One of Futurism’s most consistent traits was its hostility to traditional intellectual culture: scholarship, academies, professors. Yet, Futurism also produced its own critical-intellectual products and scholarship in the form of misurazioni (theatrical measurements-reviews), commemorazioni in avanti (forward-looking commemorations), and collaudi (prefaces to futurist poetry collections). I analyze these intellectual products with an eye to both inserting them in the history of modernist ideas, and applying to them the futurist concept of “measurement” in order to highlight what was futurist in Futurism. The surprising result of this inquiry is that Futurism’s most lasting intellectual contribution may have been its multifaceted anti-dialectical idea of synthesis, which anticipated the encounter between cybernetics and eugenics in what Marinetti called a “bellissimo dopodomani” (beautiful day after tomorrow).

This article surveys both the place of 'modern' Italy in the resurgence of Mediterranean Studies in the last decade and a half, and the contributions by Italian Studies and culture at large to the contemporary discourse on Mediterranean-ness. The author frames the discussion of recent scholarship by and about Italian Mediterranean-ness in a paradox: notwithstanding the role that 'Mare Nostrum' played in Italian identity construction and foreign policy (before, during and after Fascism), modern Italy is given very short shrift in current Mediterranean Studies. By contrast, over the past two to three decades 'Italy' has both confronted an unprecedented wave of immigration from the Mediterranean basin, and become almost synonymous with Mediterranen-ness in the global market of images. Responding to this paradox, the author argues, Italian scholars and intellectuals have been progressively transfiguring the Mediterranean from 'Mare Nostrum' (our sea) to 'Mare Aliorum' (the sea of the other).

In this interview conducted by Claudio Fogu in July 2007, Franco Cassano answers questions on the evolution of his pensiero meridiano (southern thought) from the publication of the homonymous volume in 1996 to the present. The interview is conducted in Italian, and is available in video, edited in ten separate segments, and in a written transcription. The segments cover topics ranging from the relationship of pensiero meridiano and the Mediterranean basin today, to the impact of “9/11” on the evolution of southern thought, to recent criticisms of Cassano’s perspective by fellow theorists such as Iain Chambers. Cassano defends his pensiero meridiano from accusations of Eurocentrism, while also joining his critics in calling for an opening up of the newly formed intellectual koynè of philo-Mediterraneist to a more active engagement with politics and the larger public.

Editors' Note for Volume 1, Issue 2.

Editors' Introduction to Volume 1, Issue 1.

Fillia (Luigi Colombo, 1904-1936) is one of the most significant and intriguing protagonists of the Italian futurist avant-garde in the period between the two World Wars, though his body of work has yet to be considered in any depth. My dissertation uses a variety of critical methods (socio-political, historical, philological, narratological and feminist), along with the stylistic analysis and close reading of individual works, to study and assess the importance of Fillia's literature, theater, art, political activism, and beyond. Far from being derivative and reactionary in form and content, as interwar futurism has often been characterized, Fillia's works deploy subtler, but no less innovative forms of experimentation. For most of his brief but highly productive life, Fillia lived and worked in Turin, where in the early 1920s he came into contact with Antonio Gramsci and his factory councils. This led to a period of extreme left-wing communist-futurism. In the mid-1920s, following Marinetti's lead, Fillia moved toward accommodation with the fascist regime. This shift to the right eventually even led to a phase dominated by Catholic mysticism, from which emerged in his idiosyncratic and highly original futurist sacred art.

The purposes of my study are the following: to analyze and contextualize Fillia's oeuvre; to highlight his importance for a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the futurist movement and the European avant-garde; to demonstrate his crucial aesthetic contributions to late futurism; and to bring critical attention to his radical political ideology. I also draw out the influence that his early communist activities continued to have even in his later fascist years, as well as his unprecedented interest in questions of gender and feminism.

Based on the evidence that emerges from my reading of Fillia's oeuvre, in my conclusions I show how my work contributes to a more thorough and nuanced understanding of futurism's complexity, and I discuss Fillia's importance to Italian intellectual life immediately before and under the fascist regime. Studying Fillia's ideological swing from left-wing radical to right-leaning conservative provides crucial clues about the intellectual and cultural climate in interwar Italy, and forwards scholarly understanding of the pressures and constraints that led so many Italian intellectuals to active participation in Mussolini's regime. Finally, using the evidence presented in the dissertation, I suggest some possible new perspectives for the comparative study of modernism and the avant-garde in Europe.

Vera Modigliani (1888-1974), Maria Brandon Albini (1904-1995), and Joyce Lussu (1912-1998) were antifascist activists who emigrated from Italy—fuoriuscite—and wrote novels, memoirs, and poetry about their varied experiences both during their period of exile, and well after it in the course of their literary careers. In my dissertation, I conduct a comparative study of these women’s narratives. I offer a nuanced study of the women’s literary works in order to fill a pronounced gap in current exile literature scholarship of the period, which has focused almost exclusively on male authors. My critical framework for this research is interdisciplinary, structured predominantly around the narrative theory of life writing. In addition, I also pull from exile, feminist, and sociological theory. Ultimately, I demonstrate that there are experiences and literary themes common to the three women, despite the fact that they were not closely linked in their exile. I examine the following leitmotifs, among others: the tension between an Italian cultural identity and the marginalized identity of woman, Jewish, or other; the reciprocal influence of memory and narration; the tension between narrating memories and the passage of time; and gendered identity construction through narration. I thus delineate the beginnings of a typology of women’s exile literature that male-oriented scholarship has previously been unable to detect and map.

My study focuses on the white, female experience and memory of Italian colonialism through the reading of private, unpublished sources––memoirs, autobiographies, journals, oral memories––compared to the analysis of how colonial memory has been shaped in literary and cinematic works produced by Italian women in postcolonial times. I ask if applying the lenses of class, gender and regional belonging will question the accepted notion that Italian colonialism has been repressed and not properly addressed in the Italian public sphere, while raising questions about gendered memory and the role and agency of white women in the Empire-building project and its legacy. I look at how Italian women have represented and memorialized Italian colonialism, and to what extent they have taken part in the construction of the myth of Italiani brava gente (Italians good folks) through the analysis of novels, films and a vast collection of private writings. The exploration of such documents––journals, memoirs and autobiographies––required a long work of archival research in Italy that has eventually allowed me to include the often-neglected voices of lower-middle-class and working-class white Italian women in order to sketch an overarching assessment of white women’s participation in the colonial venture. My dissertation applies an intersectional perspective to (post)colonial hierarchies, showing how in the colonial setting race prevailed over gender affiliations, creating a complex web of power unbalances complicated by class and regional differences. The first chapter, Mal D’Africa, shows the perdurance of colonial clichés, and the extensive nostalgic romanticization of Africa in contemporary memoirs and literary production that has contributed to crystallize an edulcorated acritical representation of colonialism and the systematic objectification of Africans. The second chapter, The Others, delves deeply into the analysis of the dynamics between race, gender and class and how women negotiated the problematic contours and limits of their white privilege in the daily encounter with alterity within a virility-obsessed, patriarchal regime. The third and last chapter, Empowerment, shows how eventually the colony offered white women a space for economic, class or political empowerment and agency that was lacking in metropolitan Italy. This flashes up how problematically it was the very complicity with colonial ideology that created the conditions for niches of female emancipation at the detriment of the colonial other.