Abstract
Introduction
Over the past 15 years, my work has been shaped by transnational approaches, which have provided epistemological and pedagogical tools for exploring and developing new ways of learning, teaching and thinking about Italian histories, cultures and languages. These transnational approaches have critically challenged the dominant frame for the teaching of Italian language and culture, which had been typically shaped by a narrow and normative focus on the relation between the nation, its main language, and its canonical literature. Instead, transnational Italian studies have recognised the multilingual, multifaceted and multi-sited nature of Italian cultures, and the need to explore them beyond the narrow boundaries of the nation and its best-known texts (see Bond, 2014; Burdett and Polezzi, 2020; Burdett et al., 2020; Burns and Duncan, 2022; Polezzi, 2022).
Intersecting with postcolonial, intersectional, transcultural and decolonial theories, methodologies and pedagogies, transnational Italian studies have opened up great opportunities for curriculum renewal and, at times, the development of more diverse language departments. Furthermore, the transnational approach has allowed a reflection on the future of Italian Studies that escaped the rigid confines of the nation, to dialogue more openly and productively with other language departments and disciplines, and to develop multilingual, transcultural and intersectional courses, programmes and research projects. More specifically, with regards to my own professional trajectory as a scholar of migration, the transnational approach has also allowed me to include migration history, migration studies and transcultural relations between migrants and First Nations people as key aspects of Italian language and culture programmes (see for instance Ricatti, 2018, 2020, 2021).
As Dereck Duncan (2022: 112) recently argued, any reflection and practice on diversity and decolonisation in Italian Studies has to ‘start from the positionality of the researcher/teacher/student’. My positionality is defined by the fact that for the past 20 years I have lived and worked on unceded First Nations – Gadigal, Gubbi Gubbi, Turrbal, Wurundjeri, Boon Wurrung and Ngunnawal – land. This means that any reference to decolonisation is for me first and foremost a reminder of a specific form of settler colonialism and genocide. It means that my work as a researcher and as a teacher is shaped by First Nations’ sovereignty and resistance more than by any other history of colonialism or process of decolonisation (see Ricatti, 2022a, 2022b).
For the first 10 years of my academic career, I felt relatively comfortable working at the intersection of transnational Italian studies and migration studies. My political orientation, my scholarly work and my personal life have all developed on the assumption that the encounters and reciprocal influences between different people, cultures and languages are intrinsically positive. I have always recognised and struggled against the violence, discrimination and exploitation that so often shape such encounters; but I have also always strongly believed in the creative and political potential of forms of transculturation that develop through processes of resistance, negotiation and adaptation. My Italian studies perspective made apparent how globalisation, urbanisation and migration all played a key role in providing Italian society with fundamental opportunities to escape a rigid social gaze, especially on women, and a rather conservative and repressive understanding of life, culture and politics. However, as I became more aware of Italy's own colonial history on the one hand, and the Indigenous perspectives on the genocidal history of settler colonial Australia on the other hand, I started to question such assumptions. It became apparent to me that mass migration has also played a key role in processes of colonisation, and contributed significantly to the disruption and destruction of First Nations’ lives, sovereignty, Country, languages and knowledge. The environmental crises further forced me to reflect more attentively on how industrialisation, globalisation, urbanisation and migration also played a key role in the development of highly extractive economic systems that have extensively damaged the environment.
How can we then reconcile a decolonial and ecosystemic critique of modernity with a celebration of our superdiverse and transcultural world? For instance, how can we reconcile the multilingualism brought about by migration, with the fact that migration itself has sustained settler colonialism and its linguistic genocides? How can we celebrate the gardening and culinary skills and the variety of produce brought to countries like Australia by Italian migrants, while at the same time recognising the role those Italian migrants have played in sustaining the development of monocultures on unceded First Nations’ land? How can scholars of Italian migration make sure that, as argued by Wemba Wemba and Gunditjmara artist and academic Paola Balla (2019: 22), ‘in creating new spaces of dialogue, reciprocity and collaboration, diasporic Italian communities […] support Aboriginal communities in the daily healing, repair and responses to structural violence and racism, including deaths in custody’? It is often not in our capacity as scholars and teachers of transnational Italian studies to answer these complex questions, but it is certainly our duty to recognise and address them (Pugliese, 2019; Ricatti, 2022a, 2022b), and to structure the development of our students’ multilingual and transcultural skills around these uncomfortable questions.
