Island Hopping, Liquid Materiality , and the Mediterranean Cinema of Emanuele Crialese

The history of the “mare nostrum” is a long history of the entanglement of human and more-than-human actors. Three films directed by the Italian Emanuele Crialese, Respiro: Grazia’s Island (2002), Golden Door (2006), and Terraferma (2011), recount stories of encounters and collisions on Mediterranean islands, where the challenges of political, cultural, and ecological cohabitation are intensified. Drawing on theories of material ecocriticism, this article argues that in this trio of films, the Mediterranean sea is not simply a picturesque liquid border. It is instead a generative space that participates in the very process of constituting the narratives, even while the films add another layer to the rich geo-archaeological palimpsest of the region.La historia del “mare nostrum” es una larga historia la implicación de actores humanos y más-que-humanos. Tres películas dirigidas por el italiano Emanuele Crialese, Respiro (2002), Nuovomondo (2006, Nuevo mundo), y Terraferma (2011), cuentan historias de encuentros y colisiones en islas mediterráneas, donde las dificultades de la convivencia política, cultural, y ecológica se intensifican. Apelando las teorías de la ecocrítica material, este artículo sostiene que en estas tres películas el mar Mediterráneo no es solamente una frontera líquida pintoresca, sino un espacio generativo que participa en el proceso de constituir las narrativas. Por su parte, las películas añaden una capa al palimpsesto geo-arqueológico de la región

Itinerant ecocriticism, Southern thought, and Italian cinema on foot

This short essay explores an impulse guiding Italian ecocriticism, and also a recurrent trend in Italian cinema: that of thinking on foot. Drawing on the work of sociologist and philosopher Franco Cassano, I consider why contemporary philosophers seek to understand Italy at a pace that works strategically (sometimes defiantly) against petroleum-fueled speed. Three recent Italian films that proceed on foot (“Basilicata Coast to Coast” [2010], “La lunga strada gialla” [2016], and “Il cammino dell’Appia antica” [2016]) attempt to reanimate southern Italian landscapes as “vehicles of identity, solidarity, and development” (Cassano xxxvi). Each film represents a socio-political project enabled by its walking pace; each, in turn, has the potential to unveil how these projects depend on the naturalcultural health of the landscapes being traversed. Against the “slow violence” being perpetrated on Italian landscapes—a slow violence of toxic contamination at the hand of ecomafias, of the cementification of agricultural landsand delicate coasts—and against the speed of turbocapitalism, thinking on foot enables modes of ethics and aesthetics simultaneously attuned to historical depth and ecological crisis. In this view, Italy is no longer a “bel paese,” but rather an ecocultural landscape in which the seeds for meaningful change are deeply embedded.Este breve artículo explora uno de los conceptos que está impulsando la ecocrítica italiana, así como una de las tendencias más recurrentes en el cine italiano: el acto de pensar a pie. Basándose en el trabajo del sociólogo y filósofo Franco Cassano, se consideran las razones por las cuales los filósofos contemporáneos buscan entender Italia con un ritmo que funciona estratégicamente (a veces desafiantemente) frente la una noción de velocidad alimentada por el petróleo. Usando breves ejemplos de tres películas italianas recientes en las que se “piensa a pie” ("Basilicata Coast to Coast" [2010], "La lunga strada gialla" [2016] e "Il cammino dell'Appia antica" [2016]) se observan los intentos de reanimar los paisajes del sur de Italia "vehículos de identidad, solidaridad y desarrollo” (Cassano xxxvi). Cada película representa un proyecto sociopolítico habilitado por el ritmo de su marcha; cada uno, a su vez, tiene el potencial de revelar cómo estos proyectos dependen de la salud cultural-natural de los paisajes que se atraviesan. Contra la "violencia lenta" que se perpetra contra los paisajes italianos (una violencia lenta de contaminación tóxica a manos de las ecomafias, de la cementación de tierras agrícolas y costas delicadas) y contra la velocidad del turbocapitalismo, pensar a pie permite modalidades de ética y estética simultáneamente compenetradas con la profundidad histórica y la crisis ecológica. Desde este punto de vista, Italia ya no es un "bel paese," sino más bien un paisaje ecocultural en el que están profundamente arraigadas las semillas para un cambio significativo

Violence and the Law in Gianrico Carofiglio’s Literary Courtroom

Gianrico Carofiglio’s novels featuring attorney-protagonist Guido Guerrieri have gained popularity in Italy and abroad since the first in the series emerged in 2002. Although often discussed alongside other popular crime fiction, Carofiglio’s work also has a wider resonance, participating in debates about justice, violence, and the law. This article proposes connections between the Guerrieri novels and several contemporary discussions of state violence—including essays by Jacques Derrida, Dominick La Capra, and Giorgio Agamben—that gravitate around Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Critique of Violence.” Carofiglio’s novels, like these essays, lead us to contemplate the question of what action is possible once law’s violence has been acknowledged

