UC Berkeley

Since the founding of the Italian nation in 1861, mass emigration has played a crucial role in the construction of a national identity among a population historically divided by regional, ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences. In the aftermath of the Second World War, emigration continued to fulfill a vital function in Italy's national redefinition. In material terms, it enabled Italy to rebuild a devastated political and economic framework in a manner that allowed old power blocs to evade the restructuring of traditional relations of production.

Yet emigration proved equally essential for redrawing the cognitive map of the nation, laying out the new ideological terrain upon which material reconstruction was to take place. In the ideological vacuum that followed the collapse of Fascism and the nation's loss of foreign colonies, postwar emigration narratives proved fundamental for carrying out a project of collective redemption that cleansed Italians from the stain of Fascism while restoring the colonial imaginary that had traditionally governed the nation's relationship with its South. By supplying at once absolution for past sins and an archaic internal Other against which the new nation could measure itself, postwar representations of emigration helped pave the way for Italy's transformation into a "modern," post-Fascist democracy, a founder of the European Union, and one of the world's leading economies.

This dissertation examines emigration narratives produced in literary and filmic texts spanning from 1945 to 1964 in works by key figures of Italian postwar culture such as Carlo Levi, Ignazio Silone, Rocco Scotellaro, Mario Soldati, Aldo Fabrizi, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. By examining shifting forms of interdiction that placed migrant Others outside the moral, spatial and temporal boundaries of the nation, this research aims to illustrate how the emigrants' textual presence gave shape and meaning to the new nation, bringing into focus the contours of a new republic emerging from the ashes of Fascism.