Anglophone Popular Narratives of Italian Otherness and the Politics of Orientalizing Southern Europe

Abstract

This paper sets itself the goal to analyze the ways in which the discourses that have been employed in rationalizing the political and cultural divide between the 1orth and the South of (urope find an outlet in the context of modern and contemporary Anglophone literature. My inquiry assumes the existence of an isomorphic correspondence between (urope’s constitution as centre against an Asian, African, or American other on the one hand, and northern Europe’s self-positioning as centre of modernity through its discursive otherization of the Southern countries. This conceptual premise informs my characterization of the Anglophone popular literary discourse on the Italian other as orientalist and colonial. More precisely, the object of my inquiry is a discourse on the south of Europe, perhaps a “fantasizing” about the counties and cultures of the European south that has, as one of its functions, the reiteration of a cultural hierarchy based on a perceived divide between more and less “modern” and “rational” places. To Italy, in particular, this discourse has assigned a specific kind of ́othernessμ on which I will try to shed some light in the course of my discussion of literary texts.