Italian Orientalism. Nationhood, Cosmopolitanism and the Cultural Politics of Identity, Peter Lang, 2019

Fabrizio De Donno, Italian Orientalism. Nationhood, Cosmopolitanism and the Cultural Politics of Identity

Oxford-Bern: Peter Lang, 2019, Pp. 360.

Europe’s Orientalist fantasies have nurtured an extensive critical debate. Yet, even in a context enriched by multifarious studies and theories, until recent years the intellectual appropriation of the “Orient” performed by modern Italian culture represented a largely unexplored terrain. Italian Orientalism by Fabrizio De Donno fills this scholarly gap through a superb historical reconstruction intended to probe the penetration of Orientalist myth across nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Italy. Sustained by a refined analytical excavation, this brilliant book groups into a coherent interpretive framework authors as diverse as Giovanni Berchet and Giacomo Leopardi, Angelo De Gubernatis and Giosuè Carducci, Guido Gozzano and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, re-reading their intellectual oeuvre against the backdrop of ill-concealed colonial reveries and disquieting “cultural politics of Indo-European identity” (p. 2).

Previous studies by Roberto Dainotto and Jane Schneider have highlighted the existence of long-lasting cultural dystopias affecting the intellectual geography of Europe that tended to read Italy, crucially positioned (or relegated) along the southernmost margin of the European continent, either as the object of an Orientalizing gaze, incarnating the quintessential “internal Other” in Europe post-Enlightenment intellectual geography, or as the agent of a conflicting and contradictory “Orientalism in one country” applied to southern regions of the peninsula.

Building on these strands of research De Donno suggests a productive methodological shift: his volume calls to attention the need to problematize the modalities with which Italian intellectuals actively engaged with and responded to the fabrication of the myth of the “Orient”. Italian Orientalism thus proposes a constructive disciplinary dialogue with the recent work of Barbara Spackman, Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands (2017). If Spackman focuses her study on Italian travel narratives in the Near East across a long nineteenth and early-twentieth century, De Donno unearths Italy’s endogenous emulation of Orientalist imaginaries: the two books offers symmetrical perspectives on a significant Mediterranean re-adaptation of the Orientalist paradigm.

Based on these premises, the interpretive framework presented in Italian Orientalism hinges on major conceptual/chronological caesura: in the first chapters of the volume De Donno scrutinizes the reception of the Orientalist vogue in pre-unification Italy, situating his analysis in a context where discussions on independence and modernity “reflected the more libertarian and emancipatory concerns of the period” (p. 4). The second part of the book – “Indic Orientalism and Aryanism in Italy from Unification to Fascism” – retraces the progressive transformation of these “libertarian concerns” into an ideological apparatus put at the service of racialist discourses and colonial practices. An exploration of the subterranean apprehensions that pervaded the emulation desires of Italian Orientalists further enriches this historical narrative, bringing into purview what De Donno acutely identifies as a problematic “Eurocentrism from the European margins” (p. 16).

Italy’s Eurocentric anxieties are thus addressed since the first chapter of the book, “Orientalism versus Classicism? Debating ‘Europeanness’ in Risorgimento Discourse”, focusing on an analysis of the Italian response to the early nineteenth-century “Oriental Renaissance”. De Donno develops his argumentation through a fruitful engagement with Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale (1952): the new literary geographies disclosed by discovery (and plundering) of Oriental antiquity and its subsequent intellectual appropriation by European scholars resulted in a progressive undermining of the centrality traditionally ascribed to the Graeco-Roman legacy and its Mediterranean dimension. Schwabs’ theorization of an “Oriental Renaissance”, De Donno points out, thus masks a contrastive comparison with the Italian Renaissance, and it is precisely this clash of competitive cultural mythologies to explain the “skeptical reception” of the Orientalist discourse in an Italian milieu jealously tied to its Classicist ideals (p. 24).

In the second and third chapter of the volume, De Donno shows how this conflictual relationship ended up being reflected even within the internal articulations of the Italian debate. It is thus in consideration of its anti-Classicism flavor that Romantic Orientalism became “a discursive tool of political, cultural and aesthetic revolution against Classicist provinciality” invoked by theorists of Italian Romanticism (p. 61). This linkage is explored through an excavation of the hidden genealogies permeating two seminal manifestos of Italian Romanticism, Giovanni Berchet’s Osservazioni sul dramma indiano La Sakuntala (conceived as a continuation and expansion of the renowed Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al proprio figlio) and the Osservazioni sul Giaurro by Ludovico di Breme, written in response to the widely debated article of Madame de Stäel De l'Esprit des traductions. Both texts, as De Donno points out, reveal close and explicit intertextual connections with William Jones’ English translation of the Sakuntala, a classic of Sanskrit poetry derived from a re-elaboration of the epic of the Mahābhārata (IV century AD), and George Byron’s celebrated Oriental romance The Giaour. By contrast, the response opposed by Giacomo Leopardi to the “new” literary rhetoric of Orientalist will be substantially antithetical and it is scrutinized in the third chapter of the volume. If Leopardi constructed his initial rejection of Romanticism by “juxtaposing an ‘Italian’ literary tradition, which also included Greek and Latin literatures, and the ‘foreign’ or ‘barbarous’, but global, trends of Romanticism” (p. 95), a subtle, ironic and demystifying appropriation of Orientalist tropes will be developed fully in the Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia and in several crucial passages of the Operette morali. In his twofold “protest” directed towards a stagnant volgare classicistico as well as an Orientalizing and sentimentalist volgare romantico – concepts that echo Walter Binni’s La protesta di Leopardi – Leopardi devised what De Donno compellingly terms as a “negative” and nihilistic Orientalism, intended to “mock Romantic Orientalism’s promise of a spiritual and primitive Orient that could heal the wounds of European modernity” (p. 115).

