Abstract
The present essay aims at offering some interpretative keys for the ecological disaster of one of the most beautiful sites in the Mediterranean: Taranto. It does so through the ecocritical tools of postcolonial and decolonial thinking and the analysis of an intense iconography of eco-artistic urbanist engagements, which have dramatically exemplified what it has meant living in the midst of the largest of Europe’s steelworks. These engagements, having “one foot in literature and the other on land” (Glotfelty, Fromm 1996, XIX), attempt to decolonize the imaginary related to the deeply discordant relationship between the city of Taranto and ‘its’ steelworks, which is more than twice the size of the same city. We have chosen, after Jason Moore (2016), the adjective ‘capitalocenic’ rather than the more voguish ‘anthropocenic’, since the environmental changes are not the end result of an abstract human action, but rather of the tangible century-long rule of capital: the earthless (Vázquez 2017) mode of production of modernity that à la Descartes denies the earth into which it gets its claws and, as a consequence, it denies the deep knitting of “humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity” (Moore 2015).
Highlights
Sommario 1 Cartesio, Gissing e il donkey’s method. – 2 Il Mezzogiorno capitalocenico nello spazio della differenza imperiale. – 3 Taranto: fra colonial mimicry e defuturing. – 4 Ferite ‘coloniali’ e tentativi decoloniali di guarigione estesica
The donkey’s method of ploughing was to pull for one minute, and rest for two; it excited in the ploughman not the least surprise or resentment
Though he held a long stick in his hand, he never made use of it; at each stoppage he contemplated the ass, and gave utterance to a long ‘Ah-h-h!’ in a note of the most affectionate remonstrance
Summary
Ci si starà chiedendo: cosa c’entra tutto ciò con il caso dell’acciaieria tarantina? Ci entra almeno in due modi. Luigi Carmine Cazzato, Antonella D’Autilia Colonizzazione ambientale, defuturing capitalocenico e pratiche eco-artistiche decoloniali a sud nale era, per Gissing, come per Cesare Brandi mezzo secolo dopo, il simbolo del «mechanic triumph of to-day» (34) e per questo antipatico, nonostante fosse «the pride of Taranto, and the source of its prosperity» (34). Concludendo, il progetto egemone della civiltà dell’acciaio è stato un progetto capitalocenico di doppia negazione distruttiva: la negazione cartesiana della natura attraverso uno sradicamento ‘terrestre’, nel doppio senso cui abbiamo accennato prima: gli ulivi secolari strappati dalla terra, come inutili stecchi, rappresentavano anche lo sradicamento dal pianeta; la negazione (di tipo coloniale) della cultura dell’altro subalterno: i tarantini come i primitivi d’Europa, ancora legati a sonnolenti e superati stili produttivi, che significavano non già vita vera ma vita vegetativa
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