The profound and essential changes instigated by the transnational turn have already encountered significant resistance within Italian departments that are often shaped by conservative and nationalistic views. A transnational approach may be present in most Italian programmes across the Anglosphere. Yet only a few of these programmes have been radically reshaped by it. In most instances, the study of transnational aspects of Italian cultures has instead been integrated within programmes that, for the most part, are still shaped by a national, canonical and heteronormative approach. This could just be a matter of time. Power dynamics, professional identity and scholarly expertise change slowly, as most universities and language departments are intrinsically conservative, and tenured or ongoing academic staff often have rather static careers within small departments. Yet it is hard to imagine how, within this context, decolonial approaches and the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives may significantly impact most Italian Studies programmes in the future.
A key part of the problem is our own inability, as scholars of Italian studies, to come to terms with the specific role that modern European languages, and in fact the concept of modern European languages itself, play in supporting neoliberal institutions, racist societies and Eurocentric ways of knowing. This is exemplified by two crucial issues I aim to briefly discuss in the next two sections of this article. The first is that national, transnational and colonial histories are deeply entangled, yet are still often researched, studied and taught as separate phenomena (Fiore, 2017). As a consequence, transnational, transcultural and decolonial curricula in Italian Studies are usually seen as integrating and enriching, rather than reshaping, programmes that continue to be framed by a national and often canonical approach. The second issue is that the teaching of Italian and other European languages is becoming marginal, if not completely irrelevant, to both the core business of neoliberal universities – with their extractive, utilitarian and largely monolingual fantasies of ‘diversity and inclusion’ – and critical resistance by radical scholars and activists. To this, we might add that the structural decolonisation of academia, if ever possible, would itself challenge the prominence of those European languages, cultures and societies that have mostly benefited from the legacy of colonialism. As Duncan (2022: 114) has argued, we need to ask ‘if the “decolonisation” of Italian at the level of curriculum is, from a more wide-ranging and radical perspective, a ruse to maintain, through sleight of hand, the un-decolonised hegemony of Eurocentric thinking and practice in our anglophone institutions’.
Entangled histories
The tension between national and transnational Italian studies largely mirrors a tension that has existed since at least Italy's unification. On the one hand, Italy constantly tries to keep it(self) together – managing profound political, cultural and linguistic differences, as well as a constant anxiety about migration (from and to Italy) and about its legitimacy as a powerful European nation (Insana, 2022). On the other hand, regionalism, colonialism, mass migration and globalisation have produced almost infinite altreitalie, within and outside Italy, that also long for some stable identity, while constantly producing new languages, cultures and networks. This tension creates, both in Italy and abroad, a specific dichotomy between a rather narrow and restrictive understanding of Italian language and culture, and a much more open and creative interpretation of what counts as ‘Italian’. Within this complex landscape, the profound legacies of nationalism, colonialism and mass migration have created entangled histories that cannot be addressed, understood or taught separately.
