Il meticciato nell'Italia contemporanea. Storia, memorie e cultura di massa.

L'idea diffusa degli "italiani brava gente" e della diversit\ue0 della nostra storia rispetto alla storia USA, segnata da razzismo istituzionale, si fonda sul silenziamento del passato coloniale e razzista italiano. Il ripudio della categoria di razza da parte dell'Italia repubblicana e la smentita scientifica dell'esistenza biologica della categoria non hanno cancellato la presenza della razza, formazione storico-culturale che paradossalmente esiste e non esiste. Priva di referenti oggettivi nella realt\ue0, la razza produce in essa effetti significativi, opera sia come categoria sociale e strumento di esclusione, sia come costruzione simbolica e istanza identitaria. A fronte del silenziamento del meticciato storico nell'uso pubblico della storia e nella memoria nazionali del secondo dopoguerra, il saggio sottolinea la presenza diffusa del meticciato nei prodotti della cultura di massa italiani contemporanei e ne indaga i significati con gli strumenti degli studi critici sulla razza e in prospettiva comparata tra Italia e Stati Uniti

"Razza e italianit\ue0 nella televisione di stato: il blackface e il whiteface in Tale e quale show (2012-2016)"

L'idea diffusa degli "italiani brava gente" e della diversit\ue0 della nostra storia rispetto alla storia USA, segnata da razzismo istituzionale, si fonda sul silenziamento del passato coloniale e razzista italiano. Il ripudio della categoria di razza da parte dell'Italia repubblicana e la smentita scientifica dell'esistenza biologica della categoria non hanno cancellato la presenza della razza, formazione storico-culturale che paradossalmente esiste e non esiste. Priva di referenti oggettivi nella realt\ue0, la razza produce in essa effetti significativi, opera sia come categoria sociale e strumento di esclusione, sia come costruzione simbolica e istanza identitaria. In prospettiva comparata tra Italia e Stati Uniti e con gli strumenti degli studi critici sulla razza e degli studi sulla visualit\ue0, il saggio indaga i modi in cui la "razza" si riproduce e simultaneamente viene messa in discussione attraverso l'utilizzo del blackface e del whiteface nel programma di prima serata della tv di stato "Tale e quale show" (2012-2016)

\u201cThe \u2018good American\u2019: Henry James, U.S. American studies and the frontiers of national identity\u201d

This essay is a substantial expansion of the paper delivered at an International Seminar on Henry James organized by Donatella Izzo at the University of Naples \u201cL\u2019Orientale\u201d in 2007. John Carlos Rowe argued in 2006 that the recovery of Henry James (a Modernist cosmopolitan author) and other literary expatriates into the U.S. canon because they are more American for their rebellion, well reflects the new American Exceptionalism and the international ambitions of a neo-nationalistic turn in U.S. American studies. Dismissing an either/or approach, the essay tries to demonstrate that the discourse of nation had instead a problematic and still neglected weight in James\u2019s life, writings, and critical history, and that it is not reducible to an oppositional paradigm. In line with the \u201cconscious and cultivated credulity\u201d in fictional reality advocated in the 1908 preface to \u201cThe Turn of the Screw\u201d (1898), James\u2019s U.S. identity can be defined, with a similar oxymoron, as a distanced belonging to \u2018America.\u2019 Far from being the denationalized author of New Critical forging, James contributed to a problematic redefinition of U.S. identity at the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth century. His transformation into a writer representative of the best national values and in possession of an \u2018international\u2019 range started immediately after his death and went on, notwithstanding the influence of the New Critical Master, through the 1930s, reaching a peak in the \u201950s. Such a metamorphosis \u2013 based on the older issue of James\u2019s difficult and intense relation with the motherland \u2013 was central to the developing of the early phases of American studies and complicates the facile exceptionalism of the official discipline, institutionalized during the Cold War. While a cosmopolitan James is today a necessary critical response to the neo-nationalism of a substantial part of U.S. American Studies, such a post-national imperative runs the risk of bringing back a subtler, de-territorialized form of nationalism that acknowledges neither James\u2019s contradictory belief in the fiction of U.S. identity, nor the still conspicuous power of nation states, national identity, and identifications. James created his connections to the United States through distance and the capable tool of an ideal U.S. identity, transforming \u201cAmerica\u201d\u2019s Manifest Destiny into the \u201ccomplex fate\u201d of the \u201cgood American\u201d in \u201cEurope.\u201d Redefining U.S. identity as a powerful but dangerous frontier whose counterpart is a centre \u2013 a continuously shifting \u201cdomestic\u201d anchorage (New York, Paris, Rome, London, Rye) \u2013 James believed in its potentialities and feared the main reason of its power: as an undefined form constantly in progress, U.S. identity is in fact condemned to perform a double destiny, to possess or be possessed, to expand or to contract, into a finite variety of roles. In such a theatrical role-playing disclosing the fictional reality of \u2018nation,\u2019 the shift between English and American identity is complicated by an undervalued and significant presence, both in life and fiction, a third dark party, \u2018Italy.\u2019 As the only dark hue admitted in James\u2019s world, \u2018Italy\u2019 disrupts a binary, white Anglo-American contrast and reveals the national limit of the international theme. The Master\u2019s aesthetic initiation, the origin of his chiaroscuro, contrasting art \u2013 his fastidious sense of discrimination \u2013 are inextricably linked to the reluctant abolitionism of his family and to the racist construction of whiteness and blackness in pre-Civil War New York minstrelsy and blackface. Black, as a racial color, is almost absent in James, and when it passes the color line, it does so only if purified through a significant ethnic or racial shifting: Italians are the only \u201cdark race\u201d in James but they bear the great responsibility of throwing a shadow on the Rooseveltian ideal of white, heterosexual and jingoistic U.S. masculinity