Italia barbara: Italian primitives from Piero to Pasolini

Historians of discourse formation have demonstrated how, in the decades following the Risorgimento, Italy was fashioned as the internal ‘other’ of a new, industrial civilization that had surpassed the Mediterranean one of old. In the geopolitical map of Western Europe, Italy occupied the most distant and different territory; its proximity to Africa and the Near East, its heterogeneous racial make-up, including ‘Arab blood’, and its predominantly unchanged rural economy confirmed its status as the primitive within. The essays gathered in this special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies enrich the pervasive view of Italy’s subaltern status by examining the ways in which the dichotomies of the progressive and backward, western and the non-western, northern and Mediterranean, were often reinforced, but also interrogated or collapsed by Italian ethnologists, artists, art historians and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.