Italy's Risorgimento and its unification were both nationalistic and anti-imperialist enterprises. Yet once Italy was unified, Italian governments were quick to embrace and foster their own imperialistic ambitions. As it is well-known, the greatness of the Nation was to be measured also by its colonial possessions and imperial determination; and, after all, Italy's national history has itself been shaped by racist and colonial attitudes towards the South of the country (Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop, 2013; Pugliese, 2007). Italy's colonial enterprises came to constitute a key aspect of its national history, and the Fascist regime reached the apex of political consensus with the birth of the Italian Empire in 1935–1936. Processes of independence around the world and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, even though often informed by anti-imperialist struggles, were also marked by the new nations’ quick and hypertrophic appropriation of colonial practices, imperialist ambitions and racist ideologies. So, for example, an obsession with whiteness and whitening characterised the policies and public discourse of many new nations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, from Argentina and Brazil to Australia. It is not by chance that the so-called White Australia Policy of 1901 was the very first act passed by the new Australian nation. Italy itself, while developing its colonial agenda in Africa, was also gravely concerned by the racial ambiguity of its southern Italian peasants. Many of the racist theories developed by Italian anthropologists such as Lombroso and Niceforo clearly argued the racial inferiority of the southerners. Later on, some Fascist intellectuals tried to claim the superiority of the Mediterranean race as a way of including the whole nation within a discourse of racial supremacy, with little success. The alleged inferiority of the southerners has survived in public discourse to the present day, reshaping itself to adapt to political and socio-economic changes. Meanwhile, Italy and Europe's border violence has intensified. The recent victory of the far right in Italy provides further evidence that racism has never become marginal to Italian politics, economy, society and culture.
To these brief historical considerations we then need to add mass migration as a fundamental global phenomenon, especially since the mid-19th century. Once again the example of Italy provides an illustration of national, transnational, colonial and imperial entanglements. It has been estimated that at least 20 million departures from the country were made by Italian migrants in the century following Italy's unification. This mass migration from the South and the poorest parts of the North was certainly accelerated and intensified by the unification of the country. At the same time, these migrants became entangled in broader racist and colonial processes. Their migration often supported settler colonialism, providing cheap labour. Many Italians replaced slaves and indentured labourers in settler colonial nations around the world. Many became owners of land that had been violently and illegally expropriated from Indigenous people. Some Italian governments even identified an opportunity to develop alternative forms of colonialism in the Italian diaspora. At the same time, nations as different and far away as Argentina and Australia debated for a long time about the racial ambiguity of southern Italians, and the extent to which their mass migration would whiten or darken their overall population. Countries like the United States and Australia embraced the racist theories developed within Italy by anthropologists like Lombroso and Niceforo, and were still applying or debating them in the post-Second World War period. Italian migrants themselves often carried racist ideologies and practices from Italy, embraced those of their country of settlement and attempted to whiten themselves as much as possible, to the detriment of Indigenous people, the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers and darker migrants. Italian national and transnational histories are, of course, also histories of radicalism, class struggle, solidarity and friendship with subaltern and more racialised people. Today there are as many people of Italian background in the world as there are in Italy; their histories are complex, transnational, transcultural, multilingual and multi-ethnic.
When taking into consideration these complex entanglements, it becomes necessary to recognise the role that Italians have played in processes of colonisation, racial capitalism and cultural and linguistic genocide. As important is to acknowledge that a certain celebration of Italian culture as the cradle of modernity, from Renaissance to contemporary fashion and design, while making the study of Italian language relatively popular, also renders invisible both the ‘darker side’ of western modernity (its foundation in colonialism, slavery and exploitation of people and nature; see Mignolo, 2011) and Italians’ own responsibilities in such historical developments. As critical scholars, we should recognise that this glossing effect over our understanding of modernity is not a side effect of Italian language teaching and research in the Anglosphere, but rather the key reason for its appeal from secondary and tertiary education to mass media, tourism and public discourse (Bartoloni and Ricatti, 2017). Thus, while it is essential to reject this ‘Italy-as-product’ approach, we must also recognise its resilience within ‘postcapitalist, neo-liberal constructions of both culture and education as marketable products and consumable goods’ (Polezzi, 2022: 56). We then also have to recognise that challenging these hegemonic structures may increase anxiety about the very existence of Italian language programmes, within a tertiary sector increasingly more hostile to the study of humanities and languages. Curriculum renewal towards more transnational, transcultural, intersectional and decolonial approaches may effectively provide a path forward and a critical point of negotiation in resolving this tension. Yet we must first recognise that this tension is real, powerful and nowhere more apparent than in Italian language departments and programmes.
