Wandering Through Intellectual Ashes : National Identity and the Southern Question in Postwar Marxist Italian Film. A Postcolonial Visual Ontology

Abstract: This thesis is crafted as an explorative theoretical essay, which aims to disclose the continuities and shifts in constructions of Italian post-war identity through the lenses of Marxist theory and postcolonial film analysis. The research will attempt to locate three paradigmatic cases of post-war Italian cinema and their authors in relation to the historical context, as well as coeval political and theoretical developments in the country. In order to produce a cartography of the Italian social landscape and its spaces of marginality and exclusion, the reader will be guided through this analysis by following the adventures of a paradigmatic character type, whom I will call “the wanderer”, a figure whose itinerant quality reflects the marginality of a social position and attitude that can be summed up by as the “art of getting by” (l’arte di arrangiarsi). As I will show, this position and attitude play a central role in defining a particular identity in relation to established social norms. To trace the transformation of this character, then, is also to trace transformations in the nation’s self-understanding in relation to class, race, gender, and the external world. My interpretation is built on two main theoretical premises. The first one is Gayatri Spivak’s contention that the importance of aesthetics, and aesthetic education, lies in their capacity to mediate between idealism and empiricism, or ethics and social reality. The second premise follows Fredric Jameson’s hypothesis about the creative quality of realism as an aesthetic paradigm, assuming that its primary aim and function is not a representative one, but one of active re-creation of the social reality anew. For me, these two premises are linked by the primary role they assign to aesthetic representation – as connected with imagination – in creating new grounds for social change.