Valerio Ferme

The Return to the Mediterranean in Contemporary Western Thought

Since the 1980s, a vast corpus of artistic expressions and scholarly writings on the Mediterranean has animated Western culture. Filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, and poets express in their works Mediterranean themes and concerns, while scholars from Barcelona to Marseilles, Athens to Messina, and New York to Toronto organize conferences, publish essays and monographic studies, edit volumes, create journals, and launch Mediterranean institutes and research centers. Meanwhile, disciplines and degree programs—from geography, political science, and economics to anthropology, philosophy, and literature—revamp their curriculum and coalesce around new institutional and interdisciplinary cores called “Mediterranean Studies.”

Sounds of Southern Shores

Proceeding with our examination of the cluster of cultural material that testifies to a revisiting of the many sites and locations of Italy’s Mediterraneanness, in this chapter, we will focus on the realm of popular music, a realm that has shown much ferment and creativity from the 1980s onward, from the pioneering work of Fabrizio De Andre’s Creuza de ma (1984) and two artists from Sicily and the city of Naples, respectively, Franco Battiato and Pino Daniele. Daniele, in particular, advances the idea that to be Neapolitan is to share the destiny of the trans-Atlantic other (i.e., African Americans and Cubans) and incorporates musical elements from a Mediterranean at large, thus opening a path for the daring experimentations of the groups Almamegretta and 99 Posse. While these musicians carry out the negotiations of Italy’s Mediterranean locations through contaminations that move from the outside in, other southern musicians, including Eugenio Bennato and the band Sud Sound System, evoke the syncretism within, expressing concerns that widen the local struggles of the Salento and of southern Italy (i.e., unemployment, immigration, the questione meridionale, and the political corruption of the countryside) to a global dimension.

Screening the Souths through Southern Eyes

In this chapter, we focus on Italian cinema from the 1980s onward. Although a brief discussion of the cinematic traditions that precede it— notably, neorealism, comedy, and docufiction—is in order, our analysis explores the work of a limited number of directors who vividly express the tension between Western and Mediterranean imagining. While many more have participated in these representations (and we will reference their filmography), those we discuss enable us to cover a wide gamut of perspectives vis-a-vis this geophilosophical tension. Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco, for example, screen the horrors of modernization and its corrupted developments in postapocalyptic images of the island of Sicily. Gianni Amelio and Matteo Garrone are equally critical of the disappearance of values enacted by modernization and the concomitant loss of difference between northern and southern cultures. Edoardo Winspeare, instead, strives to recover the fragments of the cultural traditions of the Salento region after its devastating encounter with globalized modernity. Likewise, Emanuele Crialese brings to light the sites and locations of cultural traditions and forms of knowledge that have survived Western epistemologies; while at times he teeters toward idealized representations, he also reminds viewers of a Mediterranean existence marked by emigration and immigration as well as natural and social upheavals.

Writing the Mediterraneity of the Italian Souths

In the last few decades, a large number of Italian writers are revisiting the sites and locations of Italy’s Mediterranean identity in works that examine the effects of modernization on the South while consciously mobilizing the historical sedimentation of composite and minoritarian cultures of the peninsula. By doing so, they express concerns that encompass a much broader transnational dimension than the rich tradition of southern Italian writing to which they are indebted.1 And while here, more than elsewhere, we will be forced to narrow our analysis, we will begin with a brief presentation of contemporary writers from the South before proceeding to an in-depth examination of Vincenzo Consolo, Carmine Abate, and Erri De Luca, authors selected for the exemplary value of their works in contemporary literary reflections of Italy and the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean of Migrant, Postcolonial, and Exile Writers

By the mid-1970s, Italy, which like Greece, Portugal, and Spain had been one of Southern Europe’s traditional out-migration countries, became a destination for individuals who crossed the Mediterranean from the Strait of Gibraltar between Morocco and Spain, the Channel of Sicily between Tunisia and Sicily, and the Channel of Otranto between Albania and the Adriatic coast. At that time, the migrants registered on Italian soil amounted to less than 150,000, but by 1997, their number had increased to over a million. Today, the dossiers of Caritas/Migrantes estimate that close to five million emigrants reside on Italian soil (Immigrazione Dossier 57).1 Nationalistic myths and strict legislative measures to control borders and reinforce frontiers soon followed, but by the early 1990s, migrants started to claim a presence in the Italian literary landscape, giving voice to the many ties that bind people across the sea and questioning normative definitions of “Italianness” to greatly enrich present-day discourses on Italy and the Mediterranean.

Geophilosophies of the Mediterranean

An Italian geophilosophical discourse on the Mediterranean emerged powerfully in the mid-1990s. Arising and inscribed within a spatially determined Mediterranean culture, this discourse originates from an idea of space understood in its geographic, material dimension but also as a symbolic element that determines, to a degree, the subject’s cultural formations and interpretative horizons.1 In this chapter, we consider the impact that Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, among others, have had in initiating a reflection on the Mediterranean in an era of accelerated globalization and so-called Europeanization. Our objective is not to chart a genealogy or deny the specificity of the Italian inquiry but rather to account for cultural and sociohistorical developments that allow one to understand Italy’s geophilosophical turn. We then discuss Italian intellectuals associated with this thought, focusing on philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars of law and jurisprudence whose work has heavily influenced geophilosophical inquiries in contemporary Italy.