The ghostly body of the future. Nostalgic objects and modernization from post-unification to post-war reconstruction

Ferrari, Francesco

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124502 Copy

Description

Title

The ghostly body of the future. Nostalgic objects and modernization from post-unification to post-war reconstruction

Author(s)

Ferrari, Francesco

Issue Date

2024-04-24

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Rota, Emanuel

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Rota, Emanuel

Committee Member(s)

• Stoppino, Eleonora
• Rushing, Robert
• Murison, Justine

Department of Study

French and Italian

Discipline

Italian

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Nostalgia
• Objects
• Affect Theory
• Modernization

Abstract

Nostalgia, despite being a construction of modernity, and despite its ubiquitous presence in the modern and postmodern world, garners many prejudices and perceptions of suspicion. The starting point of my research is precisely a prejudice, or should I say two prejudices. The first is that Italian culture is inescapably nostalgic; the second is that nostalgia is anti-modern and conservative by definition. Hence, to say that Italian culture is a nostalgic is synonymous with saying it is anti-modern and conservative. Such an inveterate cliche endures despite a myriad of examples that prove how throughout the century Italy has, conversely, given a tremendous contribution in shaping modernity, although maintaining a strong connection with its past. Opera is, in that sense, a paradigmatic example: the result of a nostalgic operation that combines and re-elaborates ancient elements of the past – in this specific case certain performative aspects of the Greek theater - to create a new form of art. Nostalgia, the way I frame it in my dissertation, defines precisely a strategy that creates something anew by reprising and reutilizing elements from the past. My assumption then is that nostalgia can be a creative force, something that draws from the past, from its symbolic and material remains to envision futurity. In doing so I aim to challenge the abovementioned prejudices about Italy, by arguing that in fact, Italian culture far from being a “pastist” country, as the futurist would have it, has produced a divergent conception of modernity. It is fair to say though, that manifestations of modernity are accompanied by manifestations of nostalgia, and that progress is at times hailed with skepticism, as I will highlight in my introduction. But it is also true, as the current intellectual debate shows, that the preoccupation for preserving the past is consubstantial to the preoccupation for modernization of the present. Especially in a country like Italy where the presence of the past is ubiquitous, the question that recurs in the public discourse, and that also lies at the core of my research is, what to do of all this past and its remains? How to make it an active part in the construction of modernity? Here is where nostalgia as a productive and even innovative force comes into play. In order to articulate this idea, I draw from voluminous literature about how nostalgia has flourished in the last twenty years. In particular, anthropology is a discipline that more than others rethinks nostalgia by focusing on the anti-pastist and anti-conservative manifestations of this sentiment. Similarly, the field of literary theory – I will mention Svetlana Boym’s seminal book The Future of Nostalgia among the others – presents nostalgia as a sentiment that can spark future oriented practices rather than a mythologization of the past that serves restorative politics. In other words, nostalgia lies on a spectrum spanning the breadth of conservativism to modernity. A crucial argument of my thesis is that nostalgia, in this acceptance, configures as a mechanism that makes up for the incompleteness of modernizing processes and pursues a future that has never fully realized. This is particularly important for the Italian context where modernity is often perceived as an incomplete project. The rhetoric of incompleteness surrounds especially two watershed moments in Italian contemporary history, two moments full of revolutionary but unkept promises which for these reasons mark the confines of my research. The first is the unification of Italy, also known as Risorgimento, that inaugurates a new, and truly modern phase for the country which for the first time in its troubled history finds itself in the institutionally cohesive form of an independent nation governed by a democratic system. However, the unreconciled differences between north and south, the state of backwardness and disadvantage of the latter which still persists today, have contributed to seeing the Risorgimento as an unfulfilled, if not failed, endeavor. The other great turning point in Italian modernity is the reconstruction following WWII when Italy experiences an unprecedented economic flourishing that goes down in history as the “economic miracle.” An inequitable miracle though, because once again, the South does not benefit of the fruits of this newfound prosperity. The first chapter engages with the hermeneutical prejudices that weigh on nostalgia as an analytic category and proposes an alternative vision. I define nostalgia as optative, mimetic and future-oriented focusing on futurist, modernist and postmodern discourse. My analysis, in particular, lingers on futurist Aeropainting, Carlo Levi’s description of the South during fascist and post-fascist era, and urban spaces, with a focus on the unfinished buildings that represent a peculiarity of Italian landscape. In the second chapter, I analyze the construction of a national identity by looking at Cesare Lombroso’s account In Calabria (1862) where we can see a paradoxical combination of romanticism, Hellenism, and positivism. The Hellenic past is reprised as a rhetorical device for accomplishing the project of Risorgimento by retrieving the “remnants of the past,” namely Greeks and Albanians settled in the region, against the recent experience of the Bourbon domination. Such rediscovery and salvage of these two ethnic minorities demonstrates that in the positivist culture the nostalgic element is not necessarily rejected but, on the contrary, it is re-integrated in the nationalist project. However, the nostalgic discourse that leads to the rhetoric of re-use serves also as an objectifying and racializing factor of southern peoples. The third chapter focuses on an Italian-American novel, Umbertina (1979) by Helen Barolini, where the female protagonist is forced to sell her precious bedspread in order to overcome the financial difficulties faced after arriving in America. This trading, and the nostalgia for the lost object, turns into a driving force that leads the woman to create what I call a “diasporic domesticity.” By this expression, I mean that the experience of migration, and the subsequent uprooting, is highly impactful and radically transforms the domestic space and traditions that it is supposed to preserve, but also reconfigures the role and the agency of the subjects, in this case specifically, a migrant woman. In the last chapter I offer a reading of two of major works of 20st Century Italian literature: Il Gattopardo (1958) by Tommasi di Lampedusa and L’Airone (1970) by Giorgio Bassani. Il Gattopardo depicts the passage from the Southern rural aristocracy to the new social order imposed by the Unification, while L’Airone focuses on the interstitial moment between the fall of the fascist regime and the boom economico. In both works, nostalgia is redefined as a yearning for an end, where “end” must be intended as the accomplishment of an historical telos, which however remains substantially estranged to the Italian tradition.

Graduation Semester

2024-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Francesco Ferrari

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