, Fulvius takes on Cabiria’s role and gives Maciste a drink of wine from a vase. The cellar functions as a site outside the symbolic realm (above ground), which allows Fulvius to change both gender and class positions. The cellar is also a location where the homoerotic nature of Fulvius’ relationship with Maciste is made evident. Taking on the feminine role may suggest Fulvius’ gratitude for Maciste’s subservience and absolute otherness, which confirms his whiteness and masculinity within the symbolic order. Finally, Fulvius grabs the vase away from Maciste and takes a drink for himself, reestablishing his role as master and proper desired subject for Cabiria. Yet the Fulvius–Cabiria relationship remains dependent upon Fulvius’ mastery of Maciste and the black body in general. The importance of the colonized subject to the stability of national identity becomes evident in the last scenes of the film depicting Fulvius’ return to Rome. The two lovers appear on their vessel embracing each other while Maciste, resting slightly above, plays his flute. The film suggests that heterosexual white pleasure can be mediated through the containment of the black male body. Moreover, because the Fulvius–Cabiria marriage symbolizes a union between north and south Italy, colonialism becomes a means by which the country can become unified by finally projecting its “blackness” onto colonial territories. Yet, both Cabiria and Maciste remain Fulvius’ desired objects (as wife and slave respectively), suggesting that external colonization does not adequately address the need to maintain the south as an internal other. In this analysis of Cabiria, I have introduced several themes concerning race, sex, class, and Italian national identity that will reemerge in the following chapters of this study. Cabiria was released at the end of a 50-year period of Italy unification, colonialism in North and East Africa, and modern nation-state building. A crucial aspect of Italy’s modernity was the establishment and diffusion of the southern question in which the Italian south and Sicily became the “index of the nation’s modernity.”59 Debates surrounding the moral, intellectual, and economic inferiority of the Italian south occur during a period of Italy’s burgeoning colonial endeavors in North and East Africa, creating both

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an internal and external colonialism that served to mitigate anxieties surrounding Italy’s attempt at creating a unified European nation in the midst of its racial and regional diversity, and its stereotypes in relation to greater Europe. Cabiria is often read as a triumphal document, a celebration of Liberal Italy’s colonial expansion into North Africa and the modern inheritor of the ancient Roman Empire. But Bartolomeo Pagano’s “blackface” performance of the mixed-race Maciste as metaphor in Cabiria can be understood not only as nationalist propaganda for occupying North and East African territories, but also as deeply invested in securing racial and class boundaries within the nation itself. The categories of race and class are collapsed upon each other, particularly in the figure of mixed-race Maciste. As shown in our discussion of the work of Cesare Lombroso and in the rise and institutionalization of criminal anthropology, there was no consensus on or secure identification of the Italian race. Although it was acknowledged that the population of the Italian peninsula was the product of various waves of conquest and migration, the ramifications of this mixture remain unsettled within the Italian psyche. In Cabiria, the fear of clear racial (and relatedly, sexual) boundaries emerges in the film through the storylines dealing with the eruption of Mt Etna, Princess Sophonisba, and the god/goddess Moloch, all of which symbolize fear of racial and sexual otherness. By the end of the film, the mixed-race body is preserved and viewed as the ultimate trophy of the colonial project. In the form of Maciste, the Italian lower classes are provided an example of loyalty and faithful service to their Roman (northern) “masters.” Finally, the union between north and south Italy and Sicily, symbolized in the marriage of Fulvius Axilla and Cabiria, also feminizes the south, as the passive bride to the virile, masculine north. The last scenes of Cabiria suggest that this union is made possible through colonialism, which allows the south to provisionally project its “blackness” and accompanying stereotypes onto Italy’s colonial subjects. Another reading of the mixed-race body is as a metaphor for the union between Cabiria and Fulvius, which, in addition to being a symbol of national unity, is also one of racial mixture, between a northern and a southern Italian subject. Pastrone’s elusive statement becomes even more provocative if Masciste is read as simultaneously acknowledging and rejecting racial hybridity, as a sign of bounded racial categories and of racial mixture. In terms of the nation-building project, Cabiria embodies the impossibility of establishing secure racial and national boundaries.

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Envisioning Postcolonial Italy: Haile Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory Adwa? Adwa? The Italians’ Adwa? Oh, History! Ehe . . . Why didn’t you come earlier if you wanted to know history? I am in a topsy-turvy state, somewhere in the midst of childhood and old age. I don’t know if I’m coming or going, let alone able to tell you history . . . (Adwa: An African Victory, dir. Haile Gerima, 1999) In the second part of this chapter, I move both forwards and backwards in time with my discussion of Haile Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory (1999). Adwa marked the hundredth anniversary of the 1896 Italo-Abyssinian War, in which Ethiopia, led by Emperor Menelik II and Empress Taitu, defeated Italian forces, stunting the recently unified nation-state’s efforts to build a colonial empire in Africa. Italy began its military incursions into North Africa in 1885 with its arrival at the port of Massawa in Eritrea.60 Despite being a newly unified nation and with anti-African colonial sentiment within the country, Italy, during the terms of Prime Ministers Agostino Depretis (1881–7) and Francesco Crispi (1887–91, 1893–6), began a program of African colonization. However, Italy was defeated by Ethiopia at the battle of Dogali (in present-day Eritrea) in 1887 and again in 1896 at Adwa. Although Italy established Italian Somaliland in 1889 and colonized Eritrea in 1890, the defeat at Adwa was a resounding setback for Italian colonialism, leading to an “Adwa complex” or the desire to avenge the defeat that influenced Italian colonial policy, making the victories in the 1911 Italo-Turkish War and the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian War retribution for the Italian “fallen martyrs” of the Adwa defeat.61 In the preceding discussion of Cabiria, the historical epic was read as recasting the history of post-unification Italian colonialism, using the Roman struggle against Carthage in the Second Punic War to construct a victorious colonial conquest and an unproblematic national unification. In this section, Adwa: An African Victory is read in light of the above discussion of Cabiria as two films that retell the history of Italian colonialism.

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While Cabiria celebrates the 1911–12 Italo-Turkish War through an allegorical narrative that renders Liberal Italy as the second Roman Empire, Gerima’s Adwa reflects upon the significance of the 1896 Ethiopian victory. It offers the occasion to both challenge the use of narrative film to construct a history of Italian colonialism, to reflect upon the legacies of Italian colonialism for Ethiopians residing in Italy, Ethiopia, and other parts of the world, and also to consider the impact of this colonial legacy for African migrants presently seeking entrance to Europe via Italy. Within the last three decades, Italy has become a European center of “transnational migration.”62 A highly competitive post–Cold War global economy, as well as political, environmental, and civil turmoil, has driven migratory movements from north and sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East. However, as Iain Chambers reminds us, contemporary debates concerning immigration to Italy and other Western European countries have not fully considered the longer trajectory of migration, resettlement, and cultural hybridity that constitute modern Europe. Although scholars have identified the many ironic parallels between Italian emigration at the turn of the century, the internal migrations of the postwar period, and contemporary immigration to the European Union, Chambers advocates a fundamental rethinking of the relation between the “West” and “non-West,” one that reveals how the very cultures against which the West defines itself are, through the legacy of migration, at the core of modern European identity.63 The “Mediterranean” is a space of linguistic, religious, and artistic hybridity where north and sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern, and Asian cultures have for centuries merged with and shaped what is presently known as the “West.”64 Excavating the cultural hybridity of modern Europe is not accomplished by way of linear narrative, but rather through new modes of storytelling that bring together what appear to be disparate and unrelated networks of movement, communication, and interaction. Members of diasporic communities residing in Western European countries, enact strategies for “talking back” to hegemonic host cultures that relegate non-Western subjects to the role of an “other” or, as Alessandro dal Lago argues, a “non-person.”65 On the level of cinematic representation, Hamid Naficy has described an “accented style” used by diasporic, ethnic, and exilic filmmakers that is characterized by a hybrid use of dominant (linear narrative) and marginal (experimental, non-Western modes of representing space and time) cinematic traditions. These works “accent” dominant narrative cinema by undermining cinematic realism,

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and using alternative modes of production, storytelling, and spectatorial address.66 Haile Gerima sets his project in both Ethiopia and the Italian peninsula, a country that is, as discussed, in many ways representative of the cultural heterogeneity at the core of Western modernity. Gerima’s Adwa aids in the recontextualization of current debates surrounding African immigration to Europe. Adwa begins with panoramic views of the Ethiopian landscape. The camera movement becomes a request to the land to tell the history of the war at a remove of almost a century. The images of the land (with brief inserts of archival photographs of Ethiopian soldiers prepared for battle) are sites that become charged with historical memory through the narrator’s disembodied voice. Sung in Amharic, the narrator’s initial words, “Adwa, Adwa? The Italians’ Adwa?” places the question of narration at the fore of this retelling of the 1896 Italo-Abyssinian War. One of the first major Italo-Ethiopian conflicts, the 1896 war emerged over a dispute regarding the Treaty of Wuchale (Wichale), a document that in its Italian form gave Italy absolute authority to represent Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in its diplomatic relations with Europe. The subsequent war resulted in the first major defeat of a European country by an African nation.67 The documentary uses extensive archival material to recount the history of the 1896 war. After explaining the significance of the Italian defeat at Dogali in 1887, Adwa details the lead-up to the decisive March 2 battle through a road trip that Gerima takes from Gondar to Adwa. During this journey, Gerima presents a traditional historical account of the war, as well as the historical memory found in the stories told to descendants of those who fought in the 1896 conflict. The documentary ends with an account of the importance of the Adwa victory for nineteenth- and twentieth-century pan-African colonial resistance movements. As the camera pans across the landscape, the narrator’s voice emanates from a nonspecified time or place. His words speak to the difficult task of telling a history, of not knowing whose history to tell or where to begin, and the impossibility of arriving at a “true” account of any event. The narrator’s words place the viewer (or interrogator) somewhere in the present (why didn’t you come earlier . . . ?), and from a position of uncertainty (I don’t know if I’m coming or going, let alone able to tell you history . . .), he offers another vision of the Italo-Abyssinian war for the present era. Adwa’s opening sequence offers another means of conveying the historical significance of the war by way of an oral tradition that makes the century-old victory alive and present for living descendants.

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After the pans of the Ethiopian landscape, the narrator addresses the interrogator and recounts the history of the war. If in Cabiria, the Roman victory in the Punic Wars became an allegory for Liberal Italy and the establishment of a modern colonial empire, Gerima establishes his own allegory through the use of the story of St George (St Ghiorgis) and the dragon. Establishing the correlation between the Italians and the “dragon” and Emperor Menelik II as “the brave one,” the narrator recounts how the brave one gathered all the members of the village to trap the dragon, and then pierce his throat with a spear. The film moves from images of the landscape to large mural paintings of St George leading the Ethiopian army in battle against the Italian forces. Through the use of lens zooms, pans, selective framing, and sound, Gerima brings the murals alive, revisioning the narrative paintings through the medium of film. Central to Gerima’s project is documenting the ways in which historical memory is retained from one generation to the next. Adwa contrasts “official history” (both Ethiopian and Italian) to that of historical memory preserved in folklore, songs, and epic poems. For Gerima, these methods of transferring historical knowledge offer a separate “narrative logic” from the dominant versions of the event.68 The reclamation of traditional narrative modes becomes a formal imperative of the documentary. By incorporating the stories of descendants of the Adwa conflict and giving prominence to historical memory as transmitted through oral storytelling and song, Gerima’s Adwa operates as a speech act, or a “collective utterance” that brings forth a “new people” or “a people yet to come.”69 As theorized by Gilles Deleuze, the failure of Third World resistance movements resulted in a “people who are missing,” or the lack of a coherent entity to which a political cinema could address itself. According to Deleuze, the modern political cinema must therefore perform speech acts to bring the “people” into existence.70 Adwa offers a retelling of the 1896 Ethiopian victory that makes the past present, allowing Gerima to merge his voice with that of his poet/playwright father, battle descendants, and youths learning about Adwa for the first time. For a country (and continent) still dealing with the legacies of Western colonialism, Adwa presents a retelling of the 1896 event that imagines another victory in a future yet to come. While relating the history of the Dogali conflict, Gerima enters his own film, speaking the narrative voiceover in Amharic, and describing his introduction to this significant moment in modern Ethiopian history. In an early scene of the film, Gerima, placing us in his native city of Gondar, recalls speaking to his father about his skepticism concerning

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the Ethiopian victory over a European imperial power. Gerima overcomes his doubt by listening to his poet/playwright father’s works based on the event. We then see archival footage of his father singing A Bell of Torment, a poem about Italian colonial aggression in Ethiopia. The film then transitions to present-day Rome, where we see Gerima completing the poem’s verses as he sits in the Piazzale dei Cinquecento, a memorial to Italian soldiers killed in the 1887 Italo-Abyssinian conflict at Dogali (Figure 1.2). Along with revising the history of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia, Gerima’s film is also cognizant of the signifying power of the monument and its resonance in the contemporary postcolonial period. In her study of Italian colonial memory, Krystyna von Henneberg argues that official monuments erected to commemorate Italian colonial endeavors are laden with “political and iconographic anxieties” stemming from both the country’s inconsistent nation-building process and failed imperial endeavors. Public spaces devoted to war memorials are legible only as generalized tributes to those who lost their lives in any number of conflicts, and do not specifically relate Italy’s history as a colonial aggressor. With the influx of African immigrants over the last three decades, many of these sites, such as the Piazzale dei Cinquecento, have become centers of what von Henneberg describes as “a new kind of diverse, transnational

Figure 1.2 Gerima at the Dogali monument, Piazzale dei Cinquecento, Rome (Adwa: An African Victory, dir. Haile Gerima, 1999).

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Italian public.”71 In Adwa, we see Gerima at the Piazzale speaking with descendants of those who fought in the conflict. The Dogali monument, as read by Ethiopians within Italy, is made to signify a postcolonial consciousness, one that dispatches the notion of the Italians as “good” colonizers, and relates the devastating legacies of Italian invasion and colonial occupations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In setting part of his documentary in Italy, Gerima enacts a spatial reorganization in which Ethiopians residing in Italy occupy spaces and convey stories of Italian colonial occupation that challenge the traditional colonial narratives that the monuments signify (Figure 1.3). Commenting on the presence of former colonial subjects in Italy as a challenge to the segregation of space enacted by Italian settlers during the colonial period, Jacqueline Andall writes: Just as colonized peoples resisted these impositions, migrants and racialized minorities in Italy are challenging the spatial norms of the country from a different perspective and seeking new ways of belonging within the boundaries of the nation. In the postcolonial period, the issue of Italian identity resurfaces as relevant to the notion of hybrid space as the presence of migrants is increasingly seen as threatening core dimensions of Italian national identity.72

Figure 1.3 Gerima in the Piazzale dei Cinquecento with the descendants of those who fought at Dogali (Adwa: An African Victory, dir. Haile Gerima, 1999).

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Andall’s comments return us to Gerima’s attempt to reconcile European and African identities in the face of Western colonialism and its legacies. Of the generative tension between his training in European and African practices of cultural transmission, Gerima states: “For me, Adwa is an exploration of the search for this lost race of Ethiopians, because I think the Western way too. Even if my case is schizophrenic, because my cultural background was African before I came in contact with my Western aspiration. My internal struggle today is the permanent conflict between the Ethiopian influence and Western influence.”73 By giving precedence to the descendants of those who fought in the Italo-Abyssinian conflict and who now reside in Italy, Gerima’s Adwa challenges the discrete national spaces constructed by dominant narratives of Italian colonialism, thereby offering a reinterpretation of Italian colonial and postcolonial histories. Adwa ends on a foreboding note, returning to Gerima’s voiceover as he relates events that will occur 40 years later in the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war. The final scene returns us to the Ethiopian landscape; however, the primordial voice that began the journey to recover historical memory is replaced by archival radio broadcast that announces the Italian victory in the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war. At the time of filming Adwa, the Axum Obelisk, looted by the Italian fascist government after its victory in the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war, was still located in Rome. The obelisk is not featured in Adwa, perhaps due to Gerima’s decision to film a second documentary, The Children of Adwa: Forty Years Later, to detail the events of the 1935 invasion.74 However, in 1997, 2 years prior to Adwa’s release, Italian President Oscar Scalfaro made the first official visit to Ethiopia to atone for the Italo-Ethiopian conflicts, and the Axum Obelisk was returned to Ethiopia in 2005 after an almost 60-year delay. Nonetheless, the 1896 victory is contextualized as a transformative moment in the pan-Africanist movement, resonating across Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean. While the film reminds us of the most significant victory against a European power by a sovereign African nation, there still remain many unresolved conflicts in the postcolonial era. Adwa’s road journey structure constructs a unified Ethiopia, one that overcame regional divisions to defeat a common enemy. This sense of national unity is in keeping with the 1996 official Ethiopian celebrations, footage of which is included in the final segment of the film. While Gerima’s Adwa subverts the construction of Italian colonialism circulated in its national cinema, it is also a construct of Ethiopian nationalism that as Alessandro Triulzi has argued, served the

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interests of the then ruling Tigrayan government.75 Similar to Triulzi’s call for moving beyond the construction of “Adwa” as historical monument, one that only allows the event to be either an Ethiopian “victory” that puts forth an unproblematic national unity, or a source of “national shame” in Italy, which commemorated the Adwa defeat only after it was “avenged” through the fascist victory in the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war, Gerima has called for a “critical view” of the colonial legacy in Ethiopia, one that acknowledges the ways in which the “Adwa” victory has aided in the construction of the Ethiopian nation-state in the postcolonial era.76 Ultimately, Gerima’s Adwa offers an alternate filmic construction of the 1896 Italo-Abyssinian war, one that though a mixture of African and Western modes of storytelling, challenges the history of Italian colonialism circulated in Italian silent historical epics such as Cabiria, and as will be shown in Chapter 2, the fascist colonial cinema. If in Cabiria, racial mixture becomes a means of reconciling Italy’s racialized north/south division with its colonial expansion in Africa, Gerima uses a trope of mixture to represent the postcolonial consciousness of the Ethiopian and larger African diaspora.

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Chapter 2

Mixed-Race Relationships in the Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginary

Faccetta Nera Beautiful Abyssinian girl Wait and hope For the hour to arrive When we will be together We will give you Another law and another King . . . Faccetta Nera (1935 version)1 Black face, get away from me, I want a white woman, made like me. I am still a soldier and I go to war to defend all good things. But in my heart I carry a bride because black face is not for me. Faccetta Nera (1936 version)2 Every footstep out in the yard, every distant sound of a human voice on the road, every hoof-beat of a trotting horse and every r’mm r’mm of a passing mekina would bring Tiye Alemitu to her feet. She would glance up and down the road . . . pause a little and return to her seat . . . and speculate as to what might have happened to Kont Florenzo . . . Tiye Alemitu stares far over your head and beyond into the distant past as she recalls her emotion of over half-a-century ago . . . most regretful had been the fact that, unbeknownst to the father, a child (my uncle) had been conceived. Faccetta Nera (2001)3 The last quote above, a short story excerpt, takes its title, Faccetta Nera (Little Black Face), from the marching song written during the Italo-Ethiopian

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war campaign (1935–6). The popular lyric, which imagines “Abyssinia” as a young girl who is presented “another law and another King” in the form of Italian colonial rule, was used to rally and inspire Italian troops sent to war beginning in 1935.4 The heroic gallantry of the Faccetta Nera song stands in contrast to the “Faccetta Nera” story, a narrative about the abandonment of an Ethiopian girl by an Italian officer. Told through the eyes of a relative who is identified as Alemitu’s grandchild, the “Faccetta Nera” moves between Alemitu’s nostalgia and the author’s ironic counterpoint produced through an account of the tragic historical events in which the “romance” unfolds. Both the Faccetta Nera and “Faccetta Nera” speak to the formative role of fantasy in the maintenance and historical reevaluation of the Italian colonial enterprise. The event that serves as a backdrop to Alemitu’s story is a 1937 bombing and massacre ordered in retribution for an assassination attempt on the life of Rodolfo Graziani, the commander of Italian forces in Ethiopia.5 The author’s knowledge of the true material relations upon which the relationship of Alemitu and the Kont are established is juxtaposed to Alemitu’s own recollection of the Kont, a member of Graziani’s inner circle, who she believes saved her village out of love for her. The relationship, most likely arranged under the system of concubinage called madamismo (madamism), ends with the birth of a child, whose story does not enter the narrative. The fascist colonial era saw the enactment of anti-miscegenation laws that attempted to secure Italian “racial prestige” by refusing to acknowledge mixed-race subjects. After the establishment of the Italian East African colonies, the lyrics of the Faccetta Nera were changed to redirect libidinal energies back toward white women as proper object-choice for Italian soldiers. However, as the Italian fascist regime begins to enact its racial policies, the history of madamismo and the mixed-race subjects produced also become subject to a revision that speaks to issues regarding Italian racial identity that were initially explored in Chapter 1. In her discussion of the relationship between European colonialism and state racism in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Ann Stoler explains that Foucault considered colonialism as a “byproduct of Europe’s internal and permanent state of war with itself, not formative of those conflicts.”6 In other words, the racism that justified and supported colonialism was already operative as a means of classification prior to imperial endeavors. Although countries such as France and Germany serve as primary examples, Italy, because of its unification process, its “southern question,” and the ongoing north/south division, is also an

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effective case study for questions concerning relations between the nation and its colonies. Foucault argues that discourses regarding race and racism were articulated through “technologies of sex,” including eugenics programs, theories of degeneration, and accompanying institutions developed to modify behavior and regulate the body politic. As discussed in Chapter 1, the work of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and his followers can be viewed as an example of the regulating mode of bio-power or the use of “diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.”7 In his 1975–6 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault articulates how the development of sciences to manage and administrate large populations lead to internal racism, or the expulsion of certain members of the population who were considered deviant and abnormal. Stoler explains: The creation of the “internal enemy” and of “the dangerous individual,” both framed within a “theory of social defense,” will be fundamental . . . to how Foucault will explain the racisms of modern states . . . the distinction between normality and abnormality, between bourgeois respectability and sexual deviance, and between moral degeneracy and eugenic cleansing were the elements of a discourse that made unconventional sex a national threat and thus put a premium on managed sexuality for the health of a state.8 The Italian fascist government created institutions both within and outside the country to construct and manage the proper Italian national citizen. Agencies to regulate maternity, leisure activities, physical development, and military preparation contributed to the development of the normative Italian citizen-subject. A late participant in European colonialism in Africa, the occupation of Ethiopia in 1935–6 and the establishment of the Italian East African Empire was also viewed as an essential step toward establishing Italy as a modern European power. Yet, the colonial territories brought their own threats to the Italian national subject, particularly through interracial sex relations that threatened the AryanMediterranean racial identity constructed and circulated by the fascist regime. Hence, in the Italian colonies, class and racial hierarchies were maintained among the Italian colonists as well as between the Italian settler communities and the colonized indigenous populations. Beginning with an analysis of the Italian colonial narrative film Sotto la croce del sud (Under the Southern Cross, Guido Brignone, 1938), this chapter

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examines the cinematic representation of interracial relationships during the Italian colonial and postcolonial eras, arguing that they have served as vehicles to process the legacies of Italian colonialism and the country’s postcolonial relations to its former colonies in North and East Africa. Under the Southern Cross is a contradictory text; in its attempt to stage fascist ideological goals for the colonial project in East Africa, it raises questions regarding racial and national identity that exceed the formal and narrative capabilities of the film. I will argue that in particular, the representation of mixed-race identities in Under the Southern Cross is rendered formally as a tension among socialist realist, pseudo-ethnographic, and calligraphic (high formalist) aesthetics, and is an example of larger debates regarding Italian racial identity that were circulating in Italy during the 1930s. The Italian fascist regime attempted to formally establish an Italian “Aryan” race through the 1938 “Manifesto of Racial Scientists.” However, the Aryan racial myth was never fully integrated even after the regime’s attempt to give the designation scientific validity and diffusion throughout the country via a propaganda campaign. The tension between the regime’s attempt to construct a homogeneous Italian racial identity, the realities of the country’s racial heterogeneity, and the need to maintain racial boundaries in the North and East African colonies can be seen in a text such as Under the Southern Cross, particularly in its juxtaposition of visual codes that are used to naturalize the Italian colonial presence in Ethiopia. However, these modes ultimately conflict with a narrative that fails to reconcile Italy’s “timeless” relation to Ethiopia: to the reality of forced occupation through the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war. Under the Southern Cross’s protagonist, Mailù, is a mixed-race woman who is a source of both attraction and repulsion, a model of racial ambivalence who is redeemed at the end of the film only by her selfremoval from the Italian colonial settler community. However, her presence dismantles the film’s diegesis to the point where the viewer questions the reality of the colonial conquest and further, the racial categories established by the film. I will argue that rather than rendering racial and colonial hierarchies as pre-given and natural, Under the Southern Cross brings into question the possibility of “realism” in film by exposing the constructed nature of racial identity. The second half of this chapter examines Italian narrative films that use the Italian-African interracial relationship to speak to the impact of African decolonization on Italy and the emergence of an Italian postcolonial consciousness in relation to its former African territories. After the

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fall of the fascist regime in 1943, Italy was forced to relinquish its colonial territories. However, unlike the long-standing British or French empires, Italy ended its short-lived empire unceremoniously, a transition that was not fully acknowledged and was historically revised to represent Italy as a “good” colonizer compared to other European nations. There are several films released beginning in the early 1960s that envision the colonial past as well as Italy’s postcolonial relation to its former African colonies. As in the Liberal era historical epics such as Cabiria, mixed-race can be read as a trope that provides insights into the Italian nation-building process during the fascist and postcolonial eras. For this discussion, I turn to Giorgio Moser’s Violenza segreta (Secret Violence, 1963), an adaptation of Enrico Emmanuelli’s novel Settimana Nera (1958), set toward the end of Italy’s colonial occupation of Somalia. Similar to Under the Southern Cross, the story of Secret Violence centers on the relationship between an Italian man, Enrico, and a Somali woman, known only as “Regina.” The relationship becomes the vehicle for Emmanuelli’s and Moser’s critique of Italian colonialism. Although an early recognition and condemnation of Italy’s participation in Western imperialism, Secret Violence accomplishes its critique through recourse to fascist colonial narratives, which like Under the Southern Cross represent the Italian male subject as one in physical and moral peril through sexual encounter in the colonial territory. I also consider Italian films released after the end of the first wave of African decolonization in the late 1960s, such as Marco Ferreri’s La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman, 1964), which offers commentary on postwar migratory patterns bringing nonwhite, non-Western postcolonial subjects to European countries and the shifting racial construction of southern Italian migrants in the midst of the country’s economic boom. With the rise of neocolonialism, internal political turmoil, and economic downturn, the early 1970s was a period of disillusionment for Italian left intellectuals as it became evident that the “non-West” would not serve as a site for resistance to the capitalist system or as a refuge from Western modernity. The middle to late 1970s brought new immigration patterns to Italy, characterized by a rise in non-Western European migrants within the nation. In addition, with the full emergence of a neoliberal economic paradigm, Italy became one of the strongest economies in Western Europe. The change in Italy’s relation to Africa, from former colonizer to source of Western aid for an Africa torn by civil war, ethnic cleansing, and an AIDS epidemic, can be seen in films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s

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L’assedio (Besieged, 1998). Besieged’s representation of the mixed-race couple comments upon Italy’s colonial past and its geopolitical position in the postcolonial era, whether as a nation coming to terms with the former colonies Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Libya or becoming one of the primary passageways into the European Union. It is during the 1980s that Italy created its first formal immigration laws not only to regulate incoming migrants, but also to reaffirm Italian and European boundaries, a process that remains controversial and highly contested. Finally, I end this chapter with an examination of what is referred to as the “first” Italian film about an interracial relationship, Cristina Comencini’s Bianco e Nero (2008). Comencini’s film about the love affair of two middle-class Romans, one an Italian of African (Senegalese) descent, uses the mixedrace couple to speak to Italy’s colonial legacy in the context of contemporary multicultural and multiracial Italy.

A “Colonial Adventure Film”: The Fascist Colonial Enterprise and the Italian Commercial Film Industry Italian fascism officially began in 1922, after Benito Mussolini, then leader of the Fascio di Combattimento was elected prime minister, dismantled opposition political parties and established the totalitarian regime. Fascism was embraced because it offered an ethnocentric and ultranationalist agenda, which entailed industrial modernization and entrance into the world economy, yet at the same time held onto notions of patria (homeland) steeped in tradition. This paradoxical position, a desire to modernize in terms of industrialization and colonial expansionism, combined with the fear of the loss of tradition and national cohesion, is characteristic of the climate that allowed fascism to emerge in Italy.9 In the post–World War I era, fascism was viewed as a means to mediate and resolve the crisis of modernity raised by the emergence of an urban environment composed of the poor, working women, and criminal elements, and related fears of racial contamination and the decline of Western civilization. To prevent the rise of a communist-controlled government as had occurred in Russia, the Catholic Church, along with support from business interests and the Italian monarchy, provided support for the regime’s installation. As Jacqueline Reich argues: “Italian fascism represented not only a political ideology but rather a synthesis of various ideological and political positions, implying constant negotiations between political factions, social institutions, and popular support.”10

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Although the first territories Italy occupied as an imperial power were in Libya as a result of the Italo-Turkish war (1911–12), the country’s involvement in North Africa began as early as the 1830s when the first Italian Catholic missionaries were sent to Eritrea.11 Distracted by its own struggles with foreign occupiers during the nineteenth-century unification period, Italy did not begin acquiring African territories until the 1870s. As discussed in Chapter 1, after occupying Somalia and Eritrea, Italy made its first intervention into Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in the 1880s. In 1935, after declaring its intention to occupy Ethiopia, Italy was subjected to economic sanctions by the League of Nations. However, without military intervention on the part of European members or the United States, Italy invaded Ethiopia and within 2 years incorporated the country along with Somalia and Eritrea as the Italian East African Empire.12 Under the Southern Cross is one of the first films produced after the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war, released during the brief period between the military victory and entrance into World War II. The narrative is set soon after Italy’s recent victory in Ethiopia. Landowner Marco Salvi (Camillo Pilotto), along with a young engineer Paolo Dei (Antonio Centa) and a group of Italian settlers, returns to Ethiopia to begin agricultural development and platinum mining on his estate. On arrival, Marco finds his property and his Ethiopian workers under the management of an unscrupulous overseer, Simone Aeriopulo, and his partner Mailù, both later identified as of mixed-race African and European descent. Marco dismisses Simone’s claims of landownership and orders both Simone and Mailù to leave the estate. However, Paolo develops an attraction to Mailù and Simone uses her influence over the engineer to delay their departure and steal platinum from Marco’s Irigare mines. After Marco discovers Simone illegally smuggling alcohol, he orders both Simone and Mailù off the estate immediately. As an act of revenge, Simone sets fire to the estate’s grain storage and makes his escape. While being hunted down by indigenous soldiers, Simone accidentally steps in quicksand and drowns. Mailù admits her knowledge of Simone’s dealings to Marco and Paolo. Although allowed to remain, Mailù decides to leave the Italian settler community. A production announcement for the film published in a March 1938 Cinema article provides insight into the ideological goals of the film. During his interview, screenwriter Jacopo Comin explains: Under the Southern Cross . . . is a colonial adventure film that at the same time manages to contain an element of propaganda, but not through the usual trite rhetorical channels. Until now, there have been colonial films, such as II Grand appello (A Call to Arms, Mario Camerini, 1936),

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Lo squadrone bianco (The White Squadron, Augusto Genina, 1936), and Sentinelle di bronzo (Bronze Sentinels, Romolo Marcellini, 1937),13 whose predominant motif is the war. I would like to do a postwar film. The Italian people took action because they needed land, they needed work: it is logical that, having conquered the colonies, they begin the war of work, prosperous even against those hostile elements that they must fight. Therefore, adventure in the elevated sense of the word with as much romance as there is in a colonial adventure lived by a people who must take possession of a land because they can work it in a way that gives bread to them and to the new families that they create. A film that exists in a time of peace with a military spirit in another sense.14 Comin characterizes Under the Southern Cross as a “postwar” film, reiterating the economic goals put forth by the regime in their rationale for occupation. The need for land expansion for the Italian population, agricultural development, and financial prosperity were the reasons for the invasion presented by the Italian fascist regime to the League of Nations and circulated within the country.15 Under the Southern Cross takes part in the dissemination of the colonial program as well as the rapidly evolving ideas concerning Italian racial identity brought about by the establishment of the East African Empire. However, profit considerations also influenced the film’s production as reflected in changes to Comin’s original script reported in an April 1938 Cinema article. Comin’s version focused more attention on Italian wives and their role in the maintenance of white endogamy, while the final script placed greater emphasis on the Mailù character and her involvement with Paolo Dei. As a reviewer explains in a September 1938 review in Bianco e Nero: It therefore must be asserted that there is a certain distance between the original draft and what takes place in the film’s version; while in the first draft, every motif was contained within the limits of an admirable integrity and balance, instead, in the film, the balance is missing because the producers focused more on the vicissitudes of the woman’s [Mailù’s] character.16 Because of the script changes, Comin decided not to direct the film and Guido Brignone was hired to complete production.17 Brignone was already an established director, having directed his first films during the silent era and successfully transitioned into sound. Prior to directing Under the Southern Cross, Brignone directed several period films often

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referred to as “calligraphic” or highly stylized period pictures produced in Italy during the 1930s and 1940s. As will be discussed later, Brignone’s participation in the emerging sound era and the resulting technical innovations brought about by this transition is evident in the eclectic formal construction of Under the Southern Cross. The extent to which the Italian fascist regime exerted hegemony over Italian culture is debatable. However, the regime recognized the importance of the media, in terms of both the propagation of fascist ideology and Italy’s position within the international film market. Beginning in the late 1920s, the Italian film industry experienced a fiscal crisis due to an international economic downturn, the rise in film imports from the United States, and the bankruptcies of several major film production companies.18 The regime took several measures to revive the industry, including the establishment of a state film industry, the L’unione cinematografica educative (LUCE) in 1924. The LUCE institute was primarily in charge of producing and distributing newsreels and documentaries on the activities of the fascist regime.19 While quotas were established to regulate foreign imports, state funding was provided to increase commercial production and create organizations such as the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National Organization of Free-Time Activities) to encourage cinema attendance. As James Hay and other scholars have argued, the Italian commercial industry was not heavily regulated.20 During this period, the Italian industry attempted to model itself after Hollywood and the Hungarian film industries, producing films with an emphasis on diversion, consumer culture, and a politics of evasion. Rather than simply a platform for fascist ideology, the Italian commercial industry was profit-oriented, releasing mainly comedies, period films, and melodramas, including the so-called white telephone narratives set within the upper middle-class milieu.21 Because of state intervention combined with high public demand for Hollywood films and as the prime example for an efficient and economically profitable studio system, Steven Ricci has argued that “the contradiction between the regime’s desire for both economic self-sufficiency and cultural purity and the domination of the American cinema constitutes a defining character of the cinema under fascism.”22 Under the Southern Cross, in many ways, manifests the contradiction between the regime’s anti-Americanism and its dependency on the Hollywood model. In particular, the character of Mailù is representative of the high formalism characteristic of the “calligraphic” or artificial style of the commercial films of the era. She appears awkwardly juxtaposed

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to the documentary style announced by the on-location shooting in the Galla Sidama region, as well as to the socialist realist aesthetic used to depict the Italian settlers. The film attempts to negotiate and resolve the disparate economic, social, cultural, and political trajectories of fascist Italy through its formal techniques. To get started, it will be helpful to examine the regime’s racial policies during this period.

The “Manifesto of Racial Scientists”: Redefining the Italian Race During the fascist era, the regime altered the definition of the Italian race for various political and social reasons. Monitoring the rise of Nationalist Socialism in Germany, Mussolini at first rejected their racial hierarchy, which placed Aryans at its pinnacle. Because of the racial mixture of Italy’s populations, Germany also denigrated Italians as an inferior, mongrelized race.23 In the early 1930s, Mussolini identified the Italian race as Mediterranean, which at that time included not only the European Mediterranean, but also parts of the Middle East and Africa. Most notably, anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi advocated the description of the Italian race as Mediterranean in his The Mediterranean Race: On the Origins of European Peoples (1901), a theory of Italian racial identity generally accepted until the late 1930s.24 However, after the rise of Nazi Germany, the second Italo-Ethiopian war, and the establishment of the Italian East African Empire, Mussolini adopted a new racial policy. In his preface to the Italian edition of Nazi statistician Richard Korherr’s Birth Regression: Death of a People, Mussolini argued that one of the primary causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was miscegenation, particularly with black Africans. Mussolini was also troubled by what he perceived as the high birth rates of Asians and Africans, fearing these racial groups would overcome the white population, eventually immigrate to Europe, and import foreign cultures.25 Mussolini also condemned miscegenation between the Italian settlers and their colonial subjects. Until the early 1930s, the Italian fascist regime regulated the racial composition of their population through eugenics programs in the form of pro-natal reforms administered through institutions such as the Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia (National Maternity and Infancy Agency). In August 1936, informed by theories of regression and degeneracy, a segregation policy was enacted within the colonies, establishing separate living areas and public spaces for Italian settlers

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and the indigenous populations. The reforms also prohibited personal relations between the two groups and officially banned the madamismo system.26 Written by Guido Landra, an anthropologist trained under Giuseppi Sergi, the “Manifesto of Racial Scientists” was first published in July 1938 and served as a statement of the regime’s position regarding Italian racial identity. Among its assertions, the manifesto argues that race is “biologically determined” and outside philosophical and cultural considerations. While maintaining the “Mediterranean” designation, the manifesto separates Italians from the Middle Eastern and African Mediterraneans, claiming that Italians are in fact “of Aryan origin” and any racial mixture within the peninsula occurred in the distant past and has no influence on the current racial makeup of the Italian population.27 The manifesto was viewed as extreme among the Italian scientific community; indeed, several members of the committee organized to write the manifesto were against its claim that the Italian race is Aryan and objected to the Nordic orientation outlined by the document. Other members opposed the regime’s support of biological determinism, preferring a definition that stressed Italian ethnic identity based on shared history, language, cultural values, and religious beliefs. Of the divergent arguments expressed by the “Manifesto” group, Aaron Gillette argues: In the end, the “Manifesto of Racial Scientists” symbolized nothing so much as the Italian elites’ lack of consensus on their own identity. Indeed, the political and scientific infighting over Italian racial identity, regardless of the regime’s official position, helps to illustrate the lack of permanent influence Fascism had on the Italian nation . . . Furthermore, the controversies over the nature of the ‘Italian race’ sparked by the Manifesto stemmed in part from a relatively weak national identity, which racism was supposed to radically solidify . . . Any attempt to impose an artificial ethnic homogeneity on the nation was bound to lead to conflict and divisiveness. Thus the “Manifesto of Racial Scientists” and the racial debate it accelerated, was another sign of the failure of the Fascist program.28 Although Gillette offers an important conclusion regarding the use of biological determinism to support a certain definition of the Italian race used to establish a cohesive national identity, the fascist regime’s construction of Italian racial identity should be placed in the context of the ongoing unification of the country begun in the nineteenth century and

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the racialized dimensions of the north/south division. The fascist period of Italian history is often read as an aberration or brief period of political extremism aggravated by a flamboyant and persuasive dictator. For example, Gillette associates the construction of racial identity with the regime, and as fascism ended, so did debates concerning race. Yet, as discussed in Chapter 1, similar arguments were used in Liberal Italy, and as will be argued in later chapters, continued in use after the establishment of the Italian Republic in the post–World War II era.

Representing “Meticci” While emphasizing the documentary aspects of the film’s on-location shooting and the use of Ethiopians in minor roles, the “meticci” (a derogatory term applied to African Italian mixed-race subjects translated as “half-breed”) characters, Simone and Mailù, are portrayed by Italian actors. The Italian colonial administration took African Italian mixedrace subjects as a particular focus of inquiry and analysis. Several articles of La difesa della razza, the publication used to propagandize the racial theories outlined in the “Manifesto,” were devoted to the purported dangers of miscegenation with non-Aryans and the biological degeneracy of mixed-race peoples. Published between 1938 and 1943, La difesa articles consistently referred to mixed-race peoples as “mongrels” and supported segregation policies and anti-miscegenation laws with pseudo-scientific claims of the physical and moral degeneracy of interracial unions.29 Prior to the racial legislation of the middle to late 1930s, there were no particular proscriptions on interracial unions, which were viewed as relations between non-Italian and Italian citizens.30 Many mixed-race relations were conducted under the institution of madamismo (madamism), which allowed exclusive, nonbinding relationships between African women and Italian men.31 In the context of Italian Eritrea, Giulia Barrera argues that madamismo was a term used to identify a particular social relationship within the colonies that was neither prostitution nor a legal marriage arrangement. The madame were often hired to perform household services and provide conjugal relations for Italian male settlers.32 As late as 1933, the children born of these unions could claim Italian citizenship if their Italian paternity was acknowledged. However, with the criminalization of madamismo in 1937, mixed-race subjects could no longer appeal for citizenship and their racial status could be considered as evidence of a crime. Between 1939 and 1940, mixed-race subjects were

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categorized as African colonial subjects, who could not be recognized or adopted by an Italian parent, and were the sole financial responsibility of the native parent.33 In addition to being the release year of Under the Southern Cross, 1938 also saw the enactment of race laws by the Fascist Grand Council that formally removed Jews from the Italian race and prohibited their intermarriage with “Aryan-Italians.”34 Italy’s anti-Semitic policies were influenced not only by the growing alliance with Nazi Germany, but also by their colonial anti-miscegenation and segregation policies. La difesa articles began to visually conflate images of Jews and black Africans, both characterized as lazy, hypersexual, and parasitic.35 Under the Southern Cross is symptomatic of the regime’s uneven and contradictory approach to Italian racial identity and the history of interracial relations within the Italian African colonies. While providing little information regarding Simone and Mailù’s origins, terms are used strategically for the purposes of identification and exclusion. For instance, Simone is called a meticcio in the film, a word that describes a person who is born of an interracial union, but not necessarily white European and black African descent.36 Hence, it is significant that Simone is labeled a meticcio rather than mulatto because it indicates within the context of the film that he may or may not be the result of relations between an Italian (or any other European) and black African. In one film review, Simone is described as a “non-Italian plantation superintendent,” and the character’s last name, Aeriopulo, may indicate Greek rather than Italian descent.37 In the 1938 Race Manifesto the Italians aligned their race with Indo-Aryanism, while the Greeks were placed in the same category as Asians and African Mediterraneans. The slippage in his racial designation anxiously renders Simone as indeterminate: he may have Italian ancestry or he may not. While distancing itself from a certain definition of “Mediterranean,” the Italian protagonists make claims of authenticity in their relation to Ethiopia. Simone’s lack of legitimacy allows for a dubious leap in the narrative in which Marco, reviewing Simone’s proprietary contracts, asserts that the papers do not prove Simone’s claim to ownership, but rather, that he was swindled by a corrupt organization with ties to the mafia. Marco tells Simone that he has paid too much for the land, suggesting that the “true” owner would not have to pay any price, let alone an extravagant one. Instead, Marco claims to have made a binding verbal agreement with the Abyssinian government prior to the war. Marco uses the European name for Ethiopia, Abyssinia, throughout the scene to

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denote Italy’s exclusive claim to Ethiopian lands stemming from Italy’s nineteenth-century attempted conquest of the country and surrounding territories.38 The establishment of the new Roman Empire allows for the perpetual legitimacy of any claims Italy makes to the country and also for eliding questions regarding grounds for the 1935–6 war.

Calligraphism and Realism In his discussion of Italian film during the fascist era, Roy Armes cites calligraphism as an important precursor of neorealism. The term, coined by screenwriter and director Giuseppe De Santis, refers to the movement of many Italian directors toward a cinematic style characterized by a formalist tendency and adaptations of nineteenth-century novels. Armes places the height of calligraphism in the final years of World War II, which saw the production of a series of period films that for him suggest a retreat from reality on the part of Italian directors who were subject to uneven but influential censorship boards.39 In particular, Armes argues that calligraphism was a means by which the film director could: [C]ombat the rhetoric and propaganda of fascism, a manner of preserving the dignity, and honesty and integrity to which every artist clings . . . Calligraphism [ . . . ] in the cinema is thus no isolated artistic aberration, but corresponds—albeit on a fairly modest artistic level—to the general cultural atmosphere of the fascist period.40 The retreat to formalism as a means to resist fascist doctrine can be seen in the precise rendering of the historical period through costume, set design, and landscape to the point where Armes asserts that calligraphism and neorealism are similar in their tendency toward realism. Armes, along with other scholars examining the neorealist period, seeks precedent for the movement in a period of Italian cinema that had been written off as artificial and escapist. In this historiographic approach, Italian cinema is characterized by a latent realist tendency that fully emerges in the postwar period. However, the regime also adopted a realist philosophy that positioned itself as pragmatic and anti-idealist. Although the fascist regime dismantled the Italian Communist party, fascist propaganda films produced by LUCE Institute were influenced by the Soviet School, as can be seen in its emphasis on rural labor and agricultural development.41

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Although calligraphism is often used to describe period films, the calligraphic style is present in Under the Southern Cross’s representation of Mailù. Marcia Landy has argued that calligraphism was not specific to period films. Rather, she finds the use of calligraphism in fascist-era films whose narratives depict: [H]ighly patterned, claustrophobic, and destructive world[s] where violence and aggression are commonplace. The central characters in the films were often somnambulists, depraved noblemen, avaricious priests, or mad and suicidal women.42 This description of the psychological and emotional conditions associated with calligraphism can be applied to Mailù’s appearance in Under the Southern Cross. As a mixed-race subject, Mailù’s character can be compared to both the “tragic mulatta” type popularized in the US postbellum period and the protagonists of nineteenth-century French naturalist literature. A sign of racial degeneracy and caught between two worlds as it were, the tragic mulatta is never fully accepted into either racial category and the crisis of indeterminability leads to social expulsion and oftentimes death. In the film, Mailù’s mixed-race status is given and the narrative does not raise the issue of “passing” or feigning a white European identity to gain entrance into the Italian settler community. Instead, Mailù and her partner Simone occupy the liminal position of colonial métis who often served as mediators between the European colonizers and the indigenous population, holding low-level positions in the military, administrative offices, and estate households. Mailù’s past is never clearly established in the narrative; we learn only that she arrived in Ethiopia 2 years prior, a date that corresponds to the beginning of the Italo-Ethiopian war. The conflict therefore circumscribes her presence, as well as mixed-race subjects’ presence in the Italian East African colonies, leaving both histories open to interpretation. Without country or family, Mailù is without origin or particular destination. Speaking to Paolo of her condition, Mailù says: “I am an errant soul . . . I close my eyes and let my soul wander.”43 Discussing the education and upbringing of mixed-race women in the colonies, Robin Pickering-Iazzi notes that they were treated in the colonies as though they were white, with the same social and economic opportunities afforded to young, middle- and lower-class unmarried Italian women.44 Mixed-race women, many abandoned and raised in Catholic

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orphanages, were provided vocational training and could serve as teachers, secretaries, or in low-level skilled-labor positions. The care and development of mixed-race children was viewed as part of the civilizing project, and taking into consideration their “European element,” their social maintenance contributed to the prestige of the colonizer’s race.45 However, as the mixed-race population grew and lines between colonizer and colonized, between European national and colonial subject became confused, segregation as well as prohibitions on interracial conjugal relations were enforced within the colonies. It is in the transition from an obsolete to a modern (i.e. fascist) colonial regime wherein lies the pathos of Mailù and Simone. The two mixed-race subjects and the colonial system in which they were raised are rendered outdated in Under the Southern Cross. The result of a failed biological experiment to create a race to mediate between the colonizer and their colonial subjects, Mailù’s and Simone’s services are no longer required. While Simone remains within the confines of an evil mulatto type who, in jealousy and anger, seeks to overthrow the European colonizers, Mailù operates within the register of a nineteenth-century naturalism, a reminder of the relation between theories of racial degeneracy and colonial expansionism. Doris Duranti, an Italian actress who made her career by portraying “exotic” female characters, plays the role of Mailù. Duranti’s performance is not that of blackface but, as Robin Pickering-Iazzi argues through her reading of Wahneema Lubiano and Judith Butler, may more productively be interpreted as a racial “drag performance” or a construction of mixed-race identity that reveals the performativity of race.46 Duranti’s Mailù has this destabilizing potential because the performance, like the film, combines various incompatible signs of “otherness.” Pickering-Iazzi comments: The initial images of Mailù evoke associations with Africa: she wears a dress of material with a tropical motif, styled along the lines of a muumuu and belted around her slender waist, and her body is adorned with large hoop earrings and a long medallion necklace. However, we next see the female lead in an unbelted kimono with brightly colored dragons standing in stark contrast to the silky black material, projecting an Asian air as she assumes a pose veiled by feigned indifference for Paolo’s eyes.47 The Mailù performance is an attempt to visualize the mixed-race subject through a kind of hyperrealism that is characteristic of the calligraphic

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films of the era. I would further argue that the anxious juxtaposition of African and Asian motifs is a means by which to delimit the mixed-race subject from the realist depictions of the lower-class Italian settlers, a distinction that in actuality may not have been readily perceived. Noting that European colonists were not an economically homogenous group, Ann Stoler remarks that concerns regarding miscegenation in the colonies were often centered on lower-class, single, male settlers who made up the majority of the settler population. Prior to the 1930s, male colonists were often legally prohibited from entering into marriage with a European woman because of the additional financial burden of preparing a household. During this period, concubinage with indigenous women was viewed as a more economically viable solution. Giulia Barrera’s study of madamismo in Eritrea indicates a similar trend in the Italian context; in 1940, she estimates that out of 75,000 Italians in the AOI (Italian East Africa), nearly 80 percent were males.48 After the establishment of the East African Empire, relations between lower-class Italian settlers and indigenous women were viewed as a particular threat to racial prestige. The relationship established between Mailù and the lower-class Italian settlers becomes evident in the film’s mating ritual scene. One of the Italian settlers, commenting on Mailù’s paralyzing effect on the men, states that although she is an “attractive woman,” he prefers “natural things” and further remarks that in Italy he has a “beautiful wife, a house and plenty of kids.”49 Here, the division made between the artificial and the natural supports notions of the family and domesticity. The incompatibility of the mixed-race and Italian settler communities is further widened as Mailù’s relationship with Simone is questioned. Another settler remarks that if offered enough money, Simone would sell Mailù, implying that she is a prostitute. Their nonmarital status is confirmed at the end of the film. This scene serves to illustrate the film’s negotiation of both racial and class boundaries and I will return to it later in this chapter.

Representing the Colonial “Hero” In his chapter on Italian colonial films and the myth of the impero, James Hay argues that these narratives imagine the conquest of Africa as a moral imperative. African colonialism becomes the means by which to rejuvenate the “motherland,” as well as forge a new world through

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settlement and development of natural resources. Africa is uncharted land, and in such films as The White Squadron (1936), the male protagonist conquers not only the land but ends his subjection to the “feminine” by joining an exclusive male enclave that will assure him purity and vitality for spiritual transcendence.50 The fascist male progresses through these films by overcoming some emasculating force, often symbolized by the bourgeois urban environment and a decadent lifestyle, and traveling to the colony or rural environment where he redeems himself through hard work, personal sacrifice, and repressing sexual desire. Devoted to land and community, the male assumes his role as patriarch and social order is restored.51 In Under the Southern Cross, the Italian male characters are either estate managers or directors such as the estate owner Marco Salvi and his engineer Paolo Dei, or the enlisted men who comprise the settler community. A father–son relationship is established between Marco and Paolo, as the elder Marco attempts to curtail Paolo’s attraction to Mailù and redirect his energies back to the colonial project. Mailù also distracts other Italian settlers, causing several of the members to become unproductive due to their infatuation with her, While Mailù is rendered through a calligraphic hyperrealism and associated with a kind of urban decadence transposed to the colonies, the representation of the Italian male is influenced by the regime’s use of neoclassical and socialist realist aesthetics to create a model for the new Italian male. Prior to entering Ethiopia, the fascist regime had already established institutions to promote the physical development of the Italian people, many of which were organized under the Opera nazionale dopolavoro (National Organization of Free-Time Activities). Benito Mussolini was the regime’s icon of virility, often depicted bare-chested in his performance of outdoor sporting activities. Physical training was viewed as central to the development of the nationalist agenda, and institutions such as the Opera nazionale balilla (National Organization of Fascist Party Youth Members) and Fasci giovanili di combattimento (Fascist Combat Youth Group) were created to organize sports programs and military preparation for Italian youth.52 Under the Southern Cross makes a populist appeal to its audience, bringing together men and women from different classes and regions of the peninsula to work toward the formation of the new Roman Empire. One of the arguments made for occupation was to increase land availability and reduce emigration, especially from southern Italy. As a country whose economy was based primarily on agriculture, the image of the

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farmer and rural worker was glorified in the vein of socialist realist aesthetics. By the 1930s, the abstract and conceptual styles characteristic of Futurism and the modernist avant-garde were rejected in favor of strapese or the “ultra-country,” which sought to reconcile the changes brought about by industrial modernization with “traditional values” embodied in Italian rural culture. In addressing the Italian population through this visual rhetoric, James Hay argues that strapese, [I]nsisted on regionalism and expressed a desire to recuperate “agricultural values”; they believed their vision to be the necessary antidote to a culture that had been “contaminated” by technological society, with its machines imported from abroad and an ideology “alien” to that of provincial communities . . . the strapese camp believed that by relying upon images of traditional culture, the arts could more effectively convey to a larger audience messages about national integration and modernization.53 In Under the Southern Cross, a prosperous settler class, originating from different Italian regions but brought together as Italian nationals through modern colonial expansionism, is represented by a socialist realist aesthetic that celebrates the fascist male body and the Italian labor classes. Subject to stagnation and lethargy in an unfamiliar climate and sexual frustration due to the lack of available Italian women, the Italian workers are called to work throughout the film. As much as they are made to “andiamo a lavorare,” the Italian workers are not shown laboring in the fields, a job left apparently to their recently acquired colonial subjects. Rather, the Italian settlers often appear in the film looking at the Ethiopian laborers working, thereby asserting a colonial gaze over the indigenous laborers and territory. Although the colonists are not shown performing manual labor, they are represented as dynamic and heroic in one pivotal scene in the film. After Simone is discovered illegally smuggling alcohol, Marco orders both him and Mailù off the estate. The night prior to their departure from the estate, Simone steals money from Marco and sets fire to the estate grain supply. The Italian workers, not the Ethiopian laborers, struggle to extinguish the blaze and save their harvest. Intercut with images of fire, the Italian males are shown shirtless and perspiring under the weight of heavy bales, their muscular physiques modeled by chiaroscuro lighting and shown in various athletic poses. The Italian males are not working like the Ethiopian land laborers, but rather, appear heroic by placing

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their lives at risk for the sake of the settler community. The body of the working-class male is transformed into a fascist body, laboring to sublimate sexual desire and liberate itself from threats of racial contagion. While socialist realism was a means by which to portray Italian fascist masculinity, the body of the indigenous male laborer is featured in a series of montage sequences. The men appear working in choreographed line formations carrying baskets of grain, felling trees, and harvesting crops. The use of horizontal and vertical lines to organize shot composition has the effect of abstracting the body, or as Karen Pinkus argues in her discussion of the commoditization of blackness in advertising during the fascist era, the “native” becomes the embodiment of labor itself, such as with the “Asiatic mode” of the African laborer who appears as “a series of automata forming a harmonious pattern.”54 The repetition and the resulting dehumanization of the native worker body is more revealing of the Italians’ fear of “forced labor” and slavery in light of the country’s own struggle to industrialize domestically. However, as will be discussed later, in Under the Southern Cross, the male worker body, whether Italian fascist or indigenous laborer, is represented as organized, regimented, and deployed for the prosperity of the colonial project. Unlike the violent conquests imagined by Marinetti and the Futurists, Under the Southern Cross offers a new vision of colonialism in which the Italian colonizers cooperate with their subjects, bringing technology, administration, and agricultural development. In one early scene, Paolo and Marco drive to the estate followed by a group of Italian settlers. Speaking to Paolo, Marco comments: “It seems impossible that the war is already finished. Can you believe in seven months we have created an empire! It’s like a miracle!”55 However, the “miracle” that brought about Italian occupation of Ethiopia actually occurred over 40 years after its resounding defeat at Adwa in 1896. The film also ignores Italy’s struggle against France and Great Britain in the League of Nations to gain permission to occupy the country, as well as the economic sanctions levied against it. The greatest irony of the film’s portrayal of Italy’s miraculous empire is that it was mostly accomplished through the use of mustard gas and heavy aerial bombardment, technological innovations that expedited the war’s end in Italy’s favor.56 Between the two wars with Ethiopia, Italy also gained experience using genocidal violence in defeating colonial resistance movements during its occupation of Libya.57 Despite this history of colonial atrocities, the film represents the Italian presence as a civilizing one. The film becomes a showcase of various technologies used by the Italians to master their newly acquired territories and manage the indigenous population.

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Although LUCE Institute documentaries and the few overtly propagandistic films produced during the period never achieved a level of potent coherency in their address to the Italian people, Under the Southern Cross does provide a representation of the Italian colonizer, his/her role in relation to Italians of different gender and class, and their position in regard to their African colonial subjects within the colonial environment.58 One means by which the film organizes the colonizer/colonized relationship is through the ability of the Italians to assume visual authority over geographic territory. In one scene, engineer Paolo is shown using a theodolite to survey the estate’s platinum mines at the base of the everdistant Irigare mountains. As he measures the territory, an Ethiopian laborer stands at a short distance behind, silently observing the engineer at work.59 The use of technologies to survey and represent the territories, privileges Paolo’s vision over that of the indigenous laborer. This scene also marks a division between skilled and manual labor, a separation that is reinforced through the formal organization of the film and the differences in stylistic representation. The elder patriarch Marco also begins to assert authority over the estate through the use of technology as he institutes new policies to regulate his workers and colonial subjects. While Simone, dressed in his crumpled white linen suit, carries a whip symbolic of an outdated and brutal colonial regime, Marco and Paolo work toward organizing the indigenous population in order to maximize their labor. Language also becomes an important means by which to manage labor. In one scene, Marco communicates to the Ethiopians through the use of an interpreter, explaining that they will now receive a salary for their work, a gesture that contrasts with Simone’s use of liquor as payment. In a series of close-up shots, the Ethiopian workers present their hands as their thumbprints are placed in a ledger to record payment. As a singular marker that identified a body among others, fingerprinting helped colonial authorities overcome language barriers in order to regulate subjects.60 In Under the Southern Cross, the use of fingerprinting not only signifies a more “just” colonial system, but also speaks to a profound insecurity that necessitates a new mode of surveillance that is at once indexical and transparent. Moreover, Marco’s use of the visual marker of the fingerprint is supplemented by his use of a native translator, allowing him to assume authority through his command of the visual and oral mediums, thereby linking mastery of the colonial subject to the ability to more accurately represent reality through sound film technology, an aspect that will be discussed further in the following section.

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The “Sound” of the Nation: Recorded Sound and the “Authentic” Voice As mentioned, segregation within the colonies served to maintain racially homogenous communities and reinforce the superiority of the Italian people that was being asserted in the “Manifesto” and the 1938 Race Laws. Within Under the Southern Cross, colonial spaces are demarcated not only in terms of race but also in terms of class divisions between the Italian workers and their superiors. Formally, these divisions are rendered primarily through montage. However, Brignone also makes use of emerging synchronized sound technology to further comment on boundary transgression within the colonies. The controversies surrounding the introduction of sound technology in the American film industry beginning in the late 1920s are well documented. Synchronized sound was viewed as an impediment to silent film aesthetics, and the transition to sound proved difficult, and sometimes impossible, for many artists. While the silent-to-sound transition may have been traumatic for some, as Sarah Madsen Hardy and Kelly Thomas explain, it became an opportunity to present “authentic” sounds, including regional dialects and music. In particular, through the new film genre, the musical, black American dialect and musical traditions were introduced to a wider American audience. This transition necessitated bringing African American talent to the screen, resulting in the less prominent role of blackface performance.61 The ability of synchronized sound technologies to capture black American dialect provided an ethnographic element to narrative films such as King Vidor’s Hallelujah! (1929), doubling the visual inscription of difference with the “authenticity” of southern black speech and musical expression. By the mid-1930s, synchronized sound was already part of classical cinematic practice and the movement toward “total cinema.”62 However, the use of African American actors to perform black characters introduced a new proximity of black and white bodies on screen, allowing racial mixture to be read as a metaphor for the “contamination” of the purity of silent film visual aesthetics. In this reading, synchronized sound technology is conceived of as a “technology of miscegenation.”63As Siobhan Somerville suggests in her reading of the use of blackface in American film, while legal segregation remained in force in the United States until the mid-1950s, the shift from blackface performance to appearances of blacks on screen is indicative of a decreased anxiety regarding racial mixture on the part of white viewing audiences, a result of centuries of

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institutional slavery and segregation that had the effect of naturalizing racial hierarchies.64 Due to the high cost of equipment and installation, in addition to the lack of faith in the viability of translating talking pictures for foreign markets, Italy did not produce its first sound film, La canzone dell’amore, until 1931 and most Italian theaters were not equipped for sound projection until 1933.65 As Carlo Celli notes, synchronized sound technologies emerged at a time when the regime enacted reforms within the industry to increase domestic production and regulate foreign imports, especially from the United States. Celli writes: By the mid 1930s after the conquest of Ethiopia, the regime sought to foster a national cultural policy. Steps were taken toward creating a stable and vital Italian film industry with the establishment of studios at Cinecittà and the Venice film festival. The Minculpop (Ministry for Popular Culture) encouraged the development of the Italian film industry under autarkic protectionism.66 Celli also argues that the autarkic form of governance influenced film narratives of the period, leading to films that emphasized the maintenance of class boundaries. Although Celli uses the “white telephone” and calligraphic period films as his examples, colonial narrative films such as Under the Southern Cross have the added function of marking both the racial division between the settlers and the indigenous populations, as well as the class division among the settlers themselves. Under the Southern Cross becomes a showcase for Italian dialects and several instances of spoken Amharic. In one scene, Marco is consulting his field manager regarding the Italian workers’ productivity. The estate manager, when speaking of Mailù’s negative influence, changes to a northern Italian dialect. Another instance occurs during a scene in the workers’ barracks where an older Italian workman recounts Italy’s major military engagements in the last 30 years through his life story, including the occupation of Libya, World War I, the March on Rome, and the ItaloEthiopian war; he uses a Spanish-inflected dialect that originates from southern Italy.67 In this particular scene, the southern Italian is interpellated by and made part of the grand narrative of Italian nationalism from the Liberal to fascist eras. The Italian male enclave carves out an Italian national space through the use of dialect. The creation of a unified Italy by overcoming the north/south division was an important objective of the fascist regime, a goal that it sought to accomplish in various ways, but

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one primary means was through the standardization of Italian. Through a reading of Benedict Anderson’s discussion of the role of print media in national identity formation, Celli notes: The role of sound in the cinema is a logical extension of the part played by linguistic identity in the formation of separate cultural and national traditions. Sound in the cinema divided national cinemas by standardized tongues, koinai, which communicate to a body politic and cultural community familiar with the historical and cultural commonplaces of the nation in question. Cinema may have been somewhat universal before sound, but after sound it became more culturally specific as national film industries reeling from competition with Hollywood after World War I were able to offer a product that could find a niche in a national market.68 While the film’s use of dialect assists with the creation of a national cinema, it also challenges the hegemony of standardized Italian, a conflict the film attempts to overcome through nationalist ideology. The use of Italian dialect corresponds to the film’s glorification of the labor class through socialist realist aesthetics; yet the presence of dialects in the film creates a kind of ethnographic spectacle, not of the Ethiopians, but of the Italians themselves. As Bertellini argues, for the fascist regime, the introduction of sound technology raised the problem of creating “realistic auditory aesthetic” to represent Italian national unity.69 He writes: “In films of the 1930s, hearing common people talking in Italian was still not as familiar as seeing them speaking. Their utterances struggled to adopt a verisimilar mode. Although the intention was to create a ‘realistic effect,’ the opposite was achieved. The secularity of their verbal exchanges challenged the medium’s capacity for universality and threatened cinema’s potential for aesthetic realism.”70 Hence, the use of sound technology enacts a crisis in the representation of Italian national identity. Ultimately, the solidarity among the Italian soldiers, their ability to separate themselves from the indigenous population, is found, following Bertellini’s analysis of the use of Italian dialect in The White Squadron, in, “their microcultural differences . . . Within the film’s ideological framework, regionalism and localism constitute the domain for generating an ‘authentic’ Italian popular identity.”71 In the following scene analysis, I will show how the depiction of the Italian working classes within socialist realist aesthetics, confounds the representation of the mixed-race Mailù.

