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Gramsci and The South as a Space of Emancipation
39-55Views:185The 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).
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The exaltation of Italian national identity in the discourse of Matteo Renzi
74-95Views:156Nations are one of the most well-established constructs in our society, and they represent a very attractive benchmark for personal and social identification. Political speeches, as well as, for example, media discourse and popular culture, constantly reiterate myth, culture and history of nations in order to reaffirm and preserve their positive image, and this tendency doesn’t seem to be weakened by some contemporary events like globalization and the reinforcement of transnational systems.
As a proof of this trend, the present work proposes an in-depth analysis of the speech held by the then Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the European Parliament on the occasion of the inauguration of the Italian semester of presidency on July 2, 2014, aiming to demonstrate that also supranational contexts are exploited to reiterate national identity and priorities.
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From Italy to the USA: Cleveland Italians, Their Heritage and Traditions
110-118Views:475One would be hard-pressed to deny the influence Italians have had on the United States of America and on the very fabric of American cultural life. Not only are metropolises like New York City and Chicago with their populations in the millions home to significant Italian communities and neighborhoods but so are cities with several hundred thousand inhabitants like Boston, Baltimore, Syracuse, St. Louis, or Cleveland. The present paper intends to focus on Italians in Cleveland, Ohio, that undoubtedly constitute an organic and significant part of the city’s population. It aims to offer an insight into the formation of the Italian neighborhoods, from the first waves of Italian immigrants in the 19th century, and the opportunities of second-, third-, or nth-generation Italians to tend to their common Italian roots as well as to preserve their customs and traditions from the old country through a wide array of Italian cultural events, the city’s Italian community hubs and memorial sites, or the local Italian-American media
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Linguistic and cultural contacts between the two shores of the Adriatic. The Italian of Albanian writers
69-86Views:230Migrant literature is a powerful medium of expression which offers a great variety of interpretation and a great source of inspiration for scholars to investigate the different aspects of the life and those of the society. Finding themselves in-between, migrant authors have the opportunity to live (in) two or more languages and cultures bringing them together, changing and shaping them. It is precisely here where linguistic contact occurs and where different strategies take place becoming an interesting part of a linguistic and literary research. This article investigates the contact between Albanian and Italian language through the analysis of some of the works of Ornela Vorpsi, Artur Spanjolli, Ron Kubati and Anilda Ibrahimi. Taking into consideration the fact that these authors has decided to use Italian as their language of expression, this investigation offers some considerations of what this means to them and the impact on both languages. Considering the fact that these writers transfer in their texts not only important aspects of the culture but also some features of the Albanian language, it is interesting to see the way in which transference takes place and what happens to the text when two different and distant languages such as Albanian and Italian meet.
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Secondary school adolescents: identity, languages and hereditary languages. The case of the provinces of Biella and Vercelli
87-109Views:246This contribution is part of the tradition of heritage languages and linguistic and cultural identity. It mainly deals with the perception of the identity of students of non-Italian nationality or origin and their relationship with the language and the culture of origin, and those of the host community. More and more children and young people of non-Italian origin are present in Italian schools: the integration model pursued in Italy wants to respect cultural differences and language is one of the key elements of this process. The research concerned two provinces of Eastern Piedmont: Biella and Vercelli. Using a sociolinguistic and sociologic approach, a study was carried out through the administration of questionnaires concerning language and identity, the motivation towards integration, the perception and attitude towards one’s own language/culture of origin, and the Italian language/culture. The emerging picture presents sometimes ambiguous attitudes that can be defined almost as a “suspension” between the desire for “Italianisation” and the preservation of one’s roots. The research poses stringent questions schools and society are called to address on the construction (or reconstruction) of their own identity.
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Why read the French classics: Calvino and the lesson of the French masters
119-131Views:103Calvino’s move to Paris in 1967 marks a new phase of his life, in which, inevitably, contact with French culture becomes closer and more direct. The essay examines the relationship that, during the years in Paris and in those of his return to Italy, the writer weaves with the great French classics, in scattered writings and within the Norton Lectures.
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Witnessing "another time within our time": Carlo Levi's Tutto il miele è finito
10-27Views:195Tutto il miele è finito is part of Carlo Levi’s interest in Other cultures and in the continuity of the encounter with the anthropological diversity of Southern Italy inaugurated by Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. This article focuses on the theme of the archaic, and on the perspective of the “contemporaneity of times” that characterizes Levi’s thought, in order to demonstrate how from Tutto il miele è finito emerges the testimony “of another time that precedes history but that is itself contemporary of history and as present as history itself” (G. Agamben).
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Luigi Russo: the union of science and life
10-19Views:281In his work as a historian and literary critic, Luigi Russo considered literature not in the perspective of the limited disciplinary knowledge, but always tended to correlate it with wider aspects of reality, history, to “make history” rather than to “know how to read”, to always connect “science” and “life”, theory and practice, study and ethi-cal-political values, according to the teaching of Francesco De Sanctis, set out in the extraordinary Neapolitan prolusion of the same name of 1872, interpreted by Russo in the monograph 1928 Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana. The work of Luigi Russo, anti-authoritarian, anti-demagogic, anti-dictatorial, can still be a point of reference for those who care about the values of culture and the polis together.