As much as we might be rightly proud of our transnational and decolonial innovations in the curriculum, if we do not address the specific role that the study and promotion of Italy and its national language continue to play in sustaining western and neo-colonial hegemony, our efforts will prove to be of limited epistemological and political value. The inclusion of transnational, intersectional, transcultural, decolonial and Indigenous perspectives in the language curriculum is, of course, a positive and necessary development. Yet my impression is that in most instances such development is marked by an attempt to keep these programmes relevant to an increasingly more diverse cohort of students, through curriculum renewal, without really addressing our irreconcilable distance from the still-dominant, anxiety-driven and nationalist approaches to Italian Studies. As I will discuss in the next section, this is particularly problematic when working within neoliberal and Anglocentric universities that constantly reassert the epistemological centrality of western civilisation.
Structural reforms?
When considering both the transnational and the decolonial turn in languages studies at the tertiary level, it is easy to note that most efforts have focused on curriculum renewal rather than on more structural reforms (see for instance Bouamer and Bourdeau, 2022; Brioni et al., 2022; Criser and Malakaj, 2020). The substantial failure of structural reforms, in those rare instances in which they have been attempted, is also indicative of deeply seeded and unresolved issues. In this section, I will briefly discuss one such attempt, which I led at my former university in 2020, when I successfully proposed to abolish separate programmes in French, German, Italian and Spanish and Latin American Studies. These were replaced by a single multilingual programme with a strong focus on language acquisitions and transcultural literacy through transnational, translocal, intersectional, decolonial, Black, Latinx and Indigenous perspectives. My main goal was to challenge the epistemic dominance of nation-based language teaching, by getting altogether rid of separate language majors, which were still inevitably dominated by Eurocentric and hegemonic perspectives. Rather than just adding to our curricula ‘the other’ from the colonies, or other geographical and political margins, my intention was to create a space where multiple and divergent perspectives could find an opportunity for multilingual research, teaching and learning. This is because, as recently argued by Ford and Santos (2022): to include marginalized peoples, their knowledge, and ways of life in a structurally uneven epistemic matrix is to be ‘included’ in a way that reinforces their position in the wider picture as the marginal other. In failing to question the very structures that marginalize and exclude, such a perspective ends up constructing yet another barrier to more fundamental systemic change, whether that be material, cultural or symbolic.
This proposal was embraced by management, probably because it was perceived as an opportunity for rationalisation, staff reduction over time and maintaining the financial viability of language programmes. On the other hand, it was opposed or criticised by some colleagues who did not understand the scholarly and pedagogical value of such reform, or perhaps perfectly understood its potential to undermine, at its core, the conflation of language studies with the celebration of specific nations and their literature. Many other colleagues did understand and support this structural reform, and the need to refocus our work on the constant intersections and reciprocal influences between different cultures and languages, as shaped by power and resistance. Together we were able to develop some important, innovative and successful courses. Among them was, for instance, an advanced multilingual course showcasing and analysing how different artists and activists around the world, including many from First Nations, have developed anticolonial and antiracist resistance to environmental destruction and climate change. This was a creative and productive way of reimagining the learning and teaching of languages at an advanced level, and one that most students loved. Similar results were achieved with other multilingual courses, such as one on the idea of Europe, as developing within Europe, but also outside and against it; one on the reciprocal influences between European cinema and the cinema of former European colonies; and one on crime novels as a popular expression of counter-hegemonic perspectives, including from the global south. The new programme also justified the hiring of a couple of colleagues with multidisciplinary expertise in transnational, decolonial and intersectional perspectives.
