Conclusion

Abstract

After 1860, the concept of the South was (re-)invented and a massive accretion of real and symbolic problems rapidly began to shape that concept as a national concern. It would be convenient, for the sake of obeisance to historiographical convention, if I could claim that the beginning of the twentieth century marked a transformation in the way the South was represented, thereby justifying my chosen temporal break. I cannot make that claim, and those conventions have to be broken for the same reason that, in my introduction, I suggested that my four essays had no pretensions to being an exhaustive treatment of the theme. Because the bank of hackneyed representations of the Mezzogiorno lends itself to such varied uses, and because context is so important in determining the significance of stereotypical images, there was no unitary discourse, no “regime of truth” determining what could and could not be said about the South and that could have undergone any such epochal shift. I owe the periodization of this book not to reasons internal to stereotypical discourse on the Mezzogiorno, but to the broader transformations in Italian society associated with the early twentieth century: the season of rapid industrialization in the Northwest; the great wave of emigration from the southern countryside; the growth of more modern forms of mass party; the first developments in consumerism and the mass media; the greater openness of the institutions that culminated in Italy’s first elections with universal male suffrage in 1913; the First World War. ¹ The Southern question also took new forms in the Giolittian era.