Another Map, another History, another Modernity

In this article, the author criticizes the consensual cultural configuration of present-day Italy
by displacing concerns of historical and intellectual identity onto a wider Mediterranean map.
Elaborating an interdisciplinary and intercultural position that looks to languages and histories that
Italian academic life and institutional culture tends to ignore, or repress, the disparaged sides of
modernity – the South, the Mediterranean, the Muslim world – become the sites of a diverse critical
understanding. Drawing upon the metaphorical powers of the sea itself, this “Mediterranean”
view of modern Italy, of the formation of its cultural and critical languages, proposes a more
unsettled and fluid cartography that renders inherited questions and “solutions” vulnerable to
an inquiry that a national culture is unable to authorize. In particular, the desire for cultural and
critical continuity, sustained in a diffuse historicist syntax and policed by moribund disciplinary
protocols, is challenged via a “postcolonial” elaboration of Italy as both a Mediterranean and
modern formation. This leads to a proposed rupture with the mold of a fundamentally patrician and
provincial understanding of native culture. In particular, the contemporary figure of the so-called
illegal migrant announces the hidden colonial histories that planetary process return to disturb
the surfaces of everyday life. It is the unwelcome turbulence of migration, as one of the central
chapters of modernity itself, which now cuts into the historical, political, and cultural body of Italy,