The fourth and fifth chapter of the book shift the attention to post-Unification Italy and retrace the progressive transformation of the Orientalist imaginary into ideological reservoir mobilized by colonial and racialist discourses, as the new Indo-European “sciences of language” turned into a “science of races” centered on the chimeric search for a supposed “Aryan” origin of European identity. As it was the case with Schwabs’ theorization of a new “Oriental Renaissance”, these pseudo-historical narratives centered on an “anti-Classicist and anti-Semitic rhetoric” hinged on “ideas of Latin and Semitic degeneration” (p. 142). The Italian response to this renewed marginalization of its Mediterranean dimension, as De Donno shows, reveals a twofold articulation. On the one hand, Italian Orientalists tried, not without glaring contradictions, to embrace and reconceptualize the myth of Europe’s “Aryan” origins in the attempt to “rehabilitate Italy’s role within Aryan modernity by emphasizing Rome’s centrality in Indo-European progressive history” (p, 143): such will be the intellectual project, veined of strong racial and nationalistic nuances, of the most accomplished Italian nineteenth century Orientalist scholar Angelo De Gubernatis, whose work at the Istituto di studi superiori pratici e di perfezionamento of Florence is at the center of the discussion in the fourth chapter of the book. On the other hand, the fifth chapter of Italian Orientalism shifts the attention on a set of specifically Italian strands of anthropology – ranging from Lombroso criminology to the Carlo Puini – and focuses in particular on the theorization of an “Eurafrican race” proposed by Giuseppe Sergi in his La razza mediterranea (1901). Sergi, De Donno observes, “inverted the Orientalists’ assertions that the Italic languages were a branch of the Aryan family of languages”, and his focus on a wishful “regeneration” of a Mediterranean race “went on to shape the Italian racial thought of the early part of the twentieth century” (p. 203).

The sixth and seventh chapter of Italian Orientalism propose instead a series of acute literary counterpoints involving Il tesoro di Golconda by Anton Giulio Barrili, an Orientalist novel set in a British-ruled India, Gioseuè Carducci’s All’aurora, the futurist manifesto Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna published by Marinetti in 1909 and the renowned (but largely fictious) letters composed by Guido Gozzano during his 1912 journey to India and later collected in the posthumous volume Verso la cuna del mondo: lettere dall’India (1917). These calibrated readings allow the identification of two distinct phases in the history of literary metamorphoses of the “Oriental” fascination in post-Risorgimento Italy, and follow the evolution of what Andrew Long defined as an “Oriental unconscious” (p. 219). If in the narrative of Barrili and in Carducci’s poem, both inspired by positivist ideals, the link with an Oriental(ist) mythology becomes a rhetorical trope supposed to buttress discourses of “historical progress and nationalism in post-Unification Italy” (p. 256), Gozzano’s crepuscular anxieties will reverse this Orientalist phantasies into an outright “existential Indophobia” (p. 278). This breaking of the positivist paradigm that informed nineteenth century Orientalism – anticipated by Marinetti’s visionary dream of a conjunction between “African primitivism and Western technology” presented in Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna (p. 258) – will however result for Gozzano in a rejection of any “optimistic interpretation of the Indo-European kinship”. His Lettere dall’India not only signal the emergence of a new, anti-realist and anti-positivist phase in the history of Italian literary Orientalism, but also betray a deep “pessimism underlying the civilizational gap between contemporary Indians and Europeans”, fueling a “poetic of hallucination” where religion, race and colonialism became entangled in yet another affirmation of the east/west divide (p. 278-281).

As clarified by copious collection of cultural materials collected, scrutinized and arranged into a compelling critical narrative by De Donno, Italian Orientalism is primarily a book about Italy’s “politics of identity” re-read through the overarching lenses of its Oriental fantasies and phobias. This critical journey unveils an historical trajectory that leads from Risorgimental emancipation to Fascist oppression in a contrasting syncretism of national(istic) impulses and Eurocentric anxieties. As argued in the “Epilogue” of the volume, devoted to the transformation of these Oriental myths into a full-fledged ideological coverture for the Fascist “imperial racism”, it will be in fact in the context of a “racial totalitarianism of imperial dimensions” that Italian Orientalism will eventually celebrate, in all its lugubrious splendor, the perfect “encounter between epistemology and propaganda” (p. 313).

Tommaso Pepe, Guangzhou Maritime University

The text of this review is also available in Annali d'Italianistica, vol. 38, 2020