Despite these achievements, the new programme has been struggling to realise its objectives at a more structural level. Some colleagues have maintained a stubborn (if passive-aggressive) resistance to it, and even when claiming to be postcolonial scholars themselves, have in fact revealed a deep attachment to nationalist ideologies, western epistemologies and conservative educational approaches. The new programme has been called ‘European Languages’ – perhaps the only viable option for marketing purposes, but nevertheless one that once again re-centres Europe. Most of the students enrolling in the new programme are still white and from privileged backgrounds, and so are most of the staff. The inclusion of Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies remains minimal, except for a couple of courses. Overall, while some scholars involved have embraced these structural changes as an opportunity to decentre national languages, some have treated the new structure as an empty shell in which to reinsert their nationalist approaches to language teaching and research.
Perhaps more importantly, these changes proved to have little or no capacity to contribute to a ‘decolonisation’ of academia. While we were trying to develop and negotiate a multilingual, transnational and decolonial framework, Australian universities were stepping up their regressive, monolingual and over-disciplined attack on multilingualism and transdisciplinarity. They were doing so by cutting language programmes and by openly penalising scholars whose work did not satisfy crude, quantitative and hypocritical measures of research quality ‘above world standard’. Many language scholars in recent years have noted that such measures overwhelmingly and unfairly penalise publications in languages other than English and/or in journals that do not benefit from a rigidly Anglocentric and citation-driven ranking model. To these targeted attacks against language programmes and scholars, we might add that in recent years respectful and slow community engagement has been implicitly, but effectively, discouraged due to the obsession with sustaining a constant stream of successful grant applications. Indigenous, decolonial and non-traditional methodologies and research outputs are often not even recognised as research, as they do not conform to an extremely narrow understanding of what research is. Extractive and exploitative practices, embellished through fantasies of ‘real-world’ impact, matter more than any actual, empathetic and productive relationships with communities. In the meantime, the same universities that argue the limited financial viability of language programmes develop heavily subsidised short tours and courses that do not require any second-language competence, and in which the colonial, racist and monolingual gaze comes to constitute the very real frame through which claims of ‘social justice’ and ‘environmental sustainability’ are promoted to students, but never critically addressed or implemented.
There is a deep and unresolvable disconnect between our intention to ‘decolonise’ curricula, and the actual reasons why such changes may be embraced and supported by neoliberal universities. Transnational and decolonial approaches in language teaching, while producing innovation at the curriculum level, do not seem to have provided a critical stance against neoliberal and Anglocentric academia. In fact, these approaches may be supported within an extractive system that must show commitment to ‘diversity and inclusion’, while maintaining all its extractive, utilitarian and often monolingual frames of reference. There is a risk that, at the exact time at which we attempt to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum as language teachers and scholars, we are in fact also proving to be compliant with the needs of neoliberal academia. This neoliberal system has constantly and consistently proven to be particularly damaging for Black, Indigenous and other minority scholars, students and communities, thus in effect undermining any real opportunity to support counterhegemonic epistemologies and pedagogies at a structural level.
I genuinely believe that our changes in the development of the new programme at my former university were pedagogically innovative, scholarly informed and highly beneficial to our students. Many of those students were asked for the first time to critically consider the constant encounters and reciprocal influences across languages and cultures, as shaped by imbalances of power and forms of resistance. We were taking the students out of that illusionary comfort zone built around monolingual and normative approaches to language learning, and stereotypical impressions of culture. Yet, this is precisely why there is value in interrogating the apparent contradictions in current attempts at transnationalising and decolonising the curriculum without really addressing the widespread resistance to more structural changes. My aim here is not to provide easy-made and illusory solutions to an almost impossible challenge. Rather, I wish to contribute to developing dialogues that move us beyond our attempts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ while inevitably failing to decolonise reality, even within our small language departments. In performing a trendy political commitment to ‘diversity and decolonisation’ through pedagogical innovation and curriculum renewal, many of us have received support from universities that are all too ready to appropriate these trends without actually addressing racism, colonialism and capitalism. Yet such support can be short lived, and academic capital easily taken away, if we actually attempt to transnationalise and decolonise our own institutions at a more structural level – the level at which Black, Indigenous and marginalised communities, activists, scholars and students may finally dictate the agenda, or get a genuine opportunity to challenge corporