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• Gramsci and The South as a Space of Emancipation

  39-55

  Antonio Fontana

  Views:

  166

  The paper will actively engage with the contradictions found in Gramsci in an attempt to tease out the elements of emancipation found in his thought, as well as a sub-culture of opposition against Western notions of rationality. Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the Italian South and of the Southern Italian peasantry in relation to the formation of a radical politics of emancipation constitutes one of the most salient features of his critique of orthodox Marxism. I argue that for the Italian Marxist theorist, the liberation of the Italian peasantry is not only a project of social, economic and political emancipation. Rather, the peasantry’s emancipation is also seen as a project of cultural liberation, a liberation from the dominant strands of rationalist and positivist Enlightenment thought, which Gramsci saw as encapsulated in Crocean philosophy. For Gramsci, the task of the organic intellectuals is to create an ideational sphere in which the colonized South can potentially articulate and celebrate a culture that has historically been deemed backward and primitive. However, Gramsci’s analyses of the South also contain historicist encrustations, which create a dialectical tension in his theory of politico-cultural emancipation that has never really been solved. I argue that the positivist and progressionist encrustations of Gramsci’s program for the emancipation of the South is an instantiation of a wider, Western, 19th and 20th century intellectual tradition which conflates “progress” as such with emancipation, a tradition that goes beyond the Italian and European context, and that is even paralleled by the model for black emancipation in the American South put forth by a figure as seemingly divergent as, say, W.E. B. Du Bois in the The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

• Staying or leaving? On the non-stereotypical representations of Naples

  36-53

  Antonio Sciacovelli

  Views:

  346

  The literary image of Naples, “Capital of the South”, that sees periodic alternations of crisis and splendour in the arts, is certainly dichotomous: on the one hand the locus amoenus in which inventiveness flourishes and different cultural traditions intersect and live together, on the other the symbolic place of immense social disparities, an outbreak of epidemics and the cradle of a lax and reactionary mentality. The image used by Benedetto Croce to define the city, “a paradise inhabited by devils” dates back to the Middle Ages, and is denied from time to time by the authors who intend to build a positive myth of Napoletanità, but already in the early 20th century, and then especially in the period from 1943 (to the present day), there are increasingly critical accents towards this image, which result - more than in hatred or in contempt for the city and its inhabitants - in a tendency to move away from Naples, to abandon a contradictory reality that does not solve its problems, but like a virgin forest grows back destroying every element of progress. The writers examined in the article are: Carlo Bernari, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Fabrizia Ramondino, Ermanno Rea, Giuseppe Montesano, Elena Ferrante.

• «Odio finanche la lingua che si parla». Power and freedom in Vincenzo Consolo's Nottetempo, casa per casa

  85-95

  Giuseppe Traina

  Views:

  21

  The essay studies the relationships between the novel Nottetempo, casa per casa and the linguistic considerations disseminated by Consolo in other texts. Consolo does not limit himself to criticising the language of fascism but broadens his critical analysis to the language of power as such and the languages of opposition, when they are tainted by empty rhetoric. In this sense, the protagonist’s final escape also takes on a palingenetic value from a political point of view