The Transnational Italian Studies major at UCSB: A paradigm shift

Abstract

This article illustrates the three criteria underpinning the creation of a Transnational Italian Studies major at UCSB in 2020: translation, imaginary, and nation-ness.

Introduction

This contribution does not aim at intervening in the fertile debate regarding the genealogy and future directions of Transnational (Italian) Studies. My purpose here is more pragmatic and declarative. In what follows I wish to illustrate the ambitions that led my colleagues and me to inaugurate in 2020 a major in Transnational Italian Studies at UCSB taught entirely in English, and explicitly aimed at offering an ancillary (double) major in the humanities to students in the social sciences and Global Studies in particular. ‘Smart move,’ our French colleagues said at the time! And I do not deny that pressures from Deans to rebound from the hemorrhage of majors we have been suffering for almost a decade, and hopes for a release from the toxic nightmares of extinction that we—and the humanities as a whole—had been having for quite a while, played a role in our decision to embark on this path. Yet, the creation of this major not only represented the coronation of a personal intellectual dance that had taken me through three ‘turns’ (linguistic, cultural, and spatial); it was also based on my conviction that the ‘transnational’ was no mere intellectual ‘turn.’ It was, or better, it had to be made into a paradigm shift for the humanities as a whole. For the first time in my career, I saw scholars in Italian Studies having the opportunity to send an intellectual signal to the entirety of humanities that it may one day be regarded as akin to German Critical Theory and French Thought. The not-so-hidden ambition in instituting a Transnational Italian Major was to offer all other language and literature programs in the humanities a model for rethinking the national in all of its forms (language, literature, culture, imaginary, identity, etc.) from the point of view of the global; to break their mutual polarization fostered by an exclusively politico-sociological reading of globalization, and the inability of the humanities to break free of the national frame of reference in their disciplinary organization, despite their repeated claims of interdisciplinarity, and anti-canon rhetoric; to explode and problematize the tension between the mobility paradigm that privileges the borderlessness of all international elites—including us of course, the academic class—and the stubborn defense of disciplinary borders reflected in the canonization of the national, by these same elites. This ambition is reflected in three structural aspects that have guided our thinking about transnationalizing the humanities: translation, imaginary, and nation-ness.

The proposal of an Italian major that is not centered on language training would have been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago when our field was mainly focused on the literary. But even these days, when thousands of students take classes every day on every American campus to learn a language spoken by no more than 85 million people (World Population Review, 2023), yet deemed the fourth most studied language in the world, our choice cannot but raise concerns and questions (I-Italy, 2019). Are we not neglecting the most essential and distinguishing trait of any national culture: its language? Are we not giving in to the imperialist globalism of standard English? And are we not giving up on the most sacred and valuable truism in the humanities that in order to really know a culture you need to learn its language? Maybe we are; but surely we are because we have applied a transnational lens to the idea of an ‘Italian‘ language. We all know that at the time of unification what we call Italian was a language spoken by a mere 2.5% of the population at most (De Mauro, 1963: 25–43). We all know that the resolution of the questione della lingua in the 16th century in favor of a purely literary volgare codified two centuries earlier in the writings of the Tre Corone (Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch) produced a courtly language that enshrined a long-lasting polarization between courtly (written) Italian and several Latin-derived volgari spoken at the time on the peninsula for centuries to come (Treccani, 2011). Some of us also believe that the first spoken ‘Italian’ should be identified with that lingua franca diffused throughout the coastal areas of the Mediterranean that mixed Italian words and rudimentary syntax with Spanish, French, Arabic, and Turkish words (Cifoletti, 1969; Fogu, 2020: 65–68). But, above all, the whole world knows that Italians ‘speak with their hands.’ Put these all together and what you get is a socio-cultural polarization between an identitarian (courtly, high class, written-literary, later administrative) notion of language for centuries policed by an Academy (La Crusca) and a communicative and oral practice that found its most pristine expression in the Commedia (all’)italiana (only later known as commedia dell’arte) (Fogu, 2020: 64; Jaffe-Berg, 2015). Dare we then call this Mediterranean Italian a transnational language? Yes, we do (along with a host of other adjectives), for we aim in our courses to problematize the very notion of a national language, literalized in the formation of those imagined communities we call nation-states. And, in so doing, we choose to use the English language to create knowledge about the communicative and multilinguistic nature of the Italian language. This is also why we have made courses in translation the main requisites for our minor and regular major. Our transnational paradigm questions directly the naturalization of ‘national’ languages that sustained the consolidation of a literary canon at the core of our majors for decades. In so doing, we see ourselves applying the insights of Burdet et al. (2020) who argue that Emily Apter's ‘translational transnationalism’ (Apter, 2006) is not merely the newest trend in comparative literature: it is the very name of the Italian linguistic game.