Ecocrítica itinerante, pensamiento del Sur, y cine italiano "a pie"

      This short essay explores an impulse guiding Italian ecocriticism, and also a recurrent trend in Italian cinema: that of thinking on foot. Drawing on the work of sociologist and philosopher Franco Cassano, I consider why contemporary philosophers seek to understand Italy at a pace that works strategically (sometimes defiantly) against petroleum-fueled speed.  Brief examples from three recent Italian films that proceed on foot (Basilicata Coast to Coast [2010], La lunga strada gialla [2016], and Il cammino dell’Appia antica [2016]) attempt to reanimate southern Italian landscapes as “vehicles of identity, solidarity, and development” (Cassano xxxvi). Each film represents a socio-political project enabled by its walking pace; each, in turn, has the potential to unveil how these projects depend on the naturalcultural health of the landscapes being traversed. Against the “slow violence” being perpetrated on Italian landscapes—a slow violence of toxic contamination at the hand of ecomafias, of the cementification of agricultural lands and delicate coasts—and against the speed of turbocapitalism, thinking on foot enables modes of ethics and aesthetics simultaneously attuned to historical depth and ecological crisis. In this view, Italy is no longer a “bel paese,” but rather an ecocultural landscape in which the seeds for meaningful change are deeply embedded.      Este breve artículo explora uno de los conceptos que está impulsando la ecocrítica italiana, así como una de las tendencias más recurrentes en el cine italiano: el acto de pensar a pie. Basándose en el trabajo del sociólogo y filósofo Franco Cassano, se consideran las razones por las cuales los filósofos contemporáneos buscan entender Italia con un ritmo que funciona estratégicamente (a veces desafiantemente) frente la noción de velocidad alimentada por el petróleo. Usando breves ejemplos de tres películas italianas recientes en las que se “piensa a pie” (Basilicata Coast to Coast [2010], La lunga strada gialla [2016] e Il cammino dell'Appia antica [2016]) se observan los intentos de reanimar los paisajes del sur de Italia como "vehículos de identidad, solidaridad y desarrollo” (Cassano xxxvi). Cada película representa un proyecto sociopolítico habilitado por el ritmo de su marcha; cada uno, a su vez, tiene el potencial de revelar cómo estos proyectos dependen de la salud cultural-natural de los paisajes que se atraviesan. Contra la "violencia lenta" que se perpetra contra los paisajes italianos (una violencia lenta de contaminación tóxica a manos de las ecomafias, de la cementación de tierras agrícolas y costas delicadas) y contra la velocidad del turbocapitalismo, pensar a pie permite modalidades de ética y estética simultáneamente compenetradas con la profundidad histórica y la crisis ecológica. Desde este punto de vista, Italia ya no es un "bel paese," sino más bien un paisaje ecocultural en el que están profundamente arraigadas las semillas para un cambio significativo

Volcanic Matters: Magmatic Cinema, Ecocriticism, and Italy

Return to the Aeolian Islands (Fughe e approdi, 2010) chronicles director Giovanna Taviani’s journey to the Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago off the coast of Sicily and setting for a host of films. Return documents the islands’ geological past in a study of ecological, and not just cinematic history. This essay begins to unravel the threads of a magmatic Aeolian landscape where volcanoes, cinema, and memory collaborate in the creation of more-than-human stories

Murderous methods: Eloquent minds and bodies in Italian crime fiction

This dissertation investigates a growing wave of crime fiction in Italy through the lens of an epistemology of crime particular to the Italian peninsula. The work constructs a new literary-historical genealogy that reveals the philosophical underpinnings of Italian crime, beginning with Cesare Beccaria\u27s Enlightenment treatise on penology and continuing with Cesare Lombroso\u27s Positivist studies of criminal man. Novels by Leonardo Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri exemplify detective fiction in the Beccarian tradition, based, as they are, in the perception of criminality primarily as an issue of civil justice: criminal man and the context in which he is pursued are predominantly a systemic, cerebral space of dialogue and words, but not of bodies. The films and novels of Dario Argento and Carlo Lucarelli instead demonstrate the provocative power of the Lombrosian tradition, a fiction that develops at the conceptual nexus of science and horror and that privileges the uncertain space of the human body over the methodological rigor of a more dispassionate type of science. Poetic and philosophical experimentation are made possible by this creative tendency to construct narratives that bleed into other genres, challenging the logic operative in traditional detective fiction (which eliminates all but the correct solution) by offering the potential for formal and philosophical multiplicity. This study is ultimately a test case for a theory of contemporary Italian culture: at a moment when ideology, like genre and like empirical knowledge, often seems elastic, this kind of crime fiction stages the cognitive, philosophical, and political ambiguities typical of postmodern culture

