Drawing from a theoretical framework which connects postcolonial, transnational and translation theory with critical constructions of gender, sexuality, and race, and using an ample and well-selected bibliography, Reimagining the Italian South is divided into three main parts. They address, respectively, transnational theories and transnational histories of the South; representations of the Italian South in contemporary Italian literature; and new representations of the Italian South in contemporary Italian transnational cinema. In the first part, the author introduces complicated issues by way of a sophisticated summary of theories about North-South stereotypes, the southern question, the Mediterranean, the Global South, and emigration/immigration, with references to some of the most authoritative scholars in those fields, such as Franco Cassano, Iain Chambers, Jane Schneider, Caroline Levander and Walter Mignolo, Piero Bevilacqua, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, to name a few.
To ‘demonstrate how the political questions posed by Santos in his “southern theory” can be pursued in the domain of literary and cinema studies’ (p. 20), in the second part of the volume, the author analyses in depth three contemporary novels: Giulio Angioni's Una ignota compagnia (1992), Evelina Santangelo's Senzaterra (2008), and Christiana de Caldas Brito's Colpo di mare (2018). Polizzi's selection is dictated by his desire to dissect the pivotal phenomenon of mobility, intertwined with cultural and linguistic hybridity, migration, integration and/or marginalisation, and ultimately with a better sense of self-understanding. He shows ‘how the current predicament of the Italian South as a border-space is explored in the novels’ (p. 70), while discussing how these selected texts underscore new representations of subjectivity.
Reminding the readers of anthropologist James Clifford's theory of what he calls ‘travelling cultures’ influenced by cultural exchanges, Polizzi analyses Angioni's text, focusing on the diasporic articulations of different southern cultures, as the story revolves around the friendship of Sardinian Tore and Kenyan Warui, both immigrants in Milan. Their employers, Mr and Mrs Bolgiani, often comment on the similarity of southern Italians to Africans, labelling both ‘terroni neri’ (p. 76). Also interesting is Angioni's ‘translingual’ practice of employing Swahili and Italian dialects (such as Sardinian, Milanese, and Venetian) as well as English and Portuguese terms throughout the novel. Senzaterra's main character is also an African migrant, arriving this time on the coast of Sicily. The place of Tore is taken by a young Sicilian man, Gaetano, who is caught between his desire to move to a large city to attend university and his father's wish to join him in Germany to help start a restaurant. The novels share similar plots and inquiries regarding the marginalisation of southern Italians and migrants from the Global South, but also a similar interest in linguistic experimentation, with Santangelo employing standard Italian and Sicilian dialogues, and small passages with a mixture of German and Italian/Sicilian. Of note here is the presentation of the South, and specifically Sicily in this case, as a terra di morti, to indicate the doomed individuals but also their lack of initiative, and the history of abuse; the South is perceived as a heterotopia, which, according to Michel Foucault, is an interstitial space, a space of contestation and experimentation.
One could say that Santangelo's Senzaterra is a Bildungsroman with a defined evolution of Gaetano's character as he navigates through his many experiences and the experiences of those around him. Evolution is the core of the third and last novel analysed by Polizzi, Colpo di mare; readers witness the protagonists’ emotional development and the growth of their friendship, while the intermixing here is mostly of genres and points of view. This text is a powerful example of a network of women – Elisa, Flora, and Clori – and their feminine knowledge and shared storytelling, which stresses the connection of cultures, histories, and languages of different Souths. Colpo di mare ‘offers a complex picture of the Italian South that emphasizes its transnational past and present’ (p. 118).
The films discussed by Polizzi follow the same threads, calling on the expertise of scholars such as Derek Duncan and Aine O’ Healy to provide some appropriate contextualisation and to introduce the renowned cinematic works of Emanuele Crialese's Terraferma (2011), Emma Dante's Via Castellana Bandiera (2013) and Jonas Carpignano's Mediterranea (2015) for a more thorough study of differences, hybridity, multilingualism, race, gender and sexuality, marginalisation and southern Italian subjectivity.
Thanks to his personal experiences and his dedicated study of the Italian South, Polizzi succeeds in convincing readers that a stigmatised identity can be reversed and transformed for the benefit of not only the individual but the collective, particularly via new possibilities of networks. Polizzi's volume is a must-have for all scholars of media studies, gender and sexuality studies, Mediterranean studies and literatures, and for those who are interested in profound analyses of language, culture, and identity. The volume's bibliography will be very useful for those who create and implement undergraduate and graduate course syllabi related to these topics.