Most scholars have long sided with Benedict Anderson (1983), that all nations are ‘imagined’ by their collectivities, and thus assumed that the act of imagining was constitutive of these national collectivities, and the basis for their collective experience of national identity. The case of Italy has long appeared to stand apart from this norm, for, as the famous motto indicated, the Italian nation state was born without its imagined subject: ‘Italy is made; now we have to make Italians!’ (Hom, 2013). Generations of scholars have thus highlighted, on the one hand, the significance of this motto in orienting major literary, cultural, intellectual, and political movements since the Risorgimento, and, on the other, the failures of these movements to reach their goal of making Italians. Our transnational paradigm challenges this customary vision of an imperfect nationalization of Italians, by proposing that the ‘making’ needs to be understood as leading to the formation of national imaginaries rather than identities. The Italian motto, so to speak, reveals in plain light the nakedness of the king: nations are not imagined once and for all, they are imaginary entities that produce national imaginaries, whereby national imaginary we intend all those cultural-discursive-image-making practices and products that seek to invert the order of signification by naturalizing the cultural construction of nazionalità. As Stephanie Malia Hom has shown (2013: 14–16), the motto itself became a perfect imaginary engine: while scandalously denouncing the fact that a nation-state was created without a collective subject that imagined it and willed it into being, it simultaneously instantiated the principle that the creation of such a collective subject was the very task that the nation-builders set for themselves in order to justify their creation. Yes: if the process of Italian national formation can be summarized as putting the cart before the horse, the ensuing cultural project of ‘making Italians’ can be likened to the action of bringing to life the horse needed to pull the cart! Take for example the naturalization of the meta-geographical notion of Italy via the image of the ‘boot’. And add to it the fact that even the first sentence in the motto ‘L’Italia è fatta’ could not have proven more inaccurate and constitutive of an imaginary haunted by the borderlessness of a nation that for 1,300 kilometers extended into a liquid continent without borders (the Mediterranean Sea). Mix it all with the iconic image of the Risorgimento, which projected the Catholic master code of resurrection onto a body politic that had never existed, and what you get are the building blocks of a pedagogical engine that instantiates the imaginary itself as a collective historical agent.

The starting point of our new emphasis can be thus summarized as our treating the idea of a national identity not only as a cultural construct but also as a never-ending process aimed at solidifying the elusive reality of the nation against other imaginary collectivities marked by class, gender, race, but also universalisms (humanity), and regionalisms (Mediterranean-ness). Our final corollary is that the cultural construction of Italian-ness has been from the beginning transnational, and continues to be so in the present. Mobilities of all sorts, from mass emigration to mass tourism, to recent immigration trends, have participated and continue to participate in the making of Italians just as much as any rooted ‘national’ agent. In fact, our principal contention is that the spectacular diaspora of late 19th-century Italians and its reversal in the late-20th century is exceptional only in its highlighting what Stephanie Malia Hom (2019) has theorized as the ‘Mobius strip’ matrix of modern imperial mobility. This matrix is not merely, nor typically, Italian. It is constitutive of the transfiguration of most nation-states into empire states (not solely in Europe) in the late-19th century. It implicates us to recognize that no-longer and not-yet national subjects have marked the process of national identity formation, just as much as the cultural elites who have set themselves to ‘make’ Italians, French, Germans, Americans, etc … And this recognition, in turn, prompts us to conceptualize national identities as resulting from the transnational production and naturalization of ‘nation-ness’, rather than being founded on the experience of nationhood. Our major, therefore, seeks to recognize and valorize the constitutive status of Italy as a transnational cultural-linguistic community and a globalized nation avant la lettre. Conversely, we believe that the superseding of nation-states by empire states transnationalizes the idea of the nation inside and out for all nations.

We can already hear the objection of presentism: ‘You are projecting onto the past a transnational process (globalization) that is typical of late capitalism!’ This is anachronistic and arbitrary. Guilty as charged. But is it any less anachronistic and arbitrary to naturalize ‘nationhood’ by teaching national languages, literatures, and cultures under the sign of self-same identity? What makes Dante ‘Italian’ is a number of vectors that connect him in space to the Mediterranean world of the late-middle ages (he was crowned ‘poet’ in Naples), and, in time, to the Roman world of his guide in Inferno (Virgil is buried in Naples, and the practice of crowning poets there goes back to the early Roman Empire), and to the 16th-century's ‘quistione della lingua.’ The name Dante thus stands for a nexus, a node in a network of urban and maritime relationships that for centuries tied the urban development in the Italian peninsula to the liquidity of the Mediterranean continent, thereby preventing the territorialization of any national identity, not even in the main nation-state on the peninsula: the Kingdom of Naples. And if this sounds like we are also endorsing certain postcolonial and feminist critiques of the ‘subject of history’ (nation/male), we openly admit that our proposal to transnationalize the humanities is indeed informed by Edouard Glissant's ‘poetics of relations’ (1990) and Judith Butler's ‘relational subject’ (2004) in the name of a responsible critique of humanist nationalism.

The establishment of a transnational major in Italian Studies is no mere application of principles, however. It represents the final step in a transformation that had been ongoing for quite a few years. To begin with, since the early 2000s, we have been offering a course on Italy's role in the formation of the European Union, which has attracted many social science majors to our program. In line with current trends in the humanities, and especially in our comparative literature program (http://www.complit.ucsb.edu/translationstudies/about), we have also begun to chip away at the essentialist idea of national culture by putting translation at the center of our upper-division program. Our ‘Art of Translation’ and ‘Found in Translation’ courses offer two intertwined visions of translation, one linguistic, the other cultural. Both satisfy our requirement for a translation theory-practice seminar. The former focuses on the multilingualism of the Italian peninsula. The latter, examines forms of cultural artifacts translation, from the ‘Spaghetti Western’ to the transnational construction of ‘Made in Italy,’ as characterizing the construction of Italian-ness as much and as deeply as Mussolini's bonifica della lingua or the fascistization of Italian history. The establishment of these courses as requirements for our regular majors several years before the establishment of the Transnational emphasis proves the intimate connection between translation and transnationalism, highlighted by Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi in their introduction to Transnational Italian Studies (2020). In these courses, we train our students to valorize the process of cultural and linguistic transference and negotiation of meaning and values over those of uniqueness, originality, and even incommensurability of national characteristics (of both language and culture). We are now in a position to inform all of our courses with the same set of learning objectives, and also to offer these educational values as principles that may be endorsed by any other program in any national language.