Island Hopping, Liquid Materiality, and the Mediterranean Cinema of Emanuele Crialese // Saltando de isla en isla, materialidad líquida y el cine mediterráneo de Emanuele Crialese

The history of the “mare nostrum” is a long history of the entanglement of human and more-than-human actors.  Three films directed by the Italian Emanuele Crialese, Respiro: Grazia’s Island (2002), Golden Door (2006), and Terraferma (2011), recount stories of encounters and collisions on Mediterranean islands, where the challenges of political, cultural, and ecological cohabitation are intensified.  Drawing on theories of material ecocriticism, this article argues that in this trio of films, the Mediterranean sea is not simply a picturesque liquid border. It is instead a generative space that participates in the very process of constituting the narratives, even while the films add another layer to the rich geo-archaeological palimpsest of the region.   Resumen   La historia del “mare nostrum” es una larga historia la implicación de actores humanos y más-que-humanos.  Tres películas dirigidas por el italiano Emanuele Crialese, Respiro (2002), Nuovomondo (2006, Nuevo mundo), y Terraferma (2011), cuentan historias de encuentros y colisiones en islas mediterráneas, donde las dificultades de la convivencia política, cultural, y ecológica se intensifican.  Apelando las teorías de la ecocrítica material, este artículo sostiene que en estas tres películas el mar Mediterráneo no es solamente una frontera líquida pintoresca, sino un espacio generativo que participa en el proceso de constituir las narrativas. Por su parte, las películas añaden una capa al palimpsesto geo-arqueológico de la región.&nbsp

Murderous methods: Eloquent minds and bodies in Italian crime fiction

This dissertation investigates a growing wave of crime fiction in Italy through the lens of an epistemology of crime particular to the Italian peninsula. The work constructs a new literary-historical genealogy that reveals the philosophical underpinnings of Italian crime, beginning with Cesare Beccaria\u27s Enlightenment treatise on penology and continuing with Cesare Lombroso\u27s Positivist studies of criminal man. Novels by Leonardo Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri exemplify detective fiction in the Beccarian tradition, based, as they are, in the perception of criminality primarily as an issue of civil justice: criminal man and the context in which he is pursued are predominantly a systemic, cerebral space of dialogue and words, but not of bodies. The films and novels of Dario Argento and Carlo Lucarelli instead demonstrate the provocative power of the Lombrosian tradition, a fiction that develops at the conceptual nexus of science and horror and that privileges the uncertain space of the human body over the methodological rigor of a more dispassionate type of science. Poetic and philosophical experimentation are made possible by this creative tendency to construct narratives that bleed into other genres, challenging the logic operative in traditional detective fiction (which eliminates all but the correct solution) by offering the potential for formal and philosophical multiplicity. This study is ultimately a test case for a theory of contemporary Italian culture: at a moment when ideology, like genre and like empirical knowledge, often seems elastic, this kind of crime fiction stages the cognitive, philosophical, and political ambiguities typical of postmodern culture

Gadda’s Pasticciaccio and the Knotted Posthuman Household

The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel, “Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana”, find detective Ingravallo pursuing a clue as he investigates the brutal murder of Liliana Balducci, an upper-middle-class inhabitant of an apartment on the street of the novel’s title. The location for the book’s concluding showdown is a dilapidated house, or an “oikos”, to borrow from the Greek, into which the Investigator, an outsider, is introduced. “Oikos”, which became the prefix “eco” in both “economics” (literally, law of the house) and “ecology” (or, study of the house) here provides a dynamic lens for the final scenes of the Pasticciaccio, and for viewing its unremitting tension between singularity and generality, interiority and exteriority, anthropic and geological time, human and posthuman. Our article proposes the space of the impoverished Roman household as a key to entering the Gaddian narrative architecture, a space that resonates with what Jeffery Jerome Cohen describes as “the tangled, fecund, and irregular pluriverse humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and forces” (Prismatic Ecology, xxiii). The dwelling on Via Merulana, and even more distinctly the house (or hovel) in which the novel ends, challenge our notions of domestic spaces, their porosity, and their proper inhabitants. In fact, in the narrative’s exploration of these two houses and their occupants, we find intriguing portraits of the tensions that trouble the supposed borders of the human and the posthuman. The “Pasticciaccio”, as we argue, closes (or opens) the door on a narrative architecture of polarity, where material and ontological tensions lead to both human and posthuman conclusions