MODERNITY IS JUST OVER THERE

Abstract

My essay will examine the relationship among conceptions of modernity, national identity and colonial conquest in Italy. Since the country's unification in 1870, Italy's position as a bridge between northern Europe and the Mediterranean has stimulated insecurities and utopian thinking in equal measure. Was modernity, and geopolitical significance, always just out of reach, in the hands of what Mussolini would later call the ‘plutocratic countries’, or could modernity, and the hegemonic West which spawned it, be reconfigured in ways that made Italy not only relevant but essential? Following upon this core question, my essay will consider the centrality of empire to the construction of both Italian modernities and Italian national identities. I argue that Italian preoccupations with its status vis-à-vis other European countries shaped Italian colonial discourse as much as local colonial realities: ‘over there’ – the mythical locus of modernity – referred as much to l'oltremare (overseas, but used to refer to the Italian colonies) as to l'estero (outside national borders, but shorthand for Europe). My essay illustrates these points with a discussion of the colonial film Il grande appello (‘The great call’, Mario Camerini, 1936). I also discuss wartime geopolitical projects for ‘Eurafrica’ within which Italy would become the central conduit, via the Mediterranean, between Europe and Africa. I end with a few reflections on how the absence of a decolonization process in Italy and a pervasive politics of nostalgia for the Italian colonies might influence contemporary attitudes towards African immigrants to Italy. I conclude that these men and women represent an ‘over there’ that evokes uneasiness because it can no longer be incorporated through conquest into the national body.