Introduction

  • John Dickie
Chapter

Abstract

The South as a place of illiteracy, superstition, and magic; of corruption, brigandage, and cannibalism; of pastoral beauty and tranquility admixed with dirt and disease; a cradle of Italian and European civilization that is vaguely, dangerously, alluringly African or Oriental. The South as the theater of sweet idleness (dolce far niente) and of the “crime of honour”; of tragic courage and farcical cowardice; of abjection and arrogance; of indolence and frenzy. Southerners as a friendly people in whom lie dormant the seeds of mafiosità and atavistic violence; a “woman people” who practice an “Arabic” oppression of women1; a pathologically individualistic people who are nonetheless indistinguishable in their teeming masses or bound to the tribal logic of familism; a people both ungovernable and slavish. The South as a society verging on anomie that is resilient in its feudalism or clientelism; a society shot through with residues of a precapitalist past that is also the site of hopes for a national resurrection. “Here it is as if we were outside Italy”2; Italy’s greatest problem; its anomalous lower third: a metaphor for the state of the country as a whole; the embodiment in extreme form of the whole nation’s characteristic problems; the index of Italy’s modernity and claims to nationhood.

Keywords

Citrus Fruit Italian State Racial Theory Nation Building Ethnic Prejudice 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    A. Niceforo, L’Italia barbara contemporanea (Studi ed appunti) (Sandron, Milan-Palermo, 1898), p. 247.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    The sentence is quoted in G. Bocca, L’inferno. Profondo sud, male oscuro (Milan, Mondadori, 1992), p. 28.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    The texts I have chiefly in mind in writing this introduction are: M. L. Salvadori, “L’interpretazione razzistica della inferiorità meridionale,” in Il mito del buongoverno. La questione meridionale da Cavour a Gramsci (Turin, Einaudi, 1963), pp. 184–205;Google Scholar
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© John Dickie 1999

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