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Having dismissed Simone’s ownership claim, Marco orders his workers to unload their supplies and equipment. Soon after, the workers are shown sitting outdoors at a large table, celebrating their arrival with dinner and wine. The exterior scenes are intercut with images of Mailù and Simone seated on the porch of the estate house, brooding over the arrival of the settlers who will soon evict them from their home. The settlers are singing a song with lyrics that include: “The men are at war / although it was a sad departure / they are thinking about their women at home. / They have to be brave and robust / because they will come home brave and with more energy and more money!”72 The settler song of spiritual transcendence through sacrifice carries over into a following scene of a frustrated Mailù rising and turning on her phonograph. Her theme song, Under the Southern Cross (Sweet Night), begins to play as she walks toward the edge of the porch. The recorded music merges with the settlers’ voices as Paolo is drawn away from the group toward the porch. The lyrics of Mailù’s song are of a more somber and nostalgic register: “My soulmate / you bring true pain to my heart / this sad, tropical night / there is a sadness as deep as the sea.”73 Here, the overlapping of the Italian male voices and recorded music marks the conflict between opposing forms of colonialism: on the one hand a tyrannical, decadent, and inefficient regime represented by Simone and Mailù, and on the other the new virile, productive colonial enterprise represented by Marco and Paolo. This distinction is emphasized by Mailù’s connection to recorded (i.e. artificial) sound contrasted with the “authentic” singing voice of the Italian workers. This scene advances the romance story line between Paolo and Mailù as one that takes place at the encounter of two different cultures. Although the intercut scenes suggests a collision of incompatible arenas, Mailù and Paolo are brought together by shared signifiers of class that temporarily supersede racial differences, including physical attractiveness, leisure pursuits, and social rank within the colonies. Their precarious union is symbolized by the image of the Southern Cross constellation from which the film takes its title. The constellation not only enhances the romantic elements of the narrative through a parallel of Italian colonialism with the seventeenth-century age of exploration and “new world” discovery, but also, I would argue, displaces the question of origin, particularly in the case of Mailù whose mixed-race lineage remains unstated throughout the film. The film comes closest to resolving the “mystery” of the mixed-race subject’s origins through reference to ritual and taboo, most notably in the fertility dance scene.

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The Pseudo-Ethnographic Spectacle The film’s centerpiece, the fertility dance scene, is where Paolo finally acts upon his attraction to Mailù. The scene moves among four distinct spaces: the triangular relationship among Paolo, Mailù, and Simone; the Ethiopian community; the Italian male settlers’ enclave: and the Italian settler married couples. The indigenous participants are shown in twoline formations, one female the other male, surrounded by Italian and Ethiopian onlookers. Paolo, Mailù, and Simone are shown in close-up and medium close-up, with the duration of shots decreasing as the dancers approach and engage each other at the nose and lips. The musical elements, a repetitive chanting and drumming, along with the physical intimacy of the dance, establishes Paolo’s isolation from the Italian settler community as he begins to succumb to his desire for Mailù. The shots begin to cut quickly from Paolo’s intense gaze to images of Mailù reclining in profile, and the Ethiopian couples performing their ceremony. As the couples make facial contact, Paolo rises and enters Mailù’s patio space to kiss her. The pseudo-ethnographic not only mediates the sexual tension between Mailù and Paolo, but the juxtaposition of the three stylistic paradigms suggests an intimacy between the colonial self and the indigenous other that contradicts both the film’s narrative and the colonial regime’s interdictions of racial amalgamation. It is also in this sequence that we have the only appearance of black African women, who appear mostly in profile, bare-chested and silent. The exposure of the women, as in the wider dissemination of images of black African women, is done under the guise of an observatory mode characteristic of ethnographic fieldwork. The qualification of the term “ethnographic” is necessary because while the women and the ceremony are filmed, and the nature and purpose of the dance are the topic of inquiry for the Italian settlers, the scene does not entail a “detailed description and analysis of human behavior,” or a study of cultural norms or a contextualization of the ceremony that would allow it to fall within the purview of an actual ethnography.74 In fact, there is no consensus as to the nature or purpose of the activity, with one Italian settler speculating that the event is a rain dance. The pseudo-ethnographic spectacle is understood only in relation to and as constitutive of the civil domesticity of the Italian couples. The obscure mating ritual is placed in absolute contrast to the Italian married couples that replicate the heteronormative and racially endogamous relations promoted by the colonial authority.

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Yet, the new proximity of Italian women and the pseudo-ethnographic presentation of black African women allow the Italian men license to comment upon black African women. In one of the scene’s dialogues, an Italian wife notes the women’s participation in the ritual, compelling her husband’s response that “they are the most beautiful young women.” Italian women were viewed as “agents of moralization,” sent to the colonies to protect “the national body politic from the threat of miscegenation.”75 Marco presents additional land to the three settlers who bring their wives to the colonies, similar to the fascist regime’s incentives to support settler families and their position as “the micro-political site for the production of Fascist colonial values.”76 After the establishment of the AOI, the regime sought to include Italian women in the colonial project, offering courses on daily living and household maintenance in the colonies as well as depicting the colonies as a space of greater independence and increased professional opportunities.77 However, Under the Southern Cross depicts the Italian women solely as sturdy laborers for their male companions, their proletarian appearance and activities a strong contrast to Mailù’s bourgeois effete and the native women’s exposed yet mundane physicality. As previously discussed, the demarcation of the Mailù/Simone/Paolo triad, the Italian male settlers, the married couples, and the Ethiopians arises not only from the imperative to separate discrete racial and class arenas, but also to regulate desire. The Italian male settler is obligated to avoid interracial relations and remain within the confines of the marriage contract. Thus, the civilizing mission in the Italian East African colonies takes part in the larger process of disciplining the Italian national subject. After all, it was a wayward and contrary regime that allowed madamismo to flourish in the colonies, creating the transgressive African-Italian mixedrace subject. As Fatimah Tobing Rony argues in her discussion of the monstrous hybrid creatures that appear in Hollywood fantasy films of the 1930s such as King Kong (1933) and Island of the Lost Souls (1933), a conflation occurs among discourses of ethnography, race, evolution, imperialism, and modernity. Tobing Rony writes that “in both films, the true monster is the insane white male who desires to manipulate nature and is willing to upset the boundaries separating man from beast.”78 Similarly, in Under the Southern Cross, the mixed-race subject, especially Simone, is represented as a monstrous, racial hybrid, an “experiment” that can be remedied only through a modern and supposedly progressive colonialism. In this scene, it is Paolo who, in his attraction to Mailù, is in danger of sliding down the evolutionary scale, a descent registered in the film on

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the level of the epidermis. During the scene, Paolo is shown in several medium, long, and close-up shots dressed in white khakis surrounded by foliage. Paolo is also placed adjacent to Ethiopian men dressed in white robes, who stand at a close distance to Paolo, but slightly out of focus. As with Simone, the extreme white of Paolo’s suit creates a contrast with his skin, making him appear darker. The mise-en-scène suggests Paolo’s struggle to maintain his identity and bodily integrity, which threatens to fall into the indefinite zone of the Ethiopian men in his vicinity. The rapid montage of the images also begins to confuse the direction of gazes, as Paolo could be looking at Simone with suspicion, toward Mailù, or at the ceremony. While the “primitive” performance seems to interrupt the conventional romance narrative, blackness, in this instance signifying sex, becomes captivating and alluring. While approaching sexual taboo, Paolo’s darkness at the same time allows him to be read as a kind of Latin matinee idol. Thus, at the moment the film attempts to illustrate the dangers of sexual transgression, the protagonist becomes estranged, foreign, yet alluring. Moreover, it is at this point in the film where sexual desire enters as a disruptive force and that the anxieties regarding racial amalgamation are revealed, particularly in the manner in which Paolo can now be read as a mixed-race subject. We can see in Paolo, as Judith Butler explains in her analysis of race and sexual difference in Nella Larsen’s Passing, that the white male protagonist is both constituted and undermined through his proximity to “the sign of blackness.” Butler writes in relation to the novel’s white male protagonist’s marriage to a mixed-race woman: The added presumption is that if he were to associate with blacks, the boundaries of his own whiteness, and surely that of his children, would no longer be fixed. Paradoxically, his own racist passion requires that association; he cannot be white without blacks and without the constant disavowal of his relation to them. It is only through that disavowal that his whiteness is constituted, and through the institutionalization of that disavowal that his whiteness is perpetually—but anxiously reconstituted.79 Similarly, Paolo’s sexual desire places into question his own racial identity. The visual codes that make Paolo appear darker as he gives in to his desire for Mailù are placed in contrast to Duranti’s performance as a mixed-race subject. In the latter, the construction of the mixed-race subject is evident; however, Paolo’s presentation in this scene suggests that

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his proximity to blackness, increased by the potential of sexual relations, has rendered him a mixed-race subject, without the pretense of cosmetic enhancement. Homi Bhabha has written extensively about mimicry and the colonial project as a desire for the colonizer race to create “a subject of difference who is almost the same, but not quite.”80 Bhabha argues colonial mimicry is ambivalent because it is both necessary to the expansion of the colonial enterprise but also disruptive, posing a direct challenge to Enlightenment discourse, forcing it to “alienate its own language of liberty and produce another knowledge of its norms.”81 This logic can be seen on comparison of Simone, whose hypersimulation of the colonizer becomes reckless and aberrant, and Yzu, the indigenous servant who has adopted the colonizer’s language and dress but does not seek to transgress. However, the scene discussed above suggests that it is the colonizer who has the desire to mimic his subject. In his essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” Roger Caillois argues that the impulse in animals to mimic in nature is not used as a defense against predators, but rather is a “luxury,” a “temptation of space” through which the mimicking subject becomes decentralized, a point among others and “dispossessed of its privilege.”82 The impulse to dissolve the self/other boundary is illustrated in the scene described above, combining notions of biological reproduction and enchantment, brought together through the manipulation of time and space in the cinematic montage. In both form and narrative, the sequence temporarily disrupts the colonial gaze established throughout the film, suggesting an intimacy between the native and colonial settler population that exceeds the narrative.

Land Restoration: Reconciling the “Artificial” and the “Natural” After the fertility dance, Paolo learns of Simone’s plan to use his infatuation with Mailù to take advantage of Marco. Hidden by a bamboo screen, Paolo stands outside the patio listening as Simone threatens to expose Mailù as a prostitute. At this point, the romance story ends, and the boundaries between the indigenous and Italian subjects are reasserted. The final dramatic scene of the film also constructs and reiterates a division between the “artificial” and “natural.” Making his escape from

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Marco’s estate, Simone’s truck becomes caught in the middle of the road. In search of a piece of wood to wedge and free the wheel, Simone enters a dense forest area on foot. Paolo’s man, Yzu, calls forth a group of hunters who in a montage sequence hunt down Simone as he desperately tries to escape. In his rumpled white khakis, Simone apprehensively walks into a clearing, accidentally steps into quicksand, and in horror sinks to his death. The scene suggests the reconciliation of “nature” and technology. The montage organizes the movement of native bodies in a manner similar to the mechanization of the indigenous laborer. In the end, it is the hunters, recruited through the regime’s transparent mobilization of their bodies that pushes Simone to the outer limits of the known territory, where the earth swallows and eliminates him. The movement of the indigenous forces, at first manifested as labor, is once again organized through montage, becoming a testament to a technological mastery that transforms the native body into a weapon. In the final scene of the film, Mailù is driven off the plantation for destination unknown, and the plantation gates shut firmly behind her. Marco and Paolo are shown looking off into the distance, perhaps at Mailù’s departure or toward the ever-elusive Irigare mountains. Throughout the film, the mountains are never shown; rather, we are offered images of Paolo, Marco, and other characters looking toward or pointing at a distance offscreen. This movement toward an unseen distance effectively pushes through the frame divide between image and audience, encouraging the viewer to transform the presently unfulfilled colonial project into a reality with limitless potential for settlement and economic growth. While Mailù’s future, like her past, remains a mystery, the Italians, too, go off to work in a location that is yet to be revealed. Within 10 years of Under the Southern Cross’s release, the Italian East Empire would no longer exist. After the demise of the fascist regime, Italy’s colonial holdings in North and East Africa were distributed among the Allied countries.83 The end of World War II would usher in a next wave of decolonization movements and a realignment of the former imperial relations into the “First” and “Third” worlds. In many ways, Under the Southern Cross nervously anticipates the end of the imperial era, as it works to suture the contradictions between fascist ideology and the history of Italy’s colonial endeavors. As I have argued, this difficult reckoning with the past is manifested in the formal composition of the film, a sometimes erratic combination of various aesthetics, including socialist realist, calligraphic, and (pseudo) ethnographic, motivated by inconsistencies such as a “miraculous” occupation, a movement from a

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“Mediterranean” racial identity toward an “Aryan-Nordic” orientation, and the establishment of a “new” Roman Empire at what would be the end of the modern imperial era. In particular, what emerges is a crisis of representation with regard to the Italian national-subject. As seen in the shift in Paolo’s appearance during the fertility scene, the depiction of mixed-race identity in the register of the “artificial” ultimately does not distinguish itself from the “realist” depiction of the Italian. This breakdown of representational codes occurs in the fertility dance sequence where in its attempt to illustrate the dangers of interracial unions, the film in fact reveals the Italian as mixed-race subject. As mentioned, after the fall of the fascist regime, Italy was eventually forced to relinquish their colonial territories in Africa. Although their colonial empire officially ended in 1943–4, Italy remained in Somalia until the end of the 1950s. However, Italy’s modern colonial history in Africa has remained only partially recuperated due to the sudden and unceremonious collapse of the East African Empire. Rather than full acknowledgment of a long-term colonial occupation that entailed chemical warfare and brutal repression of anticolonial resistance, Italy is perceived as a “lesser” colonial aggressor (compared to France or Great Britain), or as a “good” colonizer that brought modernity and industrialization to African countries. In the following section, I look at Italian films released in the post–World War II era that use the mixedrace romantic relationship between the Italian national subject and the African (post-)colonial subject, to comment upon the legacies of Italian colonialism and Italy’s shifting relation to Africa after decolonization, from the neocolonial era of the late 1960s to the rise of neoliberalism and the new global economy in the 1980s. Once again, “mixed-race” becomes a trope for exploring the shifting construction of Italian racial and national identity in the post–World War II period.

A Postcolonial Consciousness: Violent Secrets Violenza segreta (Secret Violence, dir. Giorgio Moser, 1963) begins with what appears to be an intimate encounter between two lovers. First, we see a close-up of hands intertwined, one of a white male, the other, a black female. This is followed by a series of still images of the lovers as they caress within an “exotic” interior filled with Asian and African art. The close-ups and the still frames suggest intimacy appropriate to the action

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depicted on screen. However, the fragmentation of the bodies and tight framing create a sense of claustrophobia, or an intimacy and intense closeness that borders on the obsessive. The opening belies the film’s narrative, which will focus on the specular nature of the colonizer/colonized relationship. In its attempt to convey an understanding of the fantasies that subtend the colonial enterprise, particularly the projection of desires onto the “primitive” other, Secret Violence focuses on the relationship between Enrico, an Italian national working in Italian Somaliland, and a young Somali woman named “Regina,” a domestic for an ex-fascist. Set during the final 2 years of Italy’s occupation of Somalia, Secret Violence tells the story of Enrico Mariani (Giorgio Albertazzi), a one-time journalist and writer, who works in Italian Somaliland as a primate vendor for a US viral research center. Enrico lives a fairly listless life; he is not politically inclined nor is he interested in Africa beyond its use as his source of income. He has an on-again, off-again relationship with Elisabetta (Alexandra Stewart), a British national from an affluent family in the oil-drilling business in Kenya and Somalia. Enrico’s other friend and mentor, Contardi (Enrico Maria Salerno), is a lawyer who resettled in Somalia before the establishment of AOI. Contardi is ostracized from the Italian settler community because of his homosexuality; he uses young Somali men as his servants and sometime lovers, offering them an education and passage to Europe to assuage his guilt for using them within an unequal and exploitative system. Through an ex-fascist banana plantation owner, Farnenti (Vittorio Sanipoli), Enrico meets a young Somali woman, known only as “Regina” (credited as Maryam). Enrico becomes obsessed by his desire to make Regina freely love him. However, throughout their affair she is distant and aloof, refusing to share information about her origins or even her real name. Enrico becomes frustrated by Regina’s refusal of what he believes are sincere gestures toward a true relationship. Contardi tries to warn Enrico of the exploitative nature of the relationship. Disillusioned by his own hypocrisy in his relations with Somali men, Contardi commits suicide. While holding an overnight vigil for Contardi, Enrico finally understands his role in the perpetuation of colonial violence. Prior to Secret Violence, Giorgio Moser had already begun his explorations of Africa and other parts of the “Third World” as a journalist and documentarian, producing most notably Continente perduto (Lost Continent, 1954), a study of post–World War II Indonesia.84 In interview, Moser states that although his documentary still relied on the myth of the “good savage” in a kind of “cinematic colonialism” that supports

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the dichotomy of the modern West and “primitive” non-West worlds, he argues that in Secret Violence, released in the era of decolonization and independence, he attempts to critique Italian colonialism and directly confront Western paternalism toward its former colonies. Secret Violence enacts its critique through its reliance upon and reworking of the narratives of the fascist colonial films of the 1930s. In films such as the previously discussed Under the Southern Cross (1938), Bronze Sentinels (1937), The White Squadron (1936), and A Call to Arms (1936), the representation of the endogamous community was used to establish the supposed racial homogeneity of the Italian settler community, and correspondingly to establish the moral superiority of the Italian nationals over their colonized subjects. As with Under the Southern Cross, cross-racial desire is central to the narrative of Secret Violence. Enrico’s desire to possess Regina is similar to Paolo’s relationship with Mailù in that both women serve as metaphors for colonial conquest. If in Under the Southern Cross, Paolo remains with the Italian settler community, thereby securing racial boundaries challenged by the mixed-race Mailù, Secret Violence exposes the hypocrisy of the moral imperative by condemning the inequality of sexual relations between the colonizer and the colonized subject. In the postwar decolonization era, the denial of mixed-race African Italian subjects and their nominal presence in the peninsula suggests that a “white” identity for the Italian national subject is fairly secure, at least after the country’s “economic miracle” and entrance within the European economic bloc. Ultimately however, what emerges from Secret Violence is a meditation on Italy’s new relation to the “Third World.” As will be discussed later in this chapter, Italy’s status as a “First World” nation and the implications for the country’s relation to the non-West in the emerging neocolonial era is contemplated in a series of films throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Italy began its first colonial endeavors in Somalia in the mid-1880s.85 Italian Somaliland was established in the early 1920s, and by 1927 the fascist regime annexed northern and southern Somalia. After the ItaloEthiopian war ended in 1936, Somalia, along with Eritrea and Ethiopia, were brought under the newly established Italian East Africa. During World War II, the regime attempted and failed to conquer Britishcontrolled Somalia. After the collapse of the fascist regime, Great Britain took control of both Italian and British Somaliland until 1949, when Italy was granted limited protectorship of Italian Somaliland. Secret Violence is set in 1958, 2 years before Somalia’s independence. Both the film and the novel on which it was based, Enrico Emmanuelli’s

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novel Settimana Nera (1958), anticipate an Italian “postcolonial condition” characterized by the emergence of the First/Third world dichotomy. The United States, now entering the second full decade of the Cold War, would shortly begin increasing its efforts in Vietnam. Associating Enrico with the United States, and in particular a viral research center, may be an anti-American critique on the part of the screenwriters, but also of Italy’s position in the geopolitics of the Cold War era, particularly its compliance with the United States in the emerging era of neocolonialism. Neocolonialism is further suggested in Enrico’s profession as primate vendor in that he makes his living by exploiting his Somali vendors in order to make a profit. In an early scene in the film, Enrico meets Contardi at an airfield where Enrico is sending a shipment of monkeys to his New York City based laboratory. Enrico tells the counter clerk that serum from the animal kidneys will be extracted to produce cures for diseases, such as polio. The monkeys, therefore, are to be subject to scientific experimentation and death. At the same moment, Contardi is sending one of his mentees to Europe to further his education. As the Somali men ascend the plane staircase and the monkey crates are loaded into the cargo storage, the film suggests a parallel between them, indicating the corruption of both Enrico and Contardi who still benefit and profit from Italy’s presence in Somalia. In an allusion to the transatlantic slave system, as his monkeys are being loaded, Enrico tells the worker to discard the ones that die before arriving at Roman customs so that he will not lose payment for the entire shipment.

Re-visioning the Fascist Colonial Narrative Film As mentioned, Secret Violence attempts to demystify the colonizer/colonized relationship in its narrative focus on sexual exploitation through recourse to the colonial narrative films of the fascist era. In films such as Bronze Sentinels (1937), The White Squadron (1936), A Call to Arms (1936), and Under the Southern Cross, the narratives often focus upon the reassertion of the protagonist’s masculinity through victory in battle or overcoming the hostile desert terrain of North Africa. Narratively, Secret Violence can be linked to The White Squadron and A Call to Arms through the father–son relationships established between the protagonist and his father (the elder Giovanni and the young radio operator Enrico of A Call to Arms) or a father-surrogate (Captain Santelia and the wayward

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Ludovici of The White Squadron). A similar relationship is established between Enrico and the lawyer Contardi. Throughout the film, Contardi serves as Enrico’s conscience, warning him of the corruptive nature of colonialism. However, Contardi, already compromised through his part in the perpetuation of colonialism, can only save Enrico by sacrificing himself. As with Giovanni in A Call to Arms, Contardi has lived in the colony for an extended period, and along with the ex-fascist businessman Farnenti connects the late 1950s colonial period to the Italian fascist colonial era. However, there are distinct ideological differences between Secret Violence and the fascist colonial films from the 1930s. While there are similarities between Contardi and the father figures in The White Squadron and A Call to Arms, Contardi is homosexual and represents a critique of the patriarchy that subtends the colonial enterprise. While Giovanni’s death in A Call to Arms was to the service of Italy’s great colonizing mission, in Secret Violence, Contardi arrives prior to the fascist regime, and his suicide is symbolic of both the corruptive nature and the ultimate rejection of colonial enterprise. Although complicit in the West’s exploitation of Africa, Contardi is separated from the crass brutality of the ex-fascist Farnenti. In The White Squadron, Santelia’s death solidifies Ludovici’s commitment to the colonization of Africa. Ludovici disengages from the superficial Italian bourgeoisie represented by his love interest Cristina, and enters the homosocial environment of the Italian and ascari troops. As James Hay argues, Ludovici’s transformation ultimately concerns the conquest of Africa, one that serves as a substitute for his failed union with Cristina. Hay writes: It is not simply that he decides in the end to remain in the company of men, but that Africa has become for him a place comprised of the qualities he initially sees in Cristina. In the end, Ludovici realizes what the audience has known all along—that Africa, like Cristina, really wants to be taken.86 In Secret Violence, the (black) female body as a metaphor for “Africa” and the actual sexual exploitation of African women in the colonial system are short-circuited by Contardi’s homosexuality. In the film, homosexuality is associated with anti-imperialist struggle, as Contardi comes to terms with his exploitation of young Somali men. However, the Contardi character also brings to the fore the use by Westerners of the colonial site as a space of sexual initiation and discovery.87 When speaking to Enrico

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about his decision to move to Africa, Contardi describes the continent as a site of freedom and an escape from a repressive Roman Catholic society that does not condone homosexuality. Eventually, his sexual difference isolates him from the white Italian settlers and his only clients are the British settlers who required an interlocutor to work with the indigenous population, and the Somalis themselves. The film suggests that it is Contardi’s marginalization from the Italian settler community that allows him to perceive the true nature of the colonized/colonizer relationship. Contardi also serves as a bridge between the colonial and postcolonial condition in that his character raises the question of whether an equal and mutual relationship can be established between a Westerner and non-Westerner under colonial conditions. As will be discussed, this impasse is at the core of the Enrico–Regina relationship. In addition, in relation to the fascist colonial narratives, Secret Violence does not convey the same anxiety about racial identity that is at the narrative center of Under the Southern Cross and other colonial films that were completed in AOI. While Enrico’s affair with Regina is posed as a threat to the white endogamous relationship he attempts to establish with Elisabetta, his identity as a white European male is fairly secure. As Karen Pinkus argues in her reading of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1963), by this time, during the country’s postwar recovery and entrance into the Western economic bloc, Italians are “essentially ‘white.’”88 In this sense, Secret Violence can be said to represent the fulfillment of one of the goals of the fascist colonial narrative—that of depicting a secure “white” Italian national subject within the colonial space. The examination of Italian colonialism that occurs in Secret Violence could only occur when a “white” identity of the now “First World” subject is no longer in doubt.

After Madamismo: Representing Black Female Identity in the Postcolonial Era While Secret Violence is attentive to the sexual exploitation of African women, the film’s representation of Regina as a concubine does not offer a significant challenge to stereotypes of African women as sexual objects. For instance, the story is a first-person narrative through the voice of Enrico, the film’s white male protagonist. The circumstances of Regina’s service in Farnenti’s home, her departure from home and family, her real name are relayed through Enrico or never provided. The

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erasure of black female agency is reiterated in the press representation of Maryam, the actress who portrays Regina in the film. Although the Enrico–Regina relationship offers a moralistic warning to Westerners (particularly those with liberal, yet patronizing sensibilities such as Enrico) who seek absolute otherness through the encounter with the non-West, the admonition could just as well be directed to the film’s producers in their “discovery” and promotion of the Somali actress known only as “Maryam.” The fetishized appearance of the Somali actress was perhaps a promotional gesture to entice audiences to see the “taboo” relationship, but seems inappropriate for a film that proposes to condemn the sexual fantasies that helped sustain the colonial imaginary. True to the novel’s intent, Moser presents a critique of colonialism on the level of sexual fantasy in the relationship between Regina and Enrico. Yet, along with her fetishized presentation in Secret Violence, the character of Regina is inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian and Western European colonial literature that circulated the image of the alluring, submissive, and sexually available African woman. In particular, Regina, in her dual role as Farnenti’s domestic servant and sometime concubine, can be read as a late Italian colonial period madama. As Giovanna Trento argues, Regina appears in the novel as a “direct heir of the old madam type” who speaks in broken Italian and remains subservient to the Italian male settler. Trento suggests that the madama appears in Emmanueli’s anticolonialist fiction due to the fact that by the 1960s, a full evaluation of Italy’s colonial past had not as yet been attempted, and Emanuelli could not conceive another kind of African femininity outside of the one constructed by an eroticized colonial gaze.89 In the scene of their first sexual encounter, the misrecognition caused by the colonial hierarchy is conveyed through mise-en-scène. Regina is presented through Enrico’s point of view, and is first seen shrouded in a black robe and in shadows. As Regina is placed on display, we hear Enrico call her name from offscreen. She walks toward the camera and her face becomes visible, sculpted in light, as though one of the many sculptures in Farnenti’s home. Throughout the scene, Enrico conducts himself as though he is in a romance with Regina, as though she is not Farnenti’s servant and sometime mistress. His insistence is countered by Regina’s mechanistic response to his overtures. For instance, when Enrico pulls Regina toward him to kiss her, she pulls away. Regina’s appearance and reappearance throughout the sequence also speaks to her objectification in Farnenti’s home. Regina moves in and out of shadows, in different costumes, as

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though a statue come to life. Later, Enrico commands her to sit, while explaining to her that everything will be done according to her wishes. When asked about her home and her family, Regina simply answers with a vague “lontano” (far away). Enrico tells her that he admires her and then orders her once again to come to him. In the closing image of the scene, we see Regina, reclining with her hand rested on her head, apparently bored, already familiar with this type of treatment by “benevolent” white male suitors. Regina lingers for a moment, then, slowly rises from the sofa. Regina’s silence and recalcitrance are her only agency. Throughout Secret Violence, the Enrico–Regina relationship remains firmly within the confines of the colonizer/colonized binary. Enrico sends his servant Abdi to visit Regina, to discover whether she is a “normal” woman, capable of sexual desire. Rather than questioning the unequal power structure of their relationship as a possible cause for Regina’s indifference, Enrico tries to prove that Regina is sexually incapable of being with a man, or that she only desires Somali men. After Abdi returns drunk and saddened by Regina’s rejection, Enrico decides to approach her once again. At Farnenti’s home, Enrico finds Regina with a Somali man, talking and laughing in her own language. She stops as soon as she sees Enrico, and goes toward him. Enrico asks about the man, and Regina tells Enrico that it is a friend returning to her village tonight to attend a great festival. It is at this point that Regina, encouraged by Enrico, rises and begins to dance. At first seen in a long shot, Regina’s body is soon segmented into closeups of her arms, hands, and face. Enrico kneels down beside Regina, looking up at her, enthralled by her dancing, perhaps believing it is a kind of reality of her “African, primal being” that she presents to him alone. A rhythmic soundtrack and frenzied montage support Enrico’s primitivist fantasy. As the dance comes to an end, Regina enters into a trance-like state then collapses onto the ground. Enrico climbs on top of the semiconscious woman, apparently aroused by her dancing and supposed compliance. The aggression stems from a fear-based desire, a desire to control or destroy Africa and the unknown it represents. This is the violence, the racial aggression that Moser attempts to condemn through his film. Yet, while Moser attempts to demystify the sexual fantasy that sustains Enrico’s “colonial violence,” he does this only through the spectacularization of Maryam, the actress/model who portrays Regina. Even the actress’s name, “Maryam,” a generic name for African women, particularly Ethiopian women, evokes madamismo and interracial conjugal

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relations as established in the Italian colonies. Yet, what can be called an Italian postcolonial consciousness emerges in the tension between producing an anticolonial statement while trying to avoid the recirculation of colonial stereotypes, such as the African madama. As Elisabetta Bini and Giulietta Barrera have written, the relationships between Italian male settlers and African women as established under the system of madamismo were often more complex.90 Through an examination of personal photographs collected by Italian male colonial settlers, Bini argues that these relationships were not always considered business transactions but were at times long-term, committed relationships characterized by affective ties and emotional investment by both parties. Secret Violence does not put forth a representation of the madamismo system, but, rather, remains on the level of the misrecognition on the part of Enrico, which is attributed to his unconscious desire to dominate the colonial territory through the possession of the black African female body. The sexual triad formed by Enrico, Regina, and Elisabetta in the film is also informed by the fascist colonial film narrative that used the white European female and, in particular, white endogamy as the moral salvation of the European male in the overseas colony. As much as Regina appears as a fixed colonial stereotype, so does the British national Elisabetta in her role as Enrico’s potential “savior.” Elisabetta is introduced during an early scene set at the Rainbow Bar, where European settlers (both British and Italian) mix freely with Somalis. The bar is a site of racial mixing and this is reinforced by the use of a black and white color scheme throughout. As Enrico enters the bar, we notice an older British gentleman flirting with a young Somali woman, and other women sitting at the bar who may be mixed-race and may also be prostitutes. The bar also presents changes in the arrangement of social spaces in the colonies. In Italian Somaliland of the late 1950s, under the influence of Western consumer capitalism, we see Somalis and European settlers dancing to popular music and enjoying drinks. Even though the older colonial segregation of social spaces is no longer enforced, the black/white color scheme also suggests the failure to transcend the use of the colony as a site of sexual encounter and exploitation. The conversation between Enrico and Elisabetta conveys their awareness of the sexual dynamics of their milieu (Figure 2.1). At one point, Elisabetta asks Enrico his whereabouts the night before and he responds that he was “sleeping with a negro woman.” In the 1950s, the term negra

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Figure 2.1 Enrico and Elisabetta in the Rainbow Bar (Secret Violence, dir. Giorgio Moser, 1963). Courtesy of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia— Cineteca Nazionale, Rome, Italy.

could be taken as a polite term to refer to black women. However, in the context of their conversation, Enrico’s use of the word connotes the inferior status of black women. His comment is a sarcastic poke at the cliché of interracial sexual unions in the colonies, one in which he ironically enters with Regina. When Elisabetta seats herself at the bar, the young Somali woman is pushed to the edge of the frame, leaving visible only the hand of her older paramour on her shoulder. The framing as well as the sexual relations established within the bar introduces a theme that while not fully developed, subtends the film—the relations between white European and black African women. Moser refused to place Elisabetta in a rivalry with Regina, thereby reducing the story to a love triangle. However, as Moser’s interviewer states, the film thereby refuses to give consideration to “the female experience of postcolonialism,” or rather, the film focuses primarily on the Italian male’s struggle to reconcile the colonial past, which occurs through his expression of sexual desire.91 Elisabetta also encapsulates the difficulties with the expression of Italy’s colonial memory and its postcolonial relation to Africa. In her reading of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse (1962), a story about the failed relationship between Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a young translator, and an investment banker in the midst of Italy’s early 1960s postwar recovery

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period, Karen Pinkus argues that Vittoria’s encounter with Marta, a British citizen who spent most of her life in Kenya, manifests the lack of a language within post–World War II Italy by which to speak of Italian colonialism.92 As the two characters talk, mainly of Marta’s racist views of her “homeland,” they move between English and Italian, which for Pinkus suggests a “movement from the spaces and histories of Italian colonialism to those of English colonialism.”93 Set in EUR, Esposizione Universale Roma (Universal Exhibition of Rome), a neighborhood established during the fascist era and reoccupied by the new Italian middle class during the economic boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the interaction between the two women speaks to the unresolved legacy of fascist colonialism and the metaphorical and literal difficulty of navigating the terrain of postcolonial Italy. The extremity of this failure of language by which to speak about Italy’s colonial history appears during Vittoria’s “blackface” performance, in which “Africa” is reduced to a group of signs: a leopard print sheath, elephant tusks, and wooden spears. At the end of the bar scene, Enrico refuses Elisabetta, and as she leaves, the camera moves into a medium long shot in which we see Elisabetta, dressed in black standing at the doorway, the British man and Somali woman in the center, and Enrico toward screen right. Enrico briefly remains seated at the bar, and the camera lingers on the photographs behind the bar, many of which are of black African women. We begin to understand that the bar is a place for European men to encounter black African women; however, this fact remains on the level of mise-en-scène. If the circulation of the black and, arguably, white female body on screen only sustains the colonial sexual imaginary in the postcolonial period, the character of Contardi reveals a history of same-sex relations between Western European and African men that while retaining the colonizer/colonized hierarchy, interrupts the heteronormative construction of Italian masculinity within the colonial territory as seen in the Italian fascist colonial films of the 1930s.

Homosexuality and the Postcolonial Condition Contardi is an Italian who settled in Somalia prior to the arrival of the fascist regime. As one of the most sympathetic characters of the film, Contardi serves as a moral compass for the main protagonist Enrico. The arguments against Italian colonialism, its corruptive potential for both settler and indigenous populations, are relayed primarily through Contardi, particularly as he is contrasted to the ex-fascist Farnenti.

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The decision to make Contardi homosexual is an interesting one in terms of the film’s exploration of sexual desire and colonial conquest. As discussed in relation to Under the Southern Cross, the reason Italian women were sent to the colonies and incentives provided for married men to bring their families to the colonies was to discourage not only interracial, but also same-sex relations within male-dominated communities. Italian male subjects in the colonies were made to conform to a normative heterosexuality through the establishment of a nuclear family imagined as the foundation for the nation-state. Contardi’s homosexuality challenges historical accounts of interracial relations in the colonies that focus primarily on white European men and African women. By making homosexual the character who most openly critiques Italian colonialism, the film also undermines the notion of the family institution as the foundation of the nation-state. While Contardi once imagined colonial Somalia as a space of freedom from the condemnation of Western society, Secret Violence acknowledges that although marginalized, Contardi shares with Enrico the white male patriarchal prerogative to exploit the nonwhite colonial subject. As Boone describes in the case of European travelers in Tangiers in the early to middle twentieth century: “The intersection of this ‘sanctuary’ for gay men with certain historical and economic factors of Western colonialism allowed a level of exploitation potentially as objectionable as the experience of marginalization and harassment that sent these Western voyagers abroad in the first place.”94 The recognition that his journey for sexual liberation has turned into an extension of colonial exploitation, one that has cut him off from any true, reciprocal relationship, is used as an explanation for Contardi’s suicide at the end of the film. After Contardi’s suicide, Enrico is shown plying his trade as a monkey dealer. Enrico allows Abdi to take over as he sits beneath a tree. A young Somali boy approaches him and solicits him for money, and the scene ends with an extreme close-up of Enrico’s face. It is at this point that the film conveys the postcolonial condition, at least for the liberal Western sensibility. The purpose of the colonial fantasy was to hide the true power relations between the West and non-West. Enrico finds himself trapped in an exploitative situation in which the true monetary basis of his relationship to the Somalis comes to the fore. In one film review, the writer notes the absence of an important scene from Emanuelli’s novel. In Settimana Nera, Emanuelli describes an anticolonial march that is violently suppressed by the police. The reviewer suggests that Moser only offers what he terms a “white” socialism or

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liberal “soft” critique of colonialism because he censures the more radical aspects of the novel and of actual decolonization movements in Africa. This reading of the film corresponds to Moser’s unproblematized approach to Italian “whiteness,” and the difficulties of representing a postcolonial Italian consciousness. The absence of parts of the original novel may be the reason why, as another reviewer comments, Italians still residing in Somalia in the immediate decolonization period did not have a hostile response to the film.95 Yet, the reviewer may have missed one of Secret Violence’s most damning critiques of colonialism in relation to Italian nation-state formation. After his death, Contardi’s body is not allowed to return to Italy. His sexual difference cannot be incorporated into the nation. In this way, Contardi’s death, more than the affair between Enrico and Regina, becomes the film’s most pointed criticism of Western European imperialism. Contardi’s body, the homosexual body, remains “foreign” to the European nation-state. As Boone notes, in many travelogues and anthropological studies and observations, homosexuality is constructed as a foreign condition, present, yet mostly unfamiliar to Western Europe, particularly northern Europeans.96 The irony of Secret Violence is that it is Contardi who arrives from Europe to find sexual freedom, a journey that is inextricably linked to the colonial project. In the fascist colonial films of the 1930s, Italian masculinity was constructed through its difference from the African colonial subject and with the arrival of Italian women, a perpetuation of the family institution that was envisioned as an extension of the Italian nation-state in the colonies. Contardi offers an alternate representation of Italian masculinity that does not conform to the male subject represented in fascist colonial cinema and propaganda. Ending the film with his body laid in state, hovering between the nation and the colony, speaks eloquently to the nation-building process that required a rejection of racial and sexual others from the national body.

La donna scimmia: Sexual Politics of the Postcolonial Era Along with Secret Violence, The Eclipse and the Italian art cinema of the 1960s, films of the commedia all’italiana also provide insight into Italy’s postcolonial consciousness. The commedia all’italiana genre emerged in the midst of the social and cultural transformation brought about by Italy’s postwar economic boom. The genre satirized and presented an ironic critique

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of Italian societal mores and beliefs, including those concerning patriarchy, religion, the family, gender, and sexuality.97 As will be discussed in Chapter 4 on Mafioso (1962) and Pane e cicoccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1974), the Italian-style comedy genre also broached Italian immigration within the peninsula and abroad, raising the issue of the role of migration in processes of Italian racial and national identity formation. Marco Ferreri’s La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman, 1963) touches upon the racialized north/south division (the story begins and ends in the southern capital of Naples), and the impact of decolonization and postwar migration on processes of Italian racial and national identity formation. As a narrative that uses the exhibition of a young woman’s extreme hirsutism as a metaphor for the reception of racial difference within the country, The Ape Woman also offers another instance of the cultural expression of an Italian postcolonial consciousness. The film is based on incidents in the life of Julia Pastrana (d. 1860), a woman of Mexican descent born with hypertrichosis terminalis, a condition that resulted in physical deformations and extreme hair growth on her body. During her brief life, Pastrana was exhibited throughout the Americas and Europe, and eventually married Theodore Lent, one of her promoters. Pastrana’s son was born with his mother’s condition, died shortly after birth, and was soon followed by his mother. Over the next 100 years, the embalmed remains of Pastrana and her son were exhibited in various parts of Europe.98 As a metaphor for racial fetishism, The Ape Woman also evokes the history of Sarah Bartmann (d. 1815), a South African Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited throughout Europe under the moniker “Hottentot Venus.” Bartmann’s steatopygia, or enlarged buttocks, made her the object of cultural fascination and scientific inquiry. After her early death, Bartmann’s body was subject to extensive physical examination and dissection, and her brain, genitals, and reproductive organs were placed on display at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris for over 160 years, serving as scientific proof of the pathological nature of black female sexuality.99 As Barbara Sòrgoni has written, the Hottentot Venus was evoked in the pages of La difesa della razza during the fascist colonial era, where her image and nineteenth-century scientific discourses surrounding her body were reinterpreted and deployed to discourage interracial relations in the Italian African colonial empire and the mixed-race subjects produced from those unions.100 The reemergence of the Hottentot Venus served to construct an Italian “racial consciousness” that as Sòrgoni comments “was directly functional to fascist colonial practices to preserve

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the purity of and prestige of the Italian race.”101 The use of the main protagonist’s hirsutism as a metaphor for racial difference in The Ape Woman indicates the resonance of colonial discourses concerning interracial sex and national identity formation in the country’s postcolonial era. The Ape Woman begins at a soup kitchen run by a Catholic order. A priest and a sister introduce a slideshow on the church’s missionary work in Africa. In the midst of a rowdy crowd, a series of black and white photographs of black African women are projected onto a screen, presented under the guise of both missionary work and ethnography. However, the men do not seem to be deceived by the presentation and proceed to laugh and heckle at the slideshow, making comments about the women’s breasts. The last image is of a grimacing, almost grotesque African woman holding the head of a decapitated white man presented in fullframe. The “bare-chested” African woman remains a signifier of exoticism and absolute otherness. Yet, the men’s laughter and ability to see through the church’s “missionary” objective suggest the erosion of colonial ideologies supported by pornographic images of seminude African women that were circulated in the name of anthropological study and civilizing missions. The film centers on Antonio (Ugo Tognazzi), a third-rate impresario, who meets Maria (Anne Girardot), a young woman with extreme hirsutism who works as a cook at the Catholic poorhouse. Antonio, seeing a potential financial opportunity, courts Maria and convinces her to move into his home. Soon, Antonio begins purchasing props for what will be a sideshow starring Maria as the “monkey woman.” Reluctant at first, Maria eventually agrees to perform as the “monkey woman” because of her growing love for Antonio. The show achieves some success, but Maria briefly leaves Antonio after he attempts to prostitute her to a “scientist” with a sexual fetish for her hair. In order to retrieve Maria from the convent where she takes sanctuary, Antonio marries her, turning the ceremony into moneymaking spectacle. As husband and wife, Antonio and Maria take their show to Paris, where it is transformed into an exotic burlesque at an after-hours club. During their stay, Maria becomes pregnant and decides to have her baby despite warnings from the French physician. Despite attempts to affect the gestating child with images of white, “normal” babies, Maria’s child inherits her condition. Both mother and infant die soon after. After Maria’s remains are sent to a university museum for preservation, Antonio protests his rights to her remains as her husband. Acquiring her embalmed body, Antonio returns to Naples where he exhibits Maria as the “monkey woman” in a cheap sideshow.

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In an alternate ending for the film, both Maria and her infant survive childbirth.102 However, Maria’s pregnancy causes her to start shedding her epidermal hair. By the time she and Antonio return to Naples with their child, Maria has lost all of her hair and appears as a “normal” white Italian woman. Having lost their source of income, Antonio is forced to take a regular job as a dockworker at a Naples pier. The final scene shows Maria and her son visiting Antonio at work during his lunch break. In both versions, the fetishization of skin and the subsequent dehumanization of Maria become a metaphor for the black woman in a European society. Antonio’s sideshow becomes a minor success and attracts the interest of a local businessman who wishes to meet Maria. Dressed in full hijab, Antonio takes Maria to a Dr Antonio who while claiming to have a scientific interest in Maria, asks Antonio to allow her to stay with him for a set price. Throughout their visit, the businessman asks Maria to reveal and allow him to touch her skin. His fetishization of Maria’s skin can be read as a form of perversion in that he essentially wants to have sex with her because of her hirsutism: here a metaphor for black skin. The attention given to her hirsutism can be read in the film as racial fetishism that invests her skin color with power, including hypersexuality, which is the source not only of sexual attraction but also of fear and repulsion. In The Ape Woman, this racial fetishism, which both acknowledges and disavows the other’s difference, is particularly ironic because beneath her hair, Maria really is “white.” The fact of her whiteness is the source of humor in the film because those who fawn over Maria’s supposed difference are both deceived and self-deceived. Antonio’s exploitation of Maria does not go unnoticed, mainly by Maria herself, who runs away from Antonio to the protection of a convent. The role of the church in the film can be compared to its role in providing services for immigrants newly arrived in Europe. The church provides sanctuary for Maria and, disregarding her condition, demands that Antonio marry Maria if she is to remain with him. Antonio does marry her, but uses the marriage as a publicity stunt. Forcing her to sing “La Novia” (“The Wedding”), a song whose lyrics include “White and splendid goes the bride,” Maria is paraded in the streets through large, heckling crowds, amused by the ape-woman as a “white” bride. The procession includes white Italian men in blackface who, in an extension of the sideshow performance, serve as the monkey woman’s entourage. The men’s blackface performances link Maria’s hirsutism and monkey woman persona to the images of Africa in the Western cultural imaginary.

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Again, parallels can be made between Maria and black African women. The marriage between Antonio and Maria, here cruelly mocked as one between a human and subhuman, can only be seen as a parody of a “real” marriage, presumably between whites. Here, the film considers the societal ramifications of postcolonial subjects in Europe, particularly the reception of interracial relationships. Yet, the wedding performance, replete with blackface performance, is rendered ironic considering the historical association of the Italian south with Africa and the Levant. The performance of blackness by Italian southerners who are constructed as nonwhite, indicates the use of racial performance to establish a “white” racial identity for Italian southerners in the post–World War II era. This construction of whiteness takes place during a period of rapid economic development that saw massive internal migration, including southern Italian migration to northern urban industrial centers. During this period of economic growth and migration, Italian southerners experienced racial discrimination in the Italian north and other northern European countries, where they were still constructed as a different and inferior race. The blackface performances in the film illuminate the Italian southerner’s racial “in-betweenness” or rather of having to negotiate a racial hierarchy of whiteness as part of establishing their Italian national identity. In addition, if Maria’s hirsutism is a metaphor for racial difference, her status as a southern Italian woman is significant in that the south’s racialized difference from northern Italy informs our reading of her as the “monkey woman.” As Sander Gilman argues, studies of the Hottentot Venus and other black and mixed-race women were used not only to establish the sexual deviancy of black women, but also of women in general.103 In particular, the white European female prostitute was often compared to black women to illustrate what were scientifically constructed as shared physical deformities, such as enlarged genitalia, that served as reason for the white European prostitute’s deviant behavior. Prior to the fascist invocation of the Hottentot Venus, criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso drew upon physical studies of Sarah Bartmann written by Cuvier and others to show similar deformities in Italian prostitutes in his La donna deliquente (The Criminal Woman, 1893). Studies of Sarah Bartmann formed the scientific basis for Lombroso’s claims that European prostitutes, often referring to southern Italian women, were evolutionary throwbacks to black women or even further, simians.104 Hence, even without the parallels to black African women, Maria, due to her southern identity, can already be read as a racialized other.

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Cross-racial desire and interracial relations are further considered by taking Antonio and Maria outside the Italian national context. Seeking to expand their show, Antonio and Maria meet with a show producer to arrange a “monkey woman” review in Paris. In the years before the height of the economic boom, France was a major northern European destination for Italian migrants seeking temporary employment opportunities.105 The couple’s movement from Naples to Paris then back to Naples suggests changed economic conditions of the “boom” period that reduced external migration to northern Europe, where, in addition, many Italians both southern and northern experienced forms of discrimination. In terms of Maria’s hirsutism as metaphor for racial difference, France is also significant because of its history as an imperial power and the resulting greater number of black African postcolonial subjects in the country. France has a body of nineteenth-century literature and colonial travel writing concerning black and mixed-race female sexuality, from the French reception of the Hottentot Venus to literary sources such as Emile Zola’s Nana (1880) and Thérèse Raquin (1867), in which black and mixed-race women are associated with notions of contamination, degeneracy, and pathological sexuality.106 The conflation of southern Italian and black African female bodies is staged in this scene just prior to Antonio and Maria’s move to France. The couple’s new promoter suggests that Maria appear in the nude in the French burlesque. Both Maria and Antonio object, but to assuage their concerns, the promoter asks a black female dancer to show the couple her stage costume and performance. The dancer appears dressed in a sequined two-piece suit, topped by an ornate, feathered head decoration. She positions herself in front of the promoter, which allows her partially exposed derriere to be seen on screen. She is identified as an Afro-Cuban dancer who performs striptease for a theatrical review. The promoter deemphasizes the erotic component of the dancer’s appearance, saying that “there is no harm in it” and that she is “a statue, a statue of flesh.” The erotic signifier, the black female dancer’s exposed buttocks, is collapsed onto Maria, who will shortly appear partially nude in a burlesque show in her “monkey woman” persona. The black female’s exposed body appears later in the film’s French episode. During a break in their performance, Antonio wanders backstage and gazes upon an attractive black woman dressed in what appears to be a wedding dress. She greets Antonio then turns to walk up a flight of stairs, at which point we see that the entire back of the dress is removed, thereby exposing her buttocks. This scene refers back to

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the earlier scene of Antonio’s marriage to Maria, in which the mixed marriage between Antonio and the “monkey woman” was the source of mockery and derision. Once again, Maria as monkey woman is conflated with the black female, who, like her costume, is split between the image of the normative marriage partner and the monstrous yet sexually desirable racial other. Antonio and Maria’s Paris burlesque also points to France’s “negrophilia,” most notably the “Africanist” spectacles of the 1920s, such as the Bal Negre that starred Josephine Baker, the African American dancer who moved to France and later achieved international stardom. In her stage performance, as well as her films such as Princesse Tam Tam (1935) and Zou Zou (1934), Baker appeared as the innocent, yet sexually alluring native woman, either dressed in her famous banana skirt or as the desired indigenous other for French men seeking to escape the complications of the modern Western world. In the burlesque performance in France, Maria’s “monkey woman” is no longer simply a monstrous curiosity, but a mysterious, sexually alluring figure. In the performance, now held in a fashionable after-hours club, Antonio remains in the role of explorer. However, the scene is transferred to the jungle, where he encounters the alluring monkey woman. Dressed in a see-through shift, Maria is now an object of sexual desire. In order to reach his desired object, the explorer must kill the Ape Woman’s father, a large gorilla. The dim lighting of the club keeps her partially in shadows as she tempts the explorer to come closer to her. As the explorer is about to touch the Ape Woman, she pulls out a gun and kills him. The audience response is tepid as though they are familiar with the story. Here, the parallel between Maria and the African woman is more explicit and the show’s ending serves as a warning against racial transgression. The burlesque incorporates the colonialist fantasy of sexual conquest as metaphor for possession of Africa. The gorilla-father appears as an allusion to black men, and, more generally, to blackness as a signifier of sex and sexuality. Like King Kong, the gorilla in the burlesque piece operates as a symbol for a black male sexuality that threatens the supremacy of the white phallus, as well as the “primitive” that literally destroys modern Western civilization. In the performance, the gorilla-father of the Ape Woman puts forth both the myth of the black rapist as well as the fear of interracial unions that produce monstrous mixed-race subjects. While France played an integral role in twentieth-century black modernity, with US black artists and intellectuals such as Josephine Baker, Paul

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Robeson, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin relocating to the country throughout the first half of the twentieth century, France was also a brutal and repressive colonizer. Foundational anticolonial resistance movements and postcolonial theory have their beginnings in the Francophone world, including the Negritude movement led by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Seghor, and the work of psychiatrist and postcolonial theorist Franz Fanon. At the time of The Ape Woman’s release, France was ending its violent opposition to Algerian independence. Antonio and Maria are placed within this context, not only to suggest the absence of a postcolonial discourse (for both internal and external colonialism) in Italy, but also as means of drawing upon France’s construction of blackness and black female sexuality in its cultural imaginary, as well as to draw comparisons between the two countries and their approach to postcolonial subjects within the national body. By moving Antonio and Maria to France, The Ape Woman both displaces Italy’s colonial history—one that includes relations between Italian men and black African women—and offers a means of representing mixed-race unions between northern and southern Italians, as well as the possibility of unions between Italian men and black women in the postcolonial era. The prohibition against racial mixing is made particularly evident when Maria becomes pregnant while the couple is in France. A doctor is called to their room in a pension operated by an elderly Italian woman. Upon seeing her hirsutism, the doctor is placed on alert, and begins treating Maria as though she had a transmittable disease. After determining that Maria and Antonio have consummated their relationship, the doctor informs them that Maria is pregnant. While washing his hands, the doctor, speaking to Antonio through the housekeeper, tells him that the pregnancy is dangerous for both Maria and the child, suggesting they terminate the pregnancy. Antonio says that in Italy abortion is illegal and becomes distressed at the prospect of telling Maria this news. Maria becomes distraught at the doctor’s recommendation and refuses to terminate the pregnancy. In the film’s “tragic” ending that corresponds to the life of Julia Pastrana, Maria becomes terminally ill after giving birth to a stillborn child. During her final moments, Antonio comforts Maria, telling her that she gave birth to a healthy, normal baby when in fact the infant was born with Maria’s condition. Essentially, Maria dies trying to have a “white” baby. The scene closes with an image of the dead Maria with a photograph of the desired “normal” white infant and crucifix on the wall above her bed.

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As with both Sarah Bartmann and Julia Pastrana, Maria has an afterlife, both as object of scientific research and exhibition spectacle. Maria’s body is returned to Italy and placed in the care of a museum that plans to embalm her and place her on permanent display. After Antonio mounts a protest demanding a Christian burial for his wife, her remains are returned to him. In the next scene, Antonio has expediently reverted to his conman ways. Once again dressed as the explorer, Antonio stands upon a stage below a marquee with the show title written in French, “Sensationnel.” Along with the marquee, two large illustrations of Maria as monkey woman appear on either side of the stage. On the left, she appears fully nude, exposing her hirsutism, and the other, dressed in her wedding gown. As with the opening scene in the Catholic poorhouse, the audience is not deceived by the expedition narrative, understanding that it is a pretense to exhibit the monstrous female body. The exhaustion of the African expedition narrative, along with other colonial narratives that concealed the exploitative nature of Western colonialism, similar to constructions of the Italian north during and after unification, subject Antonio to ridicule by the audience. As people queue up to enter the show, the camera pans out to a long, overhead shot of the city of Naples. Both the original and alternate endings suggest that only the “white,” heteronormative couple can form a successful union. Unlike the fascist colonial narratives, The Ape Woman can be considered a postcolonial narrative film in that it examines the possibility of mixed-race unions and mixed-race subjects of African and Italian descent within the nation, an issue that I explore further in Chapter 3’s discussion of Il Mulatto (Francesco De Robertis, 1949). Like The Eclipse (Luchino Visconti, 1962) and Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, Luchino Visconti, 1961), The Ape Woman’s representation of postcolonial Italy at the height of its postwar economic recovery is influenced by Italian internal and external migration and its racialized north/south division. If Maria’s hair is a metaphor for racial difference, the alternate ending disavows this racial difference, allowing that underneath Maria’s “hair” she is really white. Read in relation to the racialized dimensions of the north/south divide during its economic boom period, the “white” racial status of the Italian southerner is asserted through its contrast to nonwhite, non-European postcolonial migrants. While Secret Violence condemns the libidinal economy of the colonial enterprise toward the end of Italy’s presence in Somalia, The Ape Woman sets its consideration of Italy’s postcolonial condition within the nation

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during the economic and social changes brought about by the postwar economic recovery. At the end of the boom period, Italy entered an economic recession and a period marked by dramatic social and political upheaval, including the rise of a radical political left and armed resistance movements led by organizations such as the Marxist–Leninist Red Brigades. Gian Piero Brunetta’s comments on the sociopolitical shifts as reflected in the Italian comedy genre are applicable, as the late 1960s and early 1970s saw “the collapse of traditional family relationships; the advent of new forms of a secular religion and—above all—a new sexual religion; the total loss of trust in the government and politics; . . . depression; a material and emotional deficit throughout Italian society; a breakdown in social communication; and a flood of insecurity and fear.”107 During this period, Italy’s relationship to Africa changes. In the era of decolonization and subsequent neocolonization of the “Third World,” Italian films reflect both the loss of “Africa” as a space of sexual freedom and primitivist fantasy and the historical amnesia surrounding Italy’s colonial past. I briefly mention two films that exemplify this transition: La ragazza della pelle di luna (Moonskin, Luigi Scattini, 1972) and Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill, Giuliano Montaldo, 1990). Moonskin is set on the island of Seychelles, a former French–British colony, which at the time of filming was still a protectorate of Great Britain and constitutes another displacement of Italy’s colonial legacy. The story concerns the marital crisis of an Italian bourgeois couple, Albert (Ugo Pagliai) and his British-born wife Helen (Beba Loncar), which is exacerbated when Albert begins an affair with a Seychellois woman, Simone (Zeudi Araya). Soon, Helen becomes obsessed with Simone, using her camera to mediate her desire for the young woman. If at the beginning of Moonskin, Albert and Helen take Seychelles as a paradise escape from the Western world, by the film’s end, they are disillusioned, unable to articulate their reception of African decolonization and Italy’s new postcolonial relationship with former colonial territories. Often seen as the only whites standing in the midst of former colonial subjects, Albert and Helen experience the weight of centuries of colonial exploitation that can no longer be sustained by the Western colonial fantasy of desired conquest of the native other. Araya’s Simone becomes a signifier of this lack of the constitutive other. Both Albert and Helen attempt to “possess” Simone, either physically (Albert) or through what is arguably a phallus-substitute, the camera (Helen). However, neither person is able to fully constitute a “proper” Western self, or rather sustain the Western colonial narrative in which

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they were “good” colonizers who brought modernity and civilization and are now benign tourists, or altruistic aid providers. If Scattini’s Moonskin says “farewell” to at least one construction of Africa as the paradisiacal, primitive non-West, Giuliano Montaldo’s Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1989) represents cross-racial desire to explore the dark underside of this myth and condemn Italian colonialism in Africa. Adapted from the 1947 novel by Ennio Flaiano, A Time to Kill is set at the end of the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war, and concerns a young lieutenant, Enrico Silvestri (Nicholas Cage), who, believing he has contracted leprosy after his rape and subsequent murder of a young Ethiopian woman, attempts to escape back to Italy. Released at a distance of approximately three decades from the first wave of African decolonization, Montaldo’s A Time to Kill reflects the country’s anxieties related to the growing presence of non-Western European immigrants within Italy, as well as a new stage in postcolonial relations with Africa, characterized by Western aid and relief for the continent’s famines, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, persistent poverty, and a devastating HIV/AIDS crisis. Africa is no longer an unconquered terrain for Italian settlers, nor is it the refuge from the consumer capitalist Western world. As conveyed in Montaldo’s film, Africa is no longer a place for sexual freedom and exploration, but rather of contamination, disease, and death.108 By the late 1990s, Italy was part of the European Union, and non-Western European immigration was prominently featured in the Italian press and examined in Italian cinema. A film that considers the postcolonial geopolitical landscape of this period is Bernardo Bertollucci’s L’assedio (Besieged, 1998), based on a short story The Siege by British author James Lasdun. Besieged is yet another film that uses cross-racial desire and interracial relations to examine an Italian postcolonial consciousness. The story begins in an unnamed East African country ruled by an oppressive dictatorship. Shangerai (Thandie Newton) is forced to flee her country after her husband, Winston, is arrested for criticizing their country’s dictator. Shangerai moves to Rome to complete a medical degree, and supports herself by working as a maid for Mr Kinksy (David Thewlis), an eccentric white British pianist. After a silent courtship, with communication mainly through music and affectionate tokens sent by way of a dumbwaiter, Mr Kinksy professes his love to Shangerai, who rebukes him, telling Kinksy that the only way to win her love is by freeing her husband. Presented with a seemingly impossible proposal, Kinksy begins making connections with the

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African community in Rome and selling off his possessions, including his Steinway piano. Shangerai receives notice that her husband was released from prison and eventually will be joining her in Rome. Caught in an incredulous bind, choosing between a man who risked his life to challenge a dictatorship, and the man who sold almost everything he owns to free him, Shangerai ends up spending the night with Kinksy. In the final scene, we see Winston arriving at Kinksy’s home at dawn, only to ring the doorbell with no response. In the end, it remains unclear whether Shangerai chooses Winston or Kinksy. Originally set in London, Bertolucci’s decision to set his film adaptation in Rome allows Besieged to be read in the historical context of Italian colonialism and the more contemporary debates concerning immigration to Italy and other countries within the European Union. Yet, as seen in the other films examined above, Kinsky’s British nationality posits the colonial history of another former European imperial power, which in Besieged obscures significant connections that could be made between Italian colonialism and the contemporary non-Western European immigration to the peninsula. The suppression of Italian colonial history and the backdrop of new immigration patterns to Europe, allows for the film’s focus on the developing love between Shangerai and Kinksy. As Parati writes: “At the center of Besieged plot is a detailed psychological investigation of the protagonist grounded in an interest in ‘who’ they are outside of any social, economic, and racial label.”109 Besieged opens a space for the possibility of a true, equal relationship between an African woman and Western European man, and more generally for a more egalitarian relationship between the “West” and “non-West.” Situated near the affluent and tourist-friendly Spanish Steps, Kinksy’s house becomes a character all of its own. While the home literally and figuratively separates Shangerai and Kinsky, throughout the film, it is slowly stripped of all its objects, leaving a blank space for unknown, possible futures suggested by the film’s enigmatic ending. The house is a veritable monument to the Western art canon, but also of a kind of decadence, conveyed through its dark, dusty interior, oriental wall rugs and tapestries, cast models of Greco-Roman sculpture, and an overall feel and structure that suggest aristocratic decline and class hierarchies of a bygone era. Although not unusual for Rome, the anachronism of the house, set directly before a major metropolitan subway line but also in contrast to the modern interiors of Shangerai’s medical school, evokes late-nineteenth-century naturalist literature, which not only introduces the French colonial context, including stories such as Emile Zola’s Thérèse

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Raquin, whose mixed-race protagonist represents moral decline and racial degeneracy, or perhaps more directly Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Boitelle,” about a French soldier’s doomed love for an African woman. The interior serves as a signifier for an earlier period of the European colonial imaginary, and threatens to constrict readings of Shangerai and Kinsky’s relationship to one based on romantic exoticism.110 However, as established in the film’s opening African sequence, Shangerai is not an exotic, primitive other. Rather, she arrives in Rome as a political refugee working toward her medical degree. If read in the light of the body of nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific literature that constructed black female sexuality as pathological and deviant, the gesture of making Shangerai a medical student, one who is versed in and can determine medical discourse, offers a keen reflection upon the European colonial imaginary in the midst of sweeping social changes brought about by non-Western European immigration. In his efforts to free Shangerai’s husband, the final object to be removed from Kinsky’s home is his Steinway piano, the instrument that fostered nonverbal communication between the two protagonists. Kinsky’s movement toward African-inspired piano arrangements is motivated not only by his desire to communicate with Shangerai and win her love, but also through his entrance into the African Catholic community in Rome. Kinsky’s gesture to hybridize, to merge his traditional Western classical music with African syncopation, is done by way of his movement outside the home and within the confines of Catholic charity and aid relief. Kinsky’s movement also allows for a representation of the African presence in Rome, one that provides some reflection on the changing cultural landscape of Italy. Yet, the film ends with both Shangerai’s and Kinsky’s return to the now almost empty home, in which they are able to consummate their love for one another. While Besieged contemplates a relationship outside social, historical, and political categories, Shangerai’s husband is left to wait outside the doors of Kinsky’s home, which he has retained after selling everything within. Beyond proving his moral qualities by risking his life to criticize a dictatorship, Winston is not given screen time, space, or character development to make a compelling argument. While Kinsky is sincere in his devotion, the political realities of postcolonial relations between the West and non-West render the ending problematic. In his film commentary, Bertolucci states that the “new Italians will be Africans, but not only Africans, Asians and whom we [now] call the ‘extracommunitarians.’” Besieged offers this optimistic vision of a new Italy, but one

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that suspends Italy’s colonial legacy, a history that even at the time of the film’s release was present in the rising atmosphere of anti-immigration sentiment. Like Bertolucci’s Besieged, Cristina Commenici’s Bianco e Nero (2008) turns its lens toward a postcolonial Italy grappling with a new multicultural landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As a contemporary commedia all’italiana, Bianco e Nero uses a story of interracial romance to examine the legacies of Italian colonialism, African decolonization, non-Western European immigration, and the politics of Western aid to Africa in the neoliberal era. Inspired by British author Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty (2005), Bianco e Nero tells the story of Carlo Lodoli (Fabio Volo), a computer technician, who is married to Elena (Ambra Angiolini), a fundraiser for a nongovernmental organization that provides aid to Africa.111 Carlo is not particularly interested in Elena’s work and reluctantly attends a fundraising event organized by Elena and her colleague Bertrand (Eriq Ebouaney), an Italian of Senegalese descent. At the fundraiser, Carlo meets Nadine (Aïssa Maïga), Bertrand’s wife. After a few flirtatious encounters, Carlo and Nadine begin an affair. When their spouses discover the affair, both Carlo and Nadine are asked to leave their homes. Carlo and Nadine encounter hostility and resistance to their love affair from their respective communities and finally decide to return to their spouses. After several months of resuming their marriages, Carlo and Nadine meet by chance at their old lovers’ rendezvous spot. No longer willing to deny their love for one another, they decide to remain together despite the familial and societal consequences they will face. Describing the genesis of the project, Comencini states that one of the aims of Bianco e Nero was to represent the lives of middle-class Africans living in Rome or other major metropolises in Europe who do not conform to media images of Africans as “boat people,” clandestine migrants living in impoverished conditions, or in an Africa suffering from war, hunger, and disease that can only be saved through Western intervention.112 The film’s interracial romance stages the difficulties of contemporary multicultural Italy, one in which Italians and Africans attempt to communicate across their still separate communities. Bianco e Nero begins in an office for a nongovernmental organization for African aid. In a sign of the neoliberal times, Elena speaks to an engaged couple that wishes to buy an “African” wedding package, complete with a service commitment for a village in lieu of the traditional honeymoon. The couple is eager to help the “less fortunate” but hesitate

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when they learn that the package requires them to forego wedding gifts and provide a monetary donation to their host village. A popular African aid poster on the wall directly behind Elena marks Africa as a site of consumption, and comments on the West’s patronizing approach to Africa as a kind of twenty-first-century “white man’s burden.” In contrast to the image of Africa and Africans in the Italian postcolonial imaginary represented in the scene described above, Nadine and Bertrand are represented as firmly within the Italian middle class and are filmed within a contemporary mise-en-scène similar to those of Carlo and Elena. Nadine and Bertrand are also transnational migrants in that Italy is not their first European country of residence. Rather, they have made their way to Italy through France, Senegal’s former colonizer. This vision of the African middle-class in Rome, although based on interviews with actual African Italians, is a construction that speaks to the state of multicultural relations in the country. The actors selected to portray Nadine and Bertrand are French nationals, a decision motivated by the lack of available professional African Italian actors. Discussing her casting decisions, Comencini explains that the lack of a long-standing African Italian population did not afford the opportunity to locate actors in Italy for the role. She adds that “in France the immigration [is] much more matured and there are more actors.”113 While the exigencies of casting trained actors is relevant, it also speaks to the invisibility of Italians of African descent in Italian society, as well as to the conditions of the mainstream Italian film industry that marginalizes the history of African Italians, many of whom are second and third generation in the peninsula. The construction of a middle-class, transnational African community in Rome is further staged through Nadine and Bertrand’s multilingualism. For their performances, the French actors trained to speak Italian and Wolof, two languages they did not speak prior to the film’s production. In this sense, the film’s production speaks more to processes of European national and transnational identity formation in the postcolonial era than the actual film narrative. In its examination of racism in contemporary Italy via cross-racial desire and interracial relations, Bianco e Nero introduces the theme of beauty standards for women in Western societies, which establish the white, heterosexual female as both desirable and an appropriate marriage partner. As portrayed by the Barbie icon, the physical attributes for this norm are impossible for any female to achieve regardless of race. However, as elaborated in the earlier film discussions, these standards intersect with sociocultural constructions of black women that label them as sexually

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pathological or as exotic and hypersexual. In Bianco e Nero, the unstated rivalry between Elena and Nadine is inflected with an older colonial discourse that tolerated conjugal unions between white European men and black African women, but did not consider African women to be legitimate marriage partners. In the colonial regime, interracial unions raised the fear of mixed-race subjects that threaten white racial purity, necessary for the maintenance of the racial homogeneity of the nation-state.114 Bianco e Nero suggests that colonial discourses of mixed-race unions still inform interracial relations in postcolonial, multicultural Italy. The theme of rivalry between black and white women is introduced in an early scene of the film, where we see Carlo and Elena’s daughter Giovanna playing house with two Barbie dolls, one white and the other black. Giovanna pretends that the black Barbie is servant to the white Barbie. The black Barbie makes a mistake and Giovanna commences to make the white Barbie beat her. Just as her mother walks in, Giovanna begins to caress the black Barbie. Elena also corrects Giovanna’s terminology after she describes her Barbie using the politically incorrect term “negra” (negro) instead of “nera” (black). After Elena leaves, Giovanna continues punishing the black Barbie, throwing the doll on the ground. Set before the Barbie playhouse, the film identifies the home as the site for the reproduction of normative values, including traditional gender roles, heterosexuality, and racial endogamy. Rather than explaining the reason why derogatory stereotypes are offensive, Elena teaches Giovanna the difference between behaviors acceptable within public and private spaces. At a young age, Giovanna is learning to harbor racist attitudes toward blacks, and black women in particular, but to mask these sentiments when speaking in public. Thus, Bianco e Nero registers a cognizance of colorblind racism, or the assertion of the irrelevance of racial categories that results in a reassertion of racial hierarchy and inequity. By using the family as the basis for social critique, Comencini is also able to show how racial ideologies have changed (and how they, in many ways, remain the same) from Giovanna’s grandparents’ generation to the present. If read in this manner, this early scene helps to contextualize the film’s resolution in which the breakup of both Carlo’s and Nadine’s families can lead to the construction of an extended family that challenges the traditional “white” Italian family arrangement. To contrast the influence of societal beauty standards on Giovanna, Bianco e Nero shows the impact of these standards on Nadine’s daughter, Felicité. The Barbie doll motif appears for the second time in the first scene in which we are first introduced to Felicité. Nadine is seated with

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her young son holding a black Barbie doll whose hair has been bleached to an unnatural neon-green color while Felicité cries on her bed. Upon asking what happened, Nadine’s son informs his mother that Felicité was attempting to give the Barbie blonde highlights. Felicité rises and says that she wants a blonde Princess Barbie, not the black Barbie. While Nadine tells her that the black Barbie is beautiful as is she, Felicité is shown crying with her hair disheveled, as though trapped within the pathological desire to be white. Felicité’s despondency becomes an indictment of the effects of racist beauty standards, and is presented as one of the many problems faced by blacks residing in Western countries. At the end of the scene, Nadine consoles Felicité by telling her that she will take her to the salon to get her hair straightened. Beyond commenting that the black Barbie is just as beautiful as the white, blonde Barbie, Nadine does not overtly enact any strategies to contradict or deconstruct the messages concerning feminine beauty that her daughter receives, suggesting that she will simply grow out of it and learn self-acceptance as an adult. The Barbie discourse that circulates within the film also makes reference to the famous “doll experiments” conducted by American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark beginning in the 1940s. The doll tests demonstrated that black children projected positive attributes onto white dolls, and negative ones onto the black dolls with which they racially identified. The findings suggested that black children developed low self-esteem and poor self-image due to racial discrimination. The Barbie scenes in Bianco e Nero suggest that over 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education ended legalized segregation, societal messages concerning white racial superiority are still circulated within Western cultures. As opposed to the United States, Italy did not have a system of institutional slavery, legalized segregation, or a Civil Rights movement. Since the nineteenth century, Italy’s racial politics have centered on the north/ south division, in which southern Italians were constructed as racially “other.” Moreover, unlike other European colonial powers, Italy did not have a large influx of immigrants from their former colonial territories in northern and eastern Africa. As discussed, it was only in the late 1970s and 1980s that non-Western, nonwhite immigrants began to reach noticeable levels in Italy; currently, sub-Saharan and North Africans comprise the smallest number of immigrants arriving directly to Italy.115 Although the politics of Italian multiculturalism has a separate trajectory from the United States, Bianco e Nero draws upon the US political and social context, as well as its cinema, to examine racial politics in Italy at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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In the scene following Felicité’s attempt to make her black Barbie white, Nadine speaks with Bertrand about his insistence that Felicité should play only with black Barbies. Bertrand responds that if they were in Senegal, he would only purchase black Barbies for his daughter. Bertrand puts forth an argument concerning self-affirmation of black children that emerged from the Clarks’ doll experiments. The logic of this argument asserts that positive self-image can be nurtured in black children if they are presented self-affirming models that counter the derogatory stereotypes circulated in predominately white societies. Bertrand suggests that if Felicité played only with black Barbies and was surrounded by black peoples and African culture, she would not adapt to white standards of beauty. Bertrand’s argument rings slightly ironic in that he perhaps does not recognize how “white” standards impact his own self-image and comportment within white European society. In particular, studies have concluded that children undergo a much more fluid and complex process of racial identity formation than previously suggested, and that racial identity formation for African American and other African diasporic subjects in majority white environments is a complex process that should take into account “agency” on the part of black subjects to “[negotiate] processes of identification.”116 The Barbie doll motif ends in the scene of Giovanna’s birthday party, a singular scene in the film that deserves an extended analysis. The scene is set in the home of Elena’s parents located in EUR, which as mentioned previously was established under the fascist regime. Here, the film consciously evokes the fascist colonial past, as well as the relation between the metropole and the colony. In the postwar era, EUR was patronized by a new, young professional class and, as seen in Antonioni’s The Eclipse, marked the emergence of a generation whose parents grew up in fascist Italy and lived through the war. Elena’s mother, Adua, marks one such reflection on Italy’s colonial legacy. The name evokes the 1896 defeat at Adwa, which remains a highly charged memory within the Italian psyche, and here could signify both the lost second Roman Empire for an earlier generation of Italians, or the “redemption” of the defeat through the establishment of Italian East Africa during the fascist era. The name “Adua” not only suggests colonial nostalgia, but also the inability to fully process on the psychic level the legacies of Italian colonialism, the rapid demise of Italian East Africa, and the shame of Italian fascism. The fact that Italian colonialism is never explicitly mentioned in Bianco e Nero points to how the name

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“Adua” signifies an absent presence in contemporary Italy. Encountering “Adua” may evoke a distant, long forgotten memory, an exotic, overseas locale, the history of Italian colonialism, Italian fascism, or for the young children at Giovanna’s party, it can signify nothing at all. Both Elena’s parents carry the Italian colonial legacy, replete with racist stereotypes of black Africans, into this contemporary space of Giovanna’s birthday party. When Nadine and her children arrive, they are the only black guests at the party, where they are first greeted by a woman dressed as a life-size mermaid Barbie, complete with (hyper) white skin and a long blonde wig. Nadine and her children are then met by the family’s maid, a black African woman dressed in the “white apron,” evoking the other stereotype of black women: the large, asexual servant. The scene is also a cinematic quote of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1967). Groundbreaking at its time, especially in light of the US Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia that ended the criminalization of interracial marriage, the film is about a progressive couple, Matthew and Christina Drayton (Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn), whose liberal ideas concerning race are challenged when their daughter Joey (Katherine Houghton) introduces them to her black fiancée, Dr John Prentice (Sidney Poitier). Bianco e Nero uses its reference to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to set the stage for the exploration of generational attitudes concerning race within the Italian bourgeoisie. While the children play within the central living room of the home, in the peripheral rooms, such as the father’s den and the kitchen, another comedy-drama takes place as Carlo and Elena attempt to shield Nadine from the “everyday racism” of their white friends and from the racist attitudes of Elena’s parents.117 Elena’s father, Alfonso, is a caricature of the elderly man who treats African women as though sexually available. Espousing his supposed knowledge of Africa due to a youthful adventure on the continent, Alfonso extends this knowledge to African women, in particular, his relationship with an African woman only known as “Maramba.” Alfonso’s den is replete with elephant tusks and other Africanist kitsch that he uses to support his claims to “know” Africa and, particularly, African women. Throughout the scene, Nadine repeatedly attempts to move back to the center of the home and the children’s party, while Alfonso tries to pull her to the marginal areas of the home. For Nadine, both the center and the peripheral areas of the home constitute spaces of fantasy, whether as a space where the children play without concern for the politics of race and racial hierarchies, or the arena of racist fantasy within Alfonso’s den.

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The center and periphery of the home are brought together at the end of the scene when Nadine discovers Giovanna’s Princess Barbie in her bag, placed there by Felicité. The humor in the scene comes from this attempt to compensate—Nadine for her discomfort at her treatment in the home, and Elena for her parents’ “political incorrectness.” The birthday scene stages the ideological impasses of modern Western multicultural societies. While Bianco e Nero examines a racial fetishism that continues to be centered on the black female body, it also looks at black male masculinity through the depiction of Nadine’s husband, Bertrand. Bertrand is an older man who is depicted as well-educated and a good provider for his family, a representation that contrasts the stereotype of black men as street vendors, clandestines, criminals, and sexual predators. However, in its attempt to portray a “non-threatening” black masculinity on screen, Bianco e Nero moves toward another stereotype, one in which black men are constructed as passive and asexual. On the one hand, Bertrand’s character refuses to fall into the stereotype of the sexually aggressive black male, however, this depiction marginalizes his role within the film, rendering him “safe” for Italian and international audiences. While Bertrand’s character struggles to overcome racism and bring awareness of conditions in Africa, Carlo, Bertrand’s rival and Nadine’s love interest, is not politically inclined and feels uncomfortable by Elena’s “mission.” The rapport he establishes with Nadine is based on both parties’ exhaustion with what they take to be the melodramatic hyperbole of their spouses’ activist rhetoric. Throughout the film, the contradictions and hypocrisy of both Elena and Bertrand are exposed, and provide the film’s most pointed critiques of the persistence of racial hierarchies used to construct the West/non-West relation. Carlo and Nadine wish to break free from the belief systems (both progressive and xenophobic) that inhibit cross-cultural communication. However, while critiquing Elena and Bertrand’s ingrained assumptions about race and racism, many of which concern the idea that ethnic and racial diversity is fine so long as bounded, discrete communities are maintained, Bianco e Nero does not give the same scrutiny to Nadine’s enervation with Bertrand’s activism, and certainly does not delve into Carlo’s desire for Nadine. Indeed, Carlo’s apolitical stance suspends analysis of his relation to Nadine within the longer colonial and postcolonial history of white Italian male/black African female relationships traced in this chapter. Commendable in its attempt to explore the hypocrisies of Italian multiculturalism, Bianco e Nero ultimately presents a white male

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protagonist who in his “innocent” attraction to Nadine claims a position unaffected by the history of Italian and Western European imperialism. Hence, it is Carlo who makes the strongest case for the “colorblind” society, one that has its roots in the universalist claims of liberal humanism, which attempts to render irrelevant categories such as class, gender, and race used to justify oppression and capitalist exploitation.118 Carlo’s privileged position to “overcome” race and racism becomes evident in the film’s diary sequence. Having established their nascent attraction, Nadine asks Carlo to repair a broken computer as an excuse to maintain contact. While testing the computer, Carlo happens upon Nadine’s diary. Carlo begins to read Nadine’s private meditations on her life in Italy while gazing longingly at Nadine’s image on a computer screen. The film enters a montage sequence in which Carlo walks through Rome, taking notice of Africans and African Italians that he previously did not notice. While the diary sequence attempts to offer an idea of how peoples of African descent imagine the white Italian, it ultimately results in offering another image of the black in the white imaginary. As Carlo walks through Rome, viewing black Africans with whom he has never engaged in conversation, we hear Nadine speaking in voiceover about her desire to interact with whites, stating, “why don’t we have white friends” and expressing her desire to bring whites to her home in Senegal. Although this interlude wishes to provide insight into Nadine’s feelings, it can also be read as an example of what Franz Fanon has described as internalized colonization. It is as though whites dominate Nadine’s thoughts and that her primary concern is with interacting with whites. While this may be true, this desire is relayed through the film’s white male protagonist, and Nadine is not given similar access to Carlo’s thoughts. Another means of depicting race relations in contemporary Italy is by way of reversing racial categories. In one instance in the film, the reversal is accomplished by reference to Italian film history. After Carlo and Nadine have been ejected from their homes, the two take an evening walk through Rome. Stopping at the Trevi fountain, Carlo wonders if the famous fountain scene from La dolce vita would be as iconic if a black woman performed the role of Sylvia, the buxom, blonde actress, played by Anita Ekberg. Replacing Anita with Nadine not only reverses the race of the subject of desire, but also points to the absence of black leading women in the history of Italian and international cinema. In this space of play, Nadine says to Carlo: “There is an image of a white woman that I want to rip out of your head.” The comment is at once

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aggressive and redundant. There is already an image of “Nadine” that exists in Carlo’s mind and like that of Marcello’s Sylvia, it is one that exists in the realm of sexual fantasy, a fantasy that is not disrupted by the enacted role reversal. The film becomes even more problematic in the scenes where Nadine is outside of work and domestic spaces. After Nadine is ejected from her home, her sister Veronique finds her a room in a women’s hostel occupied by African women. Nadine is placed in a storage area filled with African statues and other artifacts, presumably for sale by street vendors or in art galleries. In this claustrophobic space, Nadine becomes like one of the many artifacts for sale. This is distinct from the domestic space of her home, where she was defined as wife and mother, or the workspace, where she mediates between black Africans and white Italians. Within the hostel, there are many such women who are drifting between legal and illegal status, unemployment, between Italy, “home” in Africa, or another European country. The scenes offer glimpses of a reality for most African migrant women: undocumented status, low-wage work, or prostitution. Here, the objectification of black women becomes stark and explicit; as one itinerate woman says of her three Italian boyfriends: they all saw her as an exotic other. In her hostel room, Nadine has become simply another signifier for “African” sexuality and primitivism. When Carlo joins Nadine in this space, their relationship is relegated to an exclusive, fantastical arena in which they are susceptible to falling into cliché. Outside of any social context, the room can also be read as a space where they no longer need to perform a category and, more importantly, are no longer subject to judgment and scrutiny. However, their bodies still signify a history of cinematic representations of interracial relationships that is complicated by Italian colonial and postcolonial legacies. In one scene, a slow, overhead tracking shot moves from Carlo and Nadine’s intertwined legs, emphasizing the strong black/white contrast between their skin color. Although this could be a space of freedom and fluid identity construction, the two figures, as placed within the “Africanist” room, are reduced to their skin. The above-described scene and later a scene in which Nadine and Carlo spend a night in a hotel room before returning to their families, can also be read as an interfilmic reference to Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), a film that at the time of its release was also considered controversial on the topic of interracial relationships in the complex racial terrain of the United States.119 Jungle Fever is a story about the short-lived affair between Flipper (Wesley Snipes), an African American architect,

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and Angela (Annabella Sciorra), an unmarried, working-class Italian American woman who lives in what was then the predominately Italian American neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Like Jungle Fever, Bianco e Nero also narrates the interracial relationship in the context of an extramarital affair. In both films, the extramarital affair heightens the “taboo” of the interracial relationship, which as the title describes is seen as “jungle fever” or a curiosity based on racial fetishism: the white woman’s desire for the sexually virile black male, and the black male’s desire for a white woman. While Comencini’s Bianco e Nero draws on Lee’s Jungle Fever and responds to Lee’s representation of the Italian diaspora in the United States, Comencini’s film also establishes class equality between the two couples, while in Jungle Fever Flipper is a middle-class architect and Angela a working-class temp worker. Also, while the “white” Italian community in Bianco e Nero perpetuates a subtle, “everyday” racism, Lee portrays the Italian American community, particularly its men, as extremely racist and patriarchal, using violence to draw strict boundaries between their “white” community and the African American community.120 In making a film on race relations in contemporary Italy via reference to the US context, Comencini’s Bianco e Nero reveals an awareness of how migration and shifting national contexts inform racial identity formation. Lee’s Jungle Fever is informed by the US articulation of hierarchies of whiteness, in which Italian migrants to the United States experienced racial discrimination but later became “white” through processes of assimilation, including racial violence perpetuated against black American communities.121 Although Bianco e Nero does not point directly to the nuances of “Italian racial ambiguity” that characterizes the history of the Italian diaspora in the United States, and its relation to the racialized north/south division in Italy, the film is cognizant of and perhaps wishes to be a corrective of stereotypes of Italian Americans circulated in US visual culture that construct Italian women as subject to patriarchal oppression and “low-class” status associated with prostitution.122 In this way, Bianco e Nero brings attention to both parallels and points of divergence between race relations in Italy and in the United States. The last scene in Bianco e Nero begins with the rendering of a fairy tale based on Oberon, King of the Fairies’ dialogue with the trickster Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the play’s end, lovers are reunited and awake as though their confusion was just a dream. The beginning of the final scene prefaces the “happy ending” that comes

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with the union of Carlo and Nadine, one that appears somewhat illogical in light of the preceeding scenes that show the two to be unhappy but dutifully reintegrated within their respective families and ethnic communities. Thus, Comencini’s comedy about interracial romance in contemporary Italy ends with an allusion to a play about identity confusion. The ending also operates as a meta-commentary on the cinema, reminding us that what we see is a construction of reality. In this way, a nod is given to the artist’s creative license to make a film that presents, in a limited way, controversial issues of racism, non-Western European immigration, and multiculturalism in contemporary Italian society. Comencini’s postmodern reflection on the performativity of race is a reminder that cultural representations of Italian African interracial relationships circulate within a broader Italian visual culture, much changed from the Liberal era, but that continue to be inflected by earlier racial discourses tied to the north/south division, African colonialism, and migration.

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Chapter 3

Negotiations of Mixed-Race Identity and Citizenship in the Postwar Cinema and Beyond

In Noi italiani neri: storie di ordinario razzismo (We Black Italians: Stories of Ordinary Racism, B.C. Dalai, 2010), Adama Sanneh, a 27-year-old woman of Italian and Senegalese descent, speaks of the difficulties of being a mixed-race subject of African and Italian descent in a society that renders her wholly “black.” Sanneh remarks, “I was born and raised [in Italy] by an Italian mother and Senegalese father. Italian society didn’t recognize me as Italian, because I am mulatto and therefore black.”1 In the testimony of Saba Gebremichael, a young mixed-race woman of Italian and Eritrean descent, we also find examples of “ordinary racism,” such as being told by a group of white Italians that because of her skin color, she was not truly Italian and had no right to celebrate Italy’s victory in the 2006 World Cup.2 A 1992 naturalization law that stipulates children born of immigrant parents assume their parents’ nationality and must document continuous residency in Italy for 18 years before applying for Italian citizenship, further complicates issues of national belonging for young African Italians.3 As detailed by writer Pap Khouma, the stories of second-generation Italians of African descent demonstrate the difficult terrain of being both black and Italian or mixed-race of Italian and African descent at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As seen in the discussions of Cabiria (1914) and Under the Southern Cross (1938; Chapters 1 and 2, respectively), the African Italian mixed-race subject has been present in the Italian colonial imaginary since at least the beginning of the country’s modern colonial era in the late nineteenth century. At first they were given the possibility to become Italian citizens with paternal acknowledgment, but with the introduction of the Race Laws of 1938 and the new Italian-Aryan racial identity constructed

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by the fascist regime, mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent were rendered fully “black” African colonial subjects. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1947, the Italian East African Empire ended, inaugurating the nation’s postcolonial relationship with its former African colonies. With the establishment of the Italian Republic and the country’s postwar entrance into the First World economic and political bloc, questions of racial and national identity formation centered on relations between northern and southern white Italians and the new internal migration patterns created by postwar economic recovery. However, even at this early moment in the postcolonial era, there are cinematic representations of African Italian subjects within the nation proper that, during a period of African decolonization and the rise of the Third World, begin to imagine how immigration of subjects from the former colonial territories may transform the racial composition of the country. I begin this chapter with Il Mulatto (1949), a film that approaches the issue of African Italian mixed-race children within Italy in the immediate postwar era through the story of the child of an African American soldier and an Italian woman. The 1943 Allied invasion brought African American combat troops to Italy, and the African American GI becomes a recurring figure within Italian neorealist films. Set in the vicinity of Naples, Il Mulatto (released in the United States as Angelo in 1951) examines the “problem” of mixed-race Italian children through a lens that disavows Italy’s existing population of mixed-race subjects from their colonial settlements in North and East Africa, and, drawing upon the “equal, but separate” logic and US racial segregation laws, constructs the proper national population as racially homogeneous. I then turn to Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008), a film that places the American war film genre, Italian neorealism, and, controversially, the Italian Resistance in conversation with the Italian colonial legacy, in particular the pan-Africanist movement surrounding the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Miracle’s ideological debates concerning the participation of black American soldiers in the US military is informed by an African American political consciousness developed after the Great Migration to northern urban centers in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Lee, like Haile Gerima, posits Italy as a site for African diasporic identity formation. As an example of an earlier expression of shared Italian and African American experience, I turn briefly to Alberto Lattuada’s Senza pietà

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(Without Pity, 1947). Through its themes of imprisonment and escape, I argue Without Pity makes reference to the Italian migrant experience in the southern United States beginning in the late nineteenth century to critique racism against black American soldiers in Italy. In addition, through the use of interracial relations between Italian women and African American men, Without Pity, like Il Mulatto, interrogates the nature of racial difference. In order to examine the present-day articulations of the legacies of mixed-race identity and national belonging in Italy and the United States, I turn to author and filmmaker Kym Ragusa’s experimental documentary fuori/outside (1997). Of Italian and African American descent, Ragusa explores in both her prose and video works the difficult terrain navigated by mixed-race subjects in the United States and Italy. In contrast to Il Mulatto/Angelo, which suggests that Italian mixed-race subjects emerge with the entrance of African American soldiers into the peninsula as part of the World War II liberation forces, Ragusa’s narratives reveal the suppressed history of contact between the Italy and Africa that is central to the making of modern Italy. The ports of arrival and departure along the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean also become metaphorical routes from which Ragusa forges connections between her Italian and African American heritages, from Roman Africa, the transatlantic slave trade, the southern Italian emigrant experience, and contemporary African migration into Italy and other countries within the European Union.

Il Mulatto: “A Contrived Solution” In a March 1951 New York Times review of Angelo, an Italian import concerning the adventures of a World War II orphan of Italian and African American descent, the critic writes the following regarding the film’s ending: And it is at this point that [writer-director Francesco De Robertis] is guilty of what struck this reviewer as a contrived solution to the tale. The child’s uncle turns up to claim him in compliance with his dead brother’s will. Although that effect seems somewhat spurious, the waif’s sudden love for this new relative as well as his ability to join abruptly with him in rendering a spiritual, hardly seems conclusive proof that blood suddenly can be so much thicker than affection.4

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The reviewer questions the plausibility of the film’s plot, especially the conclusion that a child, having been born and raised in Italy, can develop an instant affinity to a people and a culture to which, although tied by blood relations, he has had no previous contact. To the American reviewer, the ending appears unrealistic and contrived, a pointed critique of a film marketed and distributed within the United States as one in the body of “neorealist” films, characterized by their emphasis on the authentic rendering of lived reality. Angelo is a neorealist film that, at least for one US reviewer, presents a situation that is unrealistic. The presentation of a believable event, or at least the appearance of a cause-and-event logic, may not have been apparent to the reviewer partly due to the editing changes made in order to present the film to an American audience. First released in Italy under the title Il Mulatto in 1949, the film was distributed in the United States 3 years later as Angelo, which, as one sensationalized poster proclaimed, was “the story of a mulatto boy in a white man’s world.” Rather than portraying a neorealist film in its conventional understanding as a depiction of a social problem within Italy through the use of nonprofessional actors and on-location shooting, with an emphasis on the “real event,” one promotional poster shows an isolated, startled young boy, silhouetted by his own shadow, which he seems to be trying to contain with his outstretched arms, like an insistent blackness that he must somehow hide and suppress. Along with the bright red, roughly drawn lettering used for the title, the poster somehow signifies threat and danger, more of a horror film than a cultural experience for cineastes and foreign film buffs, who were the primary consumers of this international film product. Because the film deals with issues concerning miscegenation and interracial identity, Angelo was most likely promoted in the United States as one of a series of “social problem films” that dealt with race relations in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with Home of the Brave (dir. Mark Robson, 1949).5 The poster’s rhetoric and iconography are similar to that of the film adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son (Pierre Chenal, 1951) and No Way Out (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950), both presenting the experience of racism toward primarily black men in the United States. More directly related to Angelo are films that deal with the experience of biracial and light-complexioned subjects in the United States such as Lost Boundaries and Pinky, both released in 1949. These films have as their concern the issue of “passing”: African Americans who due to the lightness of their skin can pass as white in order to avoid racism and enjoy the “privileges of whiteness.” These films participate in larger social

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and political debates, including the anti-Communist movement, the rise of the Cold War, and, in particular, the Civil Rights movement and its challenges to institutionalized segregation that were making their way to the Supreme Court. As for Angelo, he is presented in the poster, trapped, not necessarily in a white man’s world, but in a system of racial visualization, supported by a sociopolitical system that still circulated a logic of racial classification according to the “one-drop” rule. The poster suggests that it is into his own intrinsic blackness that Angelo must fall, thereby making distinct the racial boundaries that his interracial status disrupts. Although Il Mulatto, a foreign product edited for an American audience, is inserted into this complex political climate, I want to suggest that a dialogue with American democracy, and with US economic and military domination in the postwar era, was already inscribed within the film before it became Angelo. Prior to its transition to the US context, an Italian review of Il Mulatto expresses a similar confusion at the film’s ending: It is the first Italian racial film that nevertheless, basically confirms the barriers imposed by race; that in reality, it is true and immutable. It is a well-made work, full of humanity and feeling, save some scenes towards the end, where the rhetoric and the artifice take the upper hand. Technically well made, the film has the flaw of overdone, excessive sequences, to the point of fussiness; this aspect, in our opinion, gears the film towards a specialized audience.”6 The review does not describe the actual scenes that disturb an otherwise admirable film. However, the brief appraisal suggests that the appearance of the child’s African American uncle affirms an essentialist view of race, which hampers a transcendent sentimentality that would allow the film greater audience appeal and wider circulation. The reviewer’s comments about the apparent reactionary elements of the film speak to Italy’s attempt to secure its position among the liberal democracies of the postwar Western bloc. Both Il Mulatto and Angelo are concerned with racial adjudication within the new Italian Republic; the films not only efface questions regarding the north/south division and the south’s racial heterogeneity, but also completely elide the history of mixed-race subjects born during Italy’s colonial occupation of North and East African countries beginning in the nineteenth century. The mulatto child transfers the mixedrace subject from the colony to the nation, allowing the film to operate

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as a meditation on Liberal and fascist Italian colonialism, while at the same time it presents the resolution of racial ambiguity as central to the nation-building project. The presence of first the black American GI and then the mixed-race offspring of these men with Italian women causes Italy to look toward the United States as a model to contend with mixedrace subjects of African and Italian descent, an issue that, in the film, is presented as a uniquely postwar phenomenon for the country. In order to articulate the presence of this new Italian subject, the film uses as its model the United States, a democratic republic which, at that time, had an already 200-year history of dealing with issues pertaining to race and the law; more specifically, the United States had developed mechanisms for the reconciliation of a constitutional democracy, founded on principles of equality and individual freedom, yet which remained dependent upon the exclusion and oftentimes annihilation of its nonwhite subjects. Concurrent with the emergence of Italy as a democratic parliamentary republic and its geopolitical alignment with other First World nations in the Cold War era was the desire to articulate a specifically Italian national identity, an ongoing concern within the country since its nineteenthcentury unification process. With the collapse of the fascist totalitarian regime, the United States became at once a liberator and, simultaneously, a potentially corruptive influence. The assertion of a distinct national identity becomes more of an imperative in light of Italy’s position as a beneficiary of US financial subsidies in the form of the Marshall Plan and the anxiety raised by the “Americanization” of Italian society. Neorealism becomes exemplary of both the international prestige garnered by Italy through its reconceptualization of cinematic reality and expression of the immediate postwar climate, but also of the commoditization of Italian cultural production, and the subsequent effect of trivializing the country’s significant artistic achievements. Il Mulatto is not of the canonical body of neorealist films as such, but its appearance in the late 1940s is indicative of the waning of this era, characterized by the maintenance of the visual signifiers of neorealism, while introducing Hollywood genres and commercial film production techniques. Set near the Italian southern capital of Naples, the film is a hybrid of melodramatic, comedic, and romance conventions that self-reflexively portrays southern Italian indigenous cultural practices and identities for international consumption. Corresponding transitions in Italian politics, notably the 1947 ejection of the Italian Communist Party from government and the subsequent ascendancy of the Christian Democratic Party,

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also speak to Italy’s economic and political consolidation with respect to the United States and other Western European powers. The social issue raised by the biracial Italian subject speaks to the larger conversation between Italy and the United States, which extends back to the turn of the twentieth century, when the United States was a destination for southern Italian immigrants. At mid-century, Il Mulatto suggests an ambivalent relationship to this history in which Italian self-sufficiency through domestic production is asserted against its dependence on US military and economic assistance. The mulatto child is another instance of US encroachment, the result of Allied liberation that brought the first African American combat battalions into the nation. Hence, the ambivalent relationship to the United States can be registered on the level of race in the context of desire and disavowal. To explore Italy’s mid-century conceptualization of race and national identity, I examine two aspects of religious and popular culture: the black Madonna of Montevergine, a revered Marian icon of southern Italy who appears in the film to provide the mulatto child a matrilineage separate from that of his Italian mother, and the verses of the Tammurriata Nera, a popular song about the emergence of mixed-race children in Naples during World War II that both acknowledges and denies premarital intercourse and interracial desire. Through these two texts, I further suggest that in both Il Mulatto and Angelo, questions regarding Italian racial and national identity are focused on reproduction, and consequently the role of women in the new Italian Republic. As shown in Chapter 2’s discussion of Under the Southern Cross, the mixed-race children of interracial unions, for the most part relegated to the Italian African colonies, where under institutional segregation, the legal prohibition of interracial unions, and the rendering of mixed-race subjects as wholly black African, helped to define and assert an Italian-Aryan racial identity. As with Under the Southern Cross’s treatment of Mailù, the portrayal of Il Mulatto/Angelo rearticulates in immediate postwar Italy notions regarding sexual reproduction and the state that circulated during the Italian fascist era. Finally, I show how both Il Mulatto and Angelo use narratives of Christian universalism as well as American constitutional democracy, particularly, the logic of “equal, but separate” to at first reconcile, then reject the biracial body from the Italian nation. This ejection allows for a provisional reincorporation of the Italian south into the national body at the moment the nation begins its transition toward First World status, a position that in many ways provides the basis for Italy’s subsequent policies regarding the inclusion and exclusion of particular subjects.

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What Is a “Black” Italian?: Il Mulatto and the Rhetoric of Liberal Modernity Il Mulatto begins with a summary text that appears at the end of its edited version, Angelo, in 1951: The injustice of a law dragged a man low, to the point of committing an offence. But attaining strength and faith from his own “INNATE HUMANITY” the man resolves himself to move from hate to pity, and from pity to love. The story, inspired by true facts, wishes to be an appeal to the JUSTICE OF MAN, so that the most delicate of HUMAN PROBLEMS created by the war are considered and resolved.7 The film focuses on the story of Matteo Bellfiore (Renato Baldini), a resident of Naples, who is released from prison after serving a 5-year sentence for theft. While in jail, Matteo’s wife, Maria, dies in childbirth and he anxiously waits to meet his son, Angelo (Angelo Maggio). When Matteo signs release documents at the convent orphanage where Angelo is being raised, he discovers that the blonde-haired, dark-skinned boy is the product of Maria’s rape by an African American soldier. As the husband of Maria, Matteo is bound by Italian law to assume custody of Angelo. He reluctantly takes the mulatto child, and after a series of events comes to love and accept him as his own son. During a celebration for Angelo’s birthday, the child’s uncle arrives from the United States. Joining in the festivities, the uncle performs a spiritual, thereby forming an immediate, supposedly natural bond with the child. This natural affinity between Angelo and his uncle (H. Mohammed Hussein) convinces Matteo to allow Angelo to leave Italy for a life in the United States. The preface text positions the film as offering a solution to the “problem” of biracial children born after the liberation of Italy. Prior to the arrival of Angelo’s uncle, Matteo finds himself caught within the Italian legal system that, in its colorblindness, will not allow him to relinquish guardianship of a child born from his wife and another man, in this case an African American. Here, the film enters a central paradox of liberal humanism in relation to race: an admission of race as a determinant characteristic of the subject, while at the same time a refusal to acknowledge racial difference. As theorist David Theo Goldberg asserts: [T]he irony of modernity, the liberal paradox comes down to this: As modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty,

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equality, and fraternity, as it increasingly insists upon the moral irrelevance of race, there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain. Race is irrelevant, but all is race. The more abstract modernity’s universal identity, the more it has to be insisted upon, the more it needs to be imposed. The more ideologically hegemonic liberal values seem and the more open to difference liberal modernity declares itself, the more dismissive of difference it becomes and the more closed it seeks to make the circle of acceptability.8 For Matteo, bound to a mulatto child by law, the denial of difference is not an option. Not only can the child’s conception be viewed as an affront to Italian patriarchy, Angelo’s racial difference apparently cannot be assimilated within a country unfamiliar with black and mixed-race citizens of African descent within the confines of the nation. Before his transformation and the sudden solution to his dilemma, Matteo attempts a more expedient act to rid himself of the mixed-race child: the “offence” referred to in the film’s introduction is that Matteo almost murders Angelo by plotting a supposedly accidental fall from a cliff (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Angelo (Il Mulatto, dir. Francesco De Robertis, 1949). Courtesy of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia—Cineteca Nazionale, Rome, Italy.

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Through the intervention of divine authority (in the form of a statue of Jesus Christ), Matteo is prevented from completing his plan. Although Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion of the country, Matteo’s compassion can be viewed as an expression of Christian universalism and the attempt on the part of the Catholic Church, in conjunction with the influential Christian Democrat Party, to reach out to other Christian denominations at home and abroad. In light of the Holocaust and other war atrocities, the act of murder, in particular the murder of the innocent, conforms to neither the discourse of rationalism nor Christian precepts. Therefore, within the context of liberal humanism and Christian law, Matteo can tolerate Angelo who, as his namesake suggests, then becomes a vehicle for Matteo’s redemption. Yet, the film does not resolve an unstated question: what is a “black” Italian? Although having found a moral platform by which to reconcile the presence of the interracial child, Il Mulatto is unable to come to terms with Angelo’s status as an Italian citizen, and thus, having found no definite resolution in the law, the film turns once again to divine authority in the figure of the maternal virgin. As I will show later in my discussion, through the conflation of religion, race, and sex in the figure of the black Madonna of Montevergine, a revered Marion icon of southern Italy, the film explains both the child’s matrilineage and reimposes race as an inherent quality of the subject. But first, it is necessary to provide a historical contextualization of the presence of black subjects during World War II and the signifying presence of blackness in Italian neorealist films.

Blackness and the Politics of Representation in Italian Neorealist Film In “Exploring the Boundaries of Neorealism,” Peter Bondanella examines films produced during the neorealist period that are not generally considered part of the canonical body of texts. Although these films deal with many of the issues explored in neorealism, such as “the effects of the war, poverty, labor unrest, [and] migration from Sicily,” these films do not display a coherent cinematic style.9 However, Bondanella argues, these films play an important role in questioning the goals of neorealism, particularly the “relationship between fact and fiction, illusion and reality” and the objective of achieving absolute “truth” in film.10 For Mary Wood, these films, including Il bandito (The Bandit, dir. Alberto

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Lattuada, 1946), Senza pietà (Without Pity, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1947), and Tombolo paradiso nero (Tombolo, Black Paradise, dir. Giorgio Ferroni, 1947), form a subgenre of the neorealism movement, neorealismo nero (black neorealism).11 Several films of both the canonical and particularly the boundary or black neorealist films discussed by Bondanella and Wood present the character of the African American GI. Often called Joe, the presence of the black American GI in Italian film correlates with the historical appearance of the first African American combat regiments (the 92nd Buffalo Infantry Division) included in the Allied forces sent to liberate Italy beginning in 1943. In films such as Paisà (Paisan, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946), Vivere in Pace (To Live in Peace, dir. Luigi Zampa, 1946), and Without Pity, the black American GI appears in various symbolic guises. In To Live in Peace, for example, he is represented as a benign and peaceful mute who, under the influence of alcohol, becomes the irrational, savage unconscious. During the war, African Americans participated in struggles on two fronts: to overcome racism in the United States, and to defeat fascism and Nazism abroad. Hence, the black American soldier finds himself in the ironic position of liberator in Europe, while serving in the segregated military of a country in which he does not have full rights as a citizen. The best-known appearance of the black American GI during this period is in the Naples episode of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946), in which Joe, an African American MP (played by American Dots Johnson), serves as witness to the postwar devastation, abject poverty, and death experienced by the Neapolitan people. As Chandra Harris notes: “Paisà is groundbreaking because it establishes the basis for all of the images of the black American soldier in films of the postwar era which follow it.”12 Paisan suggests that although subject to racism in the United States, the black soldier’s status as an American places him in a higher social and economic position than the Italians.13 As part of the occupying forces whose presence may have led to an increase rather than immediate diminishment of the city’s bombardment, the black American GI can be conceived as not only “oppressed” liberator but also as oppressor of the Italian people.14 Paisan’s Naples episode achieves a destabilizing of blackness as a signifier for the shared historical oppression of people of African descent in the Western world, and transfers this signification to the Neapolitan people. To make the claim that the Neapolitans are the “blacks” of Europe is not entirely an exaggeration: as discussed previously, this signification is enabled by racial conceptualizations that have associated

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the Italian south with Africa and an irresolvable “otherness” since the region became an object of scientific study in the late nineteenth century. Although subject to negative stereotypes of moral and social backwardness, the south, Sicily in particular, was the first part of the country to be liberated from Nazi control and therefore holds a significant role in the liberation movement and the postwar establishment of the Italian Republic. The entrance of the black GI onto Sicilian shores can be read as a symbol of the reemergence of the mezzogiorno into the Italian state, not as absolute negativity but in its other guise as the country’s source of future transformation. In this sense, the “blackness” of the African American GI aids in the reconfiguration of the Italian south in relation to Italy proper in the postwar era. The black GI does not appear in person in Il Mulatto/Angelo; indeed, toward the end of the film we learn that he was killed in combat. The most significant revelation is provided at the film’s beginning: after Matteo’s visit to the orphanage, he learns that while he was in prison, the African American soldier raped his wife Maria, and through this violence Angelo was conceived. Hence, the black GI appears in the film’s narrative as an oppressor who has through sexual violence inserted the mixed-race body into the Italian state. The shift of blackness from “liberating potential” to violent offence can be understood, on one level, as the film’s positioning in relation to the changing political climate of Italy in the latter part of the 1940s. The Italian Resistance, from which neorealism emerged, was heavily indebted to the work of the Italian Communist Party, which had been abolished under fascism and its leaders imprisoned, murdered, or forced to flee the country. For my analysis of Il Mulatto, I would like to situate the appearance of the black American GI within this political context.

Christian Democrats and the Italian Republic Il Mulatto is set in the Campania region of southern Italy, near the regional capital of Naples. The battles fought for Naples served as an important turning point in World War II, and the city has served as a historical reference point in several neorealist films, most notably Rossellini’s Paisan. As previously discussed, since the nineteenth century, the Italian south has been ideologically constructed as the “other” of the Italian nationstate. After World War II, the new republic had to once again incorporate the south into the Italian nation. The dominant political party, the

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Christian Democrats, played a significant role in unifying the country in the postwar era, which entailed bringing the constituents of the primarily agricultural southern regions under the centrist banner of the party. While the Italian Communist Party wielded influence over many parts of the south, primarily because of its appeal to farm laborers, recruitment efforts were hindered because it did not have the resources or the “foreign recognition” of the Christian Democrats.15 The establishment of the Italian Republic in 1947 brought the Christian Democrats to the forefront of Italian politics, where the party remained a major force from the postwar era until its demise in the early 1990s due to political scandals. The party had its constructive beginnings in the fascist era, with many of the future leaders of the Christian Democrats taking part in the Partito Populare Italiano, a group of anticommunist and pro-Catholic entities.16 However, the ideological formation of Italian Christian Democracy may be found in the emergence of the “Roman Question” in 1870, when the newly unified state minimized the political role of the Catholic Church and annexed church properties. During Mussolini’s reign, the question reemerged, leading to the Lateran Concordat of 1926 in which the Vatican State was established as an independent sovereignty. It is during the fascist era, “when questions of nationalism were being brought to the forefront,” that the Catholic Church began to re-exert its political influence in Italian politics through the formation of “Catholic Action” and other groups that “introduced Catholic ideology into social activities.”17 The Catholic Church under Pope Pius XI (1922–39) encouraged the promulgation of a civilta critiana (Christian civilization), a universalist appeal for members of the Catholic Church to participate in the wider Christian community. This approach eventually allowed the Church to participate in Italian politics through its influence within the Christian Democratic Party. Through “Catholic Colateralism,” Alcide de Gasperi, the first leader of the Christian Democrats, intended “[a] European orientation with Christian rather than narrowly Catholic roots.”18 In the south, the Christian Democrats played an important part in diminishing the role of the Communist Party in the immediate postwar period and throughout the Cold War. Between 1944 and 1950, the south experienced a series of farm-labor strikes.19 After years of suppression under the fascist dictatorship, the labor movement formed coalitions with communists and socialists, leading massive strikes that became a crucial element in the overthrow of the fascist government. Although labor unions enjoyed popularity in the immediate postwar era (1945–6), the

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merging of unions and political parties resulted in a diminished ability to organize labor.20 At the same time, the communists were expelled from the government because of political alignments necessitated by the Cold War. The Christian Democrats organized Coldiretti—peasant-owners’ organizations—in response to these labor strikes, thereby promoting the party “an agency for advancement [and] a network for support and aid” for southern Italian workers, while at the same time negating the influence of the Italian Communist Party and their union alignments.21 Il Mulatto does not view the south through this history of resistance and accommodation. Rather than a site of labor uprising, the south is represented as a location for peaceful, nonindustrial trade workers such as fishermen, potters, musicians, and other traditional artisans. The film’s protagonist, Matteo, is a musician and singer by trade; his friend Don Genna is a painter and musician; and Matteo’s love interest, Catari, works as a basket weaver and potter. The image of the southern working class in Il Mulatto corresponds to the Christian Democracts’ vision of postwar Italian working classes, a vision which asserted that, “[Christian] [f]raternity went hand in hand with the defense and encouragement of small peasant property and small business. In the new Italy, the proletariat was to be ‘dissolved’ into a nation of property holders.”22 All three characters make their living from selling goods and entertainment to local clientele and tourists visiting southern Italy and Sicily. In one scene, Matteo and Don Genna comment on Catari’s trip to northern Italy for a handicraft trade convention. Catari’s trade union journey from south to north suggests a nationalist unity among trade unions made possible by the consolidation of political power by the Christian Democrats, eviscerating more radical left and communist elements that had characterized labor unionization in the south during the immediate postwar era.

Further Considerations of the Realist Aesthetic I do not wish to claim that the influence of communism or a radical left politics, as conceived in the Italian political context, would have created more “positive” images of the black American soldier in Italian neorealist and Italian films of the immediate postwar era. For instance, Pier Paolo Pasolini and other left critics argued that Italian neorealism failed to maintain the radical political potential of the Italian Resistance, and to assist with bringing about a workers’ revolution.23 I would like to suggest, however, that changes in the political circumstances that initially gave

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rise to Italian neorealism, necessitated another deployment of blackness in order to articulate a new conception of Italian national identity. Italian neorealism began in the wake of anti-fascist movements in Italy during World War II, and it is from the Italian Resistance movement that it takes its initial political stance against the regime’s totalitarianism and also the complicity of the Italian bourgeoisie. The neorealist directors were also consciously moving away from an “artificial” filmmaking style that dominated the films produced during the fascist period, a style influenced by Italy’s modeling of the US film production system in order to compete in domestic and foreign markets. During this period, Italian films demonstrated a realist aesthetic, adopting the stylistics of both the socialist realism of the Soviet school and the nostalgic tendency for period films shown in French poetic realism. In her discussion of realism in Italian cinema, Ben-Ghiat argues that during the fascist period, the realist aesthetic was a reaction to historical conditions in Europe and to what was perceived as a crisis of post-Liberal Italy. She asserts that “realism is a set of attitudes and values formed in response to broad historical changes,” in this case, Italy’s need to modernize and adapt its political, social, and economic policies to the post– World World I period.24 Usually, fascism is seen as an aberration or a “parenthesis” that hindered or corrupted the realist aesthetic. However, Ben-Ghiat argues that the neorealists are indebted to fascist realism, suggesting that the realist aesthetic was appropriated at the end of World War II by critics who labeled it revolutionary, and “the movement became the property of anti-fascists who portrayed its predilection for populism and political militancy as resulting from the Resistance.”25 Continuity between the fascist and postwar era is also established through Il Mulatto/Angelo’s director, Francesco De Robertis, who served as a naval officer during the fascist period.26 Like many neorealist directors, De Robertis began his film career under the auspices of the state-controlled film industry, building his reputation directing documentary-style films for the Centro del Cinematografico Ministero della Marina. De Robertis directed two of three films that became known as the fascist naval trilogy, Uomini sul fondo (1940) and Alfa Tau (1942). The last of the series, La nave bianca (1942), was directed by his former assistant Roberto Rossellini.27 These films established De Robertis as an important predecessor of Italian neorealism. I wish to raise one further issue regarding neorealism and race using Angela Dalle Vacche’s discussion of the representation of the body in Italian film, and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image. Dalle

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Vacche writes of classical narrative film: “through representation of different, unrelated or conflicting elements, cinema constructs a surrogate world the cohesiveness of which satisfies our desire for truth.”28 In neorealist cinema, the artifice of this “surrogate world” is exposed and gives way to a new worldview that integrates, as Deleuze argues, the element of time.29 In exposing the constructedness of our perceived world, we can also suggest that neorealism exposes the constructed nature of subjectivity and, as I will argue, of racial identity. Ultimately, returning once again to Deleuze’s formulation, just as the movement-image depends on the suppression of time, perhaps the radical consequence of neorealism for human subjectivity is the exposure of the “other.” In Il Mulatto we may be confronted by a narrative film that uses formal signifiers of neorealism to solidify boundaries that the neorealist project in its, perhaps, unmodified form sought to dismantle.30 The above discussion concerning the rise of the Christian Democrat Party, its emphasis on a universal Christian civilization, its support within the Western capitalist bloc, as well as its vision of the Italian working classes positions the party as ideologically both anti-fascist and politically conservative, providing some concessions to the Italian working classes but maintaining a pro-capitalist, anti-communist agenda. I have argued that in its depiction of the postwar Italian south, Il Mulatto/Angelo culturally constructs the south and the nation in light of the political ideology of the Christian Democratic Party. In terms of racial ideology, although the Christian Democrat Party maintained an anti-fascist position, Il Mulatto/ Angelo suggests that the fascist regime’s racial hierarchy as well as its proscriptions against race mixture become rearticulated in the postwar era through themes of Christian compassion and tolerance. In this way, the film’s acceptance but ultimate rejection of the mixed-race African Italian subject reflects Italy’s postwar alignment with other First World capitalist democracies, particularly the United States. However, the management of interracial subjects in the Italian colonies during the Liberal and, particularly, the fascist era, provides a precedent for understanding Il Mulatto’s construction of African Italian mixed-race citizens within the nation-state. As discussed in Chapter 2, during the first half of Italy’s 50-year occupation of Eritrea (1890–1941), mixed-race children, usually the offspring of Italian men and Eritrean women, could petition to become Italian citizens if they had paternal acknowledgment.31 After the Italo-Ethiopian war (1935–6) and the establishment of Italian East African Empire, the policy toward mixed-race peoples in the

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Italian colonies changed significantly. In 1937, one year prior to the enactment of the 1938 Race Laws in Italy, a racial policy was elaborated for the AOI. The laws also made interracial relations of a “conjugal nature” illegal and subjected Italian settlers to deportation or imprisonment for violations.32 Since miscegenation was now officially illegal, mixed-race subjects could no longer claim citizenship through paternity, and those born after this period were rendered fully nonwhite, African colonial subjects. The AOI policy claimed as one of its objectives “to show humanity in consideration of past mistakes,” referring to the behavior of Italian male settlers and the resulting children.33 The Italian administration also placed emphasis on the moral imperative to support and take care of the interracial children, who provided a special opportunity to advance civilizing missions and help maintain colonial domination during a period in which claims to racial purity were being challenged. In Italian Eritrea, as in other European colonies, private and religious orphanages were established to raise mixed-race children. In reference to Dutch colonies that could be extended to the Italian colonies as well, Ann Stoler writes that the “antagonism against miscegenation and the métis (mixed-race children) was covered by a politics of compassion and charity . . . [and] camouflaged under protestations of ‘pity’ for their fate.”34 In the colonies, the orphanage institution served to develop the mixed-race child into a proper-citizen subject of the colonial project. In Il Mulatto/Angelo, after Matteo is released from prison, he rushes to the Catholic orphanage where Angelo is being raised. Located on one of the coastal islands, Matteo must hire a boat to reach the orphanage. Although there are other Italian children at the orphanage, the contrivance of the distant orphanage places Angelo and the issue of interracial Italian subjects outside of the nation proper. Matteo initially leaves the mixed-race child at the orphanage. He is only compelled to take guardianship after the Mother Superior appeals to Matteo, noting that both his wife and Angelo are innocent victims of war, and the child should be cared for in the spirit of Christian charity and compassion. Il Mulatto then repositions the mixed-raced body within the country itself, raising questions regarding the relation between racial policies enacted in the colonies and those within the European nation-state.35 The film offers an alternative solution that disavows the xenophobia of its former colonial imperatives, while retaining racial proscriptions. In Il Mulatto, the role of women in postwar Italy is as much the subject of debate as is the place of interracial Italian citizens. During the

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fascist era, Italian women were paradoxically made part of the regime’s goal of industrial modernization and colonial expansionism, while still being politically marginalized. While glorifying motherhood and joining the reproductive capacities of women to the enlargement of the Italian state, the regime denied women the right to vote, access to pay equity job advancement, and economic self-sufficiency outside the home.36 As shown in colonial narrative films such as Sotto il croce del sud (1938), Italian women were also expected to support and maintain the moral imperative in the colonies. As Stoler argues, European women were sent to overseas colonies to direct male colonists “away from miscegenation toward white endogamy, away from concubinage, toward family formation and legal marriage.”37 The experience of World War II and the Italian Resistance led to universal suffrage for Italian women in 1945. However, Il Mulatto presents several representations of women that contest and destabilize one another, suggesting that Italian women and their role in the reproduction of the nation-state remained highly contested in the postwar era. As previously mentioned, in the fascist period, reproduction was closely allied to concepts of racial purity and nation-state formation. During the fascist era, fear of racial amalgamation and degeneracy were allayed through the adoption of eugenics policies and the development of maternal programs to aid mothers throughout their pregnancies. The management of the female body also included the regulation of female sexuality. During Italian colonialism in Eritrea, interracial relationships between Italian men and Eritrean women within the institution of madamismo were encouraged for various reasons, including the fact that these contractual relations had a stabilizing effect within the colony.38 It was also believed that mixed-race children inherited the moral character of the father and therefore children with Italian fathers were supposedly endowed with superior mental, moral, and physical qualities. However, significant distinctions were made in the cases where the mother was white and the father black. In colonial Eritrea, there were few documented cases in which Italian women and Eritrean men were the subjects of race laws. The relations between Italian women and African men were immediately condemned because it was believed that the children would be more degenerate due to their paternity. Sexual domination was a metaphor for possession of colonial territory. However in these instances, the member of the “superior race,” because of her sex, could not be placed in a dominant position, even relative to an African male. As Stoler writes, “hierarchies of privilege

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and power were written into the condoning of interracial unions, as well as into their condemnation.”39 Thus, it became more imperative to regulate miscegeneous relations between white women and black African males. Turning to the context of the nation in which the film is set, Angelo’s birth mother Maria and father, an unnamed African American soldier, are revealed as dead prior to the beginning of the film’s narration. This absence of the birth parents allows the film to focus on the male protagonist and his struggle to solve the racial dilemma their mixed-race union has produced. Within the context of the various allusions the film makes to the New Testament, Matteo, named after the Evangelist, is a symbol of the reemergence of Italy in the postwar who is positioned to reconcile the past through a Christian universalist framework. Maria’s pregnancy also follows the New Testament narrative in that she conceived a child without her legal husband. However, the child’s race and the interracial relations to which it bears evidence carry an assumption of guilt. In the film, Maria is only given presence through legal discourse that attempts to reconcile racial boundaries violated through the birth of the mixed-race child, while maintaining the liberal humanist directive that deems race a “morally irrelevant category.” Maria is first partially absolved of the sin of adultery when Don Genna informs Matteo that his wife was “raped by a drunk, black American soldier.”40 The familiar rape scenario, in which black men are seen as sexual predators of white women, had not only cultural, but political currency in World War II Italy. During the Allied movement toward central and northern Italy, the then-ruling pope, Pius XII, issued a request to the British war ambassador that “no Allied colored troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation,” based on reports that Moroccan soldiers were committing acts of rape.41 The presence of any black troops in the Allied forces, such as the Senegalese or African Americans, was frowned upon because it was believed that black men should not be made part of the conquering forces.42 The Vatican also attempted to close brothels that catered specifically to black soldiers, which suggests “a particular concern with the affairs of people of color, in particular with the possibility that black men and white women might be consorting.”43 The accusation of rape also allows for the disavowal of what may have been a consensual act. The myth of the black rapist runs concurrent with a belief in the unconscious desire of the white female to be raped by the black male.44 Hence, they are dually implicated in this attack on the Italian patriarchal state.

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Finding no legal recourse to relinquish guardianship, Matteo and Don Genna decide to make the best use of Angelo by making him an attraction in their musical act. In the first restaurant performance of the film, the novelty of his dark skin and white palms solicit comparisons to a monkey and more income for the two musicians. Within this scene, issues of racism and sexual violence are diffused through a mixture of comic and melodramatic genres, mostly between Angelo and Don Genna. However, the scene also introduces a folksong, Tammurriata Nera, which centers on birth, race, and the female body that should be explored.

Tammurriata Nera and the Mystery of the Womb In the first restaurant performance scene, a rowdy male audience member requests a song entitled Tammurriata Nera. The lyrics as they appear in the English subtitled version, Angelo, are different from the original Neapolitan version: Sometimes what you see Almost can’t be believed! Like the little black boy Named Ciro Who was wrongly conceived “Ciro” means Candle Tall and white But Ciro’s just a little boy Dark as Night! Call him Frank or Tony Call him Pete or Joe Ciro’s still all black From his head to toe!45 Comprehending the song’s meaning, Matteo becomes indignant and leaves the stage. Throughout the scene, he is ridiculed mostly by other men such as the male customers and restaurant staff who take Matteo’s predicament as the subject for gossip. In the eyes of other men, Matteo’s wife has made him a cuckold.

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A tammurriata is a traditional form of dance and music indigenous to southern Italy. The tammorriate are traced back to ancient fertility and harvest rituals and are still performed in towns within the Campania region, mostly during Marian devotions and celebrations.46 Eduardo Nicolardi, an administrative manager of the Loreto hospital in Naples, and E. A. Mario, pseudonym for Ermete Giovanni Gaeta, the renowned Neapolitan poet and composer, wrote the Tammurriata Nera in 1944.47 The song’s genesis as the combined effort of a hospital administrator and a poet who engages the dialect of the region allows the Tammurriata Nera to operate as a site where popular and scientific discourses regarding maternity, race, and the female body meet and challenge one another in the circulation of ideas regarding medicine, population management, folk wisdom, and popular culture. I don’t understand at times, what happens That which one sees, one can’t believe! A creature was born, was born black And the mother called him “Ciro.” Yes sir, she called him “Ciro!” Yeah, spin the wheel, yeah . . . Yeah, spin the wheel, yeah . . . Call him “Franky” or Anthony Call him “Petey” or “Ciro” The fact is that he’s black, black how so? The women speak of these affairs: “These matters are not so rare We’ve seen thousands! At times it only takes a glance And the female is found affected by the blow!” Yeah, a glance, yeah . . . Yeah, a sensation, yeah . . . Now you go to find who has done it That has done the clever trick The fact is that this child is black, black how so?

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Let’s not mince words: “Come on, let’s not beat around the bush; Because if we reason We can explain this fact! Where one plants the grain, the grain grows, Success or no success It is always the grain that comes out. How? Tell the mama, how? How? Then tell me too! How? Call him “Franky” or Anthony Call him Petey or “Ciro” The fact is that he is black, black how so?48 The song’s lyrics give ironic play to the mystery surrounding the paternity of the child, but on a deeper level seems to ask where does race begin and how does one become a raced subject. In the second verse, the “women” defend themselves with a remarkable explanation that deserves further analysis. The cause of the births, the women in the song reason, is that the mother sees something that gives such fright that the fear affects her womb and transforms the gestating baby’s skin color. The verb impressionare translated above as “blow,” also translates as “to make an impression,” “to affect,” “to strike or hit” (figuratively), and also “to frighten” and “to upset.”49 The visual impression that causes a physical response resonates with folkloric beliefs, particularly the superstition of the evil eye cast upon a coveted object. Moreover, the lyrics suggest that the look may be the cause of the pregnancy itself, which causes them to be interpreted as a means to deflect the accompanying stigma of having premarital sex within a community dominated by Roman Catholicism. The lyric, “a volte basta solo una guardata” (“at times it only takes a glance”), does not specify who is casting the look. The ambiguity of the phrase suggests a slippage between the passivity of being looked at and an active looking upon. Did the black male (if he is the cause of the fright) look upon the pregnant woman and scare her white child black, or did the woman take the black male as the object of her look, thereafter becoming frightened by the appearance or, possibly, by her desire to look? The child’s skin color, rather than serving as uncontested truth of an interracial conjugal relation, serves as the fetish object that allows for both the acknowledgment and disavowal of desire and the sex act. The feminine voice does

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not admit to sex relations with black men, and, rather, claims the physical results to be nothing short of an immaculate conception. The humor of the song comes from the contrasting, sarcastic remarks of the masculine voice in the chorus, a voice that doubts the sincerity and innocence of the female. Finally, the community comes together to help rationalize the strange occurrence. The incredulous visual impression explanation is substituted with an agricultural metaphor that more effectively evokes the sex act yet falls just short of admitting interracial relations. The Tammurriata Nera remains a popular favorite and contemporary classic due to its musicality and lyrical sophistication. The song’s popularity also points to the acknowledgment of the presence of the mixedrace children in southern Italy and its construction as a “problem.” Max Vajro, in his 1984 study of E. A. Mario wrote the following about the circumstances of the tammurriata: Then in 1944, the ultimate project: Tammurriata nera. Moroccan rapists had gone through Naples, the people were emerging, wide-eyed, from the debris, [and] the first babies of color were born. Among the comments that seemed ironic—and not all of them were, since the disgrace was common—the neighbors smiled at those women who were mother to a dark-skinned baby, in vain christened Giro.” There was no mockery, but immense pity and bonding and resignation. It was 1943. Eduardo Nicolardi—the administrative manager of the Loreto hospital—was alerted by the mayhem in the maternity ward by an extraordinary event. A girl gave birth to a baby with dark skin. That evening, at Mario’s house (the two poets were friends), these two immediately said: “Eduà, let’s write a song.” Nicolardi, with the extraordinary immediacy of verse—was able to literally dictate a song in three parts, in an instant, without missing subtlety and poetry, as though he had worked for days—wrote tammurriata nera in which Mario composed the music. But they had written it together, words and song, a perfect thing, supported by a rhythmic and somewhat tribal beat, fiery like the classic, popular tammorriate.50 Here again, the appearance of the mixed-race children is attributed to “Moroccan rapists,” thereby relieving the pregnant women of any guilt for, and denying the possibility of, voluntary sexual relations with black men. In addition, the description of the Neapolitans emerging from the war devastation “wide-eyed” also serves to remove culpability from Italy for its own history of fascism, brutal colonialism, and allegiance to Nazi

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Germany. The tammurriata’s origin is thus given as a charming anecdote about the undying Neapolitan spirit, and is exemplary of how the Italian people survived the difficult circumstances brought about by the war. Nonetheless, the tammurriata is a form of music and dance of southern Italian peasant culture and as such exists as a form of popular knowledge that operates in relation to dominant discourses. I would argue that the Tammurriata Nera embodies what Michel Foucault calls a “subjugated knowledge,” which is at once the reemergence of “historical contents” that were, for any number of reasons, not given presence in the privileged site of historical discourse, but also, A whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity . . . it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges (such as that of the psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the nurse, of the doctor—parallel and marginal as they are to the knowledge of medicine—that of the delinquent, etc.), and which involve what I would call a popular knowledge though it is far from being a general commonsense knowledge, but is on the contrary a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it.51 The Tammurriata nera also aligns with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of folklore, an expression of subaltern cultures that does not simply exist to recover a distant, premodern past, but a “living culture” that exists in contestation with a dominant one.52 In the following sections, I will show how the tammurriata nera, along with the Catholic icon and pilgrimage of the black Madonna of Montevergine, both southern Italian communal, ritual practices, are aligned to the liberal humanist discourse of the narrative in order to resolve the film’s dilemma through recourse to a doctrine of racial essentialism.

The Black Madonna Black Madonnas first appeared in Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and till today have major pilgrimage sites in

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France, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy.53 Several theories have circulated regarding the ontological nature of the blackness of these Madonnas, whether the dark color of their hands and face was intentional, or if the Madonnas were darkened due to climate, chemical decomposition of pigments, or smoke and debris accumulated over time. Textual evidence from the medieval period shows little discussion or interpretation of the Madonna’s blackness, although over the centuries her skin coloration has been explained by numerous theories, such as her Middle Eastern origins. However Monique Scheer asserts that with “the development of race as a scientific construct in the late nineteenth century, the explanation of the color of Mary changed from miraculous to an accident or discoloration.”54 It is generally accepted that the Madonnas were not painted to depict an African or Middle Eastern woman; yet, the majority of black Madonnas originally depicted dark hues and were not subject to discoloration or oxidization. Studies within the last century have examined the Madonnas as a continuation of pre-Christian cults that worshipped earth goddesses with dark pigmentation as a symbolic representation of fertility.55 Within Christian mythology, the oldest black Madonnas that originate from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are believed to be modeled after an image painted by St Luke the Evangelist. These images of the seated Madonna and child, mostly rendered in the Byzantine icon style, many examples of which are found in Italy, are among the most revered of the Marian icons and the dark hue is interpreted as a sign of age that connects the representation to the actual Madonna; hence, the darker the image, the closer it is to the “true” or real Madonna.56 The black Madonna of Montevergine, also called Mamma Schiavona and Madonna Bruna, is in the seated Byzantine style and is located at the pilgrimage site of Montevergine in the province of Avellino, just east of Naples.57 By means of her sanctuary site, near an ancient Greek temple devoted to the earth goddess Sibyl, the Madonna Nera is tied to both pagan and pre-Christian belief systems. In Il Mulatto, these two systems are personified in two additional female characters: the Mother Superior of the convent orphanage who represents Christian humanism in its appeal to Matteo to adopt Angelo, and Catari, Matteo’s love interest. Catari is a “modern” Italian woman, yet is aligned with southern Italian indigenous culture through her self-employment as a home-based cloth and basket weaver. Catari’s position as a second “absent mother” and her significant role in the negotiation of racial identity within the film will be discussed in further detail later; for the moment, however, suffice to

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say that these female characters serve not only to mark the confrontation of Roman Catholicism and indigenous knowledges, but particularly with Catari, progress the debate between traditional and modern female roles within the film. The image of the Madonna Nera first appears after the scene in which Matteo attempts to murder Angelo. On the way home after the Tammurriata Nera debacle, Matteo notices Angelo’s attraction to flowers on the edge of a high cliff. On the precipice, Angelo first picks flowers and lays them at the feet of a statue of Jesus Christ. Seemingly unaffected, Matteo then takes the child to the top of the cliff and allows him to walk toward the edge. Suddenly, Matteo’s attention is caught by the statue of Christ and he saves Angelo before he falls. The following scene opens with Don Genna placing an image of the black Madonna on a wall in a location where in previous scenes there hung a picture of musical instruments. Genna fingers his guitar as Catari enters from screen right. Genna tells her of a new performance venue he has secured thanks to Angelo’s charm and novelty. They walk over to the patio where they view Angelo bathing. Genna remarks that Angelo is bathing “every minute” to wash his color off and often asks why he is not white like the others. In the following scene, Angelo enters the house, and now Catari, standing separate in medium shot, asks Genna why he has placed an image of the black Madonna of Montevergine on the wall. Genna does not respond because he is trying to teach Angelo a traditional Italian song for their next performance. Angelo sings off-key and is unable to learn the music. Genna remarks that Angelo will be better off playing guitar, and is followed by a shot of the black Madonna in full-frame (Figure 3.2). In the scene described above, the film begins to reveal the solution promised in the opening preface text. First, within the diegetic space of the film, the sign of the black Madonna is enmeshed with that of music. Here, the image of the black Virgin is collapsed with that of musical instruments to signify that which cannot be explained or expressed with words. This significance is underlined when Don Genna attempts to teach Italian songs to Angelo. Rather than directly responding to Catari’s question, the film demonstrates the child’s inability to hold the tune, suggesting that the reason is because Angelo is not entirely native Italian. The use of the black Madonna becomes more apparent. The black Virgin Mary replaces the impossible, white mother Maria. Thus, it can be believed that Angelo was not conceived sexually but from God. The innate cultural difference is held in check by the image of the

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Figure 3.2 Catari and the image of the Black Madonna (Il Mulatto, dir. Francesco De Robertis, 1949).

black Madonna, who postulates a racial difference that exists prior to language. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’ discussion of race and psychoanalysis may offer additional insight into the use of the black Madonna in Il Mulatto. Referring to Lacan’s theory of sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks maintains that the act of reproduction renders the self, as articulated in the symbolic, indeterminate. This fear in the loss of self allows race to act as a supplement which secures the subject after the failure of sexual difference. The logic of racial difference is structurally dependent on the master signifier of “Whiteness” that subtends the binary between “‘people of color’ and ‘white.’ ”58 Whiteness, as the “master signifier” (without signified) secures the order of racial difference and promises the subject access to an absolute wholeness that sexual difference is unable to secure. However, it is because of this dependence on whiteness that race is an inadequate means of securing the sovereignty of the subject; whiteness itself is a historical construct that does not exist outside language. Hence, race is “paradoxical” because it both “functions in support of and against the

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fantasy of wholeness.”59 Central to her argument is that this structure of racial difference is dependent upon “racial visibility,” the epidermal differences among bodies, which are rendered “pre-discursive.” She continues: Race is a regime of visibility that secures our investment in racial identity. We make such an investment because the unconscious signifier Whiteness, which founds the logic of racial difference, promises wholeness . . . Whiteness attempts to signify being, or that aspect of the subject which escapes language. Obviously, such a project is impossible because Whiteness is a historical and cultural invention. However, what guarantees Whiteness its place as a master signifier is visual difference. The phenotype secures our belief in racial difference, thereby perpetuating our desire for Whiteness.60 Thus, Whiteness allows the subject to distinguish itself from others through an investment in the epidermal, while at the same time it functions as the lack, the desired wholeness to which the subject must move toward but never attain. Seshadri-Crooks is careful to note that the desire for Whiteness is not a desire to “become Caucasian” but rather a desire for an assumed non-difference that Whiteness signifies. If a subject’s sense of being is dependent on its proximity to the master signifier, which guarantees both sameness and difference, then we may read the circumstance of the narrative—a white body that has produced a black child—as an event that disturbs the structure of racial differences that secures the subject’s difference among others. The black child emerging from the body of a white woman places into question the operation of the master signifier, as well as the structure and significance of racial hierarchy. Once again, it is the act of reproduction, the mystery of the womb, around which the anxiety of ego formation occurs. The installation of the black Madonna as Angelo’s “mother” retains the structure of racial difference, while maintaining the master signifier of desired wholeness, which within the Christian framework of the film can be rendered as “God,” the definitive signifier without signified that is characterized by its absolute non-difference. The securing of a stable identity is not fully achieved however, as racial anxiety seems to linger in the compulsion to scrub off Angelo’s skin color, an image that reoccurs throughout the film. After the incorporation of the Madonna Nera, Matteo is still reluctant to accept Angelo, even after Don Genna explains her significance as

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“miraculous . . . innocence without blame or fault, who has mercy.”61 It is only after Angelo swallows a pin and nearly dies that Matteo finally finds love in his heart for the child. Matteo soon turns his attention to Catari whom he wishes to marry to begin a family. As mentioned previously, Catari embodies both the traditional and modern aspects of Italian womanhood. This combination is signaled by her attire throughout the film, which is a mixture of 1940s contemporary and southern Italian peasant costumes. Although she was the likely candidate to assume guardianship of Angelo while Matteo was in prison, Catari does not accept the role of surrogate mother; throughout the film she remains a sympathetic but distant aunt. Catari is in love with Matteo and hopes to be his future wife, however, when Matteo does finally propose to her, she refuses because of Angelo and the fact of his blackness. Angelo’s role in preventing the union of Matteo and Catari is figured in an early scene in the film, which draws upon the US context to elaborate a theory of racial and national identity in postwar Italy. Don Genna brings the young Angelo to visit Catari. In the previous scene, Don Genna manufactures a struggle between Angelo and a group of young boys in order to rouse Matteo’s feelings of sympathy and care for his son. Upon meeting Catari, Genna says, in keeping with the film’s open statement, that Matteo has moved from hate to pity, and will soon arrive at love for Angelo. Catari finishes the last word, “love,” and in the next shot, we see Angelo with a young Italian girl, Daniella, who is about 3 years old. In her arms she holds a baby doll and a purse and we understand she is playing the role of a mother. Angelo walks toward her and pulls at her purse, causing the young girl to cry. In between reaction shots of Catari and Don Genna, the two children sit down and begin to play with the young girl’s doll, playing the role of doting parents. As the two children finally begin to play nicely together, an older boy arrives at the scene, grabs Daniella’s arm, and leads her away from Angelo. The smaller Angelo, defiant, grabs the older boy and they begin to fight. Angelo is quickly dispatched and the older boy takes away his playmate Daniella. In the final shot, we are first shown the abandoned doll, then a camera pan shows Angelo on the ground, weeping (Figures 3.3 and 3.4). Throughout the film, Catari is skeptical about Angelo’s ability, or that of any “black” Italian, to integrate within Italian society. In one sense, the scene can be read as a projection of Catari’s fears, as if to say, what happens when Angelo becomes an adult and wishes to marry a “white” Italian woman? What would happen to their children? The children’s interactions suggest that such a union would not be tolerated in Italian

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Figure 3.3 A scenario for mixed-race unions in the Italian Republic (Il Mulatto, dir. Francesco De Robertis, 1949).

Figure 3.4 Making a case against racial integration (Il Mulatto, dir. Francesco De Robertis, 1949).

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society, and that Angelo’s presence could only bring strife and turmoil. However, I would suggest that in this scene Il Mulatto/Angelo turns once again to the United States, this time to the Civil Rights era, and in particular to the famous “doll studies” conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, first published in the late 1930s and early 1940s, to stage the “problems” associated with racially integrated societies and the potential hardships that may be faced by mixed-race children in predominately white Italy. Based on Mamie Clark’s research at Freedman’s Hospital in Washington DC and her Howard University Master’s thesis, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children,” the Clarks conducted a series of studies to examine the impact of institutional racism on the self-image of black children.62 In the doll experiments, black children were asked to select a doll that they favored and one with which they identified. The majority of children selected the white doll as the favored toy and also associated the doll with positive attributes, such as prettiness and cleanliness. When choosing the black doll as the one that they most resembled, the children described the doll as having negative characteristics, such as being dirty or bad.63 The Clarks concluded that racial segregation caused the black children to internalize racism, resulting in low self-esteem and poor self-image that would have a lasting impact. The Clarks’ studies were cited in the majority opinion for Brown v. Board of Education, the case that overturned the “equal, but separate” doctrine established by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson US Supreme Court decision, a case that I will return to later in this chapter. The scene described above plays out the doll test experiment within the Italian national context. Angelo desires to play with the white doll and, by extension, the young Daniella. His desire leads to conflict as he ends up fighting with the Italian boy and Angelo is left injured and crying. Placed in the context of Don Genna and Catari’s discussion of her potential union with Matteo, the scene suggests that the future of the Italian Republic must be founded upon racial endogamy. By referencing US constitutional law, Il Mulatto/Angelo posits the impossibility of a black Italian, but also puts forth an argument for postwar Italian national unification based on racial solidarity among northern and southern white Italians. The film’s argument concerning racial endogamy as the basis for the postwar Italian state is evident in the scene in which Matteo approaches Catari with a marriage proposal. Catari appears dressed in traditional

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southern costume, placing greater emphasis on her role as protector of Italian culture and as “mother” of the future state. She rebukes Matteo’s offer, not for lack of love but because of Angelo’s difference. She says to Matteo, “the child divides us, always . . . at first it was jealousy, but now it’s simply reason. The child is a stranger, of a different race. He is not of your blood.”64 With Catari, we move from the difference of skin color to that of blood. In this sense, Angelo’s blackness prevents the continuation of the white Italian, hetero-normative family that Catari, in her traditional guise, represents. Racial essentialism is made visually explicit in the final scenes of the film. After accepting Angelo as his son, Matteo and Don Genna plan a great celebration for Angelo’s birthday. In one part of the celebration sequence, we see the Italian men and women, both dressed in traditional southern peasant clothing, performing the tammurriata as a ritual courting dance. Matteo has by this time fully accepted Angelo as his son and they play with each other jovially until Don Genna brings news that in accordance with a letter received in an earlier scene, Angelo’s uncle has arrived from the United States. Matteo is furious at the arrival of the brother, asking why the father did not come instead. Angelo’s uncle states that the father died fighting in Italy, and rather than coming to take guardianship of the child in accordance with his brother’s will, he only wishes to see and spend some time with his nephew. This peaceful response relieves Matteo and he invites the uncle to join the festivities. Once again, we are presented with images of rustic dance and music, this time juxtaposed with images of Angelo’s African American uncle, who is seated next to Angelo and positioned at the end of a large table with his back to the dance and performance floor, directly opposite Matteo and Don Genna. The two Italian men observe the interaction between the uncle and nephew and are surprised at its naturalness and spontaneity. A bit saddened, Matteo arises and goes to the performance space and sings a song he wrote especially for Angelo. Through reaction shots, we are given the impression that the child is appreciative but not overwhelmed. Finally, the indisputable innateness of music plays a central role once again, this time in the form of black American spiritual. The uncle, wishing to thank his hosts, decides to sing a song from his country and begins a slow, deep melody. Reaction shots of an alert and animated Angelo are intercut with his uncle’s performance, until Angelo walks over and sits at his uncle’s feet and begins singing in harmony with him.

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Il Mulatto and Plessy v. Ferguson: The Logic of “Equal, but Separate” If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and a voluntary consent of individuals . . . Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane . . . (Justice Billings Brown, majority opinion, Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896.)65 The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was based on an 1892 legal suit filed by Homer Plessy against the East Louisiana railroad. From the 1870s to the 1890s, southern US states practised segregation policies on public transportation and facilities as a solution to the growing social and political presence of blacks as a result of the 13th and 14th amendments, and the federally supported Reconstruction. Plessy’s suit was a direct challenge to a law that mandated Louisiana trains be installed with separate cars for black and white passengers. Homer Plessy, racially defined as an “octoroon” (one-eighth black and seven-eighths white), revealed his race and when ordered to sit in the “colored” car, refused and was arrested. When the case appeared before the Supreme Court, the justices were to decide if the Louisiana law violated Plessy’s constitutional rights guaranteed by the 13th and 14th amendments. Having established that the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery, was not in dispute, Justice Brown moved to the consideration of the 14th amendment, particularly Section 1, which reads: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.66

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Accepting Plessy’s citizenship and consequent rights, Justice Brown argues that the installation of separate cars for “colored” and “white” people, if they are of equal quality, does not violate those constitutional rights. Brown reasons that when adding the amendment, the legislature did not intend blacks to be on an equal social level with whites, and further, the Constitution cannot force exclusive, incompatible races to amalgamate. The majority decision indicates that it is beyond the law’s jurisdiction to institute a colorblind policy, and that it is sufficient for blacks and whites to have equality solely in terms of “civil and political rights.”67 Brown argued that the inability to adjudicate what he called “social equality” is because the two races are “naturally” incompatible. If blacks were the social equals of whites, they could intermingle; however, since they are not, the court cannot perform or undo the work of divine authority. The majority decision has several ramifications, including the naturalization of racial difference, the refusal to legally acknowledge mixed-race subjects, and the assumed inferiority of black subjects. However, the utility of the ruling is in its ability to claim black citizens have equal rights while at the same time preserving white privilege. Toward the end of Il Mulatto, Matteo becomes resigned to the fact that he has lost Angelo to his uncle. Turning to Don Genna for an explanation, Matteo asks: “If the Madonna is both black and white and they are equal, then why is Angelo moving towards his uncle?” Don Genna, gathering black and white breadcrumbs in separate piles, explains that they are both equal, but separate. The scene ends with the reunited uncle and nephew sparring together as the Italian crowd cheers and watches. The film’s use of the black Madonna inserts the divine entity, only suggested in Justice Brown’s opinion, which has ordered racial hierarchy prior to the established law. The dual Madonna solution places immaculate conception in two distinct registers: providing racial segregation the sanction of God but within the Christian context, the film suggests that the separation of races is presented as God’s gift to man. Here, we can return to the earlier scene in which Angelo plays with the young Daniella and her doll. Il Mulatto draws upon Plessy v. Ferguson and US Civil Rights debates regarding segregation for its resolution of the issue of mixed-race African Italian citizens. The film suggests that racial integration will not only harm Angelo but also is unnatural due to innate racial differences. However, the strongest argument against mixed-race African Italian subjects within the peninsula is made under the aegis of divine authority. The “black” mother returns us once again to the US context, but

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this time to institutional slavery and a doctrine that predates “equal, but separate.” By making the black Madonna Angelo’s “mother” in order to justify his ejection from the national body, Il Mulatto/Angelo evokes partus sequitur ventrem, a legal doctrine taken from Roman civil law that stated the mother’s status is inherited by her child. The doctrine was used to extend slavery in the American colonies beginning in Virginia in 1662. Like the AOI segregation laws, partus sequitur ventrem allowed white fathers to disown mixed-race children conceived by enslaved women. By referring to a foundational doctrine of institutional slavery in the United States, Il Mulatto/Angelo’s use of the black Madonna issues a final, damning argument that relegates the mixed-race Angelo to the status of slave and non-citizen. The scene depicting the separation of breadcrumbs is not featured in Angelo; the American version ends instead with Don Genna and Matteo consoling each other on the natural affinity shared by Angelo and his uncle. In the 3 years that separated the original and edited versions, the movement toward desegregation in the United States intensified and legal challenges against Jim Crow laws were making their way through the courts, which would eventually result in the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. To present a justification for the separation of the races based on the logic of “equal, but separate” would have been received as an offensive, uninformed statement and most likely subject the film to protest and boycott; it is unlikely that the film in its original form would have passed US censorship boards.68 With issues concerning the marketing and distribution of the film mostly evident, the question remains of why recourse is made to a construction of racial hierarchy legitimated by a legal ruling that was being challenged, even at the time of the original production. I suggest that the history of segregation within the Italian colonies, informed by many of the racial theories that influenced the Plessy decision, such as Social Darwinism, eugenics, and accompanying theories of degeneration, provided a significant precedent for the segregationist discourse within the film. However, the “equal, but separate” decision provides a model through which Italy can reconcile the presence of the interracial subject as a citizen of the nation. In the final scene of the film, Matteo, Don Genna, and Catari are shown standing by a dock as a ship, presumably with Angelo and his uncle on board, sails off to the United States. As they turn and begin to walk away, the scene moves to an image of Matteo’s feet coming to stop in front of a dark rock in his path. After a moment’s hesitation, Matteo

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nonchalantly kicks the rock into the ocean and walks off screen. The film’s cryptic ending completes the earlier scene in which Matteo leads Angelo to near death by drowning, suggesting that the unspoken solution to the “human problem,” to murder the unwanted offspring, still remains as a latent impulse. The ejection of the black body takes place at the border of Italy, a symbolic gesture that suggests the new terms under which the Italian body politic will be defined. The dock is at once an entrance and a point of departure, a passageway for liberation and for infiltration, a port for international trade and commerce, and for the loss of labor through massive emigration. As Il Mulatto participates in a new delineation of the Italian national boundary in the postwar era, the liberatory movements of Africa, the Caribbean, Southern Asia, and other countries of the Third World will enable migratory movements that will require Italy and other Western powers to not only reassert and redefine the limits of the nation and its citizens, but place into question terms such as “Western,” “Europe,” and “European.” Ultimately, Il Mulatto and the amended Angelo stand as obsolete texts, an attempt to represent an articulation of race and nation that underwent a rapid and irreversible transformation. The reality of mixed-race subjects in postwar Italy could be quite different from that depicted on screen. The young actor, Angelo Maggio, was actually an orphaned mixed-race child from Naples who was adopted by Italian actor Dante Maggio.69 As I will discuss later, during the 1950s and 1960s, the Italian cinema’s commentary on national identity, citizenship, race, racism, or the presence of African diasporic subjects is informed by what has been referred to as the “historical amnesia” regarding the full legacy of Italian colonialism and, arguably, Italy’s economic recovery and position within the capitalist democracies of the First World. In his 1953 Cinema Nuovo article, “Italy: Vivere in Pace,” journalist Rudi Berger expresses what can be considered a typical statement on racial representation in the Italian cinema: “Save for the artificial parenthesis imposed by the alliance with Nazism, a racial problem doesn’t exist in Italy, and in particular, the problem with blacks, the appearance of which, in these last years, is in our cinema, like our literature, of a sporadic and contingent nature.”70 Berger recounts the representation of Africa in the Italian colonial cinema of the 1930s, noting that the appearance of African colonial subjects, either without psychological depth, as an indigenous mass “en bloc,” or as the actual or psychic projection of a malevolent “other” to the normative Italian subject, was similar to the US Hollywood depictions of ethnic and racial others.

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Citing the portrayal of the African American GI in Rossellini’s Paisan, Berger commends Italian postwar cinema for offering more nuanced and humane depictions of African diasporic subjects, such as with the relationship between Joe and Pasquale that “overcomes their exterior differences in a communion of two beings—only and in the same moment human—losing themselves.”71 However, he notes that some films, such as Giorgio Ferroni’s Tombolo, Black Paradise (1947), persist in offering stereotypical and racist portrayals of African Americans. In films that do attempt to offer meaningful portrayals of African Americans, such as Luigi Zampa’s To Live in Peace (1946) and Lattuada’s Without Pity (1947), Berger suggests that these films suffer from “melodramatic complications” that hinder plot and character development, a comment I will return to in my discussion of Lattuada’s Without Pity. While Berger praises the 1952 Lattuada/Fellini film Variety Lights for the representation of the chemical engineer turned free-spirited jazz trumpet player (performed by John Kitzmiller), he suggests that by the beginning of the 1950s, themes concerning the African American male and racism are rarely found in Italian films, stating “the black [male] disappears from our screens now that the themes of war and of the postwar are abandoned.”72 Save for De Robertis’ Il Mulatto, which he dismisses as a “false and gratuitously sentimental” film in which the young Angelo Maggio’s “dark skin and blonde mop of hair”73 are used primarily as a gimmick to generate box office revenue, issues concerning antiblack racism no longer have a place in the Italian cinema of the 1950s. Interestingly, while Berger begins his article by commenting on the more humane representations of African diasporic subjects in postwar Italian film, most of his examples are of negative and stereotypical portrayals with little to redeem them. In addition, there is a slippage between Berger’s discussion of the representation of black African colonial subjects in fascist colonial era films and the African American subjects who appear in the neorealist and postwar cinema. As I suggest in my discussion of Il Mulatto/Angelo, the appearance of the African American GI in neorealist and postwar cinema becomes a means for Italy to process its new political and cultural relationship to the United States in the postwar era. The marginal status of black American subjects can be appropriated to speak to Italy’s relation to the rest of Europe as a former fascist nation, its racialized north/south division, and further its “southern” relation to northern Europe. The representation of the African American male and his marginalization in the United States as similar to that experienced by Italians in the immediate postwar period, also allows for the

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displacement of Italian Liberal and fascist colonialism (the “artificial parenthesis”), and as suggested by the white endogamous union between southerners Matteo and Catari in Il Mulatto, allows for the reassertion of a homogeneous Italian national and racial identity in the postwar era. However, as with Cabiria and Under the Southern Cross, Il Mulatto also fails to imagine a homogeneous Italian national and racial identity, mainly through its reliance upon the US “equal, but separate” logic then being overturned by the Civil Rights movement. Although antiblack racism in the United States no longer preoccupied the Italian cinema, questions of race and national identity remain prevalent themes in the cinema of the “economic miracle.” If “race” is not present in terms of the nonwhite, non-Western subjects whose presence will not be felt profoundly in the peninsula until the middle to late 1970s, it is certainly present in terms of the racial aspects of the Italian north/south division. When asked about the “problem” of race in the Italian cinema, commentator Paolo Valmarana notes: There doesn’t exist [in Italy] traditional racism (excluding traditional minorities) because neither the presence of the Jews, nor above all, that of people of color, assume relevant levels in Italy. However, before racism in the traditional sense didn’t exist because the racist potential of the Italian is completely absorbed by the disdain of the north for the south.74 In the next section, I examine the ways in which Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008) invokes the presence of the black American GI in Italian cinema during the 1940s and 1950s. While Miracle posits Italy as a location for African diasporic identity formation, primarily through the black soldiers’ debates on racism in the United States and their reception by Italians during the war, the film can also be placed in conversation with Italian neorealist films that used the black American GI as an expression of universal humanity, especially after the devastation of the fascist era and World War II. Using Lattuada’s Without Pity as a primary example, I also examine how the black American soldier becomes a vehicle for examining Italian racial and national identity. Rather than simply a work that seeks to redeem the image of the black American soldier in the United States war film genre, Miracle evokes a longer trajectory of representations of blacks and interracial relations in the Italian cinema that illustrates an ongoing interrogation of Italian racial and national identity formation via the context of race and nation in the United States.

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The Black GI as Liberator: Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna Spike Lee’s 2008 film Miracle at St. Anna also places a young boy, another Angelo, at the center of its narrative, this time set during the summer of 1944, as the Allied forces fought the retreating German armies in northern Italy. Based on James McBride’s 2003 novel of the same title, Miracle is a historical fiction that highlights the efforts of the 92nd Infantry Division, the only African American combat troops to serve in World War II. The first Buffalo units were organized in 1917 during World War I. The word “buffalo” was taken from the Native American name for African American soldiers who fought in the US Indian Wars at the end of the nineteenth century. Both McBride and Lee sought to recover the legacy of the 92nd Infantry, a legacy that has not been fully incorporated into historical accounts of World War II. In particular, Lee and McBride point to the US war film genre, which produced images of heroism and bravery during World War II, but with the exception of Jim Brown’s role in The Dirty Dozen (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1967) do not include representations of heroic African American soldiers. This historical and cultural absence of the black American soldier became the center of controversy when Spike Lee noted the absence of African American soldiers in Clint Eastwood’s two World War II films: Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) and Flags of Our Fathers (2006).75 Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule co-produced Miracle at St. Anna with Italian producers Roberto Cicutto and Luigi Musini with a budget of approximately $45 million. Lee employed an international crew, onlocation shooting in Tuscany and at Italian film studios at Cinecittà, as well as major Italian film stars, including Pierfrancesco Favino and Luigi Lo Cascio. Despite the efforts to appeal to domestic, Italian, and international audiences, Miracle at St. Anna received mixed reviews and made less than $10 million in its initial box office run. Despite the box office failure of the film, for which many reasons have been given including the intricate plot and complex ideological arguments concerning racism, Miracle is significant in its response to the representation of African American soldiers in both Italian and American cinemas. In addition to reminding us of the absence of the “heroic” African American solider in the American war film genre, Miracle also speaks to the presence of the African American soldier in Italian neorealist films, making direct reference to Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan and a series of neorealist films that use the African American GI and blackness as a means of representing the Italian nation-state in the immediate postwar era.

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Miracle at St. Anna begins with a framing story set in New York City, 1983. We are introduced to Hector Negron (Laz Alonso), a World War II veteran, who lives a solitary life as a postal worker. During the busy holiday season, an elderly white man approaches Negron’s counter. Recognizing the man, Negron pulls out a German Luger pistol and kills him. A young reporter, Tim Boyle (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), arrives late at the crime scene but receives permission to accompany the police to Negron’s apartment. Among the belongings, the police find a statue head, later identified as the lost head of the Primavera, one of four statues of a 450-year old bridge in Florence, missing since the Nazis destroyed the bridge in 1944. An interview between Boyle and Negron begins a flashback, transporting us to northern Italy during the summer of 1944. Negron and fellow soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division are approaching the Serchio River in Tuscany, where, due to the racism and incompetence of their white commanding officers, the company is ambushed and suffers massive losses. Negron and three of his fellow soldiers, Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), and the “giant” Samuel Train (Omar Benson Miller) are forced into German-controlled territory. Locating shelter in an abandoned barn, Train discovers a wounded boy, Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), carrying a statue head as a good luck charm; Train takes the boy to be a sign from God. He carries the boy with him, eventually nursing him back to health. The four soldiers regroup and eventually find a small village. Renata (Valentina Cervi), a young woman from the village, agrees to help the soldiers find a way out of the Germancontrolled territory. However, on establishing radio communications with their base, they are ordered by their bigoted and inept commanding officer, Captain Nokes (Walton Goggins), to capture a German, forcing them to remain in the village. A group of partisans, led by Peppi the “Great Butterfly” (Pierfrancesco Favino), arrive with a captured German soldier. Angelo identifies one of the partisans Rodolfo (Sergio Albelli)—the man Negron shoots in the New York post office in the film’s opening sequences—as a traitor. In another flashback, we learn that Angelo is the sole survivor of the St Anna di Stazzema massacre, an actual war atrocity in which German forces executed 560 civilians in retaliation for partisan activities. In the film, the executions take place because Rodolfo, the partisan traitor, did not deliver Peppi to the Germans. Rodolfo betrayed Peppi because he holds him responsible for the death of his brother, a fascist. We also learn that the captured German, Brundt (Jan Pohl), helped Angelo escape

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after the massacre. Negron, whose fluency in Spanish makes him the only soldier who can speak any Italian, learns of Angelo’s fear of Rodolfo and tries to warn Stamps. But while on watch, Rodolfo kills Brundt and attempts to kill Negron before making his escape. Rodolfo confronts Peppi, who realizes too late that Rodolfo has betrayed him. Rodolfo kills Peppi and then escapes down the mountain. After finding Brundt dead, Nokes orders the four soldiers to return to base. Train refuses and after a confrontation in which Train embodies the spirit of the “Mountain of the Sleeping Man” the mythical protector of the village, Nokes and his party depart, only to be shelled by the arriving German forces. A slaughter ensues in which most of the town’s inhabitants are killed, including Renata, Stamps, Bishop, and Train. Angelo, awakened by the spirit of his dead brother, takes the statue head and gives it to the wounded Negron. Captain Eichholz (Christian Berkel), the German commanding officer, saves Negron’s life and gives him a Luger pistol for protection. Returning to the film’s present, Negron learns that an anonymous benefactor has posted his $2 million bond. The final scene takes place in the Bahamas, where Negron sees the statue head and a middle-aged man seated near the shore. As he holds the statue head, Negron learns that he is not the only survivor: the seated gentleman is none other than Angelo (Luigi Lo Cascio). Many of the negative reviews of the film cite its complex plot structure and Lee’s attempt to combine elements of the crime thriller, war epic, and ideological commentary on African American participation in the US military. Lee and McBride also received criticism for the controversial addition of Rodolfo, the partisan traitor. The character of Rodolfo was the source for the strongest negative reviews of the film in Italy. In both the novel and the film, Rodolfo betrays the partisan leader Peppi “the Great Butterfly,” and former Italian partisans did not respond positively to McBride and Lee’s creative license.76 The reasons and details of the massacre are still subject to debate; however, in Italy, it is generally believed that the massacre was an unmotivated attack on the part of the Nazis, then in retreat in northern Italy. Responding to the controversy surrounding the story’s use of a partisan traitor, McBride stated: “I am very sorry if I have offended the partisans. I have enormous respect for them. As a black American, I understand what it’s like for someone to tell your history, and they are not you. But unfortunately, the history of World War II here in Italy is ours as well, and this was the best I could do . . . it is, after all, a work of fiction.”77 Spike

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Lee has defended his vision of the Italian Resistance in both Italy and in the United States, particularly in the Italian American community that had already taken Lee to task for his depiction of Italian Americans in films such as Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), and Summer of Sam (1999). Responding to criticism from Italian partisan organizations, such as the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (ANPI), Lee stated: “[There is] a lot about your history you have yet to come to grips with. This film is our interpretation, and I stand behind it.”78 In stating that Italians have yet to reconcile their own history, Lee may be referring to more than the Italian Resistance and World War II. As I will argue shortly, Lee and McBride’s revision of World War II history also comments upon the history of Italian colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the end of his introduction to the film’s photo catalogue, Lee comments: I truly believe the fathers of Italian neorealism willed this film to fruition. Let’s all give thanks and praises to Vittorio De Sica (Shoeshine, 1946; The Bicycle Thief, 1948; Miracle in Milan, 1951); Roberto Rossellini (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisà, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948); and Luchino Visconti (Ossessione, 1943; The Earth Trembles, 1948; Bellissima, 1951) for their blessings and inspiration that allowed a miracle birth to occur from the intertwining of Italian and African-American cinemas.79 In Miracle, Lee gives credence to his comments that Miracle is an “intertwining of Italian and African-American cinemas.” Rosellini’s Paisan becomes an important reference point for Miracle, in particular Paisan’s second episode (“Naples”), which stages the relationship between the black American GI, Joe, and the young Neapolitan boy, Pasquale, a sequence that resonates with the Train–Angelo relationship established in Miracle. The relationship between Renata and the African American soldiers trapped in enemy territory in the Tuscany region in Miracle also resonates with Paisan’s first episode (“Sicily”), in which the young Sicilian woman Carmela gives her life helping her new friend Joe and other American troops make their way out of a German-occupied area. Miracle also references other neorealist and Italian postwar narrative films that feature the black American GI. For instance, the scenes in the small village of Colognora are similar to the narrative of Luigi Zampa’s To Live in Peace, a 1946 film about an Italian American and an injured African

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American soldier who take refuge in a small Italian village surrounded by German forces. In quoting Paisan, Lee is not only reconstructing American history through his portrayal of the heroic African American soldier, but also revisiting the representation of the black American GI in Italian neorealist and postwar narrative film. As I will argue, Lee’s Miracle enacts this re-vision because of African American and African diasporic subjects’ ambivalent relation to Italy, one in which the soldiers find themselves fighting for the freedom of a nation that only less than a decade before asserted its imperial domination over Ethiopia after the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935–6. Neorealist cinema is often read as emerging from the Resistance movement against the fascist regime. However, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and its racist underpinnings were not issues prominently raised in neorealist films concerned with the plight of Italians in the immediate postwar era. In Miracle, Lee pays tribute to both the legacies of Italian neorealism, an important influence on Third World, anticolonial, and black radical cinema of the 1970s (an influence that can be seen in Lee’s political and artistic commitment to making films about the African diasporic experience), while inflecting neorealist films with a perspective that brings to light the Italian colonial legacy. As discussed earlier in relation to Haile Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory (1999), Ethiopia was seen as a shining example of black independence and self-determination for pan-African movements in the first half of the twentieth century. The country’s 1896 victory over Italy was viewed as a victory for all African and African diasporic peoples. In the United States, Marcus Garvey, leader of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought the cultural and economic uplift of African Americans and eventual return to Africa, attempted to forge political ties with Ethiopia and Emperor Haile Selassie during the 1920s. Garvey’s efforts were stunted by the Ethiopian government’s unwillingness to develop stronger relations with UNIA, Ethiopian racial hubris toward African Americans, the failure of his Black Star Line maritime company, and his eventual imprisonment for mail fraud.80 When Italy announced its intention to invade Ethiopia in 1934, Garvey encouraged African Americans to send aid and soldiers to Ethiopia. However, by this time, Garvey had become a vocal opponent of Emperor Selassie, blaming the latter for the invasion due to his reluctance in accepting aid and political support from the pan-African community, his reliance on the League of Nations, and infrastructural problems such as poor military preparation, a slavery system, and underdevelopment of human and natural resources.81

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In light of the pan-Africanist activity surrounding the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, Lee does not evade this brief period prior to World War II when Italy, because of its imperial ambitions in Africa, provided an impetus for African diasporic identity formation. A reference to Italian colonialism appears in an early scene in Miracle. Lee places us in an expensive apartment above the Piazza del Popolo in present-day Rome. The first images we see are paintings depicting Hitler, Nazi insignia, swastikas, and grotesque scenes of suffering and death. We learn this is the home of Enrico (John Leguizamo), an art dealer who specializes in Nazi art. While looking out of the window preparing to read his daily paper, we see a beautiful young woman, in lingerie, lying on a bed. Her appearance—a mass of long, textured hair, light complexion, and fluent Italian—gives the impression that she may be of mixed Italian and African descent. She approaches Enrico, and as they begin to make love she takes his newspaper and throws it out of the window. The paper lands on a table where a middle-aged man, later revealed to be the adult Angelo, sees the front-page article about Hector Negron and the discovery of the Primavera head. In three close-up shots, we first see the story’s headline: “Art, Murder, and Mystery in New York: Lost Italian WWII Artifact Found in Accused Postal Worker’s Home Sparks International Tiff.” In the above right corner of the image, we see the words “Established in 1887.” In the second shot, we are shown an image of Negron with the article title and text on the right of the image. The visible section of the article text relays information concerning Italy’s demand for the return of its artistic heritage. In the third shot, the image of the Primavera head and Negron appear side-by-side between the article text. The scene is more than an expedient to introduce a character who will be central to the film’s resolution. It is here that Lee references Italian colonialism and its importance to pan-Africanist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One reference that appears in the second shot noted above is the International Herald Tribune’s establishment date of 1887. The 1887 date shown briefly on screen can reference the Italo-Ethiopian conflict of 1887 known as the Battle of Dogali. Before the Italians’ massive defeat in the 1896 war, Italy attempted a military incursion into Ethiopia that resulted in the loss of over 500 Italian soldiers. As discussed in Gerima’s Adwa: An African Victory, the Italian loss is commemorated with a large obelisk in Rome’s Piazza dei Cinquecento. As with Gerima who sets his interviews with descendants of those who fought in the 1896 Italo-Ethiopian conflict in the piazza, Lee’s Miracle,

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by way of the news article, links the events set in present-day New York City to Italy and the country’s colonial history. Enrico’s mixed-race lover also signals an Italian postcolonial legacy, a reminder of the presence of African Italians in contemporary Italy. Finally, by juxtaposing Negron’s image with that of the missing artifact, Lee conflates the suppressed history of Italian colonialism and the unacknowledged legacy of African American combat soldiers with the question of repatriation of stolen artifacts. The scene rings ironic in light of Italy’s 65-year delay in returning the Axum Obelisk, looted by the fascist regime during the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war. The young Angelo also becomes the vehicle for Miracle’s commentary on the legacies of Italian colonialism. In the first scene in which the young Angelo appears, he has found shelter at an abandoned barn. While playing with his imaginary friend, the ghost of his dead brother Arturo, Angelo begins to sing the lyrics to the “Faccetta Nera,” the Italian marching song used to inspire Italian troops sent to fight in the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war. A popular favorite, Angelo sings the “Faccetta Nera” unaware of its use in fascist propaganda. The poignant irony of the young survivor of a Nazi massacre singing the “Faccetta Nera,” a song used to send Italian soldiers to war in Ethiopia, allows Lee to connect the experiences of African American soldiers with the Italians under the fascist dictatorship. Another reference to the Italian colonial imaginary comes when Angelo first sees Train and calls him a “chocolate giant.” During the fascist colonial campaigns, the benefits of colonialism were promoted through product campaigns for items such as coffee and chocolate. As Karen Pinkus argues, many of the ads conflated the black body with the overseas products themselves, resulting in a colonial body that could be “consumed,” as seen in the “Faccetta Nera” chocolate brand.82 Lee inserts these references to the Italo-Ethiopian war just before Train finds the young Angelo. In this manner, Lee allows a rereading of the famous Naples sequence in Paisan that incorporates the Italian colonial legacy.83 The 1935 invasion of Ethiopia mobilized a pan-African movement, with calls for Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans to go and fight with the Ethiopian forces. African Americans, aligning themselves with Ethiopia and its plight to remain a sovereign nation, organized to send aid and troops. As William Scott writes: “Reports of the fascists’ brutal attack on the Ethiopian motherland swept through African-American communities, producing bitter denunciations of Rome, some praise of the League of Nations’ decision to invoke sanctions against the aggressor

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nation, and mass mobilization in support of the invaded Abyssinian nation.”84 Several organizations, among them the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sent letters of protest to the League of Nations, garnered support for the Ethiopian cause, provided medical aid, raised funds, and sent troops.85 African American newspapers such as the Amsterdam News, Age, The Crisis, and Opportunity also encouraged black Americans to join in the war effort against the Italian invasion.86 In one article from the Amsterdam News, “50,000 Volunteers for Abyssinia Warn World of ‘Africa for the Africans,’” journalist Raymond X. Dozier commenting on African Americans’ request to fight abroad stated: “America cannot deny [African-Americans] the honor to lay down their lives that Ethiopia might be free and remain free.”87 Accompanying the article is a political cartoon that shows two black men on a map, one standing over an image of “America,” the other over the continent of “Africa.” The two men join hands in solidarity across the Atlantic Ocean. The caption reads: “The non-Nordic peoples of the five continents and the islands of the seas are pledging their able support upon the altar of ‘Africa for the Africans’ as symbolized by the plight of Ethiopian under the heels of Italy’s tyrant, Mussolini.” The arguments made for entering the conflict centered on a pan-Africanist appeal for the protection of the “fatherland” and “Africa for the Africans.” Ultimately, African Americans did not play a large role in the Ethiopian military efforts. The US government prevented many from leaving the country to fight in the war, and the impact of the global depression of the 1930s made it difficult to send large amounts of monetary aid and soldiers.88 However, as William Scott has argued, the Italo-Ethiopian war was a unifying event for African Americans, particularly for the generation that took part in the “Great Migration,” the movement of black Americans from Jim Crow south to northern urban centers in search of employment, housing, and educational opportunities that began in the first decade of the twentieth century. This new generation of black Americans settled in cities such as Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, and most prominently Harlem in New York City. The explosion of cultural production in the “black mecca” of Harlem represented the new consciousness of this mobile, educated generation. Harlem also became the center of pro-Ethiopian efforts in the United States.89 Significantly, Lee begins Miracle in Negron’s Harlem apartment. The debates among the African American soldiers concerning their ambivalence toward serving in the US military and their national affinity should

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be read within the political and cultural context of the Great Migration and the new pan-African consciousness African Americans were gaining through contact with the larger African diasporic community in northern American cities, primary among them New York City’s Harlem. Indeed, many of the arguments concerning black men serving in the US military while racial violence in the form of Jim Crow segregation and lynching were rampant throughout the post-Reconstruction era south had already been raised during the World War I period. The four protagonists of Miracle are all in a certain sense, “new Negroes,” a generation raised after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, informed by the work of W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, taking part in the Great Migration to the US north and beyond, and with a desire to gain full rights as US citizens. As Alain Locke expresses in his 1925 essay, “The New Negro,” New York City was not only a destination for black southern Americans, but also for African Caribbeans from Jamaica (such as Marcus Garvey), Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the French and Spanish-speaking Caribbean.90 Drawing from this pan-Africanist context, it is no surprise that the main narrator of Lee’s Miracle is Hector Negron, a black American from Puerto Rico who speaks English, Spanish, and Italian. Hector’s position in the film is that of mediator, as the communications specialist for the small troop, as translator for the town residents and the black soldiers, and between the film’s settings in the World War II era and the early 1980s United States. However, Hector also stands as an outsider. We meet him in his Harlem home at the beginning of the film, a solitary widower who we later learn believed himself to be the only survivor of a World War II massacre. In the scenes that take place in 1943 Italy, Hector also remains slightly apart from the other African American troops, sharing their skin color but not necessarily their racial politics. The worldly “street preacher” Bishop is perhaps the film’s strongest example of the “new Negro,” a firm realist in the face of racism in the United States and abroad who does not seek to conform to the white imaginary of the black man. Although Stamps is northern, educated, and a “race man” in his own right, he is portrayed as too idealistic and eager to prove himself to his white superiors in the military, believing that decorated military service is the key to racial equality and full rights as a US citizen. Bishop, in contrast, is a draftee who believes himself and his black comrades to be pawns in the “white man’s war.” By the end of Miracle, Bishop is redeemed because of a profound compassion lying beneath his cynical exterior, but I would also argue because of his desire

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to live freely on his own moral terms outside of religious, racial, and national proscriptions. Ultimately, Stamps’ desire to prove his worth in the US military becomes a fatal blind spot, resulting in his death and the death of several of the town’s inhabitants. The Bishop–Stamps plot line begins after the Serchio River massacre, when the four soldiers have been separated from their division and Train has taken the young Angelo under his care.91 The debate concerning black American participation in the war is first introduced with Miracle’s “Axis Sally” sequence, in which shots of a young German woman spouting Nazi propaganda to discourage the African American troops from fighting for their white superiors, for a country that still thinks of them as “slaves,” is intercut with images of the African American soldiers beginning their crossing of the Serchio River. Although the troop leader reminds them that the Nazis consider blacks an inferior race, the African American soldiers are shown becoming hesitant, deflated, and confused. The Serchio River crossing and the subsequent slaughter that takes place makes literal the African American soldiers’ impossible position between a US military that views them as expendable and European forces (both German and Italian) that view them as inferior. Due to Captain Nokes’ refusal to believe that the black soldiers have crossed the river, he orders bombardments on his own troops. As missiles labeled “Harlem Special” fall upon the black soldiers, the German forces are left free to decimate the rest of their ranks. The next scene in which tensions flare between Stamps and Bishop takes place in the home of Renata’s father, Ludovico, a fascist sympathizer. In an earlier scene, a missile labeled “Deeds, not words”—the Buffalo Infantry Division slogan—hits a power line in the Tuscan village of Colognora, somehow bringing electric light back to the village, a “miracle” that foreshadows the coming of the African American soldiers, who are seen in the next shot making their way through enemy-occupied territory. As the black American soldiers arrive in the village, Lee is able to draw upon the representation of the black American GI in Italian neorealist film. The six episodes that comprise Paisan explore relationships between Italians and Americans during the Allied invasion. Harris argues that in naming the American protagonists of both the first and second sequences “Joe,” Rossellini establishes an analogy to illustrate the differences between white and black America, thus displaying knowledge of institutional racism in the United States that he then contrasts with Italian racial prejudice against African diasporic subjects.92 Miracle retains

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this focus on communication between Italians and now primarily African Americans, especially between Train and Angelo who establish a spiritual bond despite both being unable to speak the other’s language. In Miracle, Renata offers to help the black soldiers find safe passage out of the German-occupied territory. Conveniently, we learn that Renata worked as a nanny in England and can therefore speak with both Stamps and Bishop. Here, the white American Joe is replaced with Bishop and Stamps, offering another reading of Italian and African American relations inflected by cross-racial desire. While the relationship between Carmela and Joe is an innocent encounter (Joe does not attempt to seduce or rape Carmela), Stamps and Bishop enter into a rivalry over Renata. Stamps approaches Renata with forthright intentions, presenting himself as a suitor for Renata’s affection even though she is married. Bishop on the other hand, uses every opportunity with Renata to flirt and speak in sexual innuendo. As Bishop and Stamps both pursue a relationship with Renata, the differences between their worldview on race and racism become more pronounced. Moreover, their different perspectives manifest in their relationship with Renata: Stamps pursues an idealized, unrealistic love, while Bishop approaches the married Renata with cynicism. When they establish communication with headquarters by radio and are informed that they must stay and capture a German, Stamps steps outside with Bishop and the two begin to argue about their next course of action. Bishop accuses Stamps of “shining up to” Nokes and Stamps counters that while he does not have any liking for Nokes, he is “not the worst” of the white officers. After Bishop recounts the disaster at the Serchio River and states that the only reason blacks are fighting in the war is due to the need for more bodies, they begin their ideological debate. This dialogue is conveyed through close-up shots of Stamps and Bishop, both of whom are representing ideological positions on the role of African Americans in the US military. Stamps earnestly believes in American democracy, placing his faith in uplift and “progress.” His is an idealist position, which views African American participation in the war effort as a necessary hurdle toward achieving equality and full rights in the United States for their “children and grandchildren.” Although he does not support Nokes, Stamps believes in Colonel Driscoll, who, as shown in an earlier scene set at the 92nd Infantry Division Headquarters, is in fact a vocal supporter of the African American troops in the face of racist opposition by the Division’s General. Bishop presents the pessimist viewpoint of black Americans taking part in the war effort, arguing that

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valor and decoration in war will not change the status of blacks in the United States. As this dialogue ends, the film begins another flashback, this one set at Camp Clairborne, Merryville, Louisiana, 1943. In this scene, the four soldiers, along with their now deceased senior officer, stop by Herb’s Café to redeem a winning ticket for an ice cream. Upon entering the café, the soldiers see four German prisoners seated at a booth enjoying ice cream and refreshments, while two white Military Police officers (MPs) sit at the counter. The owner of the café tells the soldiers to go to the back to retrieve their ice creams, and when Stamps points out that enemy prisoners are seated in his café, the owner pulls a gun on the group. The MPs tell the owner to put his gun away, while the owner asks the MPs “Whose side are you on?” The scene is significant in that it raises the issue of racial and national solidarity, with the owner suggesting that even in the circumstance of war, racial solidarity trumps the shared national identity of the white and black soldiers. In the mise-en-scène, our attention is also brought to the propaganda posters on the wall. After the black soldiers return to collect their ice creams by gunpoint, the camera lingers on a propaganda poster that reads, “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them. Buy War Bonds.” The poster image is of three white children, one girl with a doll and two boys, one playing with a toy bomber plane and the other with an American flag. The children’s play has given way to fear as a shadow in the form of a swastika threatens to overcome them. The poster envisions German Nazism as “blackness” threatening the innocent white children. The visual motifs of black as evil and foreboding and whiteness as innocence and purity are used to transition to the next scene, which begins with a medium shot of the black soldiers looking at the German Nazi propaganda posters directed toward the Italian residents. In a series of five close-ups, the last of which is an image of a grimacing Tuskegee airman with the word “Liberator” printed on his helmet, the posters make explicit use of derogatory images of black men, envisioning them as primitive and animal-like threatening to destroy European civilization. Although the Herb’s Café flashback lends some support to Bishop’s position, the resolution of Miracle suggests that neither Stamps nor Bishop are completely correct in their positions. The Bishop–Stamps relationship also raises the issue of cross-racial desire between black American soldiers and white Italian women. As discussed in Il Mulatto, sexual relationships between black soldiers and Italian women were not uncommon in World War II Italy. Black men

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encountered Italian women in Italy without the same violent repercussions (including lynching) existing in the United States. In Il Mulatto, the black American soldier is an absent presence, a drunken soldier who rapes Maria resulting in the mixed-race child. The myth of the black male rapist is made evident in one of the Nazi propaganda posters shown after the Herb’s Café flashback. The image shows a black soldier in a simian-like posture, grabbing a Venus de Milo that he has apparently purchased for two dollars. The stark white of the statue next to the black soldier begs comparison to King Kong and the fear of the collapse of civilization. The propaganda serves to stoke resentment toward the notion of African diasporic peoples as “liberators” of white Europeans. Western Europe is imagined as a white woman, the object of desire for the black male. In Miracle, Lee challenges the stereotype of the black male as rapist, revealing that wartime relationships were not only consensual but a complex of racial and gendered power dynamics. In Miracle, the interracial love triangle becomes a means of expressing Bishop’s and Stamps’ distinct ideas about American democracy. The two men’s relationship to Renata also becomes a means for Lee to examine the construction of black masculinity. After seeing the attraction between Renata and Bishop, Stamps withdraws, apparently not wanting to “lower himself” to compete with Bishop. Speaking to Hector, Stamps says that black men like Bishop “take the race back 400 years.” Stamps is embarrassed by both Bishop and Train for what he perceives as their unwillingness to challenge stereotypes of black men, such as Train’s “southernness” and Bishop’s “street hustler” persona complete with a gold-plated tooth. For his allegiance to the US military, Bishop calls Stamps an “Uncle Tom,” a black man who is at the service of his white superiors. However, Stamps’ belief in American democracy is challenged through his encounter with Italians, and he expresses his ambivalence when stating he feels freer in Italy than he does in the United States. The Stamps–Bishop relationship reaches its climax just prior to the German siege of Colognora that serves as the film’s pivotal moment. After Stamps discovers that Bishop and Renata consummated their relationship, the two men get into a physical altercation that ends with the arrival of Hector and his announcement that Nokes has arrived. The fight between the two men reveals Stamps’ idolization of Renata and of white womanhood. For Stamps, Renata symbolized the promises of American democracy. His misplaced chivalry represents his belief that “uplift” ultimately means conforming to his notions of the white standards of behavior and comportment that he views Train and Bishop failing to uphold.

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For failing to maintain his illusion, Stamps takes Renata off the pedestal on which he placed her, calling her a “loosey-goosey.” However, Stamps’ misrecognition leads to disastrous results: Failing to heed Hector’s warning about the traitorous partisan Rodolfo, the soldiers do not receive warning that the Germans are marching toward Colognora, leading to the massacre of the villagers. In the scene of the German onslaught, it is Stamps who leads Ludovico and Renata to their deaths, after which he is singled out for a particularly gruesome end through excessive gun fire from the Germans surrounding him. While Stamps meets his end in the midst of his ambivalence concerning the promises of American democracy, Bishop’s relation to Train allows him to transcend his cynicism and give his life to save Angelo. Train comes to represent the African American “spirit” of survival in Western modernity, lyricized in the poetry and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. For Alain Locke, the African American southerner “has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well.”93 In another sense, Lee’s Miracle recuperates the image of the African American GI in neorealist films, often portrayed in a state of semiconsciousness through injury or alcohol consumption, nonverbal or speaking in broken Italian, musically inclined, physically imposing, and/ or conforming to negative stereotypes similar to those circulated in American cinema. Train and his relationship with the young Angelo are the spiritual centers of the film. It is his spiritualism and relationship forged with Angelo that allows for the transcendence of race at the end of Miracle, one that is quite different from that achieved at the end of the “Naples” sequence in Paisan. The second episode of Paisan takes place in Naples, 1943. The episode begins with an introduction to the street urchin Pasquale, one of the numerous Italian youths trying to survive in the war-torn city. After negotiations with other street boys, Pasquale is paid 150 lire to keep a lookout while he “buys a Negro.” As described in Malaparte’s La Pelle (1949), the purchase of a black American soldier was common practice in World War II Naples.94 Italians seeking access to money, food, and other goods viewed the black American GI, now enjoying greater freedom and privilege in Italy as part of the Allied forces, as a target for exploitation. In the Naples sequence of Paisan, the connection between the purchase of African American soldiers and slavery is made explicit when we see the young urchins attempting to sell the heavily inebriated Joe by displaying

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his teeth. Harris writes: “The significance of this gesture is much deeper than simply admiring the man’s teeth: customers in the market to buy African slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth century often heard such observations as this, and, by using the banter of these boys in a way which recalls a slave auction, Rossellini alludes to the historical treatment of Africans as slaves in the United States.”95 As Harris later suggests, the episode’s references to the slave trade also implicate the Italians in Western imperialism, particularly their liberal and fascist era colonial endeavors. The drunken Joe (we never learn his real name) is bought for 3,000 lira. As Bondanella notes: “Irony rather than realism is once again Rossellini’s vehicle as he shows an Italian buying a black, the descendant of former slaves who has paradoxically been sent to liberate the very Neapolitans who now purchase him.”96 Understanding the value of Joe in the Naples market, Pasquale creates a distraction and steals Joe away from the buyer and his competition. In an effort to hide Joe, Pasquale takes him to an indoor theater where we see a puppet performance of the Christians battling the Saracens. Still drunk, “Joe” becomes intrigued by the struggle between the white Christian and the black Moor. Believing the white Christian to be getting the upper hand, “Joe” jumps on stage and begins fighting the Christian crusader and helping the struggling Moor. A fight ensues resulting in Joe and Pasquale’s ejection from the theater. Taking his harmonica, Pasquale leads Joe through the destroyed landscape of Naples. The two rest on a pile of rubble and Joe begins singing the spiritual, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Although Pasquale doesn’t understand, he says: “It’s my key, but the house isn’t there, now. We live outside . . . I don’t like caves. Airplanes . . . They wrecked everything!” are a direct response to Joe’s misunderstanding of his relatively privileged position in relation to the devastated Neapolitans. It is exemplary of the communication failures between the two that will lead to Joe’s revelation at the end of the episode. After fantasizing a brilliant tickertape parade for his triumphal return from Europe, Joe, now deflated, admits the reality that he will not be welcomed by great crowds, and that he will return to a racially and economically subordinate status in the United States. Not heeding Pasquale’s warning that he will steal his shoes, Joe falls asleep on the rubble pile. Three days later, a sober Joe catches Pasquale throwing boxes off a military supply vehicle. Joe sequesters Pasquale and begins scolding the boy and “thousands” like him who steal from the “rich and kind” America. While searching Pasquale, Joe discovers his harmonica and recognizes

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him as the boy who stole his boots. He demands that Pasquale take him to his home and to his parents. When they arrive at Pasquale’s “home,” we see dozens of children run to Joe begging for money and food. Pasquale gives Joe a pair of boots that are not his, and Joe asks again that Pasquale take him to his home. Pasquale takes Joe to a cave where we learn that Pasquale’s parents are dead. Joe, stunned at the conditions in which the Neapolitans live, drops the boots, leaves Pasquale, and drives away. The final scene of the Naples episode reveals that “Joe has taken the first step, that of understanding, toward becoming Pasquale’s paisà.”97 In Miracle, the black soldiers are rendered more sympathetic than Joe in Paisan. Train instantly becomes a father figure to Angelo, and despite Bishop’s cynicism, the men are affectionate toward Angelo and the other boys of the village. The Angelo of Miracle is also nothing like the sciuscià in Paisan, who, while also having lost their youth due to the war, are more like little adults than the vulnerable Angelo. Yet, Miracle repeatedly quotes Paisan and its representation of the black American GI (Figure 3.5). In one scene, after Angelo meets the German Bundt again, Hector speaks to Angelo in Italian, quoting lines directly from Paisan: “Dov’è il tuo padre e tua madre?” (“Where’s your father and your mother?”). Joe speaks these lines as he finally recognizes the abject conditions of the Neapolitans. Whereas Bondanella sees Joe’s final realization as a movement toward communication and understanding previously unimaginable, Harris comments that Rossellini’s revision of the original episode allows for an expression of solidarity between African Americans and the Neapolitan people. Joe can now see the similarity between his poor

Figure 3.5 Lee evokes the Italian and African American encounters from Italian neorealist films. Train and Angelo communicate despite barriers of language, race, and nationality (Miracle at St. Anna, dir. Spike Lee, 2008).

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living conditions in the United States and the destitute Neapolitans living in caves.98 One reading suggests that upon seeing Pasquale’s abject condition, Joe sees his own condition in the United States as being similar to that of the Neapolitans. However, in order for Joe to arrive at this insight regarding his solidarity with the Neapolitans, he must contend with his feelings regarding race and racism experienced in the United States and as member of the Allied forces. In this sense, Joe’s expression at the end of the episode can also be read as shame in that while wallowing in self-pity over his status in the United States, he has failed to notice the dire state of the Neapolitans, which in wartime is worse than his own as a member (albeit black) of the Allied forces. While it is true that Joe achieves a necessary transformation in his relation to the Italian people, the response of “shame” is problematic. The response suggests that Joe dwells too much upon racism directed against him, while poverty and the security of life should mitigate feelings about racial inequality, which are then subsumed under a discourse of universal disenfranchisement. In his discussion of Franz Fanon’s notes on the “racial ‘problem’ films” released in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s, particularly Home of the Brave (1949), David Marriot argues that this movement from the particularity of racist injury to universality is characteristic of the “anti-black racism” of Hollywood liberalism in the postwar period. Also set during World War II, Home of the Brave concerns an African American GI, Peter Moss, who suffers from psychosomatic paralysis after his best friend is killed in battle. Working with a military psychiatrist, Moss is cured after he is made to transform his anger at a racial epithet spoken by his best friend to a universal feeling of guilt at having survived the war. The film illustrates Fanon’s conceptualization of the dual war fought by the black soldier and black subjects in general against both societal racism and his own imago, which reflects back and incorporates racist perceptions.99 Marriot comments: Moss is just like everybody else in that he shares a universal tendency to guilt; but, at the same time, the film suggests that “to be really cured,” he has to surmount a lifetime of racist persecution by those who believe he is different. Forget your blackness in the name of a shared humanity, then, but resign yourself to it as damage, disability, or “stump.”100 The Naples sequence of Paisan follows a similar trajectory: after hearing that Pasquale’s parents are dead, Joe, stunned by the revelation, comes to

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understand that the Neapolitan conditions as worser than his own. The scene’s resonance is due in part to the silencing of Joe’s claims of racist aggression, which are made to seem individualistic and self-centered. As with Home of the Brave, Joe must reconcile himself to racist aggression in the face of a suffering that is universal. Lee’s Miracle retains the humanism of the Naples episode while offering a complex representation of the effects of racism on African American soldiers, one that does not require a displacement of their suffering under institutional racism in the United States, but rather one that is intertwined with the struggles of the Italian people. Nowhere else is this more evident than when Train manifests the spirit of the “Sleeping Man.” Just before German forces overrun the town, Train refuses to abandon Angelo, thereby maintaining his humanity in the face of Nokes’ irrational racism. When Nokes’ African American assistant, Lieutenant Birdsong, tries to separate Train from Angelo, Train begins to choke Birdsong, lifting him above ground. Lee represents Train’s spectacular gesture by paralleling his profile with that of the Tuscan mountains, symbolizing the shared hopes of the African American soldiers and the Italian people. Here, we are reminded of Lee’s oft-used call of “Wake Up!” in films such as School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), and Jungle Fever (1991). The “Wake Up!” motif is introduced in the first interview scene between Boyle and Hector, when Hector states: “I know where the Sleeping Man is.” Similar to Do the Right Thing (1989), the dramatic end of the Italian flashback episode explodes the ideological tensions of the African American soldiers caught between racism at home and abroad, between the hopes for American democracy and its failures in the form of Jim Crow, and the forgotten history of black American servicemen in World War II. In the end, the expression of hope is retained by Angelo’s awakening. The promise of a better future, represented by the Primavera head, is passed from Train to Bishop, then by Angelo to Hector, both in the film’s past and through their reunion in the present. In Miracle, Lee does accomplish the “intertwining of Italian and African-American cinemas.” Miracle manifests themes and motifs that are present throughout Lee’s oeuvre, including relationships among African American men and the political struggles of the African American community. In reading this film in light of the representation of the African American soldier in Italian neorealist and postwar films, I contend that Lee’s Miracle inflects these former representations with awareness of African American political struggles in the first three decades of the twentieth century and their relation to pan-African movements, including

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the Italian colonial occupation of Ethiopia. Finally, Miracle can be read in relation to the work of Haile Gerima in that it reveals Italy as a site of African diasporic identity formation. Hector stands as a testament of survival, not only of World War II but also of African diasporic subjects in the Americas. The ideological debates between Stamps’ American idealism and Bishop’s cynicism take place in an Italy already transcribed with politics of race relations and centuries of encounters with the African continent that continues to the present day.

Senza pietà: “Intertwining” the Italian and African American Experience By returning to an earlier moment in the Italian cinema we can already find an interrogation of Italian racial identity as read through the encounter with the black American subject. In my analysis of Lattuada’s Without Pity, I seek to position Lee’s Miracle as a continuation of the examination of race and racial identity formation already present in the Italian cinema. Miracle is not only a homage to Rossellini’s Paisan, but also evokes the portrayals of the African American GI in films such as Zampa’s To Live in Peace (1946), which marks the first screen appearance of John Kitzmiller, an African American soldier and engineer turned actor. Kitzmiller, who later became a well-known actor in the Italian cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, starring in the Lattuada-Fellini production, Variety Lights (1950), as a free spirited artist who befriends the traveling troupe’s leader and portrayed African American GIs in Tombolo paradiso nero (Tombolo, Black Paradise, Giorgio Ferroni, 1947) and Lattuada’s Without Pity (1948), an earlier expression of the “intertwining” of African American and Italian racial identity formation through the shared experience of migration. Like Tombolo, Black Paradise, Without Pity is set in the northern port city of Livorno, which as an US supply base had become a center for contrabanding and other black market activities in the immediate postwar period. On a freight train, we first meet Angela (Carla del Poggio), a young Italian woman of little means traveling to Livorno to live with her brother, Carlo. Alerted by gunshots, Angela sees a man with a gun being chased by an African American soldier. The man jumps into her freight car and while trying to escape is met by the black soldier, Jerry (John Kitzmiller), who he shoots before exiting from the car’s opposite door. Angela remains with the injured soldier who goes in and out of consciousness as they make their way to the port city.

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In Livorno, the military police are unable to locate Angela’s brother and she is sent to a women’s detention facility where she meets Marcella (Giulietta Masina). With the help of black GIs, the women escape the detention facility and Marcella takes Angela to her home, promising that Pier Luigi (Pierre Claudé), the local crime boss, can help her find her brother. We learn that Angela left her home after having a child out of wedlock that later died, and Marcella plans to escape her squalid existence as a prostitute by going to the United States. After Pier Luigi turns down Angela’s request for help, she meets Jerry again, who has recovered from his injuries. Noticing Jerry’s attraction to Angela and needing Jerry’s help to get some goods for the black market, Pier Luigi “brokers” their relationship. After an evening at the fairgrounds at Luna Park, Jerry takes Angela home where they meet Pier Luigi who tells Jerry that Angela is doomed to prostitution if someone does not take care of her. Wanting to help Angela, Jerry agrees to sell goods to Pier Luigi. However, as Jerry is about to sell goods, he changes his mind. After a fight with Pier Luigi’s men, the military police arrive and arrest Jerry. Angela asks Pier Luigi for help, but he refuses and then reveals that her brother was actually killed while working for him. Distraught, Angela attempts suicide by drowning but is rescued. Meanwhile, Jerry escapes prison and goes into hiding. After recovering from her near drowning, Angela becomes a prostitute. We see her entertaining one of Pier Luigi’s “business” partners, an Argentinean (Lando Muzio) with a strong hatred of blacks. With Marcella’s help, Angela meets the now fugitive Jerry. They want to get passage to the United States, but need one million lire. After Marcella’s departure for the United States and Angela’s unsuccessful attempts to secure the money, Angela tells Jerry about a 4 million lire delivery Pier Luigi will make to the Argentinean. The next night, Jerry robs Pier Luigi by gunpoint and takes the money. As Jerry finds Angela at a church, Pier Luigi’s men meet the couple and Angela sacrifices her life for Jerry. Jerry places Angela’s body in a truck and drives the vehicle over a cliff. The last scene shows the MPs arriving at the scene of the accident and we see Jerry and Angela’s hands intertwined, “sempre insieme” (“together, always”). Without Pity merges horror, fantasy, romance, and melodrama with the neorealist tradition of narrating current social issues.101 Francesco De Francheschi argues that Without Pity includes elements of French poetic realism, while Bondanella argues film noir influences can be seen in the Pier Luigi character, a reference to noir villains portrayed by Peter Lorre.102 As opposed to the humanism of Rossellini’s Paisan discussed in

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the reading of the Naples episode, De Francheschi argues that Without Pity portrays race and race relations in postwar Italy through a “naturalism” that “oscillates between a bloody penumbra of genres, borrowed from poetic realism and from literary and filmic noir, and a spiritualism that filters gender dynamics, purifying them of every erotic urge, and directing them towards a proposal of open and inclusive feelings, beyond all barriers of race.”103 The story of an interracial romance between an African American soldier and an Italian woman was controversial for its time, but as De Francheschi notes, this controversy was mitigated by the “innocence” of the relationship between Jerry and Angela. The film’s working title, Goodbye Otello, with its reference to William Shakespeare’s Othello (c. 1603), suggests the greater emphasis on the love affair aspect of the Jerry–Angela relationship in the original treatment.104 Although relevant connections could have been made between the history of black Africans in the northern Italian-city states and the African American presence in the Allied forces in northern Italy during World War II, rather than incorporate the violent eroticism that characterizes the relationship between Othello and Desdemona, Without Pity offers the more chaste relationship, in what De Francheschi argues was an attempt to greatly downplay the Jerry–Angela relationship as a love story.105 Overall, the relationship between Jerry and Angela, and the Italian women and African American men in the film are representative of the film’s neorealist impulse to document the social phenomenon of these mixed unions in postwar Italy.106 Without Pity is set in a port city that becomes a backdrop for the film’s recurrent themes of imprisonment and escape. In this sense, Without Pity could be read as an escape narrative, inspired by and drawing parallels to US slave narratives. As emphasized in the film’s opening credits, Without Pity’s soundtrack includes variations on “Negro spirituals”: black American vernacular music used as sound motifs for both the Italian and black American characters. The film’s depiction of flight, enacted mainly by Italian women and African American men—Angela’s journey from central to northern Italy, the women’s detention, the segregated prison, and Marcella’s departure for the United States—are used to comment upon the intersections between African American and Italian experience of migration and racism in the United States beginning at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. In the wave of Italian immigration to the United States that began in the middle to late nineteenth century, northern and southern Italians

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were rendered racially other (and thereby racially inferior) to the AngloProtestant, white US citizen. By the late nineteenth century, racial otherness was primarily projected upon southern Italians and Sicilians, who upon arrival in the United States were deemed nonwhite. During this period, many Italian immigrants, particularly southern Italian and Sicilian immigrants, migrated to the US south for work as agricultural laborers. Arriving in the United States, many southern Italians worked with and lived among African Americans in the south, destabilizing racial boundaries, which subjected them to harassment, disenfranchisement, and sometimes death by lynching. Continuities between the Italian and African American experience are presented in the character of Marcella, the young prostitute who befriends Angela. After fleeing the women’s detention, Marcella brings Angela to her “home,” a space she shares with a group from the Livorno underground, including Pier Luigi’s criminal accomplice, Giacomo. Preparing for bed, Angela asks about the black American GIs who helped the women escape. Angela is surprised when Marcella says that the soldiers are the women’s boyfriends. While Angela is apprehensive about the black soldiers, Marcella further states that the soldiers “are just like [Italians]” and that her own boyfriend is just “a little tanned.” Marcella’s statements suggest that her thinking does not conform to a racial hierarchy that would place white Italians above the black Americans. However, her comment that blacks are “a little tanned” suggests an anxiety regarding racial difference similar to that discussed in the skin-scrubbing episodes in Il Mulatto/Angelo. Placing Marcella’s comments in relation to Angela’s revelation of her infant’s death, suggests that issues of race and reproduction subtend this narrative about relations between white Italian women and black men. Marcella remains a cypher for questions surrounding racial identity throughout the film. Her African American fiancée offers her the opportunity to escape the Livorno underground and fulfill her dream of going to America. In Without Pity, her optimism rings poignant in light of her rose-colored view of “America.” This poignancy is intensified by her failure to fully acknowledge or comprehend race and racism in the US context. In postwar Italy, the black male provides her access to goods and an opportunity for a better life in another country. However, upon arrival in the United States, she will encounter another racial paradigm, in which association with black Americans will make her a target

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of racial discrimination. Jennifer Guglielmo writes of the Italian migrant experience in the United States: Virtually all Italian immigrants arrived in the United States without a consciousness about its color line. But they quickly learned that to be white meant having the ability to avoid many forms of violence and humiliation, and assured preferential access to citizenship, property, satisfying work, livable wages, decent housing, political power, social status, and a good education, among other privileges. “White” was both a category into which they were most often placed, and also a consciousness they both adopted and rejected.107 In departing for America, we wonder if Marcella’s prospects will improve, or if she will become a prostitute again. In terms of race, will Marcella become “white on arrival” in order to take advantage of white privilege in the United States, or will she remain in solidarity with African Americans and other nonwhite subjects? As Pasquale Verdicchio has written, emigration and immigration play a large part in how subjects are constructed in different national contexts. For instance, Verdicchio writes that in Canada, Italian immigrants and their descendants are viewed as an ethnic minority (nonwhite), while in the United States they are viewed as “white” (at least since the mid-twentieth century). Verdicchio further writes: “By being neither ‘black’ nor ‘white,’ but described as both by one or the other, the southern Italian experience is an anomaly that may unveil the foolishness and hypocrisy of racial exclusiveness.”108 Although Without Pity is set in northern Italy, Marcella’s process throughout the film corresponds to an Italian migrant experience that gives her a racial “in-betweenness” like that described here. The fluidity of Marcella’s racial identity, her potential to be either white or nonwhite in the United States, is suggested at the end of the scene in which Angela recuperates from her near-suicide. At this point, Marcella and her boyfriend have almost put together enough money to leave for America. For Marcella, “America” is a place to gain a new identity, and she states, “Who will know me there?” Marcella’s boyfriend offers an opportunity to begin anew, one that she feels Angela is not taking advantage of through her relationship with Jerry. Having set her sights on her future in the United States, Marcella walks over to a mirror and begins applying lipstick. As we view Marcella’s reflection in the mirror, on the lower left of screen, set upon the dresser, is a bust of what appears to be a smiling black or indigenous woman,

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decorated with flowers and pair of sunglasses. The two images—Marcella’s reflection and the bust—are a play on reality and fiction, bringing to the fore the relationship between Marcella’s dreams of “America” and the realities that she will face in her new country. The act of applying cosmetics in front of the mirror also allows the bust next to her to serve as a projection of Marcella’s “in-betweenness,” or her possibility, depending upon national context, to be read as both white and black (Figure 3.6). Toward the end of the film, prior to the tragic end of Jerry and Angela, Marcella boards the small boat that will take her on her journey to the United States. Of all the characters, she is the only one to escape Livorno alive. The highly sentimentalized scene shows Marcella running back to give Angela a final embrace, exclaiming that she will “never return.” Marcella’s departure is also in keeping with the themes of imprisonment and escape throughout the film. Unlike Il Mulatto/Angelo’s final exclusionary gesture at the Naples port that establishes a bounded white identity for Italian citizens, Without Pity suggests parallels between the African American and Italian experience of migration.

Figure 3.6 A bust of a “native” female marks Marcella’s racial “in-betweenness” (Senza pietà, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1948).

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Without Pity offers additional references to Italian migration and experience of institutional racism in the United States. As established earlier in the film, Pier Luigi needs Jerry to get contraband from the US military. After their night at Luna Park, Luigi convinces Jerry that in order to save Angela from prostitution, he must provide Luigi access to military supplies so that she can receive financial support. In the following scene, Joe drives a military supply truck to a remote location in a wooded area. As Luigi’s men prepare to move the supplies, we move to a close-up of Jerry surveying the area and his current situation. Jerry first looks off screen left, and in the next shot, we see three Italian men standing in the woods at a distance, also looking off screen left. We then return to a close-up shot of Jerry turning his head to look off screen right. Next, in a long shot, we see what appears to be a black male standing in front of a tree, who begins to walk toward the camera, then turns and walks off screen left. In the next shot, we see the man standing next to Joe and a brief dialog follows (Figure 3.7).

Figure 3.7 Racial performance as a means of questioning cinematic realism (Senza pietà, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1948).

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“Black” male: “Have a light?” (Jerry offers a lighter to the black male who then lights a cigarette) “Black” male: “Louisiana?” Jerry: “No, North Carolina.” As the camera lingers on the two men, the mysterious figure standing next to Joe could be read as a white male made up to appear as a black American or black African male. The black man walks off screen and does not appear in the film again. This brief shot sequence is enigmatic. The series of shots are confusing due to an incorrect match-on shot from the first close-up of Jerry to the long shot of the standing group of “white” Italians. Jerry’s expression throughout the scene is one of confusion or as though his eyes are deceiving him. The disorientating shot sequence brings into question the notion of cinematic realism. Whether deliberate or accidental on the part of the filmmakers, the sequence makes us aware that we are watching an artificial construction of linear time and space. In this way, the sequence challenges the belief in a transparent reality captured on film, considered one of the definitive characteristics of neorealist film. Second, by exposing the filmic construction of reality, Without Pity makes us take a second look at the presentation of racial subjects on screen, bringing into question the stability of whiteness and blackness. This is made explicit through the comparison of the “real” black male and the apparent white male in blackface performance. If black bodies are made to represent the “real” on screen, then positioning the black male next to the apparent white male in blackface challenges a racial essentialism that posits the black subject as signifier of reality. The blackface performance can also be understood through the reference made to Louisiana, which was the site of one of the most infamous cases of racial violence against Italian immigrants. In March 1891, in response to the killing of a police chief, 11 southern Italian immigrants were removed from a local jail, shot, and lynched.109 The incident remains the largest documented lynching in the United States. The brief appearance of the black male evokes this history of shared racial oppression. Read in light of Paisan and Il Mulatto/Angelo, Without Pity reveals the various ways in which the African American soldier was portrayed in Italian neorealist and postwar film. For my discussion, the black

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American GI becomes a means of articulating Italian racial and national identity formation in the postwar era by way of the United States. In Il Mulatto, the absence of the black American GI and the ejection of the mixed-race child are used to establish a bounded “white” racial identity for Italian citizens, both northern and southern, in the postwar Republic. In Without Pity, references to the Italian migrant experience of racism in the southern United States as well as relations between Italian women and African American men reveal the instability of racial categories, impacted by migration and placement in different national contexts. Although this reading of Without Pity does not reflect any politics or political affiliation on the part of the director, Lattuada’s film does respond to the realities of the African American presence in Italy at the end and in the immediate post–World War II era. Commenting on the representation of race relations in the film, Lattuada stated: Senza pietà [Without Pity] was not loved by the critics, as was Il mulino del Po [The Mill on the Po, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1949]. Even if now, the critics say: “But where is the Lattuada of Senza pietà, of Il mulino del Po?” [Without Pity] was a film ahead of the times, for its decisively anti-racist content matter: this white hand and black hand united. In America, it was not accepted; it was too forward-looking. Now the polemic on racism has become acceptable in recent years, but why?110 Lattuada goes on to say that “true racism never existed in Italy,” not toward blacks or Jews, at least before the war and the Aryan-Italian racial ideology circulated in La difesa della razza.111 Although Lattuada’s comments could be elaborated upon, particularly in light of Italian colonialism in Africa, it does indicate his awareness of the racial climate in which Without Pity was produced. Miracle at St. Anna returns to the neorealist portrayal of the African American soldier in Without Pity, Paisan, and other neorealist and postwar narrative films, contextualizing him in African diasporic political struggles of the first half of the twentieth century, revealing further connections between African American and Italian history. In the following section, I look at a contemporary articulation of mixed-race identity forged through the shared middle passages and oceanic crossings of the African and Italian diasporas.

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fuori/outside: Gender, Race, and the Italian/African American Experience Almost 50 years after Il Mulatto, Kym Ragusa’s fuori/outside (1997) raises questions of identity and belonging for mixed-race subjects of the African and Italian diasporas. Ragusa explores her Italian and African American heritage in both her 1997 documentary film and her 2006 memoir The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging. In both texts, Ragusa’s interrogation of identity is developed around the pivotal relationships with her African American maternal and Italian paternal grandmothers. The fraught emotional terrain of miscommunication, exclusion, and eventual acceptance experienced by Ragusa in both her African American and Italian families makes short shrift of the “solution” to mixed-race subjects offered in Il Mulatto. Dispatching the mixed-race child to the United States to locate and embrace an authentic black identity would inevitably lead to a return like the one that begins Ragusa’s memoir: “I stood on the deck of a ferry crossing the Strait of Messina, the narrow tongue of water that separates mainland Italy from Sicily.”112 As in Il Mulatto, the border is a symbol for inclusion and exclusion from the national community. But whereas “black” and “Italian” are irrevocably separated in Il Mulatto, Ragusa posits a broader and more reflexive field for identity construction by acknowledging the shared geography of Sicily and Africa, as well as the sea routes that once transported Africans as cargo along the transatlantic trade route. Ragusa invokes her matrilineage to connect her mixed heritage to this wider historical trajectory: “Sicily is the crossroads between Europe and Africa, the continent from which my maternal ancestors were stolen and brought to slavery in Maryland, West Virginia, and North Carolina.”113 These routes of exchange and racial mixture, veiled by modern nationstate borders, are further revealed during Ragusa’s first trip to Palermo, a city she describes as “the site of thousands of years of invasion and violation, accommodation and amalgamation.”114 Ragusa’s journey to Italy at the end of the twentieth century asserts a belonging and reclamation of both sides of her identity that becomes possible through the social, economic, and political transformations that have led to the offcited dissolution of the nation-state and the identities it seeks to contain. However, as Ragusa narrates, her journey of discovery must account for the intersection of race, nationality, class, and gender.

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As in Il Mulatto, the Madonna plays a prominent role in Ragusa’s narrative. However, rather than being placed at the service of a patriarchal authority that seeks divine sanction for the separation of the races, Ragusa’s memoir posits a Madonna who serves as the basis for the communion of women from diverse ethnic and national backgrounds. In her description of the Feast of the Madonna of Mount Carmel in East Harlem, Ragusa finds points of similarity between her maternal and paternal grandmothers in the annual ceremony. For instance, the procession of Italian women carrying candles shaped as ailing body parts upon their heads to the Madonna, brings to Ragusa’s mind African women who bear the weight of sustenance by carrying it on their heads.115 The Feast extends past the streets of East Harlem to incorporate the mothergoddess traditions from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. She writes: There are hundreds of people all around me, mostly women, Italian Americans, and Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Haitians, all moving together like an exhalation of breath. Skins of every color, the flashing gold of earrings and medallions with the Madonna’s image, the flickering of candles that we all hold as we walk slowly down Pleasant Avenue, and turn the corner to 115th Street . . . Everywhere there is singing, songs of devotion to La Santissima, La Virgen, voices filling the air in Spanish and Italian, French and Creole.116 The Madonna here is invoked as a source of women’s empowerment, and, in itself, perhaps only serves as the inverse of what is accomplished in Il Mulatto. However, in the context of her grandmothers’ stories that interweave race, class, and gender discrimination, which both tie together and separate the women and their larger communities, the image of a Madonna as “absolute sovereignty and limitless power”117 is a means of bringing together women who are separated by racism, patriarchy, and class. However, Ragusa’s narrative suggests that this intimacy and solidarity is transient, or at least no substitute for a feminist consciousness. For many years after her paternal grandmother, Gilda, learned that Ragusa was her granddaughter, Ragusa comments that a distance remained between the two because of her African heritage, exemplified by her grandmother’s fear of African Americans moving into their New Jersey suburban community. In an interview, Ragusa commented upon her grandmother’s and the larger Italian American community’s response to racial difference: “fear and isolation led to her own racism, and in a larger sense to

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some Italian Americans’ identification with whiteness and the dominant culture instead of a politicized otherness.”118 Ragusa’s fuori/outside (1997) deconstructs the processes of racial inclusion/exclusion and its work toward constructing racial and national identities that are central to Il Mulatto’s narrative. Moving between archival images of the Italian American community from the first half of the twentieth century, her own footage of the Bronx and New Jersey communities where she was raised, and conversations with her grandmother Gilda, Ragusa uses the window as a metaphor for the process of exclusion/inclusion that is undertaken by ethnic whites seeking to protect themselves from marginalization within the United States. Ragusa’s use of a mobile camera carries the viewer to disparate spaces and time periods, revealing the instability of identity and the failure of the mechanisms used to maintain racial boundaries, such as neighborhood borders and suburban relocation. Ragusa’s formal strategies are paralleled by the narrative focus on Gilda, particularly her inconsistent memory, which limits Ragusa’s ability to reconstruct her own family history and thereby arrive at a greater understanding of her position within her father’s family and the larger Italian American community. Finally, fuori/outside illustrates the failure of the procedures demonstrated in Il Mulatto/Angelo to secure racial homogeneity and allow it to serve as the basis for national belonging. In her films and writings, Ragusa, like Gerima and Lee, challenges apparently discrete and bounded racial and national categories, illustrating how Italy’s racialized north/south division and US racial hierarchies inform her movement between the African American and Italian American communities, even transporting her to Sicily to rediscover centuries of migrations, crossings, and cultural mergings between Italy and Africa. While Ragusa is informed by post-structural and feminist theories that allow her to posit an African Italian mixed-race subjectivity outside of the racial and ethnic binaries of black/white and African American/ Italian American, the deconstruction of the nation-state’s role in subsuming difference, whether racial, ethnic, or linguistic, is not always directed toward a radical rethinking of race and nation in Western modernity. In the case with Italy’s Northern League Party, calls for the recognition of ethnic and regional diversity are used to reassert oppressive hierarchies, including the racialized north/south divide, now joined to a xenophobic anti-immigration platform. If Ragusa argues that identity is never discrete or stable, the Northern League’s claim that national unification suppressed northern regional and ethnic diversity also acknowledges

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dissident identities and subjectivities that are subsumed by the Italian nation-state. Yet, while Ragusa calls for a movement away from patriarchy and bounded racial, ethnic, and national identities, the Northern League’s incorporation of nonwhite, non-Western European immigrants expands the criteria for national belonging in order to sustain capitalist expansion and exploitation in the post–Cold War global economy. The following chapter returns to the postwar economy, specifically Italy’s “economic boom” period of the early 1960s. I continue my interrogation of mixed-race identity through an examination of the construction of whiteness in the Italian cultural imaginary at the height of postwar economic recovery in the 1960s and just before the country undergoes a shift from an emigrant to immigrant nation in the middle to late 1970s. For this examination, I turn to Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso (1963) and Franco Brusati’s Pane e ciocolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1974), two films that use the southern Italian internal and transnational migrant to interrogate Italian racial and national identity formation during and after the “economic miracle.”

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Chapter 4

Transatlantic Crossings: Representing Hierarchies of Whiteness in the Cinema of the Economic Miracle

Reflecting upon her first journey from Sicily to northern Italy in 1975, author Edvige Giunta articulates the “in-betweenness” of southern Italian identity, of being “‘white,’ but not quite.” Arriving in Milan, Giunta describes being complimented on her perfect standard Italian and ability to hide all traces of her Sicilian accent, a compliment that evokes feelings of both pride and guilt. Giunta describes the experience as one of “passing”—in which she draws parallels to a process undertaken by black and other nonwhite Americans, who because of their light complexion, can pass for white, thereby allowing them to evade institutional racism and take part in the “privileges of whiteness.” As discussed in Chapter 3, beginning with their arrival in the middle to late nineteenth century, Italian immigrants in the United States, especially southern Italians and Sicilians, were considered an inferior race, a categorization inscribed upon them by existing racial hierarchies in Italy and carried over into their newly adopted country. Giunta’s narrative is notable in that it marks the existence of racial hierarchy in modern Italy, one established during Italy’s post-unification north/south division and continuing into the postwar period after Italy had established itself as part of the First World economic and geopolitical bloc. Recalling her arrival in Milan and the feeling of “passing,” Giunta writes: This cultural confrontation triggers my first serious reflection on the significance of race and racism. I feel like a trespasser, an outsider who has found a way to be on the inside: I am at once betrayed and betrayer. If I regard myself as Sicilian, I also regard myself as Italian. And these people, who discriminate against my own, are my people, too. Even though I may not be able to articulate it to myself or others,

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I become acutely aware that passing is a strategy of survival adopted to escape damning racial identification, but one adopted at a certain cost in terms of one’s sense of cultural and personal integrity. I may speak Italian, but there is something inauthentic about my Italian identity: I have adopted and adapted, but remain an outsider. Race, I begin to understand . . . is a slippery concept, part of a story made up by those in charge of language.1 Giunta’s reflections on race and national belonging arise from her experience of migration, physical and psychic movements that are thematically explored in two films produced during and after Italy’s economic boom period: Mafioso (1962) and Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1974). In previous chapters, I argued that cinematic representations of African Italian mixed-race subjects register shifts in the conceptualization of Italian racial and national identity, from the mixed-race Maciste who projects and reconciles (albeit temporarily) Italy’s internal racial heterogeneity (particularly the racialized Italian south and Sicily) to its African colonies in the late Liberal period, to the ejection of the mixed-race Mailù to secure a white Italian-Aryan identity during the fascist era, and the acceptance but ultimate rejection of the mixed-race Angelo from the national body in the post–World War II era. In each instance, the attempt to construct and stabilize a white racial identity for the Italian national subject remains tenuous or altogether elusive, revealing the instability of race and racial categorization. Departing from Giunta’s narrative, in this chapter I examine the representation of the Italian southern as a mixed-race subject, in the sense of being what scholars have noted as the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian identity. The discourses of race and national belonging in both Mafioso and Bread and Chocolate demonstrate the persistence of the racialized north/ south divide into the economic boom period and beyond. Due to internal and external migration, the protagonists of Mafioso and Bread and Chocolate must continuously negotiate hierarchies of whiteness in their home and host countries. As will be discussed in the final chapter, this process continues even into the present moment of neoliberal global capitalism, a period when Italians are for the most part racially defined as white. However, the two films, moving from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, demonstrate processes of Italian racial and national identity formation that will have ramifications for cultural constructions of relations between Italian nationals, African migrants, and other nonwhite,

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non-Western European subjects who began immigrating to Italy in larger numbers by the late 1970s and early 1980s. That southern and eastern Europeans have been constructed as nonwhite, both within Western Europe and in the United States, is not a new assertion.2 In the United States, discourses surrounding immigration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including eugenics and social Darwinism, constructed Italians (both northern and southern, but by the end of the nineteenth century, mainly southern), Irish, Jewish, Polish, and Swedish immigrants as racially inferior and less desirable migrants than northern Europeans, and as in need of reform and generational breeding to remove their undesirable traits. To be white connotes, as Richard Dyer argues in his seminal book on the concept of whiteness, a series of moral, mental, and physical attributes, including purity, goodness, enterprise, beauty, and intelligence.3 As shown in Giunta’s narrative, whiteness in the Italian context is constructed through mastery of standardized Italian, and “proper” behavior and comportment, different from what is expected from southerners and Sicilians. Through processes of migration and assimilation, the Italian southerner could be reformed or raised to the status of white, a tenuous and difficult process that demonstrates the instability of racial categories, and particularly the difference between categories of color and race. Discussing the reception and representation of Italian and other nonnorthern European immigrants in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century, Giorgio Bertellini writes: On the one hand, it is crucial to stress that European immigrants did not experience forms of racial discrimination and exclusion comparable with the violent and unbending exclusion endured by Latinos and by Native, Asian, and African-Americans . . . On the other hand, it is also important to avoid reifying the distinction between color and race. The risks that we may overlook both the historicity of race’s physical and biological ascriptions—which included skull shape, physiognomic traits, and hair type, as well as color—and the different roles that such ascriptions played in allowing or denying narratives of adaptation.4 Thus, although white, Italian immigrants were subject to racial discrimination, positioned within a hierarchy of whiteness that constructed them as lower than other Western European subjects, and, as deployed in

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post-unification Italy, positioned southern Italians as racially inferior to northerners. Joseph Pugliese writes: The deployment of the loaded signifier “Africa,” as the lens through which the South was rendered intelligible for Northerners, marks how the question of Italy was, from the very moment of unification, already racialised by a geopolitical fault line that split the peninsula and its islands along a black/white axis. From the beginning, then, the socalled questione meridionale (Southern Question) encoded a set of racialised presuppositions in which the whiteness of the North operated as an a priori, in contradistinction to the problematic racialised status of the South, with its dubious African and Oriental histories and cultures.5 Pugliese argues that this deployment of hierarchies of whiteness in the Italian context has been “constitutive in the formation of hegemonic Italian identity, politics and culture,” from its colonial and postcolonial eras to present-day debates concerning immigration and the extracomunitari.6 In my reading of Mafioso and Bread and Chocolate, I examine how the two films deconstruct a “hegemonic Italian identity” by placing the southern Italian citizen, already racially conscribed by the north/south division, in different national contexts (the United States, Switzerland). The humor and tragedy in both these commedia all’italiana films comes from the protagonists’ desire to overcome racial stereotypes of the Italian southerner without denying their cultural roots, akin to the experience of passing that Giunta describes in the passage quoted above. I argue that the cinematic representation of southern Italian racial and national identity as both white and nonwhite appears at a moment in the Italian postwar period when an Italian white identity (for both northerners and southerners) is becoming fairly secure as the country becomes a major Western European economic and political power. What films such as Mafioso and Bread and Chocolate reveal is that the massive societal shifts brought about by the “economic boom” and dramatized in the commedia all’italiana, including changes in marriage, women’s emancipation, religion, and sexuality, are underscored by considerations of race and racial hierarchy within postwar Italy. Mafioso narrates the story of Antonio “Nino” Badalamenti (Alberto Sordi), an engineer at a Fiat plant in Milan. Nino is about to leave for vacation, taking his Milanese wife Marta (Norma Bengell) and two young

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daughters on their first visit to his hometown of Càlamo, Sicily, to meet his parents and extended family. Just as he is about to leave, Nino is summoned to the offices of the factory manager, who asks Nino to take a “gift” to Don Vincenzo, Càlamo’s padrone, from friends in the United States. Honored by the request, Nino takes the package without question and sets off with his family on their journey to Sicily. The “gift,” a jewel-encrusted heart with the names of “friends” from the United States, is actually a message that marks one of the New Jersey bosses, Pescalise di Càlamo, as the target of a mafia hit. Don Vincenzo, knowing Nino’s skill as a marksman, commits Nino to carrying out the mafia hit. Upon arrival in New York City, Nino meets the US associates and comes to understand the gravity of his situation. Nino is dropped off near a barbershop where he finds his target and executes the hit. Nino is quickly dispatched back to Sicily, and eventually returns to Milan and his job at Fiat, where compliments about his honesty and efficiency ring painfully ironic in light of his recent act of murder. Released in the same year as Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and 2 years after Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, Lattuada’s Mafioso shares with its art film counterparts a concern with the impact of the internal migration of Italy’s southern populations in the postwar period. As discussed in Chapter 3, Lattuada’s work during the Italian neorealist period included Senza pietà (Without Pity, 1947), notable for its portrayal of race relations between Italians and African Americans during the immediate postwar period, a theme that I will return to later in my discussion of Mafioso. Marco Ferreri (The Ape Woman) and Rafael Azcona initially developed the screenplay for Mafioso, which was later reworked by, Agenore Incroci and Furio Scarpelli (Age and Scarpelli), the screenwriting team responsible for penning some of the best-known films of the commedia all’italiana genre.7 Beginning in the late 1950s, supported by US financial aid in the form of the Marshall Plan, economic reforms that stimulated Italian industrial production (particularly its automobile and petrochemical industries), along with the lowering of tariffs, state regulation and other protectionist measures, and new markets opened through the creation of the European Economic Community, transformed Italy from an impoverished postwar nation to a Western European economic power.8 Italians enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity, particularly the rural peasantry who through migration to northern and central Italy had access to consistent work, higher wages, and improved housing conditions. The higher per capita income of Italian households led to a rise in consumerism, with Italians buying cars, televisions, electrical appliances,

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and mass-produced foods. Along with economic prosperity and a new consumer society, Italy experienced massive cultural and social shifts. Along with the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), which allowed mass to be conducted in languages other than Latin, church attendance decreased in the country, from 69 percent in the mid-1950s to slightly over 30 percent by the end of the 1970s.9 While the Catholic Church retained a prominent position within Italian society, the boom period brought changing perceptions and greater acceptance of premarital sex, women’s emancipation, divorce, birth control, and abortion.10 The commedia all’italiana films not only satirized Italy’s new consumer society but also exposed the underside of the “economic miracle,” exploring the excesses and detrimental effects of Italy’s rapid economic development.11 Italy’s economic boom period saw not only a rise in industrialization and consumerism but new patterns of internal migration, as Italians from the peninsular south began moving to northern industrial centers for employment opportunities.12 It was during this period of internal migration, as opposed to the great overseas emigration between 1890 and 1915, that southerners comprised the largest group of Italian migrants.13 The internal migrations were partially stimulated by the enormous economic growth of the country’s northern regions, which outpaced economic development in the south. Southerners not only migrated to the northern industrial centers, but also moved to other European countries such as Germany and Switzerland, and overseas in search of employment. Although taking part in the postwar economic recovery, southern Italian migrants in north Italy were subject to stereotyping and racial discrimination. As Palumbo and Dawson write: When industrialized cities of northern Italy went through an economic upswing during the late 1950s and 1960s, national attention focused on the question of how to deal with the supposedly pathological characteristics of the Mezzogiorno and of the southern migrants who were being drawn north by the boom. Economic refugees arriving in industrialized cities of the North, such as Turin and Milan, experienced severe forms of social and economic discrimination. Such prejudice was generated in many cases by the continuing circulation of racial stereotypes concerning the “barbarous” denizen of the Mezzogiorno.14 Southern Italians and Sicilians migrating north for employment were called derogatory names such as terrone, a word that derives from the

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Italian word for earth (terra) but was used to label southerners as debased, primitive, and inferior.15 In her study of responses to southern migration to north Italy during the 1950s and 1960s, Enrica Capussotti argues that anti-southerner sentiment during this period was informed by the same southern question discourses that had emerged in the early unification period.16 Southerners were still constructed as the nation’s internal “other” and characterized as an uneducated, economic burden on northern regions, although southerners who proved themselves hardworking and industrious, like Mafioso’s Nino, could be tolerated and assimilated into the north. Capussotti writes: Rights of citizenship depended not only on territorial belongings but on class as well; and class alliance with northerners was also one of the strategies employed by southerners who wanted to differentiate between the civilized meridionali—economically well-off and educated—and their poor and ignorant counterparts.17 These persistent stereotypes of the Italian south and southerners serve as both the comedic and dramatic bases of Mafioso. However, Mafioso is particular in that it demonstrates how racial hierarchies in both Italy and the United States circumscribe the Italian southerner, bringing into question the belief that economic prosperity and southern “reform” will bring an end to the racialized north/south divide and lead to full national unification. With its transmigrant protagonist who travels both within Italy and between Italy and the United States, Mafioso stages the encounter between the “reformed” southern Italian and the Italian American, brought about not by a desire to foster cultural ties among members of the Italian diaspora, but by the rise of multinational capitalism that impacts the relations between the Sicilian mafia and their US counterparts. Mafioso’s dramatization of the lingering impact of the north/south division within the country is given heightened effect through Sordi’s tragicomic performance of Nino’s affable denial of the ongoing strife between the two regions. Nino’s attitude reflects a changing Italy, and the belief that with industrial development the south will overcome its “difference” from the north. The stereotypes of northern and southern Italy are presented to comic effect in a brief scene early in the film during which Nino speaks to his father-in-law on the phone prior to the family’s departure for Sicily. Nino explains that a typhus vaccine is not required for their journey and they are not going to “Mau Mau Land.”

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His father-in-law equates Sicily with Africa and the negative connotations of primitiveness and disease abound. The emphasis on the modernity of the north is revealed in the presentation of Nino’s home in Milan. It is a contemporary flat crammed with every modern convenience possible, including garbage disposal, telephone, and electric kitchen appliances. To further emphasize stereotypes of the Italian north, Nino is shown preparing for the journey using an electric shaver and an electric shoe shiner, all the while timing their trip down to the last minute. Time efficiency becomes an important marker of the difference between the north and south. Mafioso begins (and ends) with various images of the Fiat factory floor, steel frames moving with precision along the assembly line and hydraulic equipment operated by workers in silent repetition, serving to create an impression of northern Italian industrialization at the height of Italy’s post–World War II “economic miracle.” Nino moves through the plant, stopwatch in hand, regulating the workers who are to be kept in pace with their machine counterparts. As the film illustrates later through Nino’s forced “migration” from Sicily to the United States, he along with the plant workers are part of the larger structure of postwar global capitalism in which Italy now finds itself a part. The plot takes place when Nino is on vacation, or rather when he is supposedly not “on the clock” or subject to the time of the factory machines. Throughout the film, Nino is most vulnerable when he loses control of “time” or when others are in control of his time of action, as when he is made to work during his vacation by the mafia after the geographic and temporal displacement of his movement from Sicily to the United States. The relation to the United States is raised by the appearance of Mr Zanchi, a director at Nino’s Fiat plant. The scene between Nino and Zanchi is a careful balance of familiarity and formality. The dialogue is set in Zanchi’s office, where the two speak across Zanchi’s imposing desk. Although the two men are seated at the same level, Zanchi is also shown with the microphone used to make announcements heard throughout the plant. His automated door and microphone are signifiers of Zanchi’s power and ability to control others with technology. Zanchi compliments Nino on his exceptional work record, claiming it proves that “the Sicilian technician now equals his counterpart in Turin or Milan. Even the Germans.”18 Zanchi’s language suggests a kind of paternalism toward Nino, similar to that used toward racial minorities in the United States who are a “credit to their race.” Zanchi’s movement from

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northern Italian to German workers reveals an adherence to a racial hierarchy that posits northern Europe as superior to southern Europe, a disturbing reference when considered in the light of World War II. In this brief scene, the blending of familial and professional ties is closely linked to the question of diaspora and connections between Italians and Italian Americans that are now further complicated by postwar global capitalism. Migration, along with the maintenance of regional allegiance, can be read as a rejection of the Italian unification process and the homogeneous Italian identity it sought to produce. The logic of postwar global capitalism also challenges the nation-state formation, and Mafioso continually exploits the parallels between the multinational Fiat and the Sicilian mafia, both of which operate without regard to the boundaries of the nation-state. Mafioso conveys the optimism of early 1960s Italy through Nino’s journey from Milan to Càlamo. Making their way to Sicily with the precision granted by Italy’s modern railway system, the family takes the final leg of the trip to Sicily via ferry. As the ferry begins to enter Messina’s port, Marta laments: “I was just watching Italy fade away.”19 Just as he refuses to recognize the split within himself between his birth home and his current north Italy location, Nino also romanticizes Sicily, overlooking the long history of the island’s ambivalent relation to the peninsula that prompts Marta’s comments. Nino celebrates the power of technology and modernization by directing Marta’s attention to two power lines: one off the coast of Italy, the other in Sicily, which connects the peninsula to the island. Nino’s remark, “Tomorrow, the bridge,” makes clear his belief that Italy’s industrialization and economic prosperity will allow for the development of the Italian south and Sicily, completing the unification process begun in the nineteenth century. The images of industrialization continue as Nino and his family travel to Càlamo. As they drive on modern highways, we see images of telephone lines stretching across the countryside. In these images, Mafioso highlights the country’s transition to a modern industrial society. Old and new cultures clash as the family car arrives in the town and are greeted on an adjacent street by a Sicilian carriage. The carriage becomes another opportunity for Nino to displace his anxiety concerning Sicily’s “primitivism” by adopting a tourist mode. As the camera pans across the carriage, Nino tells his family about the carriage workmanship, then relates the story of the Christian crusaders Rinaldo and Orlando’s battles against the Muslim Moors. As tour guide, Nino’s explanation raises Sicily’s history of invasion and conquest at a safe distance. Yet, Sicily’s “difference”

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emerges as they make their way through the town. Forced to stop by one of the Sicilian carriages, Marta sees a wake, with the body of the deceased surrounded by family members. Here, Lattuada makes use of wide-angle framing to emphasize Marta’s disorientation, creating the sensation of the grotesque and macabre. When Nino learns that the man died because of mafia-related violence, he quickly moves his family, not wanting to disrupt the picturesque view of Sicily he attempts to construct. In Mafioso, as in many Italian-style comedy films, gender comes to play a significant role in conveying the dynamics of the north/south divide in early 1960s Italy. Nino’s wife Marta represents a modern, northern Italian femininity. With her blonde hair and contemporary outfits, Nino’s family receives Marta as a nontraditional woman. While Marta is the object of hostile looks from the other women in the Baladamenti household, she is desired by the young, itinerant men of Càlamo for whom Marta signifies “northernness,” economic prosperity, and social mobility. Dressed in white throughout the film, Mafioso also associates Marta with whiteness and a racial hierarchy that associates the Italian and European north with economic and social advancement. The Baladamenti women, dressed in traditional black dresses and headscarfs, frown upon Marta’s “modern” dress and comportment. When Marta attempts to refashion Nino’s younger sister, Rosalia, into a modern woman with a gift of a short-sleeved shirt, the clothing item is considered too revealing by the older women. Rosalia suffers from minor hirsutism and has a moustache and overgrown eyebrows that give her a slightly masculine appearance; this is a source of embarrassment and an obstacle to her marriage to her unemployed fiancé. As argued in Chapter 2’s discussion of The Ape Woman (1964), released 2 years after Mafioso and directed by one of Mafioso’s assistant screenwriters, Marco Ferreri,20 Rosalia’s hairiness can be read as a sign of racial difference. But Rosalia’s hairiness and her assumed backwardness can be “cured” through the advantages of modernization: Her hirsutism is taken as bad luck until Marta introduces the benefits of northern consumer culture by buying hair-waxing products for Rosalia. As layers of excess hair are removed from Rosalia’s face and body, her more feminine appearance garners compliments, with Nino saying her skin is, “so white, smooth as porcelain.”21 Rosalia’s hair removal increases her chances of getting married and bringing possible financial gain to the family. This scene humorously interrogates the belief that adapting modern technologies and industrialization, southern Italians can overcome traditional stereotypes of southern “backwardness” just as easily as Rosalia sheds her hair

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(here read as racial difference) with a simple waxing kit. The resolution of Rosalia’s hairiness also suggests that by the early 1960s, whiteness is recognized as a valuable commodity, something that can be purchased (in this case waxing can be seen as a form of skin whitening) and can increase one’s social and economic opportunities. Identities become even more unstable as Nino becomes unknowingly entrapped in Don Vittorio’s plan. Time is once again brought to the fore as Don Vittorio calls Nino, who during his vacation has abandoned his stopwatch, back to “work.” When Nino is deceived into going on a supposed hunting trip, he meets Don Vittorio in a car just before being sent on his journey overseas. As Vittorio asks for Nino’s fealty, with overtones of the primal mother–child relationship, Nino’s symbolic regress is connected to a shift in temporality, both of which will be staged in his journey to the United States. When Nino asks where he is being sent, Vittorio responds: “You’ll know when you get back.” Later when he gets on the lorry that will take him to the plane hanger, Nino asks the driver about the length of his journey, to which he responds the trip will be “long and short.” The confusion of time and space will remain until Nino returns to Milan. As Nino is cargo-shipped to the United States, the viewer is given Nino’s point of view as he sits in the dark hearing sounds of an engine and seeing brief flashes of light piercing the crate’s wooden boards. When Nino’s crate-womb is opened, he emerges wobbling and halfblind. Nino’s regression to the “womb” suggests a rebirth in the United States. Certainly, the immigrant experience can be described as a new beginning; however, the US sequence can be read as an interrogation of Italian racial and national identity by means of transnational migration. As outsourced labor for a mafia hit to take place in the United States (the film’s original title was Voyage to America), Nino becomes the object of a violent displacement on two levels: in the necessary repression of his southern culture in his transition to the north and in his forced participation in the transcontinental criminal syndicate under the pretense of tradition and familial obligation. Although the men who transport Nino in the United States speak Italian, they do not establish any rapport with Nino, who remains a foreigner. The only American who offers any greeting is the New Jersey don. Upon meeting Nino for the first time, the don gives Nino a lingering kiss on the lips, an impropriety which leaves Nino stunned. If the relationship between Nino and Vittorio is one of mother and child, the one with the New Jersey don moves to that of incest. Whether the don is attempting

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to intimidate Nino or has in fact misinterpreted and stereotyped Sicilian culture, the kiss signifies an estrangement between Italians and Italian Americans, emphasized by the don’s assumption of automatic, natural affinity that Nino does not share. This estrangement continues as Nino is shown an amateur home film of the intended target. The home footage provides very little information as to how or why Pescalise has “dug his own grave.” Nino is only told to observe Pescalise in order to identify the correct target. This inability to fully comprehend the reasons for the hit is related to Nino’s inability to construct a narrative to comprehend the Italian Americans he encounters in the United States. Unaware of his true purpose in the United States and not knowing the people he sees in the film, Nino begins to ask questions about the women and children he sees on screen, attempting to construct a family unit out of the unidentified people as a means of connecting to Italians in America. At no time during the screening is Nino given the names of the people filmed or the exact reason he is being sent to kill a man he’s never met. Nino is once again placed in a situation where he cannot distinguish between leisure time and work time. Nino’s full estrangement from himself and his “countrymen” in Italy and abroad is made apparent when he is sent to assassinate Pescalise. Nino comprehends the gravity of his and his family’s situation after he is given a gun and told that he must kill Pescalise. In another instance of impropriety, the New Jersey don grabs Nino’s knee, stating that “our Sicily [is] shaped like a heart,” that “we are one big, heart,” and then offers another inappropriate embrace. The don implies that there is some collective Sicilian identity that connects the island with its diaspora in the United States. Mafioso makes evident the hypocrisy of the don’s supposed filial connection to Nino and the exploitation that underscores the don’s words and actions. However, Mafioso opens several questions around the issue of diaspora, global capitalism, and, as will be discussed, racial identity. After receiving an explanation of the escape route, Nino is dropped off across the street from the barbershop where his intended victim awaits him. With a gun concealed in his pocket, he begins to walk toward the barbershop but stops suddenly in front of a bar when the barkeeper throws an inebriated African American man out of the bar directly in his path. Because Nino does not speak English, he remains silent as the man becomes increasingly frustrated with what he interprets as Nino’s refusal to acknowledge him. The African American raises the question of rights, in this instance the “right” to use a public toilet. The African American

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states: “No one has the right to tell me how long I can stay in a toilet . . . otherwise what would become of American democracy? Why don’t you answer me?” Nino becomes confused, stares at the man, and only responds “Yes.” Time becomes central once again as the unexpected delay causes Nino to nervously look at his watch. The African American stops him again and states: “Your silence sir, affronts me. Perhaps you think you’re better than me? Are you by any chance a dirty radical?” The black man shakes Nino’s hand, but Nino pushes him away and continues on to his destination (Figure 4.1). This encounter between the Sicilian “immigrant” and the black American, implicitly draws connections between southern Italian immigration to the United States from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and southern immigration to northern Italian urban centers in the late 1950s and early 1960s.22 The African American man’s behavior, his lack of discretion, his public drunkenness brings to the fore parallels between the southern Italian and African American experiences of racism and economic exploitation. It is through his encounter with the African American that Nino is for the first time in the film pulled out of time and taken off schedule. Nino is also unable to speak with the African American man, making him powerless to address the man’s questions

Figure 4.1 Encounter between the Sicilian “immigrant” and the black American (Mafioso, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1963). Courtesy of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia—Cineteca Nazionale, Rome, Italy.

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or demands, communicate his own, or even forge solidarity. Having believed that his white identity was secure, Nino, because of his lack of language, disorientation, even estrangement from the Italian American community, is now in the position of being “fresh off the boat,” as his family had joked upon his triumphal return to Sicily, bringing hopes for an improved Sicily and the completion of Italian unification. The scene described above also returns to the representation and symbolic function of the African American GI in Italian neorealist and postwar narrative films. As discussed in Chapter 3, a reoccurring stereotype associated with the character is inebriation, often accompanied by muteness or an inability to communicate in Italian. For instance, drunkenness and language deficiency characterize the relationship between Joe, a US Army MP, and the orphaned Pasquale in the Naples episode of Paisan. The language impasse between the two becomes evident in one scene as Joe laments about his life in the American south while the young boy sits with a perplexed look, unable to comprehend Joe’s language and complaints. The cinematic representation of the African American subject during this stage of the postwar economic recovery relates to how the black American’s position within the United States is once again used as a model for the incorporation of the southern Italian within the nationstate. In Chapter 3’s reading of Paisan’s Naples episode, I argued that Joe’s identification with the Neapolitans is achieved only after Joe sublimates his anger toward the racist aggression he has suffered in the United States. In Paisan, the black male’s acceptance then forced disavowal of his racial difference becomes illustrative of the manner in which the Italian southerner’s claim to regional and cultural difference are acknowledged, mainly as commodities for the Italian tourism and film industries, but then subsumed within a supposedly unified Italian nation-state. The ramifications of this process are dramatized in Mafioso. Removed from both his native home in Sicily and his life in Milan, Nino is not only a foreigner in the United States and unable to communicate in English, much like his countrymen before him, but in the era of postwar global capitalism, he constitutes a new type of subject: “global” but apparently from nowhere. Unlike the Sicilians in the late nineteenth and turn-of-the twentieth centuries, Nino did not immigrate, but instead was shipped as cargo by an international criminal syndicate. Nino’s exploitation by the mafia and his betrayal by “mother” Vincenzo dislodges him from his “home,” the town that anchors his identity and serves as his reference

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point as he migrates and settles in north Italy. Nino’s confrontation with the African American accentuates his identity crisis as he is forced to see himself in the black male, who serves as a reminder of the failure of “liberation” and the still incomplete unification process. Having no language by which to express his spatial and psychic displacement, Nino kills his “countryman,” who is as unfamiliar to Nino as Nino is to himself. Nino’s alienation from himself and his countrymen abroad is emphasized by the use of the mirror image in the execution scene. When he enters the barbershop, three barbers attending to their clients greet Nino. Like the African American, the barbers assume Nino speaks English and ask him to be seated. For the moment, Nino is lost, unable to communicate and identify his target because the faces of all three clients are covered with towels. Nino identifies Pescalise through his cigar and ring, two items he noticed from the home films. When the barber furthest from the door finally acknowledges Nino, we see Nino’s small mirror reflection in the far left corner. The barber turns Pescalise toward Nino and tells his coworkers and clients to duck for cover. While Pescalise fumbles for his gun, Nino shoots and mortally wounds him. With his last shot, Nino shoots the mirror directly behind Pescalise, an odd move considering Nino’s expert shooting skills. The misfire can be interpreted as a sign of heightened anxiety due to the circumstances. However, considering the question of identity and lack of access to language as a means of constructing a self, Nino’s shot into the mirror, one in which we never see his reflection, underscores Nino’s alienation from himself and from the Italian diaspora due to his exploitation by both the multinational Fiat and the Sicilian mafia within a system of global capitalism. Nino is freight-shipped back to Càlamo, repeating the crate-womb journey that brought him to the United States; Nino is then forced to maintain the pretense of having gone on a hunting trip, regardless of the fact that many in the town know the true reason of Nino’s excursion. As he lies in his parents’ bed, the camera pans across to Nino’s blonde wife and daughters. Turning around and covering his ears, Nino hears gunshots. The memory of his act is represented as trauma. The final scenes of the film return us to the Fiat plant. When Nino dutifully returns a pen to his coworker, he is complemented for his diligence, remarking that “it would be a better world” with more people like Nino. An unlikely mafia hit man, Nino can no longer define himself as “civilized” and an example of Sicilian and southern Italian “uplift.” Nino’s Italian identity is based on the idea that Sicily seamlessly merged into the mainland peninsula in

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the postwar period. Mafioso suggests that even at this late moment, Sicily both is and is not Italy. In restaging the neorealist encounter between African American and southern Italian subject, Mafioso reveals the failures of the neorealist project and represents the conditions under which national “unification” will take place in the neocapitalist era beginning in the late 1960s.

Pane e cioccolata: Whiteness in the Italian Cultural Imaginary of the 1970s Although 12 years separates Lattuada’s Mafioso from Franco Brusati’s Bread and Chocolate (1974), a period that not only saw the end of the economic boom period, but a radically transformed social and political climate, we find a similar representation of southern Italian identity as “mixed” or split between white and nonwhite identities. The film’s main protagonist, Nino Garofalo (Nino Manfredi), is a southern Italian immigrant working in Switzerland on a temporary guest permit. Although there was an Italian migrant presence in Switzerland since the late nineteenth century, the postwar economic recovery period saw a rise in Italian migration to Switzerland, comprised mostly of men seeking temporary employment.23 The film is divided into three parts structured around Nino’s three deportations, all of which he resists by disembarking from his train and refusing to return to southern Italy. After 3 years of working at various labor jobs, Nino has an opportunity to gain a prized residency permit and a stable job as a waiter that will allow him to bring his family to Switzerland. However, after being caught urinating in public, Nino loses his temporary permit and is scheduled for deportation. Upon seeing his fellow countrymen displaying southern Italian stereotypes, Nino decides to remain in Switzerland illegally rather than return home. As Nino meets people of the Italian immigrant community in Switzerland, from a suicidal industrialist to a family of manual laborers who live in a chicken coop, Bread and Chocolate conveys the discrimination experienced by Italian migrants in their adopted country as well as their nostalgia for their “homeland,” a sentimentality that both attracts and repulses Nino. His only respite from the ups and downs of being a clandestine is a political exile from Greece, Elena (Anna Karina), who eventually marries a Swiss immigration officer in order to gain legal residency for her young son Grigory. After repeatedly failing to gain employment and becoming estranged from the Italian immigrant community,

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Nino makes a final attempt to remain in Switzerland by bleaching his hair and passing as a white northern European. However, Nino’s façade is broken when he is overcome by a wave of patriotic fervor while watching an Italian–Swiss football match. As Nino is about to be deported, Elena arrives with a temporary residency permit that will allow him to remain in Switzerland for another 6 months. At first, Nino decides to return to Italy, but forced to listen to songs about the “sun” and “sea,” Nino gets off the train. Without a country, somewhere between Switzerland and Italy, Bread and Chocolate ends with Nino walking toward an unknown destination. Bread and Chocolate is particularly effective at illustrating the psychological impact of racial hierarchies and the desire to occupy a white racial category on the part of Italian immigrants who were seen as racially inferior. In Bread, Switzerland is constructed as a country of hyper-whiteness. In the first scene of the film, we are introduced to a dark-haired, “swarthy” Nino as he spends a day in the park surrounded by blonde, blueeyed Swiss people. Here, whiteness, as Nino states later in the scene, is associated with Western “civilization” and high culture. A violin quartet plays Mozart as park visitors ride horseback, prepare elaborate picnics, and row small boats upon a shimmering lake with white swans. Nino wishes to assimilate and take part in the cultural refinement that he associates with being northern European, but his difference is made evident through his colorful suit and dark features. The bread and chocolate roll he chews loudly to the consternation of the other park guests symbolizes Nino’s dilemma. Dark inside, white on the exterior, Nino is a transnational migrant who returns us once again to the concept of racial “inbetweenness,” of occupying different racial categories depending upon national context. Nino tries to blend into Swiss society and makes excuses for their prejudiced behavior toward Italians, perhaps due to his experience of racial hierarchy in Italy. However, the veneer of a pristine and civilized society is challenged within the film, particularly through its cynical representation of the police state and the precarious existence of both legal immigrants and clandestines. Bread exposes the perverse underbelly of this apparently civilized society when, toward the end of the film’s first scene, Nino finds the body of a murdered girl. In the context of the opening scene’s “hyper-whiteness,” child murder becomes black comedy as Nino is torn between reporting the murder to the authorities or escaping lest he, as a foreigner, be accused and convicted of the crime. The scene plays with the viewer’s knowledge of the criminal, non-Western,

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European, male migrant stereotype that even today is still used to support anti-immigration polices. Related to this stereotype is the foreigner who desires and poses the threat of rape to the white European female body, an oft-used metaphor for the loss of Western civilization due to foreign invasion. Fearing arrest for a crime he did not commit, Nino walks away from the body, unknowingly passing the actual murderer who is revealed to be a Swiss priest. Racial hierarchy becomes more evident in the space of the restaurant where Nino competes for a permanent position. The restaurant, where foreign guest workers from Turkey, Spain, and Italy service a predominately Swiss clientele, becomes a microcosm of the larger society. Nino’s main competitor is a worker from Turkey with whom he fights to gain the one available permanent job at the restaurant. Bread’s humor comes from Nino’s passive–aggressive attacks on the Turk as he attempts to disqualify him from the position. After a particularly difficult day, Nino takes a break on the restaurant’s outdoor patio with Gianni, his young Italian assistant server, and the “Turk.” Only Nino and Gianni speak to each other, the “Turk” being unable to communicate in Italian. Gianni asks Nino why the Swiss dislike Italians, and he responds that there are too many, an “invasion” of foreign guest workers that make the Swiss uncomfortable. While he does not speak explicitly of racial hierarchy, it is evident in his self-deprecating remarks and in his earlier admonishment of Gianni’s and other guest workers’ behavior such as lateness and stealing food. However Nino, comparing the southern migrant experience in northern Italy to northern Europe, comments: “Go see how they treat southern Italians in Milan!” The suggestion that Italian southerners experience a more severe form of discrimination and prejudice in their own country points to a recurring idea throughout Bread: internalized racism, or the ways in which southern Italians adapt, negotiate, and contest racial hierarchy and whiteness. In Bread, Nino’s comments regarding the Milanese speak to an othering mechanism by which the northern Italians can construct a racial identity separate from southerners, a mechanism that has also been used to justify internal colonialism and economic exploitation. Since northern Italian immigrant laborers would mostly likely be discriminated against in Switzerland as well, Bread illustrates how “north” and “south” are unstable, shifting positions. Nino’s competitor, The Turk, who is known in the film only by his nationality, is on the same level as southern Italians in terms of societal (and racial) standing. However, Nino’s hostility toward him suggests that

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his proximity to an easterner makes him uncomfortable. While Nino is supportive of migrants from traditionally southern European countries such as Spain and Greece, he is openly hostile toward the Turkish immigrant, whose country, often associated with the “Orient,” challenges the boundaries of Western Europe. During his first deportation, Nino watches the “Turk” greet his family and receive veneration from male family members. Although Muslim, the “Turk’s” extended family arrangement is similar enough to Nino’s family (as seen in his family photo) for him to acknowledge the missed opportunity for social and economic advancement that is now conferred upon a non-European. Through the characters of Gianni and the industrialist, Bread posits that there is no singular Italian identity, and in the case of Nino, one does not achieve familiarity with someone simply because they claim to be a paisan. Like Mafioso, Bread explores the Italian diaspora and identity formation in relation to racial hierarchy, and like the former, considers the intersections of class, age, and gender. Nino rests uncomfortably between his native and adopted cultures, wanting to improve his family’s prospects through migration but unable to fully embrace Swiss society, especially when the Italian migrant is forced to internalize discrimination and, in a sense, reject himself in order to be acknowledged within the host society. This rejection of self in order to assimilate within the host country is nowhere more evident than in the storyline devoted to the suicidal industrialist. Nino is introduced to the industrialist while working at the restaurant. Although the two men occupy different class positions, they have a rapport based on their shared Italian heritage. Commenting on the relation of the two Italian men, Parati notes, “Brusati’s protagonist focuses on the disorientation of displacement, on being different because being a migrant makes a person ‘other’ even vis-à-vis other richer Italians who travel as tourists.”24 However, the mystery surrounding the industrialist, his fugitive status, his illegitimate business, his transnational movement, even the fact that he is never referred to by a proper name suggests that, like Nino, the processes of migration and a sense of “racial” inferiority have complicated his relation to his Italian identity. After Nino loses his guest worker permit, he asks the industrialist to help him secure another position. Again, signs of wealth and affluence, such as a large home and a blonde American escort, surround the industrialist. The class tensions between the two men become heightened as it becomes apparent that the Italian industrialist is operating a pyramid scheme. He uses their shared Italian heritage to con Nino out of his

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entire savings with promises to double his investment. The industrialist’s relationship to lower-class Italians such as Nino not only helps support his lavish lifestyle, but also allows him to perform whiteness by enacting the same economic exploitation of Italian migrants that is undertaken by the Swiss and other northern Europeans. The industrialist’s exploitation of Italian laborers is further underscored by his mismanagement of his factories leading to the loss of over 10,000 jobs. The industrialist’s “in-betweenness” becomes heightened as he takes Nino to meet his family at an airfield. Nino and the industrialist expect a happy reunion, but as his two sons descend from the plane, they maintain a physical distance and hardly acknowledge their father. The distance between the industrialist and his family is further accentuated by the absence of his wife. As the group walks away from the plane, the two boys begin speaking English with each other, with Nino commenting that the boys “look like foreigners.” While the boys walk at a distance from their father, an elegant car pulls up and a young blonde-haired boy calls out to the industrialist’s sons. In their first display of enthusiasm, the two boys run and greet their friend, speaking animatedly in English. The boys immediately ask their father if they can join their friend, and the industrialist permits their departure, albeit with a curse. While the boys’ preference to join their friend can be read as a result of their father’s dissolute behavior or as a cliché of the modern bourgeois family, in the context of my discussion of Bread’s hyper-whiteness and critique of racial hierarchy, the two boys reject their Italian father for their British friend who embodies the northern European identity they have been taught to desire. The emptiness of the airfield points to the emotional and psychological consequences of migration and the negotiation of racial hierarchy for the Italian diaspora. In the following scene, the industrialist laments the loss of his family in an open grassy field, unaware of his own responsibility for his loss or of Nino’s plight. In an attempt to show sympathy and perhaps forge solidarity with the industrialist, Nino shows him a photo of his family, telling the industrialist that he too feels the estrangement and distance that occurs when separated from home and loved ones. However, the industrialist does not acknowledge any connection between himself and Nino, and becoming angered by thoughts of his wife, he thoughtlessly rips apart Nino’s only family portrait. Without family or an identity outside of economic exploitation, the industrialist moves from the emptiness of the airfield to an open field on the side of a highway, to the squalor of his disarrayed “home.” The industrialist’s

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storyline ends with his death by suicide, leaving Nino without employment, legal status, or his savings. During his three aborted attempts to return to Italy, Nino encounters other Italian migrants who for various reasons are being sent away from or voluntarily leaving Switzerland. As with his first departure attempt, Nino decides to remain in Switzerland after seeing a group of Italians performing “Italianness” by singing famous southern Italian songs. At first, Nino’s attitude toward other Italian migrants on the train seems like a shame response to what he perceives as vulgar and debased behavior on the part of southern Italians. On the three occasions he sees the other Italians on the train, they become stereotypes, a reminder of how southern Italians are constructed in other parts of the world (overemotional and passionate, musical, prone to violent outbursts, etc.). These southern types appear swearing, playing hand organs, guitars, and singing Neapolitan favorites such as Simmo’e Napule Paisan and Torna a Surriento. In Switzerland, Nino is “Italian,” an identity made homogenous through the experience of migration. However, Nino resists what is considered an authentic southern Italian identity because the Italian migrant becomes “Italian” by adopting stereotypes of “Italianness” circulated in popular media. As seen in his interactions with other Italian and foreign migrants, there is no unitary “Italian” identity within or outside of Italian national borders. What emerges in the three segments divided by Nino’s near departures is a contingent “Italian” identity, akin to what Gayatri Spivak has described as a “strategic essentialism” in which Nino forges temporary alliances with other Italians in order to achieve economic, political, or social goals that can only be gained through solidarity. In Bread, we find an example of the contingent nature of Italian transnational identity formation in the episode at the industrial factory barracks during which Nino meets with his old friend and former coworker, Gigi. Once again, Nino finds himself an unemployed clandestine without a home after the industrialist’s suicide and Elena’s developing relationship with a Swiss immigration officer. Gigi offers him temporary accommodations in his small room in a large barracks for Italian manual laborers. Gigi encourages Nino to take to the stage once again and perform as one of the “three graces,” an improvised performance troupe. Nino reluctantly agrees and Renzo, a young worker who is supporting a wife and two children in Italy, joins the two men. In their mess hall, the male laborer community is treated to a drag performance in which the three men offer humorous tales of women who provide sexual services for the Italian workers separated from their

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wives. While Gigi’s cross-dressing performance as “la Giga” is read as the pretense it is meant to be, Renzo’s “la Rosina” disturbs gender boundaries, unsettling the men. As “la Rosina” is introduced, the room falls silent, and the men become confused as to how to respond to “her” presence. One exhausted man raises his head and hallucinates that “la Rosina” is his Rosa, a wife who never writes to him. Rather than being a humorous critique of their lives as migrants far from home, Renzo/Rosina becomes a painful reminder of geographic and temporal distance from families that may not be seen again. After this initial disturbance, the performance begins again, and we see Nino is a proficient musician who sings in Neapolitan dialect and willingly aligns himself with the other southern Italian migrants. The “three graces” performance is intercut with shots of solitary men playing cards, rereading letters, and mending old clothes, providing a view into the lives of migrant laborers expressed in the film’s earlier nostalgia sequence in which Nino “speaks” with family members, defending his hopes and aspirations in the face of difficult circumstances. Here, Nino accepts a southern Italian identity in solidarity with other Italians with whom he shares a common experience of migration. Ultimately, it is Renzo/Rosina who breaks the temporary reverie. As nostalgia turns to anger toward the indignities that the Italian migrant suffers in their host country, Nino joins Renzo in condemning the workers’ complicity with their low conditions. Nino calls for “change,” but without legal standing or employment he decides to return to Italy, only to abort his departure when once again confronted by Italian stereotypes. The third part of the film is a surrealist episode that sees Nino once again attempt to remain in Switzerland, this time with an extended southern Italian family living as tenant laborers on a large estate. Upon arrival, Nino learns that he is hired to slaughter chickens, and is taken through the process by the family patriarch. The deprivation and poor conditions of Italian migrants in Switzerland become palpable as Nino and the patriarch emerge from the slaughterhouse covered in chicken feathers, and Nino is directed to the chicken coop that serves as the family home. Not only does the family live in conditions that they most likely sought to escape through immigration, they begin acting like chickens themselves. Nino, taken aback by the family’s condition, rises and asks the family: “Who am I? What do I look like to you?” The family responds, “You are like us.” However, Nino does not find solidarity with the family, and his question returns to the identity crisis he encounters throughout his journeys.

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Nino’s inquiry is interrupted as the youngest woman of the family draws everyone’s attention to the arrival of the landowner’s children. The family and Nino rush to a chicken wire fence where they gaze upon the youths bathing at a nearby pond. Again, Bread presents an image of hyper-whiteness as the blonde, blue-eyed youths become for the immigrants an idealized vision of physical beauty. As one of the young men begins to take off his clothes, the young woman turns her head away and returns to the table to sit with the older women. She is neither allowed to look upon the youths with desire nor can she embody the desired whiteness of the Aryan group. The chicken coop episode encapsulates the effects of economic exploitation and internalized racial hierarchy on the Italian immigrant. A transition from a reverse shot of Nino looking upon what we first believe to be the mountainous Swiss landscape in which the youths bathe to a mundane landscape painting in a public toilet, foregrounds Nino’s transformation. A pan shot follows an older Swiss woman attendant to a stall from which Nino emerges, walks to a mirror, and looks at his newly bleached blonde hair. Having decided to become a white northern European, Nino walks the streets, gazing at his new identity in a series of storefront windows. He is greeted on the street in a positive manner and even children approach him without apprehension. While Nino’s transformation is used for comedic effect, as with Mafioso, it becomes another instance of passing, here literalized through the use of blonde hair. Nino’s attempt to blend into Swiss society once again illuminates parallels between ethnic white and African diasporic experiences of racial hierarchy. In Bread, Nino believes blonde hair will give him entrée into Swiss society and is something anyone can purchase as easily as the items in the stores that he walks past. But like any other racial passing, Nino’s performance brings consequences and he is unable to maintain his masquerade of whiteness. After a day of enjoying his new white identity, Nino stops at a bar where a group of Swiss citizens have gathered to watch a football game. However, upon hearing the Italian national anthem he is overcome by a sense of patriotism, and when the Italian team scores a goal, Nino takes the triumph as his own and cheers the Italian team. Devastated by his failure to maintain a white identity, and perhaps by his desire to uphold a fictitious Italian national identity by supporting the Italian football team, Nino looks at himself one last time before smashing his head through a glass mirror. Bloodied and exposed, Nino is thrown out into the street. A final irony appears in the guise of a blonde woman, who removes her wig and

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reveals that she is Spanish, another southern European attempting to “pass” as white northern European. Nino’s identity crisis is never fully resolved. Once again he is forced by Swiss authorities to leave the country. In the last scenes of the film, Nino is bandaged from the wounds suffered at the pub, and his hair is a mixture of blonde and dark brown roots. Elena meets Nino at the train station and comments that he is “half-blonde” and “half-brown,” to which Nino replies that he always feels “half-something.” This in-betweenness is made evident in the final shot of the film as Nino, having once again removed himself from a train bound for Italy, emerges from a dark tunnel and walks along the train tracks. Elena has secured a work permit for Nino, but as he stands on the tracks somewhere between Switzerland and Italy, it is not evident that he will return to Switzerland. As the image suggests, Nino is in transit, not Italian but not northern European, neither white nor nonwhite. The ending of Bread and Chocolate finds Nino occupying a position of being neither here nor there, an in-betweenness that speaks to the southern Italian internal and external migrant experience. Yet, Nino’s non-place status at the end of the film also anticipates the experience of contemporary global migration. Bread was released just prior to Italy’s transformation from a country of emigration to one of “destination” for non-Western European migrants. By the mid-1970s, Italy begins to experience new migration patterns that will change the racial and ethnic landscape of the country. With the increased ability to rapidly and affordably travel, communication technologies that allow for “virtual” migrations and online diasporic communities, and multinational labor and business practices, the formation of stable, homogeneous national identities is no longer within the exclusive purview of the state. As discussed at the end of Chapter 3, the African, Asian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern migrants who settled in Italy in the middle to late 1970s have produced a new generation of Italian citizens who challenge a homogeneous, white identity and propel Italy toward its current status as a multicultural and multiracial country. Many of the experiences of Italian guest workers in Switzerland depicted in Bread and Chocolate—black labor, onsite injury and fatality, the longing for a “homeland,” and new identities formed through migration and resettlement—resonate with the experiences of immigrants in Italy today. As Italy begins experiencing an influx of non-Western European migrants, films are produced that explore the changes brought about by the appearance and settlement of new migrants. As Karen Pinkus

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observed in the late 1990s: “The generation of Italians now in their twenties is probably the first to have seen black bodies circulating in urban and suburban areas, but even today in certain regions, blackness always elicits a gaze; a black body is black before it is anything else (gendered, clothed, still or in motion, old or young, African or Western, and so on).”25 Several of these films, such as Michele Placido’s Pummarò (1990) and Mouhammed Soudani’s Waalo Fendo (Where the Earth Freezes, 1998), are inspired by actual events and explore the racist backlash against African migrants in Italy. Other films, such as Lamerica (Gianni Amelio, 1994) explore the fascist colonial legacy in Albania. By illustrating parallels between Italian migration of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and post–Cold War Albanian migration, Amelio’s film is also a damning indictment of Italian treatment of Albanian refugees. In particular, the transformation of the film’s protagonist, Gino (Enrico Lo Verso), from Italian national subject to Albanian refugee, illustrates once again the “in-betweenness” of Italian racial and national identity, even at the close of the twentieth century.26 Neither Mafioso nor Bread and Chocolate is a “political cinema.” Rather, these two commedia all’italiana humorously draw attention to issues concerning migration and Italian racial and identity formation that anticipate post–Cold War era debates concerning external immigration and the Italian nation-state. Although the appearance of Asians, Middle Easterners, Africans, and Eastern Europeans transforms Italy’s racial composition, the north/south division remains as a lens through which to view Italy’s current multiracial landscape.

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Chapter 5

Zumurrud in her Camera: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Global South in Contemporary Italian Film

Actually, the “glance” of a peasant—perhaps directly from a country or region in a prehistoric condition of underdevelopment—takes in another type of reality than the glance given to that same reality by a cultured middle class person. The two actually see different sets of things, not in isolation, but even a thing in itself looks different in two “visions.” . . . In practice, therefore, for a possible common linguistic level based on “glances” at things, the difference that a director can capture between himself and a character is psychological and social . . . if [the director] is immersed in his character, and tells the story or represents the world through him, he cannot make use of that formidable differentiating instrument of nature that language is. His activity cannot be linguistic but stylistic.1 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Cinema of Poetry” (1965) In the final scene of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974), the film’s protagonist, Zumurrud, once slave now a king, stands in her mirrored chamber, framed within frames. As she stands in front of Nur-ed-Din, her subject and her master, she reveals herself as both monarch and slave, both male and female. The mirrored reflections of the king’s chamber serve as metaphor for the infinite progress of the stories of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, which are brought to conclusion only through the artifice of an ending, spoken by Nur-ed-Din: “What a night! God has never created another like this. Its beginning was bitter, but how sweet its ending!”2 The mirrored chamber, the camera, is also a cinema; each mirror providing a different point of view, its own sequence shot.3 Through the selection of frames within the sequences, Pasolini as poet-director gives the images meaning through the process

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of editing. Reality continues outside of the “audiovisual technique” that is the cinema, and the individual film becomes an instance of “writing reality with reality.”4 Zumurrud is also the “flower,” the tapestry weaver and storyteller who provides the framing story that unites the selected tales. As such, her presence becomes an instance of Pasolini’s theory of the free-indirect subjective in film, which he defined as “the immersion of the filmmaker in the mind of his character and then the adoption on the part of the filmmaker not only of [her] character but also [her] language.”5 This interaction between the filmmaker and his character, and the various implications for this book’s investigation of Italian racial and national identity formation that arise from the theorization and use of such a technique, will be the focus of this chapter. I begin this chapter with the character Zumurrud, portrayed by Italian Eritrean model/actress Inez Pelligrini, who is yet another presentation of African Italian mixed-race identity in the Italian cinema. Through an examination of Pasolini’s Arabian Nights, specifically the final mirrorchamber scene briefly introduced above, I argue that the free-indirect subjective offers a new model for representing processes of racial and national identity formation in Italian film, one that ultimately proposes the breakdown of bounded categories of race and nation, and that can have implications for the representation of contemporary African immigration to Italy and other countries in the European Union. As an Italian Eritrean, Pelligrini, in her role as Zumurrud and later as the maid-servant in Pasolini’s last film Salò (1975), can be read as a signifier of Pasolini’s explorations of Africa and the non-West begun in his earlier works such as Notes for an African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana, 1970). Pelligrini’s figure on screen signifies a history of Italian colonialism and the mixed-race subjects who emerged from Italy’s occupation of its North African territories. In the films examined in the previous chapters such as Under the Southern Cross and Il Mulatto, the biracial subject remained outside or was displaced beyond the geographic borders of the nation. I argued that the ejection of mixed-race subjects arises from a historical revisionism that disallows the full trajectory of Italian colonialism and from the nation’s ambivalence toward its own internal racial heterogeneity. Chapter 4’s discussion of Mafioso and Bread and Chocolate explored the southern Italian transnational migrant as a mixed-race subject, moving between white and nonwhite identities as they negotiate different national histories and racial hierarchies. As a mixed-race subject, Pelligrini is emblematic of Pasolini’s “miscegenous” cinema—what has

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often been described as a “cinema of contamination,” a “contamination” that takes place in terms of the merging of the white, male, leftist intellectual with the black, female, postcolonial subject. However, this contamination extends beyond the author-director and character to a series of mergings that undermine binary constructions of the relationship between Italy and Africa, and further between the West and non-West. Pasolini’s investigations of the “Third World” began in the 1950s, after having published his first poetry collections based on Friulian, the dialect of his mother’s northern Italian region, and after his transition to Rome and his artistic production based on the youth of the Roman borgate. In his theoretical, political, and artistic productions, Pasolini attempted to reclaim diversity (diverso) through the use of Italian dialect in his poetry and his literary and filmic representation of the subproletariat in their movement from rural to urban centers during the 1950s and 1960s. Diverso (translated as “diverse,” “diversity,” or “different”) is a term used to describe peoples, cultures, and expressions that remained beneath sanctioned homogeneity. Pasolini’s involvement with non-Western societies was motivated by what he viewed as the disappearance of the subproletariat in Italy’s transition into late capitalism. Examining Pasolini’s Accatone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), Angelo Restivo argues that the post-neorealist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, of which Pasolini was a major contributor, enacts a tension between Italy’s rapid industrialization during the period and an antique past, represented by the rural peasantry then becoming the petite bourgeoisie. Geographically, this tension is realized in the economic and social divisions between the industrialized north and an underdeveloped south. Rome experienced an influx of immigrants from southern Italy during this period and served as an intermediary between these two worlds. Discussing the new proximity of the rural south and the industrialized north made possible through the split between central Rome and its borgate margins, Restivo writes: All of this leads us to two preliminary premises to be made about the construction of the nation during this period. The first is that in many ways, the South needs to be conceived of as a postcolonial space which exists within the very nation. The second is that, in whatever attempts are made to construct a unified nation, the regional divisions that traverse the nation must be taken account of in advance. Taking these two conclusions together, we can see the extent to which the construction of Italy as a coherent national entity occurs not under the discourses of

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modernity in which the other great Western nations were constructed but rather within the tensions between that modernist, democratic impulse and an incipient postmodernity that would valorize (for the purposes of consumption, of course) the very dispersion that renders the idea of the nation already an antiquated one. This tension, I will argue, thoroughly animates both the artistic practice and the theoretical work of Pasolini.6 Pasolini’s work concerning the Italian subproletariat and non-Western countries not only marks Italy as a “postcolonial space,” but is an important precursor of his artistic productions in and about the non-West that reformulates the relation between Italy and its former African colonies, and that anticipates contemporary debates concerning immigration to the European Union and the borders by which it is defined.7 I will begin with a brief description of the political climate of the period, followed by a discussion of Pasolini’s political interest in the Third World via Notes for an African Orestes. Here, I argue, Pasolini’s concept of diverso is challenged in his attempt to parallel the emergence of European civil society with that of emerging African nations in the era of decolonization. I will then discuss Pasolini’s use of the free-indirect subjective in the Arabian Nights. Pasolini sought to represent the subproletariat body as protest against the commodification of the human form. I investigate not only Pelligrini’s function within the film, but also Pasolini’s representation of and ambivalence toward black male subjects. In its scenes, the Arabian Nights reveals the instability of the body as sign and the problems raised in portraying the subproletariat body on screen. I conclude with Pasolini’s abandonment of his politics of the “revolutionary” body by returning to Pelligrini’s appearance in Salò (1975). In this film, the act of interracial conjugal relations, banned in the African colonies after the establishment of the Italian East African Empire (AOI) and in Italy under the 1938 Race Laws, triggers a final spectacle of carnage and the complete annihilation of the body. Salò can thus be read as a pessimistic statement on Italy’s inability to confront its past and acknowledge its own heterogeneity, the suppression of which, since unification, has troubled the conceptualization of the “nation.” Finally, I return to the current period with Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008), an adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s bestselling novel on the Neapolitan criminal syndicate, the Camorra. While within the last two decades several films have addressed the issue of non-Western European

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immigration to Italy, Garrone’s film is a representation of the Italian nation-state under advanced capitalism and globalization. Gomorrah visualizes a world far removed from Pasolini’s diverso and a revolutionary heterogeneity that could challenge the hegemony of the nation-state and neocapitalism. By way of Pasolini’s exploration of the Third World, Gomorrah offers an opportunity to reflect upon the articulation of Italy’s north/south division in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and as a destination country for non-Western European immigrants, its relation to the global south.

Pasolini and the Italian Left Pasolini’s work during the 1960s and 1970s emerged in the context of a rapidly industrializing Italy that was experiencing the prosperity of its “economic miracle” after the depression of the immediate postwar era. Industrial expansion and decreased unemployment were made possible by the arrival of Italians from the south who began immigrating to northern urban centers seeking employment. Along with substantial changes in the economic landscape, Italy also underwent cultural and social changes. The Second Vatican Council, which convened from 1962 to 1965, initiated liberal reforms within the Roman Catholic Church including broadening outreach to other Christian denominations and changes to the liturgy that until this period was still spoken in Latin. Social mores regarding sexuality, marriage, and women’s rights were also debated during this period and led to the legalization of abortion and divorce. As will be discussed further, Pasolini, by this period a prolific commentator on Italian society and politics, was skeptical of what he called the “repressive tolerance” of capitalist societies, or more precisely its ability to allow dissent without changing the ideological premises by which it maintains hegemony.8 Italian politics of the late 1960s and 1970s was marked by the activities of the Red Brigades, the paramilitary arm of the Italian Communist Party, as well as resurgent neofascist organizations. As expressed in “For Communism: Theses of the Il Manifesto Group,” a political tract written in 1969 by the Italian communist “new left,” the efforts of European communist groups were undermined in the post–World War II period by their engagement with a “reformist” policy that sought to advance the party’s goals through cooperation with Christian Democracy and within the modern capitalist system. The new left statement also criticized the

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efforts of “Frontist” groups who attempted to forward their agenda by way of mass organization of labor in order to “provoke tensions” within the current political and economic situation and allow for the development of a “mass revolutionary consciousness.”9 The failure on the part of these factions centers around their inability to take into full consideration the defeat of revolutionary movements in the 1920s, the failure of Soviet totalitarianism, and the development of mass capitalism in the postwar era. The new left statement argued that because of the European left’s inability to adapt to actual historical conditions it found itself unable to further social and economic reforms. During the 1970s, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, continued working toward the political compromise with the Christian Democrats begun in the 1950s. In this period, Italian communism debated its political goals, dividing itself internally between members who wanted to advance socialist objectives within the confines of global capitalism and those who wanted to return to the party’s original revolutionary objectives by organizing labor and directly confronting the growth of capitalism. Disassociating itself from the Soviet Union, the PCI sought to work with communist parties of other European nations under the banner of “Euro-Communism.” In its 1978 “historic compromise” with the Christian Democrats, the PCI supported Italy’s entrance into NATO and the European Common Market.10 Although he was expelled from the Italian Communist Party in 1949 because of his homosexuality, Pasolini remained aligned with the party through his commitment to defending the proletariat and subproletariat in Europe and abroad. Yet Pasolini was at odds with Italian communism, and was often referred to as a “Christian-Marxist” because he wanted to retain a belief in the “sacred and irrational” found in the subproletariat that he often depicted. Pasolini’s readings of Antonio Gramsci inspired his poem “Ashes of Gramsci” (1955), and his identification as an “organic intellectual” who serves as a mediator between “low” and “high” cultures. However, it is at this point that, as Maurizio Viano notes, Pasolini breaks with Gramsci and his contribution to Italian left political thought. Abandoning Marxist dialectical synthesis, Pasolini adapts a theory of contamination that engages the struggle between “historical reason” (movement toward the proletariat revolution) and “passion,” defined as that which “points outside the sphere of rationality” and “reveals our awareness of the impotence of any rational discourse,”

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without allowing reason to subsume the latter.11 Remarking on Pasolini’s significance to the Italian left, Viano writes: Pasolini represents the stage of a left losing philosophical legitimacy, a left surviving as passionate alterity against power. With Pasolini, the left finds itself in the face of an alternative: either it weakens its thought and allows for contradictions in its own body, or it enforces a strengthening. Clearly, from this position one can move onto either pluralism or terrorism.12 For Pasolini, the loss of the subproletariat through its inability to achieve historical consciousness amounts to the “end of history.” As will be discussed later, the body as vehicle for passion then becomes a means by which to confront capitalist hegemony and revitalize the left. In the face of the transformation of the subproletariat into the petite-bourgeoisie, Pasolini sought alternatives by which to revive liberatory movements in the West of which his films, screenplays, and poetry set outside of Europe take part. Prior to examining the subproletariat body and the theory of contamination in Arabian Nights, I discuss some problems raised by Pasolini’s approach to the Third World.

“When We Speak of Italy, We Speak of Italians”: Pasolini’s African Orestes Prior to his exploration of the Third World in the Arabian Nights, Pasolini became interested in the liberatory movements taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as the radical left movements in the United States and Europe. In La Resistenza Negra, the introduction to an anthology of contemporary African writers, Pasolini writes: The concept “Africa” is an extremely complex subproletarian condition that is not yet utilized as a real revolutionary force. Perhaps I am best able to define this concept if we identify Africa with the entire world of Bandung, Afro-Asia, which saying clearly, begins at the peripheries of Rome, encompasses our South, parts of Spain, Greece, the Mediterranean states, the Middle East. Don’t forget that in Turin, there are writings on the walls that say “Via i Terroni = Arabs.” In such a sense, the concept “Africa” encompasses the world of the subproletariat “consumer” with respect to capitalist production, the world of

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the under-governed, of the subculture, of the pre-industrialized civilization exploited by the industrial civilization.13 As the quotation marks around the word “Africa” suggest, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s relationship to Africa is at once geographical, literal, and metaphorical in nature. Pasolini was “in Africa”; in 1963, he made the first of several trips to the continent, and throughout the decade traveled to various nations, including Kenya, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Senegal, Tanzania, and Congo. However, Pasolini’s dialogue with the African continent began prior to his knowledge of it as a physical site. Pasolini’s discovery of Africa was mediated through his first vocation as poet, through the Nègritude poets such as Aimé Césaire, and especially through his translations of the poetry of Leopold Senghor. This 1961 essay serves as a critical statement on the significance of African liberation movements and their potential global impact. Pasolini writes that “Africa” is a concept; and politically his “Africa” encompasses what he often referred to as the “global subproletariat.” However, in his poetic and filmic works of the following decade, Pasolini transforms the “real” Africa into myth, an imaginative retreat in order to return to the world the “revolutionary force” of an ideal. From the passage quoted above, we can see how Pasolini’s “Africa” not only refers to the continent, its nations, and its peoples, but also to the entire Third World, defined as those countries—many former European colonies—that emerged in the post–World War II era as technologically and economically less developed than the First World bloc, composed of the United States and its allies. However, for Pasolini the Third World does not stand in direct opposition to the United States and Europe. In La Resistenza Negra, Pasolini traverses geographic, historical, and cultural boundaries, collecting his global subproletariat from the Roman borgate, southern Italy, Indonesia, several parts of the Mediterranean, South America, and the black inner cities of the US urban north. Pasolini’s search is not solely to collect peoples who are oppressed by capitalist exploitation, but also to find within these communities a pre-industrialized, prehistoric world that could negate the capitalist economic and cultural hegemony he thought prevalent in the Western world. For the period, it is not altogether unusual that Pasolini, a selfascribed Marxist intellectual, selected Africa and other parts of the Third World as his political and artistic nexus. In the post–World War II era, Africa became a center of political and philosophical debate. A series of wars, including the 1953 Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya and

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the start of the French-Algerian war in 1954, was followed by the rapid decolonization of African nations beginning with Libya in 1956.14 With the liberation of these former European colonies came the struggle: which of the two major political ideologies of the Cold War era would dominate the governments of these newly independent nations. As Chris Bongie suggests, the possibility of a new world order, in contrast to the hegemony of the capitalist West, was attractive to many European intellectuals: With the political “liberation” of former colonial territories, an escape from the capitalist prison house of the “West” again seemed possible; a host of writer-activists, of whom Sartre can be taken as exemplar, would attempt to project themselves beyond their own corrupted society into new and decolonized promised lands of innocence and marginality.15 Pasolini arrives at his version of the “promised land” through a series of lost utopias. By the early 1960s, Pasolini’s hopes in the rejuvenating power of the Italian Resistance and of the immediate postwar period had expired. The economic “miracle” of the 1950s brought with it the denigration of two of Pasolini’s most significant inspirations: the rural culture of Friuli, the home of his maternal ancestry, and the Roman borgate. Pasolini made the impoverished outskirts of Rome the subject of two novels of the period, Ragazzi di Vita (Children of Life, 1955) and Una Vita Violenta (A Violent Life, 1959), and his first films, Accatone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962). Pasolini regarded with dismay the transformation enacted by the rapid industrialization of Italy during this period. As discussed previously, the vital subproletarian world became that of the petit-bourgeoisie, characterized by consumerism and a vapid cultural hegemony that for Pasolini hinged on the eradication of regional dialects in favor of a standardized Italian language. Since the Italian proletariat was being subsumed by an ever-encroaching neocapitalism, Pasolini turned to the Third World. In another passage from La Resistenza Negra, Pasolini writes: The black Resistance is not finished; and it seems it will not finish as it is finished here by us, with the clergy and De Gaulle in power; while if for us “Resistance” is still equivalent to “hope,” the historical resistance that has concluded culturally, a decade or so ago, is already without hope. In Africa, it’s clear the split between resistance and Resistance has not come. The struggle is everywhere.16

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Here, Pasolini distinguishes postwar Europe from the Third World. Whereas in the postwar era in Europe, resistance and “Resistance” have separated (in Italy, exemplified by the capitulation of the Italian Communist Party to the Christian Democrats), in the Third World of Africa and beyond, this separation has not and may not occur in the future. As Pasquale Verdicchio writes, for Pasolini, in the Third World, “the political movement for national autonomy and the struggle for social justice are one and the same.”17 Notes for an African Orestes (1970) is a film about a potential film. Notes is a filmed sopraluogo, a scouting trip to find actors and locations to be used in the final production. Originally planned as an adaptation of Aeschylus’ play set in contemporary Africa, Notes was envisioned as one film in the uncompleted project entitled Poema sul terzo mondo (Poem on the Third World). The Orestes myth concerns the establishment of law and civil society. After avenging the death of his father Agamemnon by murdering his mother Clytemnestra, Orestes flees to the city of Athens where the goddess Athena, in an attempt to stop the cycle of murderous revenge, establishes a court to try Orestes for the murder of his mother. After Orestes is acquitted, the cycle ends and civil law is established. The Furies—the deities who sought to avenge Clytemnestra’s murder—are then transformed into the Eumenides, and their wrath is subsumed by the new civil society, characterized by trial by jury.18 In Notes, Pasolini finds himself a decade removed from the first wave of African decolonization. The continent was experiencing industrialization and modernization, yet the independence movement also brought warfare among ethnic groups. Pasolini’s Notes incorporates documentary footage of the Biafran War (1967–70) and the Eritrean struggle for independence from Ethiopia, which annexed the country as its province in 1962, beginning a war that lasted for the next 30 years. Pasolini watches this reality from a distance, and questions which of the two economic models, capitalism or communism, will succeed in the postcolonial era. Pasolini’s film project attempts to build a parallel between the Greek myth and the complex and disparate state of affairs in contemporary Africa, arguing that this liberatory period is similar to the movement from irrational and primitive to the establishment of civil society.19 However, as Kim Gardi notes, there is an inherent paradox in Pasolini’s film project. He claims that there is a fruitful parallel between the story of the Oresteia and the emergence of independent African countries, centered on the transition from the primal, irrational, and uncivilized to

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the civilized state. In this sense, democracy is seen as part of this advancement from the irrational to the rational state, and is part of the industrial development and modernization of the continent. However, at the same time, Pasolini’s overall approach to the Third World is to imagine it as a prehistoric, preindustrial world that has the capacity to undermine the neocapitalist world. In essence, Pasolini wants his “Africa” to remain primitive, while at the same time advance to a state of civilization and formal democracy. Comparing Notes to Medea (1969), another of Pasolini’s films based on Greek myth, Gardi writes: The crisis confronting Jason, which is akin to the dilemma found in Notes [for an African Orestes], is how are we to operate in the world with the freedom gained from the birth of reason without sacrificing the spiritual vision of reality inspired by the old religion? How can one reconcile the mystical and the rational?20 For Pasolini, in Notes the reconciliation comes in the transformation of the Furies to the Eumenides. He states: “The furies are destined to be defeated. With their defeat, the death of the ancestral world—ancient Africa disappears as well.” However, as indicated in the quote above, the Furies do not disappear; instead, transformed into the Eumenides, they become the “unconscious” of the civil state. In order to assume this position within the civil state, Pasolini suggests that the transformation of the Furies can be understood as a movement from the pre-Symbolic to the Symbolic. Hence, in order to retain the Furies, they must be lost through language. The idealized state, which Pasolini imagines for the newly independent African nations, is one in which the Furies (now the Eumenides) coexist peacefully with civil law. The paradoxes of this vision of Africa are highlighted in two interview segments conducted with African students at the University of Rome. In the first interview sequence, Pasolini is primarily interested in whether the students think the final film should be set in present-day Africa or earlier, during the height of decolonization in the 1950s and early 1960s. Throughout his series of questions, Pasolini does not pose the question as to whether he should make the film at all or if there is a viable parallel between the Orestia and contemporary Africa. Throughout the difficult exchange, the students challenge these assumptions: Pasolini: Do you think I should shoot this film in the Africa of today or do you think it would be better to set the film back in the Africa

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of 1960, in the period when practically speaking, the majority of the African states gained their independence? Student 1: Africa is not a country, it is a continent. Student 2: I don’t see the connection.21 The awkwardness of the exchange is also rendered on the formal level. Pasolini positions his body outside the camera’s frame. His hand appears holding a microphone to capture the students’ voices as the lighting casts his shadow over his interviewees. This interview method not only places both Pasolini and the students in a physically estranged position in relation to each other, but the interview amounts to the author attempting to place into quotations the comments of the African students. Although the students are unable or unwilling to see Pasolini’s analogy, he persists with his questions and the conversation soon shifts to the issue of nationalism. One student comments: Student 3: I don’t think the filmmaker should focus too much on tribalism in Africa because Europeans used tribalism to divide the continent. When we speak of Africa we should speak of a race, not a tribe. When you hear about Italians you don’t just mean Calabrians. When you talk about the French you don’t just mean the Bretons. Pasolini: We mustn’t be afraid of reality; it is what it is, so if there are tribes in Africa we suppose that the Ibo tribe feels that it’s different from the Hausa tribe. Student 3: The region of Katanga doesn’t stand for all of the Congo. The same is true for Biafra with respect to Nigeria. When we speak of Italy, we speak of Italians.22 (emphasis added) This second exchange touches upon Pasolini’s reason for his explorations in the Third World. When Pasolini argues for reality, he wishes to argue that prior to European colonialism, there existed within the continent a diversity of peoples with their own language, culture, customs, etc., that was somehow subsumed or lost by the artificial division of the continent. However, in his reply, the student argues that this precolonial reality, what Pasolini calls “tribalism,” was as much imposed upon Africa as colonial separation. The student’s response challenges Pasolini’s conception of a reality that seeks to uncover heterogeneous cultures prior to Western intervention.

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However, it is exactly this heterogeneity that he sees disappearing in mass capitalist society. A review of Italian history reveals: “when we speak of Italy” we have not always spoken of “Italians.” Not only has “Italy” been conceptualized through its internal division between a civilized north and backward south, prior to unification, Italy was composed of several states, and experienced centuries of occupation under Austria, France, and Spain, to name a few countries. Although Pasolini attempts to draw parallels between the process of unification and colonialism, the establishment of a diverso prior to the “nation” is interpreted by the students as another construct. Whereas the director wishes to imagine a generative diversity, the student points to the constructed and subjective nature of reality and, more critically, reveals how such fictions were used in the service of colonial oppression. Ultimately the exchange suggests that the neocapitalist model has already been adopted (at least by the students), and Notes documents this transformation. Trento comments upon the lack of rapport between Pasolini and the students: If we review the interview with the African university students— whose names, however, we don’t know—filmed for Notes for an African Orestes, we see on the one hand, Pasolini often attempts to redirect the responses of the interlocutors to themes that are dear to him, or to an African panorama that is framed a priori (so much so that a student reproaches him for loose generalizations about Africa), while on the other hand, his voice is in general louder than that of his interlocutors—at times slightly professorial or annoyed— so that, in the end, between Pasolini and these young men there is established neither a dialogue nor a “classical” dynamic of observerobserved.23 Trento goes on to suggest that the true discussion of diverso can be found in Pasolini’s interactions with actor Ninetto Davoli, who she argues constitutes for Pasolini a “deteritorialized primitive,” the internal southern other. Pasolini continues his sopraluogo ending optimistically with an image of trees swaying gently in the wind envisioned as the transformation of the Furies into the Eumenides. The film project was never completed, perhaps because the countries he explored adopted the Western neocapitalist paradigm he sought to challenge and the a priori reality that

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Pasolini sought to manifest could not be made legible through cinematic language. In this case, the incomplete status of the screenplay of Notes is also that of the yet unrealized subproletariat revolution.24 Pasolini claims as much in an essay entitled “The screenplay as a ‘structure that wants to be another structure.’” In this work, Pasolini argues for a reading of the screenplay as “a continuous allusion to a developing cinematographic work,” which necessitates the author accepting the screenplay as an “autonomous ‘technique’” or rather a complete work in and of itself. He wishes to redefine the screenplay in order to stress that it is not only “literary” in nature but also oral and, most importantly, visual. The simultaneous existence of multiple sign systems, in particular the literary and the visual, supposes that the screenplay is always a form that desires to be another form. For Pasolini, the “screenplay-text” should be read as a clash between “structure” and “process,” in which the screenplay-text is a “structure morphologically in movement.”25 In the same way that the screenplay “wills to become another structure,” so too does the radical force inherent in the subproletariat to transform the capitalist structure to another. Pasolini writes: That an individual, as author, reacts to a system by constructing another one seems to me simple and natural; in the same way in which men, as authors of history, react to a social structure by building another through revolution, that is, [they react] to the will to transform the structure . . . I am speaking of a “revolutionary will,” both in the author as creator of an individual stylistic system that contradicts the grammatical and literary-jargon system in force, and in men as subverters of political systems.26 Notes is not a screenplay, but perhaps can be read as a becoming-film. The parallel Pasolini draws between the creative and political will is most evident in the image of the Eumenides as swaying trees, where through the language of cinema, reality is made poetic. Notes constitutes one attempt to examine the relation between the West and the non-West as the merging of the primitive, “irrational” non-West with the “rational” West, a merging that is challenged in Pasolini’s encounter with the African students. Even though Pasolini seeks an “Africa” that existed prior to Western imperialism, his interview with the African students prompts a return to the question of the establishment of the modern Western European nation-state, supported by fictitious binaries between the West and non-West. In terms of Italy and its national unification, the Notes’

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interview prompts a critical reconsideration of the diverso or heterogeneity subsumed by Italian nation-state formation. In the next section, I discuss Pasolini’s “cinema of poetry” and the free-indirect subjective as another model Pasolini develops for fostering connections between the global subproletariat in Western Europe and beyond.

The “Cinema of Poetry” and the Free-Indirect Subjective Pasolini’s complex and contradictory views on realism in cinema led to his divergence from the direct socialist realism seen in many Italian neorealist works. Yet, he maintains a belief in reality, one revealed paradoxically through artifice and that always bears the mark of its author. For Pasolini, reality does not exist as “nature” prior to language, but is itself a system of signs that is read and given another form through cinema. Guiliana Bruno writes that for Pasolini “reality itself is not a monolithic, unitary, ontological entity,” rather, it is a site that “inhabits the dynamics of social negotiation, contradiction and communication.”27 One of his most sustained theoretical discussions of the cinema is found in his essay “Cinema of Poetry,” first presented at the 1965 Pesaro film festival. His definition of the cinema emerges through literary comparison. Pasolini distinguishes institutional, literary languages from what he calls the “common” language upon which cinematographic communication is based. He proves the existence of this common language through reference to “gesticulatory” communication, which aids our comprehension of spoken language and that can be separated and studied as nonverbal communication on its own.28 This system of visual signs forms the basis of common language because it communicates meaning through “natural archetypes” that humans have become accustomed to reading. In addition to this exterior world of visual signs, there exists an interior world of images of memory and dreams. Pasolini calls these “meaningful images” image-signs or im-signs. Both dreams and memories are constructed through a “sequence of imsigns,” which are fundamentally cinematographic in nature.29 In arguing for a grammar of cinema, Pasolini asserts that the imagesign (also called the moneme) is produced with the use of kinemes or “the objects, the forms, [and] acts of reality” that appear in the individual shot (moneme). The relation between the moneme and kinemes form the “double articulation” of film.30 Hence, the filmmaker’s work is dual in that he must first pull kinemes out of “chaos,” give them meaning, and thereby endow the im-sign with its “individual quality of expression.”31

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It is only beginning in the post-neorealist period that Pasolini finds what he identifies as a “cinema of poetry,” which is characterized primarily by the “free-indirect cinematographic discourse” or the “freeindirect subjective.” As with previous definitions, Pasolini takes the term “free-indirect” from literary examples. He writes that for the cinema, free-indirect cinematographic discourse is “simply the immersion of the filmmaker in the mind of the character, and then the adoption on the part of the filmmaker not only of the psychology of his character, but also his language.”32 In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze elaborates Pasolini’s theory of the free-indirect: In the cinema of poetry, the distinction between what the character saw subjectively and what the camera saw objectively vanished, not in favor of one or the other, but because the camera assumed a subjective presence, acquired an internal vision, which entered into a relation of simulation (“mimesis”) with the character’s way of seeing. It is here that Pasolini discovered how to go beyond the two elements of the traditional story, the objective, indirect story from the camera’s point of view and the subjective, direct story from the character’s point of view, to achieve the very special form of a “free-indirect discourse,” of a free, indirect subjective.33 Pasolini’s film theory becomes one of the primary sources for what Deleuze identifies as a “cinema of time,” which arises in the postwar period. In a 1969 interview, Pasolini provides further insight into the free-indirect subjective, using the character Riccetto, protagonist of Ragazzi di Vita, as example: [T]o these extreme [literary] refinements, is mixed the most brutal, Roman language, and it is mixed in a technically exact way; thus, there is a pole that is extremely spoken, brutally physiological . . . But these two poles are so close as to mix, as to blend, as to contaminate. And this happens through that which the stylists call a discourse of the lived, or free-indirect discourse. It is true that sometimes I say: “Ricetto said” and then the curse that Ricetto says. But other times, instead to make a direct discourse, I think through Ricetto. This entails the linguistic contamination: I write his thoughts in his language. This linguistic contamination becomes then a fact of style; I don’t know it as a naturalistic fact, not at all, it could be at the limits of naturalism in direct discourses, but in free-indirect discourses this naturalism disappears

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completely, in favor of linguistic pastiche, of contamination. It was therefore a fact of style.34 Thus, according to Pasolini’s description of his own use of the freeindirect subjective, “contamination” occurs through the merging of his own cultured, literary background with that of the Roman subproletariat with which he came into contact while living in the city outskirt of Rebibbia between 1950 and 1954.35 The emergence of style comes through the author’s attempt to render the reality before him, not in a mode of simply recording what he sees and hears but, rather, in his submergence within reality. As I have shown in the earlier discussion of Notes for an African Orestes, there are convergences between Pasolini’s film theory and his understanding of the relationship between the West and his global subproletariat. The dichotomy of the “rational,” a term which he uses to define literary languages, and the brutal, concrete, and oneric, which describe the “language of action,” corresponds to the way in which Pasolini mediates the relation between the West and the Third World; a relation already established in his literary and filmic works dealing with northern Italian peasantry, the south, and the Roman borgate. As Louis-Georges Schwartz writes: True free-indirect discourse must bear the inscription of the socioeconomic difference between speakers in their language and consciousness . . . One could also say that free-indirect discourse exposes socio-economic differences between audiences. What is important is the existence of different languages, and hence of different social groups. Pasolini interprets the existence of languages other than the dominant one as concrete forms of social resistance.36 Schwartz’s comments return us to the interview scenes of Notes where Pasolini argues for the linguistic and ethnic diversity that colonialism had concealed. Unlike Notes, in Arabian Nights, Pasolini uses the freeindirect subjective and the subproletarian body as a means to bring forth new subjectivities. In the following reading of Arabian Nights, I explore the possibilities of free-indirect images in this final film of Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life. As John David Rhodes argues, the free-indirect subjective, as theorized in “The Cinema of Poetry,” can also be read as “a theorization of style as the very medium of the appearance of political consciousness in the cinema.”37 Through my reading of the Sium and Zumurrud

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episodes in Arabian Nights, I argue that the free-indirect subjective is utilized to destabilize gender, sexual, and racial binaries. By using the freeindirect subjective, Pasolini undermines the West/non-West dichotomy, ultimately moving toward a revolutionary global south.

Arabian Nights In the three films of the Trilogy of Life, Pasolini envisions a type of body and sex act that would serve as a form of political resistance to an encroaching mass capitalism. To this end, Pasolini selected three premodern texts for his Trilogy, portraying bodies in their most non-idealized state: dirty, diseased, fornicating, defecating, and dying. The Decameron (1971) and Canterbury Tales (1972) are particularly graphic, alternating between humorous and grave depictions of pedophilia, sodomy, and bestiality. Pasolini does not represent these acts in order to condemn them as tasteless or ribald but, rather, he refuses any moralistic redemption of the bodies or acts. As Maurizo Viano suggests, the Trilogy of Life film adaptations are without “any progressive imperative”; on the contrary, Pasolini’s own comments suggest that rational liberal modernity has only led to desacralization of the body. As Pasquale Verdicchio notes of Pasolini’s use of the human form: According to Pasolini, people’s physicality, their bodies and sexual organs, identify them as peripheral products of specific socio-economic conditions and a-historical conditions. Therefore, since the language of action or simply of offensive presence [is a] stage of pre-revolutionary contestation, official culture finds it necessary to silence or censor these bodies and render them invisible. The uninhibited display of sub-proletarian bodies one witnesses in most of Pasolini’s films is offensive to societal norms because it offers a code of being that demystified the ideal body of bourgeois representation and proposes (sub) alternatives to it.38 Pasolini’s Arabian Nights is a liberal adaptation of several stories from the collected text. Set in the medieval Arab world, the film was shot in various locations in Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran, and Nepal, and depicts a society very unlike that of the two previous films in the trilogy. The original story’s protagonist, Scheherazade, is replaced by the slave Zumurrud, who appears in “Ali Shar and Zumurrud,” the tale from which the majority of

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the film’s framing story is composed. The introduction of Zumurrud and her young master Nur-ed-Din is followed by Zumurrud’s telling of the tale of King Harun al-Rashid and Queen Zeudi. Zumurrud is then stolen and the second half of the film is framed by Nur-ed-Din’s search for her and comprises four interlocked stories, beginning with the tale of Prince Tagi and Princess Dunya, from which emerge the tales of Aziz and Aziza, Shazaman and the Demon, and Yunan and the Bronze Knight. After the conclusion of the Tagi and Dunya episode, the reunion of Zumurrud and Nur-ed-Din ends the film. Moving away from the dialectics that characterized his approach to the non-West in Notes for an African Orestes, Pasolini enacts a new engagement with the subproletariat body, in this instance, those of the actors selected during the sopraluogo for the film. In the following scene analyses, I make reference to an article published in the 1973 edition of Italian Playboy entitled “My Thousand and One Nights.” The essay amounts to a literary sopraluogo in that it is an anthropological investigation of postcolonial Africa, as well as the cultures of the various former colonial entities that have adapted themselves to the new era.

Harun-Sium-Zeudi The medieval Arab world, as imagined in Arabian Nights, is a site that allows for an imagining of eros—sexual love and desire—that is fluid and arbitrary in its object-choice. Pasolini attempts to situate a kind of sexuality that does not conform to heterosexual normativity or to the wave of sexual liberation occurring during this period, which he sees as a false liberation that is only reinforcing the repression of sexual difference. Pasolini adapts the tale of King Harun and Queen Zeudi in a manner that exchanges and redirects sexual desire in order to formulate a politics of the erotic. The tale involves a competition between Harun and Zeudi who wish to decide which of two youths is the most beautiful. Induced to sleep and awaken at separate times, the youth who awakens and loves the other loses the competition. In the end, both youths awaken and love each other, proving that the two are equally beautiful. Pasolini describes his revision of the tale in “My Thousand and One Nights”: I said, at the beginning of these notes, in the text of the “Thousand and one nights,” it is Harun who discovers the beauty of the girl Sitt, and Zobeida [Zeudi] who discovers the beauty of the boy Hasan; while in

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the film it is the pseudo Harun who discovers the beauty of the boy and Zobeida who sees the beauty of the girl. It is a modification that I have brought to the “Thousand and One Nights” according to my style.39 The changes that Pasolini brings to the text are not simply to assert a new hierarchy in which homosexuality is placed at the fore. Rather, Pasolini goes on to describe a symmetry of sexual orientation that can be enacted due to the subtleties of the text. He continues: [The stories of the “Thousand and one nights”] are full of stereotypes, but also with exquisiteness and ambiguity. Every story is a story of an anomaly of destiny. Banal simplicity is not present. In the specific case, the general design of the group of stories is such that, in the true story of Sitt and Hasan, it is true that the king discovers the girl and the queen discovers the boy: an infinity of other anomalies supply and adjust this obvious and natural point of departure. In the film . . . I had to recuperate, concentrating the motivations, the given and hidden elements . . . For example, in this instance, a symmetrical homosexuality upon which is superimposed, rendering it prehistorical and profound in its reality, an equally symmetrical heterosexuality, that however, in turn remains consequentially suspended and deprived of its blind certainty . . . There are in the “Thousand and One Nights” infinite, pathetic, eulogies of homosexuality and infinite, venerated exemplifications of magic: but no one attempts an explanation . . . Thus it gives to these phenomena the same absoluteness of the purest normality.40 In his film adaptation, Pasolini brings into question the “certainty” of heterosexuality by positing a “symmetrical” homosexuality that exists and can be made present through the force of destiny intrinsic to the tales. The tale of King Harun begins with a wide-angle shot of Queen Zeudi bathing in a small pond. In the next shot we see King Harun spying on his wife from behind the bushes, followed by a medium close-up of Zeudi, then of Harun, followed by Zeudi’s reaction shots, a look of surprise and then the covering of her sex, and ending with Harun leaving the scene. In the next sequence, Harun is walking with his entourage and the court poet Sium, who he asks to write a poem from a prompt based on his experience viewing Zeudi at the pond. Sium recites: Misfortune; my eye saw her and holds me in an anguish that ought to leave . . . The gazelle that has made me her prisoner by the shadow

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of two palm trees. She poured the water on her body from a silver vase. She saw me and covered herself. But her sex spread between her hands. Oh if I could get on top, one hour or two!41 Here, Pasolini enacts a movement from reality to cinematic language, and then to poetic language. Sium’s role as mediator between Harun and Zeudi is significant in that it occurs through poetry. Sium gives verse to Harun’s emotions by adopting his position in relation to Zeudi. In the Harun and Zeudi shot sequence, except for overdubbed sound of water, wind, and physical movement, Pasolini does not use sound, emphasizing montage as the central mode of narration. He also eschews the use of the shot-reverse-shot technique, using instead a series of frontal long, medium, and close-up shots.42 The technique seems basic and sparse, but renders the immediacy of the visual experience that the film suggests is equal to that given by poetry. Pasolini continues his exploration of eros in a scene in which Sium solicits three young men for an evening of festivities. The symmetrical relation between heterosexuality and homosexuality having been established in the previous scenes, the Sium interlude is introduced in an open exterior, in the midst of a community gathering. The interaction between Sium and the young men is characterized by light banter as the poet entices his lovers with poetry rather than money: Sium: Boys! May I read to you my verses? I wrote them some years ago when I was young like you. “An aged man with young desires loves the beautiful boys; he has passion for amusements. He awakes in the morning in the spirit of Mossul. Ah, the city of purity! But throughout the day, he dreams of nothing other than the sinful life of Aleppo!”43 This scene plays with a series of binary relations in that Sium is presented to the young men as both the elder and the youth who has written the verses. The recitation also describes a split between the body and spirit, and the encounter takes place at a site where the separation between public and private domains is indiscernible. These contradictions are not experienced as antagonistic, but follow from Pasolini’s theory of contamination. The next scene takes place in Sium’s tent, where after a series of shots depicting the interior of Sium’s abode, we are given a partial view of the poet with the three boys. The camera is positioned at a point directly outside a room in which the four kneeling figures are seen from the

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waist down. The three youths are nude and kneel frontally, while Sium appears on screen right kneeling toward them. This establishing shot is followed by a series of shot-counter-shots consisting of close-ups of Sium and the three men as the poet is reciting verses. The sequence ends as the viewer is returned to the original image of the men kneeling, followed by a close-up of Sium and concluding with an image of the male genitals. The Sium episode corresponds with Pasolini’s interest in overcoming moralistic prohibitions on homosexuality, representing relations among men that are not condemned by their larger community. However, while the presentation of the subproletariat body challenges the degradation of the human form in modern capitalist societies, the bodies and sex acts shown in the Trilogy were also read as pornographic, as is seen by the popular reception of the Trilogy films.44 The African, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean locations that Pasolini selected to film parts of the Trilogy not only offered him an opportunity to imagine a mythical, premodern world, but can also be read as what Robert Aldrich refers to as “sites of colonial homoeroticism.”45 Maurizio Viano adds, “The Trilogia della vita operated as if its author did not know that the search for a ‘savage’ adolescent by a cultivated older man was a topos of homosexual literature and practice.”46 However, as Caminati and Trento suggest, the scene can also be read in relation to Pasolini’s concept of diverso and the global south.47 The parallels between the director and the poet Sium are sustained by Pasolini’s adaptation of the original text. As Caminati notes, in the original screenplay for Arabian Nights, Pasolini substitutes Scheherazade with four Arab youths. In terms of Pasolini’s depiction of eros and postcoloniality, there are similarities between the original screenplay opening, where four young Arab men participate in sexual play with one another, and the Sium scene. Of the original screenplay, Caminati writes: The decision to multiply Scheherazade transforming her into four Arab subproletariats is an ingenious class and gender inversion. Pasolini substitutes the image of the woman—a figure of shrewdness and of oriental passivity—with one—the neo-urbanized youth—of strong social and political significance.48 As I will argue later, Pasolini makes use of a similar substitution with his Zumurrud, who comes to represent a fluid, hybrid identity in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. However, in the Sium episode, as with his

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interview with the African students in his African Orestes, Pasolini is once again confronted with the racial and class difference between himself and his subjects. More precisely, can Pasolini perform a revolutionary aesthetics that can supersede racial and class difference? This inquiry is not a condemnation of Pasolini’s project but seeks to speculate on the possibilities and limits of the use of a free-indirect subjective in film. In an article published March 20, 1975, Pasolini addresses the fictional Neapolitan youth Gennariello, touching upon the issue of tolerance within Italian society. At one point, speaking about his homosexuality, Pasolini writes: “I am like a negro in a racist society which has felt the need to indulge in a spirit of tolerance. That is to say, I am tolerated.”49 Pasolini’s illustrative comparison is placed in the context of letters that are addressed to a youth of the subproletariat. In his letters, he acknowledges the difference between himself (literate, left intellectual artist) and his pupil, and the awareness of difference must also be considered in his equation of the lived existence of homosexuals and black peoples. Pasolini describes a psychic condition whereby the “negro,” although allowed to exist “normally without obstacles to his difference,” will carry within him the “mental ghetto” of a tolerance that always assumes “condemnation.”50 Here, “negro” and “homosexual” are collapsed together out of the mutual experience of oppression and repressive tolerance,51 a solidarity that as theorist Kobena Mercer explains was not uncommon during this era of decolonization and cultural transformation. However, as Pasolini acknowledges in his letters to Gennariello, the differences between them are insurmountable, even as he outlines the conditions and offers instruction to overcome the forces that are destroying his culture. Similarly, there is a limit to Pasolini’s expression “I am like a negro” of which he is conscious (“like a negro”), but to which he nevertheless makes recourse in order to describe the discrimination he experiences as a homosexual. As Kobena Mercer suggests, such a comparison is characteristic of the political coalitions sought during this period, and consistent with Pasolini’s aesthetics and politics of the body: The word liberation tends to stick in our throats these days because it sounds so deeply unfashionable; but we might also recall that in the 1950s and 1960s it was precisely the connections between movements for the liberation from colonialism and movements for the liberation from the dominant sex and gender system that underlined their radical democratic character. Under what conditions does eroticism

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mingle with political solidarity? When does it produce an effect of empowerment? And when does it produce an effect of disempowerment? When does identification imply objectification, and when does it imply equality?52 While the scene continues the play of eros, and parallels can be made between Sium the poet and Pasolini the poet-director, I suggest that even by way of the free-indirect subjective, Pasolini’s consciousness of colonial oppression inform his rendering of the scene, due to the knowledge that such a merging between the poet-director and his characters cannot be made without invoking a history of racism and Italian colonialism in Africa. I want to substantiate this reading by means of a brief encounter between Pasolini and one of his found actors recounted in the same “My Thousand and One Nights.” In this passage, Pasolini describes his selection of the actor who portrays Berhame (Hasan), the young boy favored by King Harun: Of Fessazion Gherentiel, who will be Hasan, I know something of his body. I had never examined him out of prudence, and for shame of seeming like a slave owner examining the goods. But a series of bad experiences had persuaded me to examine him, at least in some way: to see that is, the nude body of the actor before using it, using his nudity. To say it is brutal, let alone actually doing it. The boy undressed before me, Peter and Fredzy, in Peter’s room at the Imperial Hotel, where Peter stayed. It was a rapid and silent operation, and he took away one by one his poor articles of clothing, all dry and dirty, especially his socks and shoes, white with dust, and in a dry, burnt aura of dust, his nude body appeared, covered only by a pair of colored, striped briefs, the swelling of his sex was, as we say, normal, and so I did the sign to Fessazion Gherentiel not to complete his undressing, interrupting him while, obediently and submissively, he was about to do it.53 On his sopraluogi, Pasolini searched for and was attentive to the physiognomy of the actors he sought to portray roles in his films. Thus, what is described in the scene above is not an unusual gesture on the part of the filmmaker. However, in commenting on his physical inspection of the young woman who plays Berhame’s lover Giana, Pasolini writes that her figure could be discerned through her dress and no additional inspection was necessary.54 Here, the homoerotics of this encounter is of interest

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mainly because it becomes entwined with a discourse regarding slavery. The “dry and dirty” clothing, markers of Gherentiel’s socioeconomic status, are removed to reveal his form, which emerges like a specter out of the dusty air. Once Pasolini surmises that the size of the penis is “normal” by viewing its impression through the undergarment, he indicates to the young man to stop undressing. The anxiety concerning the use of the youth’s nude form is centered on the penis. However, the inspection is not taken to its conclusion, the actual sight of Gherentiel’s sex. Pasolini acknowledges a feeling of guilt in his inspection of Gherentiel’s body because he can imagine himself in the position of a “slave owner examining his goods.” The political implications of this episode are heightened by placing the encounter in a bedroom of the “Imperial Hotel,” emphasizing the parallel between Pasolini’s meeting with Gherentiel and the larger history of Italian colonial occupation of Eritrea. Positioned as potential master and lover, Pasolini’s gesture to stop disrobing interrupts a desire that is potentially colonizing. To entirely undress Gherentiel, thereby revealing his sex, would compromise the director’s ability to claim and revolutionize his own “difference,” which he has aligned with anticolonial struggle. Yet in the same instance, Pasolini’s interaction with Gherentiel remains within the realm of a master–slave dichotomy as Pasolini issues the command to stop undressing that Gherentiel silently obeys. Within the context of what Homi Bhabha has described as “racial fetishism,” the dirty garments, the dust, and the cloth all become fetish objects that serve to acknowledge yet disavow racial difference, but that also signify the “menace” of colonial discourse. This figuring of lack is problematic in terms of Pasolini’s concept of diverso that seeks to retain difference in the face of an oppressive hegemony. To restate, diverso is a term used to describe homosexuality but was also expanded upon by Pasolini as a means to preserve cultural diversity in the form of subproletariat dialects, knowledge, and experiences that remain outside of and threatened by hegemonic discourse. To seek “sameness” through a disavowal of racial difference is to contradict diverso, yet at the same time, to maintain difference through the installation of a fetish object is to become complicit in the logic of racial oppression. In this instance, to reveal the penis, to grant desire, to “use” Gherentiel’s sex is to commit violence. The scene in the Imperial Hotel raises a central problem of presenting the revolutionary subproletariat body that Pasolini admits in his “abiura” of the Trilogy and in Salò, namely that to depict the body is always, in some form, a violation.

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As will be shown in the following discussion of Zumurrud, Pasolini is conscious of how the body and the sex act can be used to challenge normative categories of race, gender, and sexual identity. The Sium and Gherentiel episodes are presented here to further consider Pasolini’s revision of his project as expressed in the “Trilogy of Life Rejected.” As Pasolini predicted, the bodies presented in The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, and finally Arabian Nights became the victims of pornographic exploitation, evacuated of their liberatory potential, while the peoples of the Third World are also reduced under the mantra of samenessin-difference through the logic of mass capitalism. Although this statement may be true of the signifying presence of blackness within postmodernity, in the following discussion of the character of Zumurrud, I suggest that the actress’ mixed-race heritage offers another reading of blackness that troubles yet ultimately extends Pasolini’s theory of the diverso by referencing the history of Italian fascism and colonialism.

Zumurrud Zumurrud first appears in the opening scene of Arabian Nights being bid upon by potential buyers in an outdoor marketplace. Although a commodity, she is given a modicum of agency through her ability to select her new master. Through wit and intelligence, Zumurrud manipulates her limited situation by heckling and berating members of the maledominated arena. At one point in the sequence, she renders impotent the most powerful merchant-patriarch by publicly chiding his sex as a “candle” that cannot be lit. Ignoring her solicitors, Zumurrud selects the naïve and inexperienced Nur-ed-Din as her new owner. Throughout the film, Zumurrud refers to Nur-ed-Din as her master; yet in this scene, she provides the 1,000 dinars for her purchase, orchestrating a circulation of currency that allows her to buy herself. As in the Harun and Zeudi tale, Pasolini illustrates a “symmetrical” relation between the terms enslavement/freedom and master/slave. The dominant terms remain, but they are neutralized through Zumurrud’s management of chance and the arbitrary. Inez Pelligrini was a 21-year-old model living and working in Europe when Pasolini viewed her portfolio and selected her for the role of Zumurrud. Raised in Rome, Pelligrini was born in Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea, to an Italian father and Eritrean mother. Her mixed heritage led to several monikers in the Italian press, including “faccetta nera”

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(pretty little black face), “cioccolationo” (chocolate candy), “negretta,” and “meticcia,” an offensive designation for peoples of mixed European and African ancestry.55 The terms used to describe Pelligrini in the press coverage for Arabian Nights are reminiscent of the language of the Italian colonialist era, and it is to this evocation of the Italian past raised by the circulation of Pelligrini’s image that I wish to turn.

The Return of the “Faccetta Nera” As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, the marching song “Faccetta Nera” was popularized during the deployment of troops for the occupation of Ethiopia beginning in 1935, and used to encourage enlistment and raise support for the extension of the Italian colonial presence in North Africa.56 In the “Faccetta Nera” the Ethiopian woman becomes a metaphor for Italy’s colonial ambitions, which are undertaken through the themes of rescue and salvation recurrent throughout the song. The “Faccetta Nera” is a variation of the “Smiling Negress,” another popular icon that circulated in Italy around the turn of the twentieth century. Both the “Faccetta Nera” and the “Smiling Negress” were used in advertising campaigns for products such as chocolate and coffee, luxury commodities that could be garnered through the acquisition of colonial territories. By the time the song was disseminated in the early 1930s, the smiling face of the “Faccetta Nera” chocolates was a familiar Italian cultural icon, already associated with the economic benefits of colonial expansion.57 The official and commercial use of images of African women was paralleled by the circulation of postcards, anthropological journals, and personal photographs which point toward mixed-race unions within the institution of madamismo and the means by which these unions were negotiated during and after the fascist regime’s prohibition of interracial unions. Among actions to discourage interracial unions, Mussolini had the “Faccetta Nera” lyrics changed soon after Ethiopia was brought under Italian rule, replacing the original lines with: Black face, get away from me \ I want a white woman \ Made like me . . .58 Segregation laws enacted within the Italian East African Empire in 1937, the Race Laws of 1938, and the “Manifesto of Racial Scientists” further attempted to transform the signification of the image of black women in Italian society.59 In “My Thousand and One Nights,” Pasolini is aware of the lingering impact of colonialism, and the colonial legacy is evident as he travels

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through the former Italian colonial territories, selecting shooting locations and actors. Due to her upbringing, Pelligrini is distinguished from the actors selected for the roles in the King Harun and Sium episodes in that she is the product of both African and Italian cultures. As discussed previously, the news features regarding Pelligrini describe her as: “21 years old, a photo model since the age of three, born in Asmara, living in Rome since she was a little girl. The story of her fortune began one day in November last year, when Pier Paolo Pasolini saw several of her photographs and decided that she would be the interpreter of the role of Zumurrud in the film Le mille e una notte . . .”60 In this quote from “My One Thousand Nights,” Pasolini provides an affective description of his Zumurrud: I was in Eritrea only to select actors; especially young women, that in the Arab countries are impossible to find. The Eritrean women are of a particular, apprehensive beauty. When I saw in the PEA (Produzioni Europee Associati) offices a mixed-race Eritrean-Italian woman (who would play the part of the slave Zumurrud) I was nearly moved to tears before those small and irregular, but perfect elements, those of a metal statue, at that twittering, interrogative Italian, and those eyes prepared in an uncertain implore. I was in Asmara looking for other young women like her.61 The description, which focuses on the face, can be read as reminiscent of the “Faccetta Nera,” albeit decontextualized from early-twentiethcentury Italian colonialism. As with Gherentiel, Pasolini’s attention is drawn to the aesthetic qualities of Pelligrini’s form; however, toward the end of his brief elation, he moves toward abstraction as Pelligrini’s features become that of a “of a metal statue.” Inez Pelligrini, however, is not a member of the Italian subproletariat, as were the young men recruited to perform in Pasolini’s films concerning the Roman borgate or the other cast members from Sicily, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa who appear in Arabian Nights. As a fashion model, Pelligrini is part of and circulates within Italian culture and society as a signifier of blackness and female sexuality in the colonial imaginary, but also of a cultural heterogeneity that is subsumed by the nation-state formation and the bounded identities it constructs. While as Zumurrud, Pelligrini performs as an indigenous “other,” who unlike the Italian actors in the film is not readily seen as the Italian national that she is, the film production photographs, in which she

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appears in contemporary Western clothing, wigs, or with straightened hair, contrasts this image of Pelligrini as the “native” woman for Western consumption.62 The reversal that takes place in the marketplace scene, in which Zumurrud, the slave, uses her cunning to purchase her freedom, parallels the way in which Pelligrini’s image both supports and undermines the colonizer/colonized dichotomy, speaking both to an Italian colonial imaginary that constructs her image as the reemergence of the “Faccetta Nera,” and to the possibility of uncovering an already existing cultural and racial heterogeneity. The use of mixed-race identity to challenge the fascist colonial legacy and supersede the West/non-West dichotomy corresponds with Pasolini’s merging of Eastern and Western visual regimes in Arabian Nights. In his reading of Arabian Nights, Patrick Rumble argues that Pasolini merges Western and Eastern “visual dialects,” including the hegemonic Western perspectival system with that of the spatial orientation enacted in Eastern representation, such as the seventeenth-century Rajput miniature that inspired the meeting between Aziz and his lover in the “Aziz and Aziza” episode, as a means of enacting a “contamination” between Western and non-Western cultures. Rumble writes: Just as his early poems in the Friulian dialect formed a linguistic resistance to the standardizing culture of Fascism in the early 1940s, the contamination of visual languages characteristic of Il fiore, in its mixture of Western and Oriental pictorial models, is a manifestation of an analogous resistance to what he called in his Lettere luterane the “angolo visuale” (or “visual angle”) of the conformist or even neo-Fascist majority. Regional dialects and visual subcultures serve as functions of Pasolini’s search for counter-traditions and counter-sexualities.63 Ultimately, Pelligrini’s mixed-race body as reference to Italian colonial history is brought forth in Pasolini’s essay as a tension between nostalgia and the desire to free oneself from the fantasies that structure colonial relations.64 The liberatory potential of the mixed-race identity can be seen in the final mirrored chamber scene of Pasolini’s Arabian Nights. After the end of the tale of Harun and Zeudi, Zumurrud is captured, escapes, and then arrives at a city where, having dressed herself in men’s clothing she is mistaken for a young man, and is told by the waiting citizens and city officials that since the death of their king, they vowed to make ruler the first male who approached their city from the desert. The head

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magistrate then offers his daughter as bride, and Zumurrud is married to the young woman. When the bride is presented in the bedroom chamber, Zumurrud reveals her sex and wins the bride’s support in finding her lost master. In this scene, Zumurrud appears seated in front of a large mirror in which the young bride is seen reflected. The chamber itself is filled with mirrors of various shapes and sizes. It is the location where Zumurrud is free to reveal her identity, as she is able to explain her ruse to the pleasure of the princess. Zumurrud/Pelligrini is not the only character to complete this inversion of gender identity; in fact, a young male actor performs the role of the princess.65 The mirrored room, which reflects itself in an infinite procession of frames within frames, is symbolic of the fluid and infinite slippage between male and female identities. Zumurrud provides the first signs of her sex by revealing her breasts, then removes her mask, and fully disrobes, overlapping the image of the princess framed within the mirror behind her. The room can be interpreted as one that “looks” back upon the viewer, although the only mirror that reflects is the large, central one that dominates the chamber. As with the opening scene in the marketplace, Zumurrud has once again subverted a patriarchal order in that her gender masquerade allows her to assume leadership of the city through marriage with the princess. The entrance into the chamber to disclose another self also demarks a separation between the public and the private, where Zumurrud upends the gender hierarchy between “husband” and “bride,” showing herself to be female like the princess and unable to produce an heir. The chamber scenes can be read against the opening marketplace sequence in which Zumurrud is placed as an object to be looked at. Here, her body enjoys a cohesion and prominence in the diegetic space of the film. After an amorous interlude in which the story of Tagy and Dunya is concluded, Nur-ed-Din resumes his search for his stolen slave. Led through the desert by an enchanted lion, Nur-ed-Din is taken to the city where Zumurrud is serving as king. After eating from a forbidden plate of rice, Nur-ed-Din is arrested, bathed, clothed, and ordered to the prince’s chamber, where he believes he will become the king’s concubine. Zumurrud orders the reluctant Nur-ed-Din to remove his clothing and present himself on the bed. Zumurrud allows Nur-ed-Din to believe she is a man until she finally reveals herself, and the two are reunited. During this sequence, Nur-ed-Din is laid out upon the bed, revealing himself in preparation for what he believes will be intercourse with the prince. The camera presents a foreshortened view of Nur-ed-Din’s

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body and the wall directly behind the bed. This wall is also decorated with multiple mirrors, and in one small, decorated centered frame, we see reflected the image of Zumurrud’s face, still disguised as a male. Although different in subject matter and composition, the reflection of Zumurrud’s face in the mirror is reminiscent of the organization of subject viewing positions in Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656). I turn to a brief discussion of this painting because in using the free-indirect subjective, Pasolini attempts a similar displacement of the author’s viewing position that is achieved in Velazquez’s work. In Las Meninas, Velazquez depicts the Infanta Margherita surrounded by her maidservants and attendants in a large hall, which also represents the painter at work on a large canvas. The painting’s originality in the history of Western art comes from the representation of Philip IV and Queen Maria Ana, the models for the artist’s work, as seen in reflection upon a mirror on a wall behind the painting’s subjects. In his analysis of Las Meninas, Michel Foucault argues that the painting’s multiple points of view confirm the impossibility of an image’s achieving objective reality.66 Pasolini’s use of multiple mirrors may also be a means by which the author introduces a critique of objective realism. As John R. Searle writes, Velasquez’s image is distinctive in that it undermines the assumptions of “classical pictorial representation.” In particular, this form of representation holds that the painting is a representation of what the artist sees from some chosen point of view, or, as Searle says, the point of view is “not a natural point in the world; it is defined relative to whatever it is that can be seen.”67 By placing himself inside the painting while, as suggested by their images reflected in the painting’s mirror, Philip IV and Maria Ana occupy the artist’s viewpoint, Velasquez disassociates the “‘I see’ of the picture and the ‘I see’ of the painter of the picture.”68 Through the mirror reflection we view Zumurrud, who occupies the artist’s point of view. If we consider the filmmaker’s biography, we may suggest that the construction of the mise-en-scène allows the director to merge his desire with that of Zumurrud, providing an example of how the free-indirect subjective is made possible within the cinema. This suggestion may be further supported by Zumurrud’s identity as both male and female. In this sense, the use of the free-indirect subjective inserts the homoerotic gaze within the text. This final scene also places Pasolini in the position of the “other” both in terms of gender and race. As Trento argues, Pasolini is not operating in an “orientalist” manner, simply constructing an imaginary “Africa” to support an image of the “West”; but rather, posits an “unstable, fluid,

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global south” and “[inserts] himself into the play of representations.” The north/south dichotomy is therefore never static, but a relative position.69 Trento continues: The approach to postcolonial studies is likely to remain bogged down in Manichaean dichotomies, Western/non-Western or colonial/postcolonial . . . On the contrary, Pasolini conceives of his own life, his own work and his observation of the “other” as dynamic elements that continually fade, reshuffle or contradict set categories, drawing their own force from an oxymoronic tension which, I believe, could be further developed critically. Moreover, with a continual inclination towards interdisciplinarity and transversality, with a markedly autobiographical approach, Pasolini lives and manifests, ahead of his time, the limits of the “observer/observed” dichotomy.70 Pasolini was later to reject the Trilogy of Life because of the inability to represent the reality of bodies in the midst of a “consumerist power” that grants only a “repressive tolerance” to sexual difference. However, Arabian Nights, through Pasolini’s use of the free-indirect subjective, offers a mode by which the body can be used as a critique of cultural homogeneity and Italian colonial history. This ability to create a “social text” through the relation between the languages of cinema and reality, hinges on the body’s ability to mediate the two. As Bruno writes: Like his writings, Pasolini’s films are populated by corporeal signifiers. His cinema refigures the politics of the body, and reclaims the inscription of the lumpenproletariat physiognomy and the homosexual gaze in the filmic landscape. Both his cinematic and theoretical works are informed by “fisicità” a physical pregnancy, as Pasolini practices writing’s visibility. In dialogue between the subject and res, the position of the subject is defined in relation to the corporeal “smell”—the imprint of sex, class, race, and the geopolitics of physiognomy. This imprint is marked on the subject’s body as well as on the body of things, on their system of use and exchange values.71 If perhaps Pasolini was unsuccessful in his attempt to confront the loss of subproletarian cultures in the onslaught of mass capitalism, Pelligrini’s body on screen becomes an opportunity to reexamine the suppressed

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history of Italian colonialism. Arabian Nights, by positing a fluid and interchangeable notion of identity through the use of the free-indirect subjective, moves beyond static constructions of racial and national identities, and toward a postnationality characterized by the end of colonial hierarchies and the emergence of hybrid identities.

Salò The “reality” of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, enslaved by consumerist power indeed such violence to human bodies has become the most macroscopic fact of the new human epoch. Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Trilogy of Life Rejected (1975)72 Pasolini’s rejection of the Trilogy is made upon three conditions: first, the co-optation of the sexual liberation movement; second, the “innocent” or subproletariat body he depicted in the films has not only been desecrated but, Pasolini adds, if they could be manipulated within modern capitalism, they always already had the potential to be despoiled, thereby undermining the strategy of seeking the subproletarian body in a precapitalist past; finally, homosexuality, instead of being integrated within a continuum of possible sexual orientations, has become emblematic of masochistic fantasy, and of what Pasolini describes as “suicidal disappointment . . . shapeless torpor.”73 The terms “neofascism” and “neocapitalism” come to describe this period, which Pasolini does not view as simply the resurgence of the former period of political totalitarianism, but as Michael Ceasar remarks: [T]he memory of the old Fascism seems to remain in a new civilization which otherwise erases all reference to the past other than for purely instrumental purposes and is governed by an unbridled consumerism, facilitated by a conformity and uniformity produced by the triumphant imposition of the mass media, and more broadly of a mass culture, which encourage, or demand, a desacralized view of life and a cult of gratification and enjoyment. This hedonism, as Pasolini calls it, is endorsed by the “repressive tolerance” of power, in other words, the ability of power to tolerate everything and allow nothing.74 Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) is based on the Marquis de Sade’s 1785 “The 120 Days of Sodom.” Pasolini sets De Sade’s work (originally

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set during the end of the reign of Louis XIV) in Salò, the northern Italian town that the Germans established as the last stronghold of the Italian fascist regime beginning in 1943. Aware that the regime is about to be overthrown, four fascist libertines, Blangis the Duke, Curval the Magistrate, the Bishop, and the President, inspect and choose nine male and nine female youths from the small village. Along with their wives and daughters, the libertines transport their captives to a remote estate, where they perpetrate a series of sexual and physical tortures, inspired by stories recited by their female collaborators. The film, following the organization of Dante’s L’Inferno, is divided into four episodes beginning with the Antechamber of Hell, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Excrement, and culminating in the Circle of Blood where all the youths are maimed and slaughtered. In my discussion of this film, I turn again to the figure of Inez Pelligrini who appears briefly in Salò as a maid of the estate. As a servant, her character does not participate in the activities designated for the gathered youths; she only appears twice in the film: during the party’s arrival at the estate and then when she is murdered just prior to the “Circle of Blood” episode. In the first scene, as the libertines establish the rules that will govern the events to take place, a brief scene occurs outside the surveillance of the libertines showing the maid making eye contact with one of the young men recruited to serve as a guard. The two characters next appear shortly before the final death orgy of the film. The Bishop enters the female sleeping quarters on suspicion that one of the girls has hidden a sentimental object, a photograph of a young man. In order to avoid punishment, the young girl leads the Bishop to two other females who are shown having sexual intercourse. To save themselves, the two girls reveal that the guard and the maid are having an affair. All four libertines and the young girl walk down to the servant’s quarters and spy on the two in bed. Alerted by their presence, the guard stands up and foists his arm in the air as a sign of resistance. The libertines are stunned and hesitate for a moment before shooting the guard several times in the chest. The President walks over to a chair where the maid is crouched and kills her. The movement of the sequence of shots is not necessarily through different forms of impermissible sex acts, but rather through prohibited acts of free will. The condemnation on the part of the libertines is because the youths have freely chosen and attempt to develop affective attachments outside the laws that dictate all actions that occur at the estate. The youths are given reprieves, not for relinquishing the desired

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object, but for complying with the libertines’ rule. The guard is murdered, I would argue, because of his engagement in an act of miscegenation. Although condoning coprophagy, torture, and various forms of sexual violence, interracial conjugal relations remain outside the libertines’ imaginary. The libertines scotomize the act of interracial sex because the ideal “white” body, which they have carefully selected and preserved for their own uses, has entered into relation with a body that does not fall within their defined parameters. In this scene of miscegenation, Pasolini enters a critique of both the prohibitions against interracial unions enacted during the fascist regime and the then-contemporary debates concerning sexual liberation. As has been discussed in Chapter 1, fascist aesthetics, such as seen in the work of futurist F. T. Marinetti, displayed contempt for bourgeois norms concerning sex and sexuality.75 However, the regime itself, through the issuance of race manifestos and laws, and the institution of segregation in the Italian East African empire, sought to delimit and preserve an AryanItalian identity. The safeguarding of a mythic racial identity through white endogamy helped promote the nation-ideal as a homogeneous, racially uniform entity. However, I would not argue that in this scene of resistance Pasolini is using interracial intercourse as a means to simply criticize racism. Rather, the scene transforms what was conceived as the libertine’s sexual perversion and what they themselves believed as their radical breach from bourgeois convention, into a pure banality, a vicious exercise of power with no liberatory value. The final orgy of the film is the death and mutilation of the idealized form, which like Pasolini’s “revolutionary” subproletariat body, never existed. I’ve argued that Pier Paolo Pasolini, through his use of the freeindirect subjective, inaugurates a new representation of mixed-race identities in Italian film, one that puts forth more fluid and hybrid constructions that deconstruct binaries such as north/south and West/nonWest. In examining Notes for an African Orestes, I first discussed Pasolini’s approach to the Third World as the possibility for the resurgence of a “global subproletariat” to counteract the progress of mass capitalism and homogenization of Italian society. Although Notes, as a becomingfilm, parallels the filmmaking process with the decolonization movements taking place on the African continent, the interview with the African students suggest that Pasolini’s diverso, the reemergence of cultural, ethnic, and racial heterogeneity, can be interpreted as another form of colonization.

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In the Trilogy of Life series, Pasolini proposes a preindustrial, precapitalist, “revolutionary” body as a critique to what he viewed as the commodification of bodies in the era of countercultural politics and social reform movements. In the Arabian Nights, Pasolini invokes this body, however with varied results. By reading his adaptation of the tales of Harun, Sium, and Zumurrud through his sopraluogo documented in “My Thousand and One Nights,” we find the persistent affects of racial fetishism and the colonial imaginary intertwined with goals of liberation and transformation through the creative process. I propose a reading of Pasolini’s films through his theory of contamination, allowing for the presence of contradictions that are raised by the bodies he reveals on screen. Through the use of the free-indirect subjective in the mirrored chamber scenes from Arabian Nights, the director is displaced from the position of authorial point-of-view, suggesting the foundation for new arrangements of sexual, gender, and racial identities. Finally, Salò can be read as a cautionary work regarding the failure to reassess the formation of the Italian “people” and the loss of a generative heterogeneity that is required to establish the nation.

From Pasolini’s Third World to the Twenty-First-Century Global South: Gomorrah and Considerations of Italy and the “Global South” in the Twenty-First Century It has been over 35 years since Pasolini’s Arabian Nights and over half a century since the poet/director’s first considerations of the non-West as a site for revolution and emancipation from neocapitalism. In that time Italy has undergone a now well-documented transition from a country of emigration to immigration. Despite the rejection of the Trilogy of Life and the loss of the Third World and global subproletariat as a source of revolutionary transformation, Pasolini’s explorations of the global south do anticipate many of the economic and migratory shifts that have taken place within the last 30 years. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in Empire, their geopolitical study of the post–World War II era, neoliberal economic policies have contributed to the demise of the nation-state and its ability to construct homogeneous national identities.76 The rise of immigration to European countries, necessitated by economic crises, civil and ethnic wars, and environmental catastrophe in the Third World, or now global

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south, has led to the rise of extreme right-wing parties with anti-immigration platforms based in xenophobia and racism. In northern Italy, under the auspices of the Northern League Party, the recognition of ethnic diversity has led to challenges to the Italian central government and calls for federalist reforms that will give the northern regions more control over their economy. While the north hosts the highest numbers of foreign immigrants in the country, this diversity is based on the need for low-wage labor as northern industries and small businesses seek to remain competitive in a highly flexible global economy. Ironically, the “post-national” society that is emerging in Italy is still underscored by the north/south division in which the south is constructed as the economic “ball and chain” of the north and also as the site for the influx of illegal immigrants. In the past two decades, several films have approached the issue of immigration, and the encounter with the migrant “other,” representing how the new patterns of emigration and immigration challenge “Italian” racial and national identity.77 In this section, I discuss Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008), the film adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, an expose of the Neapolitan criminal syndicate, the Camorra. While the film does not wholly adapt the politics of Saviano’s novel, I argue that Gomorrah’s representation of the Italian south can be read as a visualization of the impact of neocapitalism on Italy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Garrone and his commentators have noted that the Camorra operates as a multinational corporation and, in many ways, is an organization that is emblematic of our current era of globalization. Like Saviano’s novel, Garrone’s film can be read in relation to Pasolini’s investigations on the global south, returning us once again to the north/ south divide and Italian racial and national identity formation. If in the late 1960s and early 1970s Pasolini detailed the catastrophic impact of neocapitalism on the Italian subproletariat and working classes in numerous articles and in his films, Gomorrah offers a dystopic vision of advanced capitalism. A New York Times review of the film states that unlike Saviano’s “passionately personal approach” in his novel, Garone’s Gomorrah is “emotionally detached,” and more of an “ethnographic study” of the Camorra.78 As one journalist writes, the Camorra is a paradigm of postindustrial globalization as Saviano’s novel reveals, “how the Camorra, unlike the more famous Sicilian mafia, which operates as a more insular network—has embraced globalization.”79 The Camorra embraced a neoliberalist ideology that allows the federation of clans to cross borders and infiltrate

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numerous markets throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Saviano comments: Investigations conducted by the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor reveal that the Camorra’s flexible, federalist structure has completely transformed the fabric of the families: instead of diplomatic alliances and stable pacts, clans now operate more like business committees. The Camorra’s flexibility reflects its need to move capital, set up, and liquidate companies, circulate money, and invest quickly in real estate.80 The instance of the “British Camorrista,” the first non-Italian to become a member of an Italian mafia organization, is illustrative of the ways in which processes of globalization have challenged the nation-state formation and the identities it constructs. Both the novel and the film offer an analysis of the effects of global capitalism in Italy in the twenty-first century. While non-Western European immigrants live and operate within the network of Camorra-controlled territories and activities, they are not the central focus of the film’s narrative, which focuses primarily on the lives of southern Italians who occupy the housing projects on the northern outskirts of Naples. By narrating the lives of southern Italians living under Camorra authority and their relations with non-Western European migrants, Garrone’s Gomorrah invokes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work on the Roman borgate, the Italian subproletariat, and the global south. As discussed earlier, beginning in the 1950s, Pasolini’s interest in the decolonization movements merged with his investigations of the impact of neocapitalism on the Italian subproletariat. The global south encompasses the postcolonial subjects from the former European colonial territories that would within the next three decades begin to make their way to Europe, as well as the postcolonial subjects within Italy, the agricultural laborers who migrated to central and northern Italian urban centers and became the industrial worker class and petite-bourgeoisie. Gomorrah has been called a neo-neorealist film for its documentary-like depiction of life in the Scampìa and Secondigliano projects. Garrone sets his film in the actual housing projects; uses both professional and nonprofessional actors; and uses camera techniques, such as long takes, that feel unobtrusive and “fly on the wall.” In an interview Garrone has cited Roberto Rosellini’s Paisan as a major influence on Gomorrah, particularly Paisan’s episodic structure. Pasolini’s early films such as Accatone and Mamma Roma were a commentary upon, or as John David

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Rhodes argues, a “rereading” of Italian neorealism. According to Rhodes, Pasolini adapts neorealist techniques in order to critique and subvert the “sentimental progressive politics,” as neorealism’s formal innovations outpaced the “cultural regeneration” the movement once heralded.81 In his filmmaking process, Garrone comments that he wanted to make a film “about the Camorra,” deemphasizing the political critique of Saviano’s book. While the film is a study of life under the Camorra, it offers a representation of Italy in the post–Cold War era. Gomorrah interweaves five stories set in the Secondigliano housing projects on the outskirts of Naples. Centered on eight characters, the film relates the workings of the multinational criminal syndicate, beginning with the story of Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), a courier for a local clan who delivers support payments to families of imprisoned or deceased members, and Maria (Maria Nationale), the wife of an incarcerated clan member whose young son, Simone, decides to join a rival gang. Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a delivery boy who aspires to become a fully initiated clan member. Franco (Tony Servillo) manages illegal waste disposal for the Camorra with his assistant, Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), a recent graduate who believes he’s receiving an apprenticeship in a legitimate business. After years of being exploited by a garment factory owner, master tailor Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is recruited by local competitor Xian (Ronghua Zhang) to train Chinese garment workers in haute couture. Gomorrah ends with the conclusion of the story of Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), two delinquent youths who spend their days reenacting scenes from Hollywood gangster films such as Scarface and committing random criminal acts that eventually lead to their early demise, which is far less spectacular than those of their screen heroes. The young men of Gomorrah, such as Totò, Marco, and Ciro, are also reminiscent of the youths that populate Pasolini’s novels and films set in the Roman borgate, as well as the young southern Italian men transformed by consumer capitalism whom he addresses in a series of articles addressed to Gennariello written between 1974 and 1975.82 The story of Marco and Ciro epitomizes the lost youth of the Secondigliano projects. More than Totò’s unquestioning acceptance of his future membership in the Camorra, or his friend Simone’s resignation to death on a daily basis, Marco and Ciro exist on the outskirts of the outskirts, without family or allegiances, content with their own company and a fantasy world that on occasion seeps into the reality of the Secondigliano projects. As Megan Ratner argues, while in Accatone there remains a possibility of transcendence, as revealed through Pasolini’s use of classical music

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(Bach and Mozart) and paintings by Italian masters, the world that has produced Marco and Ciro is debased, ersatz, and homogenized through “generic tattoos, piercings, and attitudes copied from television and the movies.”83 If Marco and Ciro were of the rural subproletariat, what Pasolini described as neocapitalism has transformed their beauty into a blank violence directed toward imaginary Columbian enemies, abandoned boat wrecks, and randomly selected victims. Marco and Ciro do not achieve the solemnity of Accatone’s Vittorio, and in their deaths they become like so much toxic waste once delivered from the north, now produced and disposed of in the south. Gomorrah does not romanticize its depiction of the boys who serve as deliverers and lookouts for the camorristi. The film slowly reveals Totò’s unremarkable initiation into a life he seems destined to enter. At the beginning of the film, he is no more than one of many delivery boys carrying groceries for cammoristi family members. Without comment or hesitation, he takes steps to come to the attention of the older clan members, such as retrieving drugs and weapons after a police raid. What remains of his childhood is offered in one scene where he plays with other children in a rooftop oasis made of plastic astroturf, beach umbrellas, and a small pool, surrounded by adult lookouts who pace the grey decay of the housing projects. As he moves from delivering groceries to drugs, Totò’s character offers a view of life within the Camorra-controlled territory, of people attempting to have “normal” lives in what amounts to a war zone. In this way, he is aligned to the story of Don Ciro, whose delivery routes provide a spatial orientation to the housing projects. Don Ciro is often seen walking through the deserted concrete halls of the projects, observing drug sales or the burned out cells that were once apartments. As the observer on the ground, Don Ciro’s character also takes the viewer into the lives of the project residents, who, surrounded by gun violence, drug dealing, and constant police surveillance, live as though inmates in a large prison complex. Maria, a Secondigliano resident who receives both groceries and financial support from the clan, brings together the storylines of Totò and Don Ciro. Illegal waste disposal motivates the film’s exploration of the north/ south divide in present-day Italy. In one scene, Franco and Roberto are ready to depart on a business trip to Venice where Franco will negotiate a deal to dispose waste in a remote outskirt of Naples. At the airport, Roberto introduces his father to Franco, who arrives late and is hurriedly polite to the older man. Roberto’s father is a hospital worker, and

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as he speaks to Franco, we learn that he was an intranational migrant who traveled to Venice and other regions of northern Italy for work. Roberto’s first journey to Venice is contextualized within the larger history of internal migration within Italy. As Roberto’s father explains that he was unable to secure work for his son due to the lack of a business network or contacts, the gratitude he extends to Franco is underscored by several ironies. Like numerous southerners before him, Roberto is about to embark on a journey north due to limited employment prospects, and even with an advanced degree, like his predecessors, he becomes exploitable labor within the global capitalist system. In traveling to Venice to secure contracts for toxic waste disposal in southern Italy, Roberto also unknowingly participates in the continual disenfranchisement of the southern peninsula perpetrated by corporate elites of the north. While the southern Italian terrain appears as abstract, desolate spaces on a computer screen, Franco plots to transform the natural environment into a waste dump, and encourages Roberto to seek larger land areas to pollute and contaminate. While Franco finalizes contracts for “clean” waste disposal, Roberto observes the city of Venice from their water taxi. Roberto looks around in expectation, only observing that in the city, “everything is done by boat.” Seen only in the dull, gray monotone of an overcast day, the city has little more to offer. Even the occasional gondolas that take passengers by the Rialto bridge appear drained of color and energy, nothing more than another overpriced attraction in a glutted tourist market. From the mundane Naples airport where a father’s ambitions for his son take flight, to the surprising routineness of “the city of love,” Gommora visualizes landscapes transformed by global capitalism. The storyline of master tailor Pasquale is distinct in that it is the only one that develops a relationship between a southern Italian and a nonWestern European immigrant. Pasquale’s decision to help Xian and the Chinese garment workers is motivated by the exploitation of his time and talent by a factory owner financed by the Camorra. After the owner accepts another work order that will require long hours, low wages, and no overtime pay, Pasquale decides to accept an offer to train Xian’s garment workers in haute couture, thereby giving the Chinese factories the ability to compete within the Camorra-controlled garment industry. As the Camorra operates as a multinational corporation, regardless of nation-state boundaries and state regulations, Pasquale also jettisons national affinities, “Italian” allegiance, and loyalty to a criminal syndicate that uses him to generate large profits under the “Made in Italy”

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label. Pasquale and Xian forge a business partnership based on shared economic exigencies created by the Camorra: Pasquale’s inability to financially support his family and the exclusion of non-Camorra factories from competition in the Naples garment industry. In their first scenes, Pasquale and Xian meet at night, moving in and out of shadows to avoid the Camorra, but also suggesting their lack of knowledge and apprehension about one another, especially on Pasquale’s part. During his arrival at Xian’s home, Pasquale lingers outside a large room in which Xian and a group of Chinese prepare dinner. Xian brings Pasquale in and offers him a meal, which he initially refuses. Xian attempts to break down barriers, offering Pasquale not only an opportunity to make additional income, but also friendship. This nascent friendship is interrupted by the dangerous nature of their agreement as Xian asks Pasquale to ride in the trunk of a vehicle for the safety of all passengers. Unlike the factory at which he works, Pasquale is brought to a high-tech factory where the Chinese manager and workers treat him with courtesy and respect. In the following scene, Pasquale walks home in the early morning hours. Upon waking his wife, Pasquale says he has “been in China,” and presents her his payment in cash. Gomorrah refuses a sentimentalization of cross-cultural relations. Although we gain a sense of Xian’s extended family through the brief scene of Pasquale’s initial arrival at his home, parallels are not drawn between Xian’s family, who are not given any extensive storyline in the film, and Pasquale’s wife and child. Rather, Gomorrah illustrates how Italians and immigrants who experience economic exploitation under the Camorra can forge allegiances. Cross-cultural understanding therefore is not based upon the Chinese replication of Western cultural norms. In Western debates regarding the rise of the multicultural society, the non-Western immigrant is often required to assimilate the dominant culture as a prerequisite for integration within the host society. In the relation between Pasquale and Xian, it is Pasquale who assumes the role of the other. Except for his communication with Xian, Pasquale is unable to speak with the other Chinese workers and requires the assistance of a translator. Solidarity is based on specific skills that Pasquale offers to the Chinese garment workers and the technological superiority of their factory as compared to the Camorra-operated factory where Pasquale works. The storyline of Pasquale and Xian offers a vision, albeit brief, of an effective means of creating alliances in a competitive global economy that reveals the constructed nature of national boundaries. Through this contingent alliance, Pasquale and Xian begin a friendship that comes to

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an abrupt end when Xian is murdered upon the Camorra’s discovery of Pasquale’s “betrayal.” Pasquale and Xian’s relationship perhaps comes closest to Pasolini’s imagined global south. The relationship between the two global southerners offers the possibility, however brief, to put forth a solidarity that can challenge oppressive, hegemonic forces such as the nation-state and capitalism. Like Pasolini’s Zumurrud, Pasquale and Xian are also equivocal subjects who challenge fixed boundaries and homogeneous identities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many of the shifts that Pasolini anticipated in his later work on the Third World and global subproletariat have unfortunately transpired. However, as seen in the recent political upheavals in Libya that have brought thousands of North African migrants to the shores of their country’s former colonizer, Pasolini’s investigations from over a half-century ago are more pertinent now than ever before.

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Conclusion

This study ends where it began, with a discussion of the southern question and the legacies of Italy’s racialized north/south divide. As an analytic through which to comprehend Italy’s national unification, which can be read as a process of internal colonization, the Italian south and Sicily became the “other” of the nation, and the reform of the southern regions the gauge by which to evaluate the country’s modernity. For post-unification Italy, the southern question served as one of many nationalist discourses, which sought to reconcile the south and Sicily’s “difference” from the north, and to construct the southern populations as “Italian.” Although constructed as racially other prior to national unification, the north/south division fixed racial difference upon the south and Sicily, thereby projecting onto these regions the entire country’s racial heterogeneity and its status as a “southern” nation relative to northern Western European countries. The Italian south and Sicily’s proximity to Africa rendered them spaces of permeability, the areas where the borders between “Europe” and “Africa” threaten to dissolve. In this study, I examined the representation of African Italian mixed-race subjects as figures through which we can read shifts in Italian racial and national identity formation from the Liberal era to the present. Mixed-race also becomes a trope for the negotiation of racial hierarchies within the nation-state and in different national contexts necessitated by both internal and external migration. I argued that representations of racial mixture in the Italian cinema reveal the limitations of the north/south paradigm and its ability to assuage anxieties surrounding both racial and national identity formation, and this in turn leads to the continual rearticulation of racial and national identity in the films produced in each period under discussion. By mixed-race I refer to the peoples of both Italian and African descent as seen in Under the Southern Cross (1938), Il Mulatto/Angelo (1949/1951), and Arabian Nights (1975). However, the book also examined the various figurations of and encounters with “blackness”: as seen in the use of blackface to resolve the south’s ambivalent relationship to the peninsular

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north and its newly acquired North African colonial territories in Cabiria (1914); the solidarity forged through shared histories of migration and discrimination between black American GIs and Italian women in Without Pity (1947); the encounter between the African American and the transmigrant southerner in Mafioso (1963); and the hybridization of identities undertaken by Pasolini in his Arabian Nights and explorations of the global south. In this sense, mixed-race refers not only to persons of European and African ancestry, but is also read as symbolic of Italy’s shifting relationship to Europe, Africa, and the United States through its history of national unification, colonialism, and migration. The question remains as to exactly how film, as a medium, participates in the production of national discourse, or as Angelo Restivo writes, “the issue for the cinema becomes, thus, the issue of constructing some sort of consensual idea of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ within a strongly heterogeneous cultural field.”1 Restivo’s study of Italian art films of the 1960s provides a useful model by which to conduct studies of national cinema that attempts to go beyond a “reified” account of the cinema’s relation to history. Restivo is interested in embedding the Italian cinema in the “political and economic transformations” of the period, namely the rise of neocapitalism and Italy’s entrance into the Western economic bloc.2 He argues that fruitful analyses of national cinemas can be garnered by utilizing the tensions between “cultural context” or between “film and other cultural products” and studies of the “formal system” whereby cinematic discourses are used to construct the “nation.”3 In this book, I have drawn on contemporary discourses surrounding racial identity, postcolonial theory, and theories of subject formation to propose that one means by which the Italian cinema has contributed to the “discursive construction” of the nation is through its attempts to visualize ideologies of race.4 In Cabiria, the use of blackface for the Maciste character served to reconcile the newly unified country and its north/south division with the nation’s recently acquired colonial territories in North Africa. Although the silent historical epics produced by the Italian film industry in the pre–World War I era have been shown to take part in the promotion of the country’s colonial ambitions by connecting the recently unified country with its Roman imperial past, through an analysis of the film’s use of blackface in the context of criminal anthropology, the southern question, and the futurist avant-garde, I show how the film operates to demark Italy from Africa, while colonial expansionism is promoted as a means (albeit provisional) by which to displace blackness from the Italian south and thereby achieve national unity.

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In the colonial narrative film Under the Southern Cross, the mixed-race subjects Mailù and Simone are represented in the artificial, calligraphic style characteristic of the Italian commercial cinema of the period. When juxtaposed to the socialist realist aesthetics of the film, Under the Southern Cross counters the emergence and claims to citizenship on the part of mixed-race subjects in the Italian colonies of Northern and Eastern Africa. In suppressing colonial mixed-race subjects, what emerges is a new pluralistic representation of the nation, signaled notably by the film’s presentation of Italian dialects through emerging film sound technologies. The film’s diverse aesthetics ultimately fails to offer a cohesive presentation of an Italian national subject. However, unlike Cabiria, in which blackface performance may be read as marking the southerner in both their difference and provisional incorporation into the nation, Under the Southern Cross exploits the trope of “mixture” in its use of sound and contradictory representational codes which undermines a narrative that promotes the regime’s racial policies. What occurs is a new incorporation of the southern Italian subject that foreshadows the representational codes used to depict the Italian south in the films of the neorealist period. In Il Mulatto/Angelo (1949/1951), the mixed-race subject’s claims to Italian citizenship are jettisoned so that the south can once again be brought into the national fold. With the emergence of African Italian mixed-race subjects within the peninsula, the south’s “difference” from the north is embraced for both its value as commodity and necessary incorporation under the system of parliamentary democracy. As represented in Il Mulatto/Angelo, the new Italian Republic assimilates indigenous southerners while relegating mixed-raced subjects to the recent colonial past or as a “problem” imported from the United States. Pasolini’s interventions against the loss of diverso (diversity, difference), particularly as manifested in the migration of rural southerners to northern urban centers during Italy’s economic miracle can be seen in his use of the free-indirect subjective and the “revolutionary” body. In Arabian Nights and Salò, the body of Italian-Eritrean actress Inez Pelligrini signifies the history of Italian colonialism. Pasolini engages the Third World, attempting a “contamination” of the author and subject positions through the use of the free-indirect subjective. While the Third World proves to be an unviable source for the revival of diverso or heterogeneity within the peninsula, Pasolini’s imagining of a global subproletariat does offer a reevaluation of Italian colonialism and challenges the West/ non-West binary.

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The contemporary films examined in this book, including Adwa: An African Victory (1999), Bianco e Nero (2008), Miracle at St. Anna (2008), fuori/outside (1997), and Gomorrah (2008), reveal the legacies of earlier iterations of Italian racial and national identity formation in the Italian cinema, pointing to historical points of contact and cultural hybridity that are not fully acknowledged in current debates regarding non-Western European immigration to Italy and in media representations of the country’s new multicultural, multiracial society. Gerima’s Adwa crosses geographical and temporal boundaries to retell the history of the 1896 Italo-Abyssinian war and its legacies in the postcolonial era. Set in various locations in Ethiopia and Italy, Gerima’s documentary also acknowledges the voices and long-standing presence of Ethiopians in Italy. In this way, Gerima uses film to challenge the history of Italian post-unification and Liberal-era colonialism circulated in the silent historical epics such as Cabiria. By using film to challenge the hegemony of the Italian narrative of its colonial endeavors in Ethiopia (reframing an Italian “defeat” as an African “victory”), Gerima’s Adwa postulates a hybridization of Italian and Ethiopian/African histories that challenge bounded national territories as well as discrete racial and national identities. I contextualized Comencini’s Bianco e Nero, the first mainstream narrative film in Italy to address interracial relationships, in the longer history of interracial relationships in the Italian colonial imaginary and as represented in its cinema since the fascist era. The representation of African Italian mixed-race relationships—from the fascist colonial film Under the Southern Cross, to decolonization and early postcolonial narratives such as Secret Violence (1963), La donna scimmia (The Ape Woman, 1964), to neoliberal narratives such as Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1989), and L’assedio (Besieged, 1998)—traces the shifting relations between Italy and Africa from the colonial period to its current postcolonial moment. This selection of films also conveys the ways in which the racialized north/south divide and Italian migration have been and continue to be influenced by Italian colonial and postcolonial histories. For instance, The Ape Woman speaks to the presence of African postcolonial subjects (particularly African women) in the nation by way of a north/south discourse that marks the inferior status of southern Italians within Italy and as migrants in other Western European countries. The Ape Woman conveys a racial anxiety both about the possibility of African Italian mixed-race unions and about the country’s existing racial heterogeneity, especially the racial “otherness” of Italian southerners and Sicilians. The Ape Woman’s two alternate endings raise fears that the economic boom will not bring the promised national

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unification and a homogeneous, stable, white racial identity. While Besieged posits the potential for new, hybrid identities that can displace ones from an antiquated colonial imaginary, Bianco e Nero suggests that the colonial past has been surmounted in a new cosmopolitan, multicultural Italy. The testimonies from Pap Khoma’s Noi italiani neri that begin Chapter 3 challenge the vision of Italy’s multicultural society presented in Bianco e Nero, proving that Italians of African descent are still not recognized as full citizens within their own country. The question of Italian citizenship for African Italians is raised as early as the immediate postwar era in Il Mulatto/ Angelo. While the mixed-race child is at first accepted but ultimately ejected from the nation-state, other neorealist and postwar narrative films, such Paisan and Without Pity, examine the relation between the United States and Italy by way of the representation of the African American GI. If Paisan offers a transcendent humanism through the African American GI’s acknowledgment of the suffering of the Neapolitan people, Without Pity examines the shared history of disenfranchisement and displacement experienced by both the Italian and African diasporas. Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna reflects upon the neorealist representation of the African American GI while drawing upon the larger history of pan-Africanist activity surrounding the 1935–6 Italo-Ethiopian war. Like Lee, Kym Ragusa, in fuori/outside, traces the shared history of the Italian and African diasporas. However, through her focus on the stories of her Italian and African American grandmothers, Ragusa draws upon feminist theory to put forth a hybrid notion of identity formation that destabilizes bounded categories of race and nation. If Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Arabian Nights imagined a global subproletariat through a technique of free-indirect subjective that merged Western and non-Western subjectivities toward a hybrid identity formation, Garrone’s Gomorrah depicts the global subproletariat of the early twenty-first century, brought together by the logic of late multinational capitalism. Inspired by Rossellini’s Paisan, Garrone’s Gomorrah episodic depiction of northern Naples under the control of the Camorra envisions the nation united by drug trafficking, toxic waste dumping, and worker exploitation. The north/south divide is ever present in the use of the south as a dumping ground for the industrial waste of northern corporations, and poignantly, in the lost youth of the characters Totò, Marco, and Ciro, reminiscent of the subproletariat youths of Pasolini’s Roman borgate novels, Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenza, and the Neapolitan youths addressed in his letters to Gennariello. While glimpses of a viable solidarity among members of the global subproletariat can be seen in the relationship between

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the tailor Pasquale and the Chinese factory owner Xian, these nascent possibilities are crushed under the onslaught of the camorra’s mantra of “business, business, business.” Although acolyte Roberto turns away from participating in the exploitation and poisoning of his land and people, Gomorrah ends with the disposal of the bodies of Marco and Ciro at a remote seaside location. Gomorrah’s ending returns us to the Mediterranean, a location of contact and cultural hybridity, but as seen in Gomorrah, a reminder that in the present day it is also a terminal space of detention and death, particularly for immigrants seeking entry to Italy and other parts of Europe. The Mediterranean, its embedded histories of migration, commerce, forced movement, and colonial conquest, signifies both the potential for a productive post-national order and the closure and reification of national borders and identities. In closing this study, I’d like to discuss Isaac Julien’s Western Union: small boats, a recent cinematic reflection upon Italy, Africa, and the Mediterranean that merges memories of Italian unification, immigration/emigration, and the racialized north/ south divide with that of the transatlantic slave trade to comment upon current African immigration to Italy. Western Union: small boats (2007) is the third part of Isaac Julien’s Expedition Trilogy, which includes True North (2004), a film about African American explorer Matthew Henson, believed to be the first person to reach the North Pole, and Fantôme Afrique (2005), a visual journey through modern-day Africa shot in Ouagadougou and Burkina Faso. Western Union: small boats is a multimedia installation that presents a vision of contemporary migration to Europe via Lampedusa—the small island between Sicily and Tunisia that serves as a first stop for African migrants attempting to find passage to Europe.5 As argued by Iain Chambers, Western Union proposes a new mapping of the Mediterranean, one that rearticulates the relation between “illegal” and “citizen” in order to reveal suppressed passages, connections, and interactions that constitute another history of modern Europe. In order for us to confront this other history, Chambers suggests a new language is required, such as enacted in Julien’s nonlinear, multiple-screen projection work. Only by way of a radical restructuring of time and space can the “historical and cultural complexity proposed by contemporary migration” be used to reconfigure our understanding of modern European identity formation. Lampedusa is a significant site within Julien’s radical cartography not only because of its geographical proximity to northern Africa, but also in that it serves as his entrée to the Italian national cinema. Lampedusa

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provides the setting for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), adapted for the screen by Luchino Visconti in 1962. Set during the 1861 unification, Lampedusa’s novel narrates the social and political changes brought about by the unification process through the eyes of Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster), a member of the Sicilian aristocracy. In Western Union, Julien parallels the defining historical moment of the Risorgimento to the contemporary period of immigration and the appearance of extracomunitari who cross the nation’s borders to begin a new life in Italy and other parts of Europe. Julien comments: This project started life a couple of years ago in Sicily, it’s based in Palermo and it’s a meditation on Visconti’s Leopard but it’s set in modern day. So we know the story about Visconti . . . it’s about the decline of the aristocratic classes and in this moment in time in Sicily it’s really about, to me, the kind of new émigrés . . . new people from Africa coming to Europe and so essentially Western Union: small boats is really about these two journeys: one is a cinematic journey into the history of Italian cinema, and then the other journey is really the new people coming from Northern Africa and Africa to this part of Europe.6 Western Union7 is structured around the appearance of the “survivor” (performed by Vanessa Myrie, the lead actress of the Expedition Trilogy films), who witnesses migrant passages among various locations, including the Palazzo Gangi in Palermo, Sicily, the eighteenth-century baroque palace where the final ballroom sequence of Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) was filmed; the Hotel Orientale in Palermo; and the Turkish Steps, the white, ridged cliff formations on Sicily’s southern coast (Figure C.1). As a meditation on contemporary migration to Europe, Julien’s Western Union, like Lee’s Miracle and Ragusa’s fuori/outside, posits Italy as a site of African diasporic identity formation, particularly through processes of migration and forced movement that connect the contemporary tragedies to the Middle Passage and transatlantic slavery. Julien arrives at this commentary by way of a reflection upon the current status of art cinema and its capacity to produce alternate histories of modern Europe. For Julien, this includes not only non-narrative and experimental form, but also installation and display.8 The use of a multiple-screen installation for Western Union allows viewers to move through space as a means to construct the story of contemporary African migration to Europe, and is closely aligned to the project’s exploration of time and memory in relation to contemporary migration. Multiple projection and

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Figure C.1

The “survivor” (Western Union: small boats, dir. Isaac Julien, 2007).

a transformation of architectural space creates a rupture in linearity that can bring together and overlap what are ordinarily viewed as disparate histories, including those of Italian unification, contemporary migration, and the transatlantic slave trade. The Leopard’s revisionist history of Italian unification can also be read alongside several films released in the early 1960s that reflected upon Italy’s north/south division during a period of postwar economic recovery and internal migration, such as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962). By referencing two formative moments in Italian history, the Risorgimento and the postwar Republic’s economic recovery period, Western Union points to the fact that Italy, prior to the massive wave of non-European migrants in the last 30 years, already had a history of race relations that ironically informs the country’s and the EU’s immigration policies and the response of EU citizens to migrants from the developing world. Julien’s reference to Visconti’s The Leopard is significant not only as a reflection on Italian art cinema of the 1960s, but also in that it is a revisionist history of Italian unification.9 In The Leopard, Visconti highlights Lampedusa’s critique of the Risorgimento and post-unification period based on Gramsci’s concept of transformismo, or the appropriation

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of a radical politics by a political elite.10 The Leopard’s retelling of the Risorgimento not only demonstrates how a popular “revolution” resulted in the maintenance of power for the Italian political and economic elite, but also challenges “the notion of national unity on which all Italian historiography is based” because it deconstructs the belief that a “unified” Italy and an “Italian” people existed prior to foreign invasion.11 Like The Leopard, Western Union is a revisionist history of modern Italy, one that further challenges the idea of a homogenous Italian nation-state and those who may be included or excluded from the national body. In this sense, Julien draws upon The Leopard’s role in the construction of what James Hay refers to as “national-popular history,” or the role of cinema and other mass media to reformulate the conditions under which history is told and transmitted to its assumed “national” audience.12 Visconti’s adaptation places the Risorgimento into a field of competing interpretations of the historical “event,” not only the Italian historical epics of the 1930s but the Risorgimento as circulated over time in television, popular journals, and national and international film festivals. Hay writes: To discuss “a national past” . . . is not to refer simply to a sequence of events whose chronology is somehow unmediated by discourse and outside the modes of cultural production. In this sense, the past is deeply embedded in a memory of previous and existing cultural formations activated through each public performance of history. The need to remember/to record (ricordare) springs not only from a larger process of cultural conservation or conservatism but from an inability to decipher and a need to remake traditional or existing implotments of history.13 Western Union is another appearance of The Leopard in the “public theater of history,” this time deployed to reconfigure the idea of the “nation,” which now constructs a history of the Italian imagined community inflected by postcolonial discourse, and also includes members of the African diaspora. Although Western Union makes relevant comparisons between contemporary African immigration and Italian southern external and internal migrations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such parallels between the cinematic representation of Italian and present-day migration threaten to diminish the “material differences involving questions of citizenship, mobility, and rights of settlement” between southern Italians and non-European migrants.14 While there are distinct differences between contemporary non-Western European migrants and southern Italian migrants from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries,

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Julien’s Western Union uses Italy and its history as a vehicle for narrating African diasporic identity in the present era, locating the African diasporic subject within Western modernity. In Western Union, the Mediterranean Sea is both a space of movement and a temporal locus that joins contemporary African migration to the transatlantic slave system. As Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic used the image of the ship to speak to the transnational development of black thought and its centrality to Western modernity, so does Julien’s Expedition Trilogy posit African diasporic identity formation as a consequence of global movement, settlement, and relocation. In contemporary transmigration literature in Italy, Cristina Lombardi-Diop argues that African disasporic writers make parallels between contemporary clandestine migration across the Mediterranean and the “Middle Passage” of the transatlantic slave trade. She writes: “The circulation across the Mediterranean of African migrants, as well as their enslavement and trafficking, activates a parallel circulation of images and memories of the Atlantic Middle Passage.”15 As a site to comment upon global migration at the turn of the twenty-first century, Italy also becomes, for Julien, what Graziella Parati has theorized as a “destination culture.” In her study of Italian transmigration literature, Parati uses the term “destination culture” to define processes of cultural hybridization that allow an incoming culture to draw upon and “talk back to” existing diversity (ethnic, racial, linguistic) within the host culture. For Parati, the hybridization that takes place within a destination culture is enacted in transmigration texts through a process of “recolouring,” which undermines the erasure of ethnic and racial heterogeneity and imagines the future world based on the merging of the past (including Italian unification, colonialism, emigration, and language standardization) and the present (global migration). In this sense, Julien’s reference to Visconti and his depiction of the “new people” enacts, on a filmic level, what Parati sees at work in transmigration literature in Italy.16

Bodies in Motion: Return to the Palazzo Gangi Western Union also evokes Italy’s multicultural past by allowing the migrant body to inhabit geographical and architectural spaces that bring together disparate and often hidden histories of contact and hybridity.

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In his statements concerning shooting locations in Sicily, such as the Turkish Steps and the Palazzo Gangi, Julien remarks: I was interested in occupying that space in the twenty-first century as a way of commenting on the ways in which Sicilian society has changed— Sicily being a place that’s got a long history of migration built into it—including the migrations of Sicilians to America, and the Ottoman Empire invading Europe from this point.17 This occurs most forcefully in the sequences filmed in the Palazzo Gangi, where the climactic ballroom sequence of The Leopard were filmed. In The Leopard, the ballroom sequence illustrates the passing of an older-era generation, represented by Prince Salina, that must make way for the new modern Italy, represented by his nephew Count Tancredi’s marriage to the commoner Angelica. It is the decisive moment in the film when Visconti stages Salina’s abnegation of the Sicilian aristocracy.18 In her chapter on the Visconti adaptation of Lampedusa’s novel, Millicent Marcus notes that the original script devoted almost an hour of the entire film to the final ballroom sequence. Within the film, dance has both social and political significance. The ball celebrates the union of Tancredi and Angelica, and more significantly, the aristocracy’s collaboration with the Sicilian bourgeoisie in an attempt at class survival. The dances are a series of learned movements that denote class status and class belonging. As Marcus writes: Since dance is the metaphor per eccellenza of social order in its imposition of collective rules and rhythms on the movement of consenting individuals, it is no accident that in the film’s original version, the ball scene should last one hour and comprise onethird of The Leopard’s entire footage. As in the novel, the ball is microcosmic: it stands not only for the self-enclosed universe of nineteenth-century Sicilian aristocracy but also for a ceremonial reenactment of the entire plot of The Leopard, which Visconti said all boils down to the history of a marriage contract. The ball thus constitutes “a forceful means to expression, an enlargement by use of hyperbole . . . those [pages] summarize the action, are the microcosm, so to speak, of all the conflicts, of all the values, of all the perspectives of the novel.19

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The Palazzo Gangi ballroom also serves as a transitional space for Julien who, like Visconti, uses dance as a vehicle for political and social commentary. In contrast to the disciplined, “proper” bodies that move within the opulent space in Visconti’s recreation of the mid-nineteenth-century Sicilian aristocratic society, Julian’s migrants are unruly. In The Leopard’s ballroom sequence, the only moments we see undisciplined bodies are when Salina contemplates the demise of his class. The connection between class disintegration and the ungainly body is forcefully made evident toward the end of the ballroom sequence when, after Salina’s final mirror reflection, the camera pans left to reveal a toilet room with pots filled to the brim with human waste. The full weight of class compromise is rendered as the exposure of the most abject of bodily functions. Not having mastered the waltz for entrée into the upper classes, the migrants in Western Union squirm, writhe, and eddy upon the Palazzo Gangi floor. Decorated with ocean motifs reminiscent of the mosaic designs of ancient Roman Africa, the palazzo floor becomes a “sea” in which the migrants “swim” and “drown.” The migrant dance performance is scored to the sound of turbulent waters and the sequence is intercut with images of the dancers/migrants recreating the same gestures in water. The migrant body is an intruder in this space, and constitutes a breach in historical time that places the twenty-first-century migrant in the space of eighteenth-century Baroque architecture. The movement between the palazzo and bodies in actual water link The Leopard to the contemporary issue of migration and death, a condition that subtends Western Union and which Julien specifically contemplates in the last sequence of the film. The metaphorical death of the Sicilian aristocracy, realized in a mode of somber desperation through Burt Lancaster’s performance, creates a cruel irony when juxtaposed to the “actual” dead bodies strewn upon the Sicilian shore. The final sequence of Western Union returns us to small vessels floating on the sea, bodies circulating in waters, the Turkish Steps, and the survivor, now recovering articles of clothing from those lost in what is often referred to as the “Sicilian holocaust.”20 The survivor as witness connects the present-day tragedies of attempted migration to Europe to the transatlantic slave trade of the first period of global capitalism. Julien’s Western Union makes similar connections, extending as far back as the Roman Empire in North Africa, connecting the attempt to enter Europe off the shores of Sicily to the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage. Julien’s Western Union opens a space for members of the African diaspora

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to insert narratives of migration and survival that ultimately destabilize the “West/non-West” dichotomy. Examining the representation of mixed-race identity in Italian film becomes a means by which we can explore how visual media participate in the construction of the “nation” and the “national” subject. The trope of racial mixture as used in contemporary Italian visual culture is revealing, particularly in light of the country’s membership in the European Union and its attempts to curtail African immigrants entering from Sicily and other southern European ports. In the on-going attempt to delimit the nation’s boundaries, Italy, like many European nations, is challenged by its own history of religious, cultural, and linguistic conflict. Hence, this examination of the mixed-race body in Italian cinema reveals how the unstable categories of “citizen” and “non-citizen” are continuously negotiated and redefined.

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Notes

Introduction 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8 9

10

11 12

Alessandra Di Maio, “Black Italia: Contemporary Migrant Writers from Africa,” in Black Europe and the African Diaspora, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009). Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 6. Ibid., 7. Stefano Allievi, “Immigration and Cultural Pluralism in Italy: Multiculturalism as a Missing Model,” Italian Culture 28, no. 2 (September 2010): 95. For contemporary discussions of African Italians, see among others, Mauro Valeri, Black Italians: Atleti neri in maglia azzurra (Rome: Palombi, 2006); Mauro Valeri, Negro, ebreo, comunista: Alessandro Sinigaglia, venti anni in lotta contra il facismo (Black, Jewish, Communist: Alessandro Sinigaglia, Twenty Years of Struggle Against Fascism) (Rome: Odradek, 2010); Mauro Valeri, Nero di Roma: storia di Leone Jacovacci, l’invincibile mulatto italico (Black in Rome: The Story of Leone Jacovacci, the Invincible Italian Mulatto) (Rome: Palombi, 2008); Pap Khouma, Noi italiani neri: storie di ordinario razzismo (Milan: B.C. Dalai, 2010); Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan, eds, National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Culturei (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). See Patrica Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 27. Ibid., 79–81. See Robin Pickering-Iazzi, “Ways of Looking in Black and White: Female Spectatorship and the Miscege-National Body in Under the Southern Cross,” in Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 194–222. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 36–46. Also see Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, eds, Theorizing National Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” 44. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998); Richard Dyer, White (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 4. See also

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16 17 18

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Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds, Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Classes, revised edn (London and New York: Verso, 1999). Miguel Mellino, “Italy and Postcolonial Studies: A Difficult Encounter,” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2006): 463. Ibid., 462. Vetri Nathan, “Mimic-Nation, Mimic-Men: Contextualizing Italy’s Migration Culture through Bhabha,” in National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures, ed. Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 59. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005), 66. Ibid., 66. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 121–31. Ibid., 62. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, 6–7. Ibid., 6–7. Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 68–9.

Chapter 1 1

2

3 4 5

6

7

8

Aicha Ben Abed, ed., Stories in Stone: Conserving Mosaics of Roman Africa: Masterpieces from the National Museums of Tunisia (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 2. F. La Cecla, S. Savona, and I. Sposito, Mazara del Vallo/Tunis: Osmosis—Mohammed Beshir, Fisherman, Stefano Boeri and Maddalena Bregani, eds, Uncertain States of Europe: A Trip Through a Changing Europe (Milan: Skira Editore, 2003), 187. Susan Raven, Rome in Africa, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1993), 37. Ben Abed, Stories in Stone, 1–2. For discussion of the Maciste character’s relation to the Italian working classes see Steven Ricci, “The Italian Cinema under Fascism: Film Culture and Public Discourse from 1922 to 1943,” dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996, 145–50. Stella Dagna and Claudia Gianetto, eds, Maciste: L’uomo forte, Il Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna: Tipografia Moderna, 2009), 5. Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 85–6. Giorgio Bertellini, “Colonial Autism: Whitened Heroes, Auditory Hetoric, and National Identity in Interwar Italian Cinema,” in A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patricia Palumbo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 260. Bertellini also notes that this “whitening” of other “strong men” characters such as Saetta, Ausonia, and Cimaste begins in the middle to late 1910s, 259–60. Bertellini uses the term “autism” to describe a process by which the

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10 11 12

13

14 15 16

17

18

19

20 21

22 23

24

Notes to pages 16–22

narrative and visual absence of black African subjects, as well as the challenges of the African colonial endeavor, are obfuscated by a hyberbolic representation of national identity through symbols of imperial triumph. See note 18 in ibid. Also reproduced in Paolo Cherchi Usai, Giovanni Pastrone: Gli anni d’oro del cinema a Torino (Torino: Strenna UTET, 1986), 75. Bertellini, “Colonial Autism,” 274. Ibid., 258. Aliza S. Wong, Race and Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911: Meridionalism, Empire and Diaspora, ed. Stanislao G. Pugliese, Italian and Italian American Studies (New York and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 26. Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question, ed. Antonio D’Alfonzo, trans. Pasquale Verdicchio, Picas Series 46 (Toronto: Guernica, 2005), 32–3. Wong, Race and Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861–1911, 11. Ibid., 47–77. Some northern factions advocated the division of Italy into separate federations, preventing the south from further hindering the advancement of the north. For example, the Lega Nord (Northern League), an influential far-right political party, in the late 1990s proposed northern secession and creation of a new country, Padania, because of its cultural, economic, ethnic, and racial incompatibility with the rest of the country, particularly the Italian south. For additional reading, see “Conclusion” of John Dickie’s Darkest Italy and the various studies that address the significance of the north/south division to contemporary Italy, including Italy’s “Southern Question:” Orientalism in One Country, ed. Jane Schneider (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001). Grace Russo Bullaro, ed., From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Troubador Italian Studies (Leicester: Troubador Press, 2010); Anna Cento Bull and Mark Gilbert, The Lega Nord and the Northern Question in Italian Politics (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave, 2001). See Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (Cranbury, London, Mississauga, and Ontario: Associated University Presses, 1997). See also Wong, Race and Nation in Liberal Italy. Norma Bouchard, “Reading the Discourse of Multicultural Italy: Promises and Challenges of Transnational Italy in an Era of Global Migration,” Italian Culture 28.2 (September 2010), 107. Pasquale Verdicchio, “The Preclusion of Postcolonial Discourse in Southern Italy,” in Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, ed. Beverly Allen and Mary Russo (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 199. Ibid., 199–200. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 68. Bouchard, “Reading the Discourse,” 107. John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860– 1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 8. Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 17–18.

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Ibid., 18. I refer to the large-scale costume productions of Italy’s “golden age” of silent cinema, including La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy, Giovanni Pastrone, 1911), Antonio e Cleopatra (Anthony and Cleopatra, Enrico Guazzoni, 1913), Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii (The Last Days of Pompei, Mario Caserini, 1913), and Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1913). Ibid., 20. Arthur Lennig, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of The Birth of a Nation,” Film History 16.2 (2004), 121. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films, 4th edn (New York: Continuum, 2001). Also see Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema, AFI Film Readers (New York: Routledge, 1993). Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 4–5. Ibid., 10. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema, 168. John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Modernizing White Patriarchy: Re-Viewing D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms,” in Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts, ed. Russell Leong (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1991), 140–1. Liliana Ellena, Paola Olivetti, et al., eds, Film d’Africa: film italiani prima, durante e dopo l’avventura coloniale. Cinema Esedra 29 Ottobre–7 Novembre 1999 (Turino: Centro Stampa Giunta Regionale, 1999), 19–38. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 34. These stereotypes were particular to the political climate of the pre– and post– Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 22. Adam Lively, Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 16–17. Lott, Love and Theft, 6. See Mary Wood, Italian Cinema (New York and Oxford: Berg, 2005), 66–7. Wood succinctly draws the parallel between Cabiria’s representation of the ancient Roman Empire and Liberal Italy. Carlo J. Celli, “Cabiria as a D’Annunzian Document,” Romance Languages Annual IX 9 (1998), 180. Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 7–10. Robert Brown, “Comte and Positivism,” in The Nineteenth Century: Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. C. L. Ten, Routledge History of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 151. Ibid., 152. Mary Gibson, “Biology or Environment? Race and Southern ‘Deviancy’ in the Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1920,” in Italy’s “Southern Question”:

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48 49

50

51 52 53 54

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56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

64 65

66

67

68

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70 71

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Notes to pages 33–48

Orientalism in One Country, ed. Jane Schneider (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), 101. Ibid., 101–2. Anthony Walsh, “The Holy Trinity and the Legacy of the Italian School of Criminal Anthropology,” Human Nature Review 3.15 (January 2003), 2. Thorsten Sellin, “A New Phase of Criminal Anthropology in Italy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 125 (May 1926), 233. Gibson, “Biology or Environment?” 100. Ibid., 101–4. Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 34. See also “Marinetti’s Mafarka: A Paradigm,” 33–41. Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, trans. Carol Diethe and Steve Cox (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998), 21. Richard Drake, “Decadence, Decadentism and Decadent Romanticism in Italy: Toward a Theory of Decadence,” Journal of Contemporary History 17.1 (January 1982), 67. Celli, “Cabiria as a D’Annunzian Document,” 181. Drake, “Decadence, Decadentism and Decadent Romanticism in Italy,” 70. Celli, “Cabiria as a D’Annunzian Document,” 180. Dickie, Darkest Italy, 1. Angelo Del Boca, The Ethiopian War: 1935–1941, trans. P. D. Cummins (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 4. Ibid., 12. Mellino, “Italy and Postcolonial Studies,” 462. See Bullaro, From Terrone to Extracomunitario; Alessandro Dal Lago, Nonpersone: L’esculsione dei migranti in una società globale, 4th edn, Saggi Universale Economica Feltrinelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2009); Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings; Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Buffalo and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings, 131. See both Graziella Parati’s discussion of transmigration literature in Italy in Migration Italy and dal Lago’s Non-persone. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 1882–1941: Policies, Praxis and Impact (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987), Dissertation (Uppsala University), 125. Alessandra Speciale, “Haile Gerima: Adowa, When We Were Active Travellers in History,” African Screen 24 (1998), 78. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 222. Ibid., 220. Haile Gerima, Adwa: An African Victory (Mypheduh Films, 1999), VHS; Krystyna von Henneberg, “Monuments, Public Space, and the Memory of Empire in Modern Italy,” History & Memory 16.1 (2004), 76. Andall and Duncan, National Belongings, 6. Speciale, “Haile Gerima,” 77. Ibid., 81.

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Notes to pages 49–57 75

76

271

Alessandro Triulzi, “Adwa: From Monument to Document,” in Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, ed. Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Oxford: Peter Lang Publishers, 2005), 143. Mark I. Choate, “From Territorial to Ethnographic Colonies and Back Again: The Politics of Italian Expansion, 1890–1912,” Modern Italy 8.1 (2003), 157. See also Speciale, “Haile Gerima,” 82–3. Although he received support from the Ethiopian government, Gerima was hampered in the filming of Adwa, even subject to house arrest and censorship, due to his criticism of the Ethiopian government and their approach to the nation’s colonial legacy.

Chapter 2 1

2 4 5

6

7

8 9

10

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12 13

14

15

16

As quoted in Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 56. As quoted in ibid., 58. Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 56–8. Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience (London: Zed Books, 1985), 48. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 28. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley, 2nd English ed. (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1990), 141. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 34. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1996), 111. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, eds, Re-viewing Fascism : Italian Cinema, 1922–1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 4. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, “Chronology,” in Italian Colonialism, ed. Stanislao G. Pugliese, Italian and Italian American Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), xiv. Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini, 43. Comin refers to colonial genre films produced prior and during the ItaloEthiopian war of 1935–6. For a detailed discussion of these films see chapter six “Italian Colonial Films and the Myth of the Empero,” in James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987); Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931–1943 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). “Cinema, III, no. 41, 10 March 1938,” in Film d’Africa: film italiani prima, durante e dopo l’avventura coloniale. Cinema Esedra 29 Ottobre–7 Novembre 1999, ed. Liliana Ellena, Paola Olivetti, et al. (Turino: Centro Stampa Giunta Regionale, 1999), 73. Ellena and Olivetti, Film d’Africa, 95–7. See also chapter 12, “Italian Colonization,” 95–118. “Bianco e nero, II, no. 9, 30 September 1938” in Ellena and Olivetti, Film d’Africa, 74.

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272 17

18

19

20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28 29

Notes to pages 57–61

“‘Cinema,’ anno III, n. 43, 10 aprile 1938” in Ellena and Olivetti, Film d’Africa, 73. Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema: 1896–1996 (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 52–4. Jacqueline Reich, “Musolini at the Movies: Fascism, Film and Culture,” in Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 7. Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 7–9. Reich, “Mussolini at the Movies,” 3. Ricci, “The Italian Cinema under Fascism,” xiv. Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, Routledge Studies in Modern European History (London: Routledge, 2002), 13–15. Indo-Aryanism was popularized in Germany beginning in the early nineteenth century. Noting similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Germanic languages, scholars argued that Europeans could trace their ancestry to an Aryan people who migrated to Europe from India in the tenth century BC. The Aryans were believed to be responsible for the character and great achievements of Western civilization. The term “Nordic” identifies peoples of northern European countries, but racially came to define physical characteristics of the “ideal” type, including blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion. Sergi argued that Nordics were not Aryans, rather “Aryanized Eurafricans” and that Nordic Germans were more closely related to black Africans than Aryans. Sergi’s “Hamitic” thesis is often viewed as a reaction to the Nordic thesis and the debasement of Italians and other southern European populations as an inferior race. During the fascist era, the Hamitic thesis was considered controversial because it basically argued that Europeans were descendants of Africans, an affront to the Aryan thesis and in particular to the racial policies being established by the regime. For a discussion of Giuseppe Sergi and the influence of Italian anthropological studies on the fascist regime, see Barbara Sòrgoni, “Italian Anthropology and the Africans” in A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrica Palumbo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). Also see Giuseppe Sergi, The Mediterranean Race: A Study of the Origin of European Peoples (Oosterhout N.B.: Anthropological Publications, 1967); Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, 43. Aaron Gillette, “The Origins of the ‘Manifesto of Racial Scientists,’” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6.3 (2001), 319. Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, 72. Gillette, “The Origins of the ‘Manifesto of Racial Scientists,’” 318. Richard Pankhurst, “Racism in the Service of Fascism, Empire-Building and War: The History of the Italian Fascist Magazine ‘La difesa della razza,’” Marxist Internet Archives (March–April 2007). Originally published in Stefan Brune and Heinrich Scholler, eds, “Auf dem Weg zum modernen Äthiopien: Festschrift für Bairu Tafla” (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005), 134–64.

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Notes to pages 61–9 30

31

32 33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40 41

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43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56

273

Giulia Barrera, Dangerous Liaisons: Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea, 1890–1941 (Evanston: Northwestern University, Program of African Studies, 1996), 26. Barbara Sòrgoni, Parole e corpi: antropologia, discorso giridico e politiche sessuali interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea, 1890–1941 (Naples: Liguori, 1998). Barrera, Dangerous Liaisons, 1–2. Ibid., 33–4. Pankhurst, “Racism in the Service of Fascism, Empire-Building and War.” Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 46. Robin Pickering-Iazzi, “Ways of Looking in Black and White: Female Spectatorship and the Miscege-National Body in Under the Southern Cross,” in Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 209. William W. Brickman, “Under the Southern Cross (Under the Southern Cross), Review,” The Modern Language Journal 25.9 (October 1941), 743. Also, Frank S. Nugent, “At the Broadway Cine Roma,” New York Times April 10, 1939. This 1939 New York Times review of the film also refers to Simone as a “half-breed Greek” and Mailù as his “oriental-looking mistress.” See Angelo Del Boca, The Ethiopian War: 1935–1941, trans. P. D. Cummins (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1969). Roy Armes, Patterns of Neorealism (London: Tantivy Press, 1971), 37–9. Ibid., 37. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Formation of Fascist Culture: The Realist Movement in Italy, 1930-43,” dissertation, Brandeis University, 1991, 41. Marcia Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13. Sotto la croce del sud (Under the Southern Cross), dir. Guido Brignone, Consorzio Italiano Noleggiatori Filmi (CINF) and Esperia Film Distributing Col. Inc., 1938. Pickering-Iazzi, “Ways of Looking in Black and White,” 209. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 69–70. Pickering-Iazzi, “Ways of Looking in Black and White,” 207. Ibid., 207–8. Barrera, Dangerous Liaisons, 36. Under the Southern Cross. Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, 190–1. Landy, Fascism in Film, 152–5. Gigliola Gori, “Model of Masculinity: Mussolini, the ‘New Italian’ of the Fascist Era,” in Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon—Global Fascism, ed. J. A. Mangan, Sport in the Global Society (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2000), 42–3. Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, 133–5. Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 58–9. Under the Southern Cross. Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini, 26.

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274 57

58

59

60

61

62

63 64

65

Notes to pages 69–72

See Nicholas Doumanis “Italian as ‘Good’ Colonizers: Speaking Subproletariats and the Politics of Memory in the Dodecanese,” in Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, ed. Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005). Italy suppressed several resistance movements over its 50-year occupation of Libya. General Rodolfo Graziani led some of the most severe campaigns, leading to the deaths of thousands of Libyans. Also see Nicolas Lablanca, “Studies and Research on Italian Colonialism, 1922–35: Reflections on the State of the Art,” in Palumbo, A Place in the Sun, 37–61. Both authors argue that a full assessment of Italian colonialism in the fascist period requires a reevaluation of Italian colonialism in the Liberal period (1914–22), the country’s occupation of Eritrea, Tripolitania, and Cyrenaica (Libya) and Somalia, and its activities during the first period of decolonization, which began in the post–World War I era. For discussions of how the fascist regime addressed Italian women as colonial settlers, see Pickering-Iazzi, “Ways of Looking in Black and White.” Also, Pickering-Iazzi, “Structures of Feminine Fantasy and Italian Empire Building, 1930–1940,” Italica 77.3 (Autumn 2000); Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1992). For a discussion of colonial subjects as film spectators, see Salvatore Ambrosino, “Cinema e propaganda in Africa Orientale Italiana” (Cinema and Propaganda in Italian East Africa) in Ellena and Olivetti, Film d’Africa, 253–69. Ambrosino examines fascist colonial policies concerning film distribution, content, audience statistics, and theater segregation. Apparently, the colonial administration was concerned with censoring the content of films shown to indigenous audiences. Quoting one contemporary author, Ambrosino notes the general condescending attitudes toward indigenous spectators: “After emphasizing once again that ‘for the indigenous African, the cinema, along with the airplane, is one of the most impressive revelations of the superiority of the white race,’ he affirms that the problem is political, psychological and artistic.” The administration distributed films that would not only display the superiority of the Italian people, but also prevent identification with “white” Italian characters, believing such identification would incite revolt. Radhika Singha, “Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India,” Studies in History 16.2 (2000), 138. Sarah Madsen Hardy and Kelly Thomas, “Listening to Race: Voice, Mixing, and Technological ‘Miscegenation’ in Early Sound Film,” in Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 416. See Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2004). Hardy and Thomas, “Listening to Race,” 421. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 64. Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 56.

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Notes to pages 72–85 66

67

68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

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81 82

83

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85

86 87

88

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Carlo J. Celli, “A Master Narrative in Italian Cinema?” Italica 81.1 (2004), 82–3. I thank Paola Menabue for bringing to my attention the use of Italian dialects in the film. Celli, “A Master Narrative in Italian Cinema?” 81. Giorgio Bertellini, “Colonial Autism: Whitened Heroes, Auditory Rhetoric, and National Identity in Interwar Italian Cinema,” in Palumbo, A Place in the Sun, 262. Ibid., 262. Ibid., 270. Dialogue from Under the Southern Cross. Ibid. Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 5. Pickering-Iazzi, “Ways of Looking in Black and White,” 202. Ibid., 203. See “Biology as Destiny: Brignone’s Under the Southern Cross,” in Ben-Ghiat, “Envisioning Modernity,” 135–42; Pickering-Iazzi, “Ways of Looking in Black and White”; and de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women. Fatimah Rony Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 169. Judith Butler, “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge,” Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen Elizabeth Abel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 269. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005), 86. For a discussion of the applicability of Bhabha to analyses of Italian colonial and postcolonial culture, see Vetri Nathan, “Mimic-Nation, Mimic-Men: Contextualizing Italy’s Migration Culture through Bhabha,” in National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures, ed. Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 41–62. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish, in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 99. John D. Hargreaves, “The Postwar World,” in Decolonization in Africa, ed. A. J. Nicholls and Martin S. Alexander, 2nd edn (London and New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1996), 95–6. Roberto Poppi, Dizionario del cinema italiano: i registi dal 1930 ai giorni nostri, vol. 1 (Rome: Gremese Editore, 2002), 300. See Robert L. Hess, Italian Colonialism in Somalia (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966). Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, 192. Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 2. Karen Pinkus, “Empty Spaces: Decolonization in Italy,” in Palumbo, A Place in the Sun, 315.

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276 89

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92 93 94

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96 97

98

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101 102

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104 105

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Notes to pages 86–102

Giovanna Trento, Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini: panmeridionalismo e rappresentatzioni dell’Africa postcoloniale (Milano: Mimesis, 2010), 226. See Elisabetta Bini, “Fonti fotografiche e storia delle donne: la rappresentazione delle donne nere nelle fotografie coloniali italiane,” in La storia contemporanea in Italia oggi: linee di tendenza e orientamenti di ricerca (2003). Also, Barrera, Dangerous Liaisons. Nino Ferrero, “Cinema e letteratura: conversazione con Giorgio Moser ed Enrico Emanuelli (I: Giorgio Moser),” Filmcritica: mensile di cinema, teatro, tv 14.133 (May 1963). Pinkus, “Empty Spaces,” 313. Ibid., 312. Joseph A. Boone, “Vacation Cruises: Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” PMLA 110.1 (January 1995), 101. Arturo Gismondi, “L’occhio del critico: Violenza segreta,” Cinema 60 4.33 (March 1963), 47. Boone, “Vacation Cruises: Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” 94. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum Press, 2001), 145. Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 233–41. For recent and canonical essays on Sarah Bartmann and the representation of black female sexuality in Western art, see Deborah Willis (ed.), Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). Barbara Sòrgoni, “‘Defending the Race’: The Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus During Fascism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8.3 (2003), 412–13. Ibid., 413. For the alternate ending English dubbed version, see The Ape Woman, directed by Marco Ferreri (1963; Italy: Something Weird Video, 1994) VHS. See Sander Gilman, “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality,” in Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot,” ed. Deborah Willis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 18. Ibid., 22–3. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 211–12. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 76–85. Gian Piero Brunetta, The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from Its Origins to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 185. Trento, Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini, 226. “Nevertheless, the centrality of the fear of infection emphasized in Naldini’s Tempo di uccidere must also be read, retrospectively, in light of the experiences and anxieties lived through by those who were sexually active in Europe, especially those who were homosexual, in the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic.” Graziella Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Buffalo and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 138.

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Notes to pages 103–16 110 111

112 113 114

115

116

117

118

119

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277

David Kehr, “Besieged,” Film Comment 35.2 (March/April 1999), 8. Bianco e Nero: All the Colors of a Set (Commentary and Interview with Cristina Comencini), DVD, 01 Distribution S.R.L, Italy, 2008. Ibid. Ibid. For an extended discussion of the representation of African women and black female sexuality in Italian cinema and Bianco e Nero, see Áine O’Healy, “[Non] è una somala’: Deconstructing African femininity in Italian film,” The Italianist, no. 29 (2009), 175–98. See Stefano Allievi, “Immigration and Cultural Pluralism in Italy: Multiculturalism as a Missing Model,” Italian Culture 28.2 (September 2010). Gwen Bergner, “Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem,” American Quarterly 61.2 (June 2009), 302. See Philomena Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory, Sage Series on Race and Ethnic Relations (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1991). David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993). Comencini briefly mentions the scene’s reference to Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever in the DVD audio commentary. See Cristina Comencini, Bianco e Nero, DVD, 01 Distribution S.R.L., Italy, 2008. John Gennari, “Giancarlo Giuseppe Alesandro Esposito: Life in the Borderlands,” in Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 244. For a discussion of the problematic aspects of Spike Lee’s representation of Italian Americans in Jungle Fever see Pasquale Verdicchio’s essay “It’s a Jungle in Here,” in Bound By Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 106–15. In light of Comencini’s Bianco e Nero, the questions Verdicchio poses at the end of his analysis of Jungle Fever: “How do we, black and white, men and women, react to the characters in Jungle Fever: a professional black man, a black careerwoman, and working-class Italians? Are the conflicts portrayed in the film classist, ethnic, racial, or all of these taken together? (114), could also be used consider how an African American director’s portrayal of Italian Americans are received by contemporary Italian audiences. Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (Cranbury, London, and Mississauga, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 1997), 111.

Chapter 3 1

2

Pap Khouma, Noi italiani neri: storie di ordinario razzismo (Milan: B.C. Dalai, 2010), 81. Ibid., 67–8.

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278 3

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6 7

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13

14 15

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17 18 19 20

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Notes to pages 116–30

Jacqueline Andall, “Second-Generation Attitude? African-Italians in Milan,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28.3 (July 2002), 394. A. W., “The Screen: 3 Features Arrive; Universal’s ‘Up Front’ Brings Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe to Loew’s State ‘Rawhide,’ With Tyrone Power, Opens of Rivoli—‘Angelo’ is 60th St. Trans-Lux Bill,” The New York Times March 26, 1951, 19. Home of the Brave (dir. Mark Robson, 1949). For an analysis of this film, see David Marriot’s essay, “Frantz Fanon’s War” in On Black Men (Columbia University Press: 2000). “Le prime visioni a Roma,” Intermezzo April 16–30, 1950, 6. Il Mulatto, directed by Francesco De Robertis (1949; Italy: Scalera Films, S.p.a.) Film. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 6–7. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (New York: Continuum Press, 2001), 81. Ibid., 74. Mary Wood, Italian Cinema (New York and Oxford: Berg, 2005), 101–4. Chandra M. Harris, “Who’s Got the Power? Blacks in Italian Cinema and Literature, 1910–1948,” dissertation, Brown University, 2004, 18. See Harris, “Who’s Got the Power?” in particular, her analysis of Paisan, “From American Idea to Italian Realization: Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà.” Ibid., 133. Gino Bedani, “The Christian Democrats and National Identity,” The Politics of Italian National Identity: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, ed. Gino Bedani and Bruce Haddock (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), 228–9. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 48. Bedani, “The Christian Democrats and National Identity,” 216. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 228. Lutz Niethammer, “Structural Reform and a Compact for Growth: Conditions for a United Labor Union Movement in Western Europe after the Collapse of Fascism,” in The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe, ed. Charles S. Maier (New York: New Viewpoints; Franklin Watts, 1978), 212. Bedani, “The Christian Democrats and National Identity,” 229. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 49. John David Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 59–60. See chapter 3, “‘Scandalous Desecration’: Accattone against the Neorealist City” for a further discussion of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critique of Italian neorealism. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Formation of Fascist Culture: The Realist Movement in Italy, 1930–43,” Brandeis University, 1991, 15–16. Ibid., 15. Riccardo Strada, “Il cinema neorealista: tra arte e verita ritratto di Francesco De Robertis: intervista a Danela De Robertis,” l’efante 4 (January 2007), online article, accessed on January 1, 2008.

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Notes to pages 130–7 27 28

29

30

31

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Callisto Cosulich, “Regista in nome della Marina,” Paese Sera March 15, 1986. Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 65. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For a discussion of the reception of neorealism and its relationship to radical left politics in postwar Italy, see Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome. In discussing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critique of neorealism (chapters 3 and 5), Rhodes presents Marxist critiques of neorealism that argue the movement did not live up to its potential to aid in the fundamental transformation of Italian society. Rhodes writes: “First we must recognize that he is criticizing a movement that he believes to have failed in its attempt to assist and promote the ‘complete reorganization of the culture.’ As a Marxist (though not an official member of the PCI), he knew that such a reorganization would have meant only one thing: a proletarian revolution . . . Part of the history of the reception of neorealism is, in fact, the history of the persistence with which it was judged a failure, particularly by critics on the left, and Pasolini shows himself to be writing and thinking in this tradition”; pp. 59–60. Giulia Barrera, Dangerous Liaisons: Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea, 1890–1941 (Evanston: Northwestern University, Program of African Studies, 1996), 29. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 32–3. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 76. Ibid., 78. Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1992), 52. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 63–4. Barrera, Dangerous Liaisons, 25. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 76. Il Mulatto. Robert G. Weisbord and Michael W. Honhart, “A Question of Race: Pope Pius XII and the ‘Coloured Troops’ in Italy,” The Historian 65.2 (Winter 2002), 403. Harris, “Who’s Got the Power?” See chapter 4, “(African) American Cultural Power: The Black Soldier in La Pelle and Paisà.” Weisbord and Honhart, “A Question of Race,” 416. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 178–9. Il Mulatto. Timothy Rice, ed., Europe: Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8, 9 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 609–10. Max Vajro, “E.A. Mario: Notizie sulla vita e appunti per un saggio,” Ministero delle Poste e Telecomunicazioni (1984), 14, online source accessed on August 13, 2006. Nicolardi, Edoardo and E. A. Mario, Tammurriata Nera. Published in Christopher Wagstaff, “Appendix 26: Tammurriata nera (1944),” in Italian Neorealist Cinema:

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Notes to pages 137–51

An Aesthetic Approach, Toronto Italian Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 453. The original version is written in Neapolitan dialect. There are several versions of the Tammurriata Nera, which include additional variations on the lyrics. “Impressionare,” Il Nuovo Dizionario Inglese Garzanti, Redazioni Grandi Opere Garzanti, ed. Garzanti Editore, S.p.a., 2nd edn (Garzanti, 1984). Vajro, “E.A. Mario: Notizie sulla vita e appunti per un saggio,” 14. Michel Foucault, “7 January 1976 lecture,” in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 81–2. Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (Cranbury, London, and Mississauga, Ontario: Associated University Presses, 1997), 141. Monique Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” The American Historical Review 105.5 (2002), 1414. Ibid., 1412–13. Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology, Studies in the History of Religions, vol. 59 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 213–15. Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery,” 1424. Ilaria Pagani, “Il Santuario di Montevergine: Monumenti funebri di eta angioina tra cultura francese e centro italiana,” Storiadelmondo 32 (February 2005), online source. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000), 21. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 21. Dialogue from Angelo (1951). Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 90–2. Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” The Journal of Negro Education 19.3 (Summer 1950), 8. Il Mulatto. As quoted in Marouf Hasian Jr., “Revisiting the Case of Plessy v. Ferguson,” in Brown v. Board of Education at Fifty: A Rhetorical Perspective, ed. Clarke Roundtree (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), 13. As reproduced in ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 12–13. I have not found any documentation indicating when the film was edited, if other versions of the film exist, or whether the revisions along with subtitling were completed in Italy or the United States. Scalera Films S.p.a. is listed as producer and distributor for both Il Mulatto and Angelo. Dizionario del cinema italiano: gli attori, vol. 2 M-Z, ed. Enrico Lancia and Roberto Poppi (Rome: Gremese Editore, 2003), 11.

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Rudi Berger, “Italia: vivere in pace,” Cinema nuovo: rassegna quindicinale 2.11 (May 15, 1953), 312. Ibid., 312. Ibid. Ibid. Paolo Valmarana, “I pericoli del moralismo contenutista,” Rivista del cinematografo 41.11 (1968), 606. Viviana del Bianco, “Interview: Spike Lee,” Italian Vogue ( July 2008), 52. Richard Owen, “Italian War Veterans Denounce ‘Insulting’ Spike Lee Film,” The Times October 1, 2008, online article. Ibid. Ibid. Chiara Ratti, ed., Miracle at St. Anna: the Motion Picture (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 13. Alberto Sbacchi, Legacies of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935–1941 (Lawrenceville and Asmara: The Red Sea Press, 1997), 3–4. Ibid., 6–13. Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). See Harris, “Who’s Got the Power?” 170. William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 99. Sbacchi, Legacies of Bitterness, 15–16. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race, 104. Raymond X. Dozier, “50,000 Volunteers for Abyssinia Warn World ‘Africa for the Africans,’” Amsterdam News March 2, 1935. Sbacchi, Legacies of Bitterness, 14. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race, 101. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 5. See chapter 4, “The Battles for the Serchio Valley,” in Buffalo Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II, ed. Hondon B. Hargrove (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, 1985). Chandra Harris, “Nero su Bianco: The Africanist Presence in TwentiethCentury Italy and Its Cinematic Representations,” in ItaliAfrica: Bridging Continents and Cultures, ed. Sante Matteo (Stony Brook: Forum Italicum Publishing, 2001), 293. Locke, “The New Negro,” 16. Harris, “Who’s Got the Power?” See chapter 4, “(African) American Cultural Power: The Black Soldier in La Pelle and Paisà,” and discussion of Malaparte’s La Pelle, “Othello Debased: The Black Soldier in Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle,” 137–56. Harris, “Nero su Bianco,” 168. Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, 44. Ibid., 45. Harris, “Nero su Bianco.”

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Notes to pages 174–87

David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 68. Ibid., 77. See Wood, Italian Cinema, 103. Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, 82. Leonardo De Franceschi, “Senza pietà di Alberto Lattuada,” Cinemafrica (July 15, 2009), film review; www.sentieriselvaggi.it/170/32995/CINEMAFRICA_-_ Senza_pieta_di_Alberto_Lattuada.htm, accessed on April 4, 2011. Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi, eds, Da La canzone dell’amore a Senza pietà, vol. 1 (Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2009), 231. Franceschi, “Senza pietà di Alberto Lattuada.” Faldini and Fofi, Da La canzone dell’amore a Senza pietà, 231. See Lattuada’s interview based on his reflections on the making of Senza pietà and his observations on the relationships between African American soldiers and Italian women. Jennifer Guglielmo, “White Lies, Dark Truths,” in Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America, eds. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2. See Pasquale Verdicchio, “The Preclusion of Postcolonial Discourse in Southern Italy,” in Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, ed. Mary Russo Beverly Allen (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), 192. See also M. Heather Hartley, Linciati: Lynchings of Italians in America, National Film Network, United States, 2004, documentary. Faldini and Fofi, Da la canzone dell’amore a Senza pietà, 231. Ibid., 231. Another possible source of Senza pietà’s discourse on race and racism in both the US and Italian contexts is one of the film’s screenwriters, author, and film director Mario Soldati (1906–99). Between 1929 and 1931, Soldati lived in the United States, during which time he taught at Columbia University. In 1935, Soldati published a memoir of his experience in Depression-era United States, America primo amore (Mondadori, 1990). Kym Ragusa, The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 17. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 143–4. Ibid., 145. Livia Tenzer, “Documenting Race and Gender: Kym Ragusa Discusses ‘Passing’ and ‘Fuori/Outside,’” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30.1, 2 (Spring 2002), 217.

Chatper 4 1

2

Edvige Giunta, “Figuring Race,” in Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 228. See among others, Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema; Dyer, White; Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White?; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.

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Notes to pages 187–210 3 4 5

6 7

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283

See chapter 1, “The Matter of Whiteness,” in Dyer, White, 1–40. Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema, 169. Joseph Pugliese, “Whiteness and the Blackening of Italy: La guerra cafona, Extracommunitari and Provisional Street Justice,” Portal 5.2 (July 2008), 3. Ibid., 32. Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, Comedy Italian-Style: The Golden Age of Italian Film Comedies (New York: Continuum, 2008), 121. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 211–13. See also Lanzoni, Comedy Italian-Style, 52–4. Lanzoni, Comedy Italian-Style, 58–9. See also Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 245. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 243–4. Lanzoni, Comedy Italian-Style, 31. Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 116. See also chapter 4 “Fourth Generation: The Sweet Life,” 115–43. Donna Gabaccia, “Two Great Migrations: American and Italian Southerners in Comparative Perspective,” in The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 219. Ashley Dawson and Patrizia Palumbo, “Hannibal’s Children: Immigration and Antiracist Youth Subcultures in Contemporary Italy,” Cultural Critique 59 (Winter 2005), 169. Giunta, “Figuring Race,” 228. Enrica Capussotti, “Nordisti contro sudisti: Internal Migration and Racism in Turin, Italy: 1950s and 1960s,” Italian Culture 28.2 (September 2010). Ibid., 130. Dialogue from Mafioso. Mafioso, dir. Alberto Lattuada, Rialto Pictures, 2002. Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Mafioso,” in Alberto Lattuada: il cinema e il film, ed. Adriano Aprà (Venezia: Marsilio, 2009), 220–1. Dialogue from Mafioso. Parati, Migration Italy, 144. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 227–9. Parati, Migration Italy, 42–3. Karen Pinkus, “Shades of Black in Advertising and Popular Culture,” in Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, ed. Beverly Allen and Mary Russo (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 134. For a discussion of Italian films concerning non-Western European migration released over the last twenty years, see Áine O’Healy, “Mediterranean Passages: Abjection and Belonging in Contemporary Italian Cinema,” California Italian Studies 1.1 (2010), online.

Chapter 5 1

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 167–86.

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Notes to pages 210–24

Pasolini, Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights) (Italy and France: British Film Institute, 2001), DVD. Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism. 233–7. Ibid., 197–222. Ibid., 175. Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 48. Bouchard, “Reading the Discourse,” 105. Pasolini arrives at this conclusion in his film Comizi d’amore (1963) an analysis of Italian society of the early 1960s, conducted by way of a series of interviews that encompassed various geographic, economic, and social groups. Andrew Levine (trans.), “For Communism: Theses of the Il Manifesto Group,” Politics & Society 1.4 (1971), 409–13. Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones, A New Guide to Italian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 113–14. Maurizio Viano, “The Left According to the Ashes of Gramsci,” Social Text 18 (Winter 1987–8), 55. Ibid., 56. Quoted from Chiara Praindel, “Africa e terzo mondo nell’opera letteraria e cinematografica di Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Tesi di Laurea, University of Studies, Trento, 2001–2, 59. Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa, 162–8. Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 190. Quoted in Letizia Giulia Giannuzzi, “Terzo mondo, tra ideologia ed esperienza poetica nell’opera di Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Tesi di Laurea, University of Bari, 1977–8, 57. Pasquale Verdicchio, “Colonialism as a ‘Structure that Wants to Be Another Structure’,” in The Savage Father, ed. Guernica Editions Antonio D’Alfonzo (Toronto and Lancaster (UK): Guernica, 1999), 58. Roberto Chiesi, “Pasolini e la ‘nuova forma’ di Appunti per un’Orestiade africana,” in Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, ed. Roberto Chiesi, Il Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna: Tipografia Moderna, 2008), 8. Sam Rohdie, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, ed. Colin MacCabe and Paul Willemen, Perspectives (Bloomington, Indianapolis, and London: Indiana University Press and BFI Publishing, 1995), 87. Kim Gardi, “The Crisis of Transition: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s African Oresteia,” Quaderni d’Italianistica 27.1 (Spring 1996), 93. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (Notes for an African Orestes) (Bologna: Cineteca Bologna, 2009), DVD. Ibid. Trento, Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini, 248. Verdicchio, “Colonialism as a ‘Structure that Wants to Be Another Structure,’” 63. Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 191–3. Ibid., 193–4. Giuliana Bruno, “Heresies: The Body of Pasolini’s Semiotics,” Cinema Journal 30.3 (Spring 1991), 32.

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Notes to pages 224–31 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 167–8. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 169–70. Ibid., 175–6. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 148. Giuseppe Cardillo, “Le borgate romane me sembrarono un sogno: New York ’69 Un’intervista inedita,” La Repubblica 2005, 58. Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini: A Biography, trans. John Shepley (New York: Random House, 1982). See chapter 6, “The Discovery of Rome,” 151–72. Louis-Georges Schwartz, “Typewriter: Free Indirect Discourse in Deleuze’s ‘Cinema,’” SubStance 34.3 (2005), 117. John David Rhodes, “Pasolini’s Exquisite Flowers: The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 155. Verdicchio, “Colonialism as a ‘Structure that Wants to Be Another Structure,’” 52–3. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le mie ‘Mille e una notte,’” Playboy Edizione Italiana (September 1973), 123. Ibid., 123–4. Pasolini, Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights). Oswald Stack, ed., Pasolini on Pasolini: Interviews with Oswald Stack (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). As opposed to the use of a long-take characteristic of neorealist films, Pasolini employs shorter takes, and usually positions the camera directly in front of the filmed subject. At once, this means of filming speaks to Pasolini’s lack of technical training and late start as a director (he made his first film at the age of 40), but also his rejection of “naturalism,” or the reenactment of “real life.” Pasolini states of his approach: “I reconstruct everything. I never have somebody talking in a long shot away from the camera, I have to have him talking straight into the camera, so there is never a scene in any of my films where the camera is to one side and the characters are talking away to themselves . . .” Pasolini, Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights). See Maurizio Viano, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993). Also see Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Trilogy of Life Rejected” reprinted in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (Manchester and Dublin: Carcanet New Press, Raven Arts Press, 1983). Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, 4. Viano, A Certain Realism, 271. From her section, “Noi, ‘altri,’” Trento writes, “Later, in the 1970s, Pasolini will present in the film Arabian Nights another figure of the poet in which it is possible to recognize a personal identification. It concerns the poet Abu Nuwas in the court of King Harun: certainly not a principal figure, but described with care, making use of autobiographical cues. This man, in fact, besides being a poet, is homosexual and ‘negro’ (therefore ‘marginal’), good looking, though no longer young, and is loved by beautiful, poor and inexperienced youths” 99.

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Notes to pages 231–42

Luca Caminati, Orientalismo eretico: Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del terzo mondo (Genova: Bruno Mondadori, 2007), 112. For a discussion of the Gennariello articles, see Verdicchio, “Colonialism as a ‘Structure that Wants to Be Another Structure,’” 75–83. Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 21. Ibid., 21–2. Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 219. Pasolini, “Le mie ‘Mille e una notte,’” 122. Ibid., 122–3. “L’ultimo nudo di Pasolini,” Il Lombardo October 13, 1973. Quoted in Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 56. Ibid. Quoted in ibid., 58. Bini, “Fonti fotografiche e storia delle donne.” See section “Le fotografie nei rapporti di madamato.” “L’ultimo nudo di Pasolini.” Ibid. Images from the collection of Roberto Villa, courtesy of the Archivio Pasolini. Patrick Rumble, Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 70–1. For a discussion of the influence of images of black women from the colonial period on contemporary Italian visual culture, see Sandra Ponzanesi, “Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices,” in Andall and Duncan, Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory, 165–89. Ponzanesi examines the continued circulation of the “Smiling Negress” and “Faccetta Nera” icons in late-twentieth-century Italian advertisements ranging from food products to digital technologies. As these icons are revised and invested with new meaning, Ponzanesi concludes: “Grasping how the elaboration of contemporary racial stereotypes depends upon past ingrained legacies is overdue, because of the earlier removal and denial of the Italian colonial chapter”; 185. I thank Roberto Villa, the set photographer who traveled and worked with Pasolini during a 3-month period filming the Arabian Nights, for this production information. Michel Foucault, “Las Meninas,” The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1994). John R. Searle, “Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation,” in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 257. Ibid., 257–8. Trento, Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini, 246. Ibid., 246. Bruno, “Heresies,” 37. Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 50.

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Notes to pages 242–59 73 74

75 76

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Ibid., 50–1. Michael Caesar, “Outside the Palace: Pasolini’s Journalism (1973–1975),” in Pasolini Old and New: Surveys and Studies, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 369. Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 33–5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 12. See Áine O’Healy, “Mediterranean Passages: Abjection and Belonging in Contemporary Italian Cinema,” California Italian Studies 1.1 (2010), online article; O’Healy, “Humanity, Hospitality, and the Detention Camp: Screening Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema,” International Journal of the Humanities 4.3 (2006); David Forgacs, “African Immigration on Film: Pummarò and the Limits of Vicarious Representation,” in Media and Migration: Constructions of Mobility and Difference, ed. Nancy Wood Russell King (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Enrica Capussotti, “Moveable Identities: Migration, Subjectivity and Cinema in Contemporary Italy,” Modern Italy 14.1 (2009); Monica Rossi, “Apologia della differenza: uno sguardo dall’esterno alla condizione degli immigranti africani in Italia in Pummarò e L’articolo due di Maurizio Zaccaro,” Canadian/American Journal of Italian Studies 20.54 (1997). Rachel Donadio, “Living Where Crime Conquers All,” The New York Times online (February 5, 2009). John Hooper, “John Hooper talks to Roberto Saviano about his reckless defiance of the mafia,” Guardian online (January 14, 2008). Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah, trans. Virginia Jewiss, 1st American edn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 45. Rhodes, Stupendous, Miserable City, 59. Megan Ratner, “The Gomorrah Doctrine,” Film Quarterly 62.4 (Summer 2009), 79. Ratner draws attention to a similar ethos of “macho fatalism” in Gomorrah’s depiction of the young clan members of the Secondigliano district and the small-time criminals who scrape out a meager existence in Accatone (1961). The “Letters to Gennariello” are collected in Pasolini, Lutheran Letters. Ratner, “The Gomorrah Doctrine,” 79.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8

Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles. 18. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 16. For a description of one variation of the Western Union installation that was staged for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s PERFORMA 07 (2007), see Craig Houser, “Racial Castaway,” MUSEO, 2008, online. Isaac Julien: Western Union: Small Boats, interview, Art Newspaper, 2007. This description is based on a DVD transfer of the audio-visual installation: Isaac Julien, Western Union: small boats (Italy: Isaac Julien Studio, 2007). Houser, “Racial Castaway.”

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Notes to pages 260–4

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Luchino Visconti, vol. 3, Cinema One (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 80. Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 48. Ibid., 49. James Hay, “Visconti’s Leopard: Remaking a National-Popular History,” Forum Italicum 21 (Spring 1987), 37. Ibid., 38–9. Derek Duncan, “Italy’s Postcolonial Cinema and Its Histories of Representation,” Italian Studies 63.2 (Autumn 2008), 196. Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “Ghosts of Memories, Spirits of Ancestors: Slavery, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic,” in Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections, ed. Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi, Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies (New York and London: Routledge), 163. Parati, Migration Italy, 50. Isaac Julien: Western Union: small boats, interview. Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book, 53. Ibid., 53–4. Houser, “Racial Castaway.”

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Index

13th Amendment 148 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto Il (1949) 14th Amendment 148 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto Il (1949) 40 Acres and a Mule 154 see also Lee, Spike 92nd Buffalo Infantry Division 126, 154–5, 163–4 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Accatone (1961) 13 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Adua (Anna Bonaiuto) 109–10 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Adwa 3, 42, 44–9, 69, 109 see also Italo-Abyssinian War (1896) Adwa: An African Victory (1999) (Gerima) 10, 21, 42–9, 158–9, 256 Adwa Complex 42 Africa 16 see also Italian colonialism African American 2–4, 8, 11–12, 71, 98, 109, 113–14, 117–23, 126–7, 134, 147, 152, 154–94, 187, 189, 196–200, 254, 257–8 black American GI 4, 11, 117, 121–3, 126–7, 134, 152–80, 196–200, 254, 257 see also Johnsons, Dots M.; Kitzmiller, John; Miracle at St. Anna (2008); Ragusa African diaspora 10, 49, 180, 181, 257, 261, 264

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African Italian (citizenship) 2, 5, 10, 27, 55, 61–6, 100, 105–15 see also Andall, Jacqueline; Angelo (1951); Bianco e Nero (2008); Khouma, Pap; Maggio, Angelo; Mulatto, Il (1949); Ragusa, Kym Age and Scarpelli 189 see also Incroci, Agenore; Mafioso (1962); Scarpelli, Furio Albania 209 see also Lamerica (1994) Alfa Tau (1942) 130 see also De Robertis, Francesco Alima (1921) (Cerruti) 26 Allied Forces (World War II) 11, 117, 122, 126, 134, 154, 163, 167, 170, 174 Allied invasion of Sicily (World War II) 117, 122, 126, 134, 154, 163, 167, 170 Almirante-Manzini, Italia 37 see also Cabiria (1914) Americanization 121 Andall, Jacqueline 47–8 Anderson, Benedict 73 Angela (Carla Del Poggio) 172–8 see also Without Pity (1948) Angelo (1951) (De Robertis) 4, 8, 11, 100, 117–53, 165–6, 175, 177, 179–83, 211, 253, 255, 257 see also Mulatto, Il (1949) Angelo (Angelo Maggio) 4, 119–53 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto, Il (1949) Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi) 154–60, 163–4, 167, 169, 171 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

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302

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anti-Semitism 34 see also Race Laws of 1938 Antonio (Ugo Tognazzi) 94–100 see also Ape Woman, The (1964) Antonioni, Michelangelo 85, 89, 109 see also Eclipse, The (1963) Ape Woman, The (donna scimmia, La, 1964) (Ferreri) 11, 54, 92–101, 189, 194, 256 Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte, 1974) 4, 8 Armes, Roy 63 Araya, Zeudi 4, 101 see also Moonskin (1972) Aryan 16, 34, 59, 60–2, 80 Aryan-Mediterranean racial identity 34, 52–3, 60, 62, 80 “Ashes of Gramsci” 215 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo “Asiatic mode” 69 assedio, L’ see Besieged Associazione nazionale partigiani d’Italia (ANPI) 157 Axum Obelisk 48 Azcona, Rafael 189 Aziz and Aziza 228, 238 see also Arabian Nights (1974) Baker, Josephine 98 Bal Negre 98 Baldwin, James 99 Balibar, Étienne 4, 9 Bandit, The (Bandito, Il 1947) (Lattuada) 125 Barbie doll (icon) 106–11 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Barrera, Giulia 61, 66, 68 Bartmann, Sarah 93–4, 96, 100 see also The Ape Woman (1964); Hottentot Venus Battle of Dogali (1887) 42, 44–7, 159 see also Adwa: An African Victory (1999) (Gerima) Batto 30–1, 38 see also Cabiria (1914) A Bell of Torment 46 see also Adwa: An African Victory (1999)

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Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 130 Benetton 6 Berger, Rudi 151–2 Berhame (Fessazion Gherentiel) 233 see also Arabian Nights (1974); Gherentiel, Fessazion Berlinguer, Enrico 215 Berlusconi, Silvio 1, 2 Bertellini, Giorgio 15–16, 23–4, 73, 187 Bertolucci, Bernardo 11, 54–5, 103–5 see also Besieged (1998) Bertrand (Eriq Ebouane) 105–11 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Besieged (assedio, L’ 1998) (Bertolucci) 11, 55, 102–5, 256–7 Bhabha, Homi 7, 8, 28 Biafran War (1967–75) 219 Bianco e Nero (2008) (Comencini) 4, 55, 105–11 Birth of a Nation (1915) (Griffith) 22–5 see also Griffith, D.W. Birth Regression: Death of a People (1928) (Korherr) 59 Bishop (Michael Ealy) 155–6, 162–7, 169, 171–2 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Black Madonna 122, 125, 139–44, 149–50 see also Angelo (1951); Madonna of Montevergine; Mulatto, Il (1949) blackface 10, 20, 23, 27–8, 41, 65, 71, 90, 95–6, 179, 254–5 blackface minstrelsy (United States) 23, 27–8 blackface performance in Ape Woman, The (1964) 95–6 Cabiria (1914) 10, 20, 27–8, 41, 254–5 Eclipse, The (1963) 90 Without Pity (1948) 179 see also Cabiria (1914); Lott, Eric; Maciste Boitelle (1889) (Guy de Maupassant) 104

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Index Bondanella, Peter 125–6, 168–9, 173 Bordastoret 35, 36 see also Cabiria (1914); criminal anthropology; North Africans Bread and Chocolate (Pane e cioccolata, 1974) (Brusati) 12, 93, 184, 186, 188, 200–9, 211 Brignone, Guido 10, 26 British colonialism 54, 81–2, 85, 90, 103 in Somalia 81–2, 85 see also Secret Violence (1963) Broken Blossoms: The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919) (Griffith) 24–5 see also Griffith, D.W. Bronze Sentinels (Sentinelle di bronzo, 1937) ( Marcellini) 57, 82–3 Brown, Jim 154 Brown v. Board of Education (1954) 108, 146, 150 see also Clark, Kenneth and Clark, Mamie; doll experiments Brunetta, Gian Piero 101 Brusati, Franco 12, 184, 200, 203 see also Bread and Chocolate (1974) Buffalo Soldiers see 92nd Buffalo Infantry Division; Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Butler, Judith 65, 77 Cabiria (1914) (Pastrone) 10, 14–43, 45, 49, 54, 116, 153, 245, 255, 256 blackface performance in Cabiria 10, 23–9 see also Maciste; Pagano, Bartolomeo Cabiria (Elissa) 21–2, 25, 30–1, 35–6, 38–40 see also Cabiria (1914) Caillois, Roger 78 calligraphism 63–4 in Under the Southern Cross (1938) 64 Camerini, Mario 28 Caminati, Luca 231 camorra 213, 246–58 Cane, Sandy 2

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Canterbury Tales (racconti di Canterbury, I) (1972) (Pasolini) 227, 235 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Carlo (Fabio Volo) 105–15 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Carthage 14, 15, 21, 22, 31, 35, 38, 39, 49 Carthaginians 15, 27, 31, 33 see also Cabiria (1914) Catari 129, 140–4, 146–7, 150, 153 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto, Il (1949) Catholic Action 128 Catholic Colateralism 128 Celli, Carlo 29–30, 38–9 Cerruti, Gino 26 see also Alima (1921) Césaire, Aimé 99, 217 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 7 Chambers, Iain 9, 43 The Children of Adwa: Forty Years Later 48 see also Adwa: An African Victory (1999); Gerima, Haile Christian Civilization (Civiltà critiana) 128 Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana) 121–2, 125, 127–9, 131, 214–15, 219 Cicutto, Roberto 154 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Cinecittà 72, 154 “A Cinema of Poetry” (1965) 210, 224–6 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Cines 27 Civil War (U.S.) 22–4 Clark, Kenneth and Clark, Mamie 108–9, 144–7 in Angelo (1951) 144–7 in Bianco e Nero (2008) 108–9 in Mulatto, Il (1949) 144–7 see also Angelo (1951); Bianco e Nero (2008); Brown v. Board of Education (1954); doll experiments; Mulatto, Il (1949) Cold War 43, 83, 120–1, 128–9, 218 post-Cold War 43, 184, 209, 248

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304

Index

Comencini, Cristina 4, 55, 105–7, 114–15 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Comin, Jacopo 56–7 see also Under the Southern Cross (1938) commedia all’italiana (comedy Italianstyle) 12, 92, 105, 188–90, 209 commedia dell’arte 27–8 Contardi (Enrico Maria Salerno) 81–5, 90–2 see also Secret Violence (1963) Continente perduto (1954) 81 see also Moser, Giorgio criminal anthropology 20, 33–5, 41, 254 see also Lombroso, Cesare Criminal Woman, The (donna deliquente, La, 1895) (Lombroso) 96 Crispi, Francesco 19, 42 Cyrenaica 15, 20, 26 see also Italo-Turkish War 1911–12

difesa della razza, La 61–2, 93, 180 The Dirty Dozen (1967) 154 diverso 13, 212–14, 222, 224, 231, 234–5, 244, 255 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Do the Right Thing (1989) 157, 171 see also Lee, Spike doll experiments 108–9, 144–7, 149 in Angelo (1951) 144–7 in Bianco e Nero (2008) 108–9 in Mulatto, Il (1949) 144–7 see also Clark, Kenneth and Clark, Mamie Don Genna 129, 134–5, 141, 143–4, 146–7, 148–9 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto Il (1949) DuBois, W.E.B. 162 Duranti, Doris 65 see also Mailù; Sotto la croce del sud (1938) Dyer, Richard 187

Dagna, Stella 15 dal Lago, Alessandro 43 Dalle Vacche, Angela 32 D’Annuzio, Gabriele 16 see also Cabiria (1914) Dante 243 Darwin, Charles 33, 150, 187 see also social Darwinism Davoli, Ninetto 222 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo De Robertis, Francesco 4, 11, 100, 118, 130, 152 see also Alfa Tau (1942); Mulatto, Il (1949); Uomini sul fondo (1941) De Santis, Giuseppe 63 De Sica, Vittorio 157 decadentism 38 The Decameron (Decamerone, Il 1971) 227, 235 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Deleuze, Gilles 45, 131–2, 225 Depretis, Agostino 42 di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi 259–60, 263

Eastwood, Clint 154 see also Flags of Our Fathers (2006); Letters from Iwo Jima (2006); Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Eclipse, The (eclisse, L’, 1962) (Antonioni) 85, 89–90, 92, 100 economic miracle (1958–63) 8, 11, 82, 117, 153, 184, 185, 190, 192, 214, 218, 255, 256 Ekberg, Anita 112 Elena (Ambra Angiolini) 105–11 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Elena (Anna Karina) 200–8 see also Bread and Chocolate (1974) Elisabetta (Alexandra Stewart) 81, 85, 88–90 see also Secret Violence (1962) Emmanuelli, Enrico 54, 82 see also Secret Violence (1962); Settimana Nera (1958) Emperor Menelik II 42, 45 see also Adwa: An African Victory (1999)

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Index Empire (2000) 245 see also Hardt, Michael; Negri, Antonio Empress Taitu 42 see also Adwa, an African Victory (1999); Gerima, Haile equal, but separate doctrine 11, 117, 146, 148–51, 153 see also Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Eritrea 7, 20, 26, 42, 55, 56, 61, 66, 82, 131–3, 217, 219, 234, 235, 237 Italian colonization (1890– 1944) 20, 26, 42, 82, 131–3, 234 madamismo in Eritrea 51, 60–1, 66, 76, 85–8, 236 Ethiopia (Abyssinia) 3, 10, 29, 42–9, 50–3, 55, 56, 61–73, 75–7 in fascist Italy 52, 59, 133 Italian colonization (1936–44) 42–9, 50–3, 56, 59, 64, 69, 72, 75, 82, 102 eugenics 52, 59, 133, 150, 187 in the Italian East African Empire 52, 59, 133 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto, Il (1949) Eumenides 219–20, 222–3 see also Furies; Notes for an African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, 1970) (Pasolini) European Common Market 215 European Union 1, 2, 14, 43 The Expedition Trilogy (2004–7) (Julien) 258–9, 262 see also Julien, Isaac; WESTERN UNION: small boats (2007) extracomunitario 188, 259 Faccetta Nera 13, 50–1, 160, 235–8, 286n. 64 see also Arabian Nights (1974); Under the Southern Cross (1938) Fanon, Franz 99, 112, 170 Farnenti 81, 84–7, 90 see also Secret Violence (1963)

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305

Fasci giovanili di combattimento (Fascist Combat Youth Group) 67 Fascio di Combattimento 55 Fascism, Italian 51–69, 126–7, 130, 138, 235, 238 Favino, Pierfrancesco 166–7 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Fellini, Federico 4 Ferreri, Marco 11, 54, 93, 189, 194 Ferri, Enrico 18 Ferroni, Giorgio 126, 152, 172 see also Tombolo, Black Paradise (1947) Fiat 188–9, 192–3, 199 see also Mafioso (1964) Flags of Our Fathers (2006) 154 see also Eastwood, Clint; Lee, Spike; Letters from Iwo Jima (2006); Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Flaiano, Ennio 102 see also A Time to Kill (1990) Foucault, Michel 51–2, 139, 240 History of Sexuality 51 lectures at Collège de France (1975–6) 52 see also Stoler, Laura Ann France 7, 51, 69, 80, 97–9, 106, 140, 222 African American expatriates in 98–9 colonialism in Africa 7, 51, 80 negrophilia 98 Franco (Tony Servillo) 248–50 see also Gomorrah (2008) free-indirect subjective 13, 211, 213, 224–7, 232–3, 240–2, 245, 255, 257 see also “Cinema of Poetry”; Pasolini, Pier Paolo French Poetic Realism 130, 173–4 French-Algerian War (1954–62) 99, 218 Friulian 212 Fulvio (Fulvius) Axilla 10, 15, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28, 31, 32, 39, 41 see also Cabiria (1914)

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306

Index

fuori/outside (1997) 12, 118, 181–4, 256–7, 259 see also Ragusa, Kym The Furies (Eumenides) 219–20, 222 see also Notes for an African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, 1970) (Pasolini) Gaeta, Giovanni Ermete (E.A. Mario) 136, 138 see also Nicolardi, Eduardo; Tammuriata Nera Galla Sidama 59 see also Under the Southern Cross (1938) Garrone, Matteo 13, 213–14, 246–8, 257 see also Gomorrah (2008) Garvey, Marcus 158, 162 see also United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Genina, Augusto 26 Gennariello (Letters to) 232, 248, 257 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Gerima, Haile 10, 21, 42–9, 117, 158–9, 172, 183, 256 see also Adwa: An African Victory (1999) German National Socialism 59 Germany Year Zero (1948) 157 Gherentiel, Fessazion 233–7 subproletariat 12–13, 212–18, 223–4, 226, 228, 231–2, 234, 237, 241–9, 252, 255, 257 body 12–13, 213, 216, 228, 231, 234, 242, 244–5, 255 global 13, 217, 224, 231, 245–6, 252 see also Arabian Nights (1974) Gianetto, Claudia 15 Gianni Amelio 209 see also Lamerica (1992) Gibson, Mary 34 Gillette, Aaron 60–1 Gilman, Sander 96 Gilroy, Paul 262

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Giunta, Edvige 185–8 Goldberg, David Theo 123 Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008) (Garrone) 13, 213–14, 245–52, 256–8 Goodbye, Othello 174 see also Without Pity (1948) Goulette, La (Tunisia) 14 Gramsci, Antonio 17, 19 “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926) 17 Graziani, Rodolfo 51 Great Britain 7, 24–5, 69, 80, 82, 101 British Somaliland 82 Great Migration (African American) 161–2 Griffith, D.W. 22–5 Birth of a Nation (1915) 22–5 Broken Blossoms (1919) 24–5 Intolerance (1916) 22, 25 Guazzoni, Enrico 38 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1968) (Kramer) 110 Hallelujah! (1929) (Vidor) 71–2 Hannibal 21, 27, 38 see also Cabiria (1914) Hardt, Michael 245 see also Empire (2000) Harlem 161–3, 167, 182 in Miracle at St. Anna (2008) 161–3, 167 Harlequin (Arlecchino) 28 see also blackface minstrelsy; commedia dell’arte Harris, Chandra 126, 163, 168–9 Hasdrubal 21–2, 38–9 see also Cabiria (1914) Hay, James 58, 66, 68, 84 Higson, Andrew 6, 7 hirsutism 93–100, 194–5 in Ape Woman, The (1964) 93–100 in Mafioso (1964) 194–5 HIV/AIDS 54, 102, 276n. 108 Hollywood 58, 73, 76, 121, 151, 170, 248 Home of the Brave, 1949 (Robson) 119, 170–1

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Index homosexuality 81, 84–5, 90–2, 215, 229–34, 242 in Arabian nights (1974) 229–34 and Italian colonialism 90–2 in Secret Violence (1963) 81, 84–5, 90–2, 104 see also Contardi Hottentot Venus 93–4, 96–7 in La difesa della razza 93–4, 96–7 see also The Ape Woman (1964); Bartmann, Sarah hypertrichosis terminalis 93 see also The Ape Woman (1964); Pastrana, Julia immigration 1–2, 5, 8, 12–13, 23, 27, 36, 43–4, 55, 102–6, 115, 117, 183, 188, 209, 213–14, 245–6, 256, 258, 260–1 African immigration to Italy 1–2, 5, 43–4, 102–6, 115, 117, 183, 188, 245–6, 260 Italian immigration to Switzerland 200, 202, 206 see also Bread and Chocolate (1974) Italian immigration to the United States 174, 176, 197 see also Mafioso (1964); Without Pity (1948) Impero 66 Incroci, Agenore 189 see also commedia all’italiana; Mafioso (1963) Intolerance (1916) (Griffith) 22, 25 see also Birth of a Nation (1915) Island of Lost Souls (1932) (Kenton) 76 Italian colonialism 3, 6, 7, 51, 53–4, 66, 80, 82, 85, 90, 91–2, 99–100, 105, 109, 110 internal colonialism, southern Italy and Sicily 6, 9, 14–20, 26, 28–32, 37, 40–1 Italian East African Empire (Africa Italiana Orientale, L’) 5, 6, 51–3, 56–7, 59–60, 64, 66, 76, 80, 82

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307

Italian Communist Party (PCI) 63, 121, 127–31, 214–19 Italian neorealism 12, 63, 117, 121, 125–7, 129–31, 157–8, 248 Italian Resistance 117, 129–33, 139, 157–8, 218–19 Italian Socialist Party 18, 34 Italian Somaliland 42, 81–2, 88 see also Secret Violence (1963) Italian unification 3, 7, 9, 14–15, 17–21, 23–5, 29, 34, 36, 40, 42, 51, 56, 60, 100, 121, 183, 185, 188, 191, 193, 198, 199–200, 213, 222–3, 253–4, 256–60, 262 Italo-Abyssinian War (1896) 3, 20, 21, 42–9, 256 see also Adwa Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6) 42, 48–9, 50, 53, 56, 59, 64, 72, 82, 102, 131, 158–61, 257 Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) 10, 15, 20, 42–3, 56 Jerry (John Kitzmiller) 172–9 see also Kitzmiller, John; Without Pity (1948) Jim Crow 28, 150, 161–2, 171 see also blackface minstrelsy Johnson, Dots M. 4, 126 Julien, Isaac 258–64 see also WESTERN UNION: small boats Jungle Fever (1991) 113–14, 157, 171 see also Lee, Spike Kalida’a, the Story of a Mummy (Kalida’a, la storia di una mummia, 1918) (Genina) 26 Karthalo 21, 33, 35, 36, 38 see also Cabiria (1914) Khouma, Pap 116 see also We Black Italians: Stories of Ordinary Racism (2010) King Harun al-Rashid 228–30, 233, 235, 237–8, 245 see also Arabian Nights (1974)

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308

Index

King Kong (1933) 76, 98, 166 Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia 14, 18, 19 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 18 Kitzmiller, John 4, 152, 172 see also Without Pity (1948) Korherr, Richard 71 Kramer, Stanley 122 see also Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) La canzone dell’amore (1933) 72 Lacan, Jacques 142–3 theory of sexual difference 142–3 Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948) 157 Lamerica (1991) (Amelio) 209 Lampedusa 258–60 see also WESTERN UNION: small boats (2007) Landra, Guido 60 see also Manifesto of Racial Scientists Landy, Marcia 64 Larsen, Nella 77 see also Passing (1929) Las Meninas 240 see also Velasquez, Diego Lasdun, James 102 see also Besieged (1998) Lateran Concordat of 1926 128 Lattuada, Alberto 11, 12, 117–18, 126, 152–3, 172, 178–84, 189, 194, 197, 200 see also Mafioso (1963); Variety Lights (1950); Without Pity (1948) League of Nations 56–7, 69, 158, 160–1 Lee, Spike 113–14 see also Jungle Fever (1991); Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Lega Nord (Northern League) 2, 183–4, 246 Lent, Theodore 93 see also The Ape Woman (1964); Pastrana, Julia

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Leopard, The (Gattopardo, Il 1962) (Visconti) 259–64 see also WESTERN UNION: small boats (2007) Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) (Eastwood) 154 see also Lee, Spike; Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Liberal era (1876–1914) 9, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 29, 32, 36, 41, 43, 45 colonialism in Africa 16 Libya 5, 15 Italo-Turkish War 1911–12 15 Lo Cascio, Luigi 154, 156 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Lo Verso, Enrico 209 see also Lamerica (1994) Locke, Alain 162, 167 see also The New Negro (1925) Lombroso, Cesare 18, 33–5, 41, 52, 96 The Criminal Man (1876) 33–4 The Criminal Woman (1893) 96 The White Man and the Man of Color (1871) 34 see also criminal anthropology Lost Boundaries, 1949 (Werler) 119 Lott, Eric 26–7 Loving v. Virginia (1967) 110 Lubiano, Wahneema 65 LUCE (L’unione cinematografica educative) 58, 63, 70 Lutheran Letters 238 see also Gennariello; Pasolini, Pier Paolo McBride, James 11, 154, 156–7 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Maciste 10, 15–22, 25–9, 31–41 in Maciste against the Sheik (Maciste contro lo sceicco, 1927) (Camerini) 26 in Maciste in the Mouth of the Lion (Maciste nella gabbia dei leoni, 1926) (Brignone) 26 see also blackface minstrelsy; Cabiria (1914); Pagano, Bartolomeo

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Index madamismo (madamism) 51, 60, 61, 66, 76, 85, 87–8 Madonna of Montevergine 122, 125, 139–44 see also Angelo (1951); Black Madonna; and Mulatto Il (1949) Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel (1910) 37 Mafioso (1962) (Lattuada) 9, 12, 93, 184, 186, 188–200, 203, 207, 209, 211, 254 Maggio, Angelo 4, 123, 151–2 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto Il (1949) Maggio, Dante 151 Mailù 53, 56–8, 62–8, 72–9, 82 see Sotto la croce del sud (1938) Malaparte, Curzio 167 see also La Pelle (1949) Mamma Roma (1962) 13, 189, 212, 218, 247, 260 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Manifesto of Racial Scientists (1938) 53, 59–62, 71 Mankiewicz, Joseph 131 Maraza del Vallo (Sicily) 14 Marcella (Giulietta Masina) 173–7 see also Without Pity (1948) Marcus, Millicent 263 Maria in Angelo (1951) 123, 127, 134, 141, 166 in Ape Woman, The (1964) 94–100 in Mulatto Il (1949) 123, 127, 134, 141, 166 Marinetti, F.T. 37, 39, 69 Mafarka the Futurist: An African Nove (1910) 37 Mario, E.A. 136, 138 see also Gaeta, Giovanni Ermete Marshall Plan 121, 189 Maryam 81, 85–7 see also Regina; Secret Violence (1962) Massinissa 21–2, 33, 36–9 see also Cabiria (1914)

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309

Matteo (Renato Baldini) 123–55 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto Il (1949) Mau-Mau uprising 217 Mediterranean (racial identity) 16, 52, 59–62 Mediterranean (sea) 9, 15, 43, 79, 118, 216–17, 231, 258, 262 Mediterranean Race: On the Origins of European Peoples, The (1901) 59 see also Sergi, Giuseppi Mercer, Kobena 232 meridionalisti (Southernists) 17 mezzogiorno 33, 139, 190 Middle Passage 180, 259, 262, 264 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 114–15 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Miguel, Mellino 7 Miracle at St. Anna (2008) (Lee) 11, 117, 153–72, 180, 256, 257, 259 miscegenation 51, 59, 61–2, 76 in Italian East Africa 51, 59, 61–2, 66, 76 in La difesa della razza 61–2 and synchronized sound 71–4 Moloch 21, 37–9, 41 see also Cabiria (1914) Moonskin (ragazza dalla pelle di luna, La, 1974) (Scattini) 4, 101–2 see also Scattini, Luigi moor 27, 168 in Mafioso (1963) 193 in Paisan (1946) 168 Moroccan soldiers 134, 138 Moser, Giorgio 10, 54, 80–1, 86–9, 91–2 see also Lost Continent (1954) 81; Secret Violence (Violenza segreta 1963) 10 Mr Kinksy (David Thewlis) 102–5 see also Besieged (1998) Mt Etna 21, 30, 37–8, 41 see also Cabiria (1914) Mulatto, Il (1949) (De Robertis) 4, 8, 11, 100, 117–53, 165–6, 175, 177, 179–83, 211, 253, 255, 257 see also Angelo (1951); De Robertis, Francesco

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310

Index

multiculturalism 6, 108, 111, 115 in Italy 108, 111, 115 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Multiplicity (art and research collective) 14 Mu see de l’Homme 93 see also Ape Woman, The (1964); Bartmann, Sarah Musini, Luigi 154 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Mussolini, Benito 15, 55, 59, 67 “My Thousand and One Nights” 228–9, 233, 236–7, 245 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Myriam (1928) (Guazzoni) 26 Myrie, Vanessa 259 see also WESTERN UNION: small boats (2007) (Julien) Nadine (Aïssa Maïga) 105–15 see also Bianco e Nero (2008) Naficy, Hamid 43 Nana (Émile Zola, 1880) 97 see also Zola, Émile Naples 93–7, 117, 121–3, 126–7, 136, 140, 151, 157, 160, 167–72, 174, 177, 198, 247–51, 257 in Angelo (1951) 117, 121–3, 136, 138, 140, 151, 177 see also tammurriata nera in The Ape Woman (1964) 93–7 in Bread and Chocolate (1974) 200–9 in Gomorrah (2008) 247–51, 257 in Mulatto Il (1949) 117, 121–3, 136, 138, 140, 151 see also tammurriata nera in Paisan (1946) 126–7, 157, 160, 167–72, 174, 198 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008); Without Pity (1948) Nathan, Vetri 8 Native Son, 1951 (Chenal) 119 NATO (North Atlantic Trade Organization) 215 nave bianca, La (1942) (De Robertis) 130

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Nazi Germany 59, 62, 126–7, 138–9, 151, 155–6, 159–60, 163, 165–6 influence on Fascist Italy 59, 62, 151 Negri, Antonio 245 see also Empire (2000) negritude 99 Negron (Laz Alonso) 155–6, 159–62 see also Miraéle at St. Anna (2008) negrophilia 98 neocapitalism 13, 214, 218, 242, 245–7, 249, 254 neofascism 254 neo-neorealism 247 see also Gomorrah (2008) neorealismo nero (black neorealism) 126 The New Negro (1925) 162 see also Locke, Alain Niceforo, Alfredo 18 Nicolardi, Eduardo 136, 138 see also Tammuriata Nera Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria, 1957) (Fellini) 4 Nino (Alberto Sordi) 188–208 see also Mafioso (1964) Nino (Nino Manfredi) 200–8 see also Bread and Chocolate (1974) No Way Out (1950) (Mankiewicz) 131 North Africa 14–20, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32–7, 40, 41, 42, 43 Italian colonization in 2, 3, 5, 15–16, 18–19, 32, 40–2, 53, 56, 79, 120, 211, 236, 254–5, 264 representation of North Africans 26–39, see also Italo-Turkish War 1911–12 north/south division 5, 6, 8, 14–20, 22–3, 26, 28–32, 34, 36, 40–1, 49, 51, 61, 72, 93, 100, 108, 114–15 Northern League (Lega Nord) 2, 183–4, 246 Notes for an African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, 1970) (Pasolini) 211, 213, 219–20, 226, 228, 244 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo

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Index Numidian 15–16, 18, 21, 27, 31, 33, 36 Maciste as Numidian slave 15–16, 18, 31 Nur-ed-Din 210, 228, 235, 239 see also Arabian Nights (1974) Obama, Barack 2 Obsession (Ossessione, 1943) (Visconti) 157 On Beauty (Zadie Smith) (2005) 105 one-drop rule 120 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto Il (1949) Opera nationale dopolavoro (National Organization of Free-Time Activities) 58, 67 Opera nazionale balilla (National Organization of Fascist Party Youth Members) 67 Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia (National Maternity and Infancy Agency) 59 Oresteia 219 see also Notes for an African Orestes (Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, 1970) (Pasolini) Orlando and Rinaldo 193 Othello (Shakespeare, William c.1603) 174 Other Race, The (altra razza, La, 1920) (Camerini) 26 Pagano, Bartolomeo 15, 16, 20, 36, 41 see also Cabiria (1914); Maciste Paisan (Paisà 1946) (Rossellini) 4, 11, 126–7, 152, 154, 157–63, 167, 169–70, 172–3, 179–80, 198, 247, 257 Palazzo Gangi 259, 262–4 see also The Leopard (Il gattopardo 1962); WESTERN UNION: small boats (2007) pan-Africanism 44, 48, 117, 158–62, 171–2, 257 Paris (France) 93–4, 97–9 in The Ape Woman (1964) 93–4, 97–9

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311

Partito Populare Italiano 128 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 4, 12–13, 129, 189, 210–58, 260 see also Accatone (1960); “A Cinema of Poetry” (1965); Arabian Nights (1974); Mamma Roma (1961); Salò (1975) Pasquale 152, 157, 167–70, 176, 198 see also Paisan (1946) Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) 248, 250–2, 258 see also Gomorrah (2008) Passing (1929) 77 passing (racial) 64 Pastrana, Julia 93, 99, 100 see also The Ape Woman (1963) Pastrone, Carmine 10, 14, 16, 32, 41 see also Cabiria (1914) Pelle, La (The Skin, 1949) 167 Pelligrini, Inez 4, 13, 211, 213, 235–9, 241, 243, 255 in Arabian Nights (1974) 4, 13, 211, 213, 235–9, 241 in Salò (1975) 243, 255 Piazzale dei Cinquecento 46–7, 159 see also Adwa, an African Victory (1999) Pickering-Iazzi, Robin 64–5 Pier, Luigi (Pierre Claudé) 173, 175, 178 see also Without Pity (1948) Pinkus, Karen 5, 69, 85, 90 Pinky (1949) (Kazan) 119 Placido, Michele 4, 209 Plessy, Homer 148 see also Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 146, 148–50, 162 see also “equal, but separate”; Plessy, Homer Poema sul terzo mondo (Poem on the third World) 219 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Pope Pius XI (1922–39) 128 Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) 134 Port of Massawa 42 see also Italian colonialism

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312

Index

positivism 33 postcolonialism 5, 7–8, 10–11, 21, 47, 49, 53–5, 80, 88–107, 112, 113, 117, 160, 212–13, 219, 228, 231, 241, 247, 256, 261 postcolonial consciousness (in Italy) 8, 10–11, 21, 47, 49, 80, 83, 88–107, 112, 113, 117, 160, 212–13, 261 postcolonial theory (in Italy) 7 post-neorealism 212, 225 Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster) 259, 263–4 see also The Leopard, 1963; WESTERN UNION: small boats Pugliese, Joseph 200 Pummarò (1988) (Placido) 4, 209 Punic Wars (third and second centuries BC) 15 second Punic War 15, 21, 32, 42 see also Cabiria (1914) Queen Zeudi 228–3, 235, 238 see also Arabian Nights (1974) Race Laws of 1938 51, 61–3, 71, 116, 132–3, 150, 213, 236, 244 racial fetishism 93–8, 111, 114, 234, 245 in The Ape Woman (1964) 93–8 in Arabian Nights (1974) 234, 245 in Bianco e Nero (2008) 111, 114 racial in-betweenness 12, 35, 96, 176–7, 185–6, 204, 208–9 in The Ape Woman (1964) 96 in Bread and Chocolate (1974) 204, 208–9 in Cabiria 35 in Without Pity (1948) 176–7 Ragazzi di Vita (Boys of Life, 1956) 218, 225, 257 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Ragusa, Kym 12, 118, 181–4, 256–7, 259 fuori/outside (1997) 12, 118, 181–4, 256–7, 259 Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging, The (2006) 181–2

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recolouring 262 see also Parati, Graziella Red Brigades 101, 214 Regina 54, 81–2, 85–9, 92 see also Maryam; Secret Violence (1963) Reich, Jacqueline 55 Renaissance (Italian) 4, 38 Republic of Italy 7, 11, 61, 117, 120–2, 127–8 Resistenza Negra, La 216–18 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Restivo, Angelo 212, 254 Rhodes, John David 226 Rialto Bridge 250 Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) 248–50, 258 see also Gomorrah (2008) Robeson, Paul 99 Rocco and his Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) (Visconti) 100, 189, 260 Roman Africa 15, 118, 264 Roman borgate 212, 217–18, 226, 237, 247–8, 257 Roman Catholic Church 55, 125, 128, 137, 141, 190, 214 Roman Empire 4, 10, 15, 16, 20, 22, 32, 36, 38, 41, 45 “second” Roman Empire 15, 29, 43, 45 see also Cabiria (1914) Roman Question (1870) 128 romanità 22 Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1945) (Rosellini) 157 Rossellini, Roberto 126–7, 130, 152–3, 157, 163, 168–9, 172–3, 257 see also Paisan (1946) Rumble, Patrick 238 Sade, Marquis de 242 see also Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (1975) St Anna di Stazzema massacre 155 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) St George (St. Ghiorgis) 45

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Index Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (Salò, o 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1975) 211, 213, 234, 242 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Saviano, Roberto 13, 213, 246–8 see also Gomorrah (2008) Scalfaro, Oscar 48 Scampìa 247 see also Gomorrah (2008) Scarpelli, Furio 189 see also Age and Scarpelli; Incroci, Agenore; Mafioso (1962) Scattini, Luigi 4, 101–2 see also Moonskin (1972) Scheer, Monique 140 see also Black Madonna Scheherazade 227, 231 see also Arabian Nights (1974) Scipio Africanus 21–2, 39 see also Cabiria (1914) Second Vatican Council (1962–65) 190, 214 Secondigliano 247–9 see also Gomorrah (2008) Secret Violence (Violenza segreta, 1963) (Moser) 80–92, 100, 256 see also Moser, Giorgio Seghor, Léopold 99 Selassie, Haile 158, see also Italo-Ethiopian War 1935–36 Senegal 55, 105–6, 109, 112 in Bianco e Nero (2008) 55, 105–6, 109, 112 Senghor, Leopold 217 Sergi, Giuseppe 18 Seshardri-Crooks, Kalpana 142–3 see also Black Madonna Settimana nera 66, 83, 91 see also Emmanuelli, Enrico; Secret Violence (1963) Shangerai (Thandie Newton) 102–5 see also Besieged (1998) Shazaman and the Demon 228 see also Arabian Nights (1974) Sicily 1, 14, 15, 17–19, 25–7, 29–31, 40–1 Allied invasion (1943) see Allied invasion of Sicily (World War II)

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313

and southern Italy 1, 14, 15 Siege, The (James Lasdun, 1985) 102 see also Besieged, 1998 Simone 56, 61–70, 74–9 see also Under the Southern Cross (1938) Sium 226, 228–35, 237, 245 see also Arabian Nights (1974) The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging (2006) 181 see also Ragusa, Kym Smiling Negress 248, 286n. 64 Smith, Zadie 117 social Darwinism 150, 187 socialist realism 53, 67–9, 73, 130, 224 Somalia 21, 54, 56, 80–3, 90–1, 92, 100 Italian colonialism in 21, 26, 54, 56, 80–3, 91, 92, 100 see also Italian Somaliland Sophonisba 21, 22, 33, 36–9, 41 see also Cabiria (1914) sopraluogo 219, 222, 228, 233, 245 see also Pasolini, Pier Paolo Sordi, Alberto 188, 191 Sòrgoni, Barbara 93–4, 272n. 24 Soudani, Mohammed 4, 209 see also Where the Earth Freezes (Waalo Fendo, 1997) southern question 3, 16–18, 20, 23, 31, 34, 40, 51–2, 188, 191, 253–4 Soviet Union 215 Spivak, Gayatri 7 Stamps (Derek Luke) 155–6, 162–7, 172 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) steatopygia 93 see also Ape Woman, The (1964); Bartmann, Sarah Stoler, Laura Ann 51–2, 66 strapese 80 Summer of Sam (1999) 157 see also Lee, Spike Sweet Life, The (dolce vita, La 1960) (Fellini) 112

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314

Index

Switzerland 12, 140, 188, 190, 200–2, 205–6, 208 in Bread and Chocolate (1974) 12, 140, 188, 190, 200–2, 205–6, 208 synchronized sound 71–2 in Under the Southern Cross (1938) 71–2 Tagi and Princess Dunya see Arabian Nights (1974) Tammurriata Nera 122, 135–9, 141, 147 see also Angelo (1951); Mulatto Il (1949) Tchen, John Kuo Wei 25 Thérèse Raquin (Emile Zola, 1867) 97, 103–4 see also Zola, Emile Third World 12–13, 45, 81–3, 101, 117, 151, 158–9, 212–21, 226, 235, 244–5, 252, 255 cinema 12–13, 45, 158–9 terrone 190, 216 Tiff Kebbi (1928) (Camerini) 26 A Time to Kill (Tempo di Uccidere, 1990) (Montaldo) 101–2, 256, 276n To Live in Peace (Vivere in pace, Luigi Zampa, 1946) 126, 152, 157, 172 Tombolo, black paradise (Tombolo paradiso nero, 1947) (Ferroni) 126, 152, 172 see also Ferroni, Giorgio Touadi, Jean-Leonard 1 tragic mulatto/a 64 Train (Omar Benson Miller) 155–7, 160, 163–72 see also Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Treaty of Paris (1947) 117 Treaty of Wuchale (Wichale) 44 Trevi fountain 112 Trilogy of Life, The 12, 226–7, 231, 234–5, 241–2, 245 “Trilogy of Life Rejected” 235 Tripoli Films 27 Tripolitania 15, 20, 26 see also Italo-Turkish War 1911–12

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Triulzi, Alessandro 48–9 Tunisia 14 Turin 190, 192, 216 Turkey 202 Uncle Tom 23, 166 Under the Southern Cross (Sotto la croce del sud) (1938) (Brignone) 10, 52–8, 62–85, 91, 116, 122, 133, 153, 211, 253, 255, 256 United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) 158 see also Garvey, Marcus Universal Exhibition of Rome (Esposizione Universale Roma, EUR) 90, 109 Uomini sul fondo (1940) (De Robertis) 130 see also De Robertis, Francesco U.S. Civil Rights Movement 108, 120, 146, 149, 153 U.S. Supreme Court 110, 120, 146, 148 see also Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Loving v. Virginia (1967); Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Vajro, Max 138 see also Tammurriata Nera Valmarana, Paolo 153 Variety Lights (Luci del varietà, 1952) (Fellini/Lattuada) 152, 172 Vatican State 128, 134 Velazquez, Diego 240 Las Meninas (1656) 240 see also Arabian Nights (1974) Venice 72, 249–50 in Gomorrah (2008) 249–50 Verdicchio, Pasquale 19, 188, 219, 227 Viano, Maurizio 215–16, 227, 231 Vidor, King 71 see also Hallelujah! (1929) Villari, Pasquali 17 see also southern question Violent Life, A (vita violenta, Una) (Pasolini, 1958) 218

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Index

315

Visconti, Luchino 100, 157, 189, 259–64 Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1962) see Leopard, The (Gattopardo, Il 1962) (Visconti) Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers, 1960) see Rocco and his Brothers (Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) (Visconti) Vitti, Monica 89 von Hennenberg, Krystyna 46 Voyage to America 207 see also Mafioso (1963)

White Squadron, The (squadron bianco, Lo 1936) (Genina) 57, 67, 82 whiteness (concepts of) 7, 12, 23–4, 36, 40, 77, 92, 95–6, 114, 119, 142–3, 165, 179, 183–8, 194–5, 200–4, 207 Without Pity (Senza pietà 1948) (Lattuada) 4, 11, 118, 126, 152–3, 172–80, 189, 198, 254, 257 Wood, Mary 125 Wright, Richard 99, 119

Washington, Booker T. 162 We Black Italians: Stories of Ordinary Racism (Noi italiani neri: storie di razzismo ordinario, 2010) 116 see also Khouma, Pap WESTERN UNION: small boats (2007) 258–64 see also Julien, Isaac Where the Earth Freezes (Waalo Fendo 1997) (Soudani) 4, 209 White Man and the Man of Color, The (1871) 34 see also criminal anthropology; Lombroso, Cesare

Xian (Ronghua Zhang) 248, 250–2, 258 see also Gomorrah (2008)

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Zampa, Luigi 126, 152, 157, 172 see also To Live in Peace (1946) Zola, Emile 97, 103–4 see also Nana (1880); Thérèse Raquin (1867) Zumurrud (Inez Pelligrini) 13, 210–11, 226–8, 231, 235, 237–40, 245, 252 see also Arabian Nights (1974); Pelligrini, Inez

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