S’ode a destra… ah, saperlo!

Kritische Berichte (ISSN: 0340-7403), 2023

This conversation with Alessandra Ferrini, led by Kathrin Rottmann and Friederike Sigler, explores the changes in art and cultural policies in Italy during the first months of Giorgia Meloni’s term as Prime Minister (October 2022–February 2023). In particular, it focuses on the new government’s appointments in the arts sector, considering the relation and continuities between historical Fascism and the current Far-Right. Reflecting on Italian Fascism’s value and investments on culture and its impact on the contemporary arts and cultural landscape in Italy, this article gives an overview on nationalist discourse, attitudes to the past, and to Fascist heritage in Republican Italy.

The 1970s in Italy were notoriously a period of social upheaval, widespread social conflict and political violence. Thirty years after the fact, the “era of collective action” remains the topic of heated debates in the public arena transforming all historical reconstruction or literary work on or set in the 1970s a conflictive political gesture. What could well be a polemic among scholars or literary critics often turns into a tearing debate over the state of Italian democracy today, its uncertain viability, and the inherently conflictive nature of the Italian polity. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Rome among left-wing radicals active in the 1970s, and comparing their narratives with the Italian historical and literary texts about the period, the paper will argue that such “texts” should be understood as peculiar ironical expressions of what the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has defined “cultural intimacy”, whereby negative representations of “national character” parado...

Italian Culture 42.2, 2024

This article analyzes Italy’s politics of memory in the age of presentism, an approach to temporality in which the present is the place of a blocked historical dialectic. Presentism captures the widespread sense that everything is changing rapidly (technologies, social relations, cultural trends), while the “system” itself—the neoliberal order—is perceived as eternal, unalterable, and above all natural. Hence the title phrase “we have forgotten the future”. The essay explores what happens to our cultural memory when hopes of sociopolitical transformation vanish from the horizon and we seem unable to project ourselves into the future. The first part of the article offers a theoretical elaboration of presentism, focusing on how the loss of a utopian dimension has influenced political forces in Italy. Drawing on mnemonic hegemonic theory, Bellin analyzes how the Italian left’s incapacity to articulate a viable political alternative has shaped Italy’s memory ecosystem. The second part of the article gives experiential concreteness to the argument developed in the first part by engaging with Francesco Piccolo’s “Il desiderio di essere come tutti” (2013), a novel that offers a narrative analysis of the trajectory of the Italian left from the 1970s to the last Berlusconi government. Bellin foregrounds the “loss of the future” as (paradoxically) both a cause and an effect of Italy’s multidimensional forgetting. Shuttling between the Italian context and global political trends, the article raises the question of how to fight the corrupting effects of self-absolving national myths and reactionary memory tropes during a time when neoliberalism dismantles the social and erodes democracy from within.

Analysing the political and social conflicts in post−war Italy, Francesco M. Biscione recognizes the seeds of civil war that "without interruption, have cast a shadow over our collective life". An "underground Italy" far removed from the principles of the republican constitution can be found at every social level throughout the post−war period. These classes have finally found their political home in the movement conceived and led by Silvio Berlusconi.

Dame in 1983 and was sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1989 until 2017. Hosted by JSTOR, Annali italianistica is an independent journal of Italian Studies managed and edited by an international team of scholars. Annali is listed among the top tier journals (class A, area 10) by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR). It is listed in the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS). It is listed in the MLA International Bibliography. It is a member of the The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ).

In this article we argue that the success of the Italian right can be explained in terms of its populism – which consists of a set of loosely connected but distinctive ideological traits – which has been skilfully connected to other ideological elements that resonate with Italian society , using specific political and extra -political resources to optimise electoral appeal. We will thus identify the central and the peripheral elements of populism and explain their contribution to the success of the right through an analysis of the values of the elect orate and of the electoral programmes of the right -wing coalition, drawing some general conclusions on the fit between the right -wing voting bloc and the political opportunity structure. This article explore s the ideological innovation in which the Italian right has engaged.

1999

The Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials (ICPS) was created by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Diputació de Barcelona in 1988. The ICPS is attached to the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. These "Working Papers"-thought of as subject for discussion-are the result of research work in progress. Appearance in this series does not preclude further publication. This paper must not be reproduced without the author's licence.

This volume investigates how resistance to the new conservative culture has been articulated in Italy, and how this has been expressed and explained by those involved. The volume is divided into four areas: 1. The Economic and Media Landscapes, which sets the scene for the rest of the book by explaining how Italian society, and particularly its media environment, have developed in recent years; 2. Political Challenges, which discusses the main threats to the authority and policies of Berlusconi coming from within his own centre-right coalition, the left and social movements; 3. Texts, which analyses films, internet sites, television programmes, novels, newspaper articles and theatre performances that sought to resist increasingly dominant conservative norms and/or respond to events set in motion by the Berlusconi governments; 4.Experiences, covering the voices and practices of those who have opposed Berlusconi from within the cultural industries and identity movements. http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/resisting-the-tide-9781441176134/

2021

In Pier Giorgio Ardeni's last work, the author proposes an analysis of the success of populism in relation to the level of inequalities, identified as the main propulsive of the growth of consensus among populist actors on the Italian scene. The proposed approach is multidisciplinary in nature and tries to integrate socioeconomic analysis with political analysis to offer a exhaustive explanation of the populist success in Italy. The hypothesis advance is that, as discontent, social unrest and levels of inequality growth, populism strengthens (see Rosanvallon, 2017) until it reaches positions of power. The originality of the work is tied not only to the theoretical hypothesis, but also to the methodology adopted: for the empirical verification, the author proceeded to trace the socio-demographic and economic profiles of the inhabitants of the lower territorial levels, that is the municipalities, taking as reference the ISTAT data coming from the registry offices to intersect them with the electoral results. The aim is to shed light on the connection between unequal income distribution, territorial gaps and voting behavior in the different areas of the country. In the first chapter of the work, attention is focused on the historical reconstruction of the underlying causes of the increase in inequalities in Italy. After the economic boom that culminated in the early 1990s (see Toniolo, 2013), the Italian economy underwent a sudden slowdown, until the recession of the 2000s during which real per capita income produced returned to the levels of twenty precedent years. The survival of Italian companies, over the years, has increasingly been tied to a progressive decrease in wages rather than to a series of product and process innovations-stimulated by public and private investmentscapable of increasing the added value of production (see Montoroni, 2000; Felice, 2005; Carreras and Felice, 2010) and the total factor productivity (TFP, indicator that measures the degree of economic efficiency of the system in it's complex). Furthermore, growing inequality has been accompanied by a reduction in social mobility (see Lipset and Bendix, 1991; Sorokin, 1998; Breen and Breen, eds. 2004) and class mobility, elements that contribute to the widening of social gaps that pockets of discontent are swelling. Another central theme of the first chapter is that concerning education. The author highlights, based on the last OECD data, that Italy has a low level of qualified and specialized education compared to the average of European countries. The percentage of people with only a primary or lower secondary school certificate is around 40%, only Spain and Portugal have higher figures. Tertiary education is achieved by only 17.7% of Italians, compared with a European average of 33.4% and an OECD average of 36.7%. On the basis of what is expressed in the report, it also emerges that Italy is one of Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike 3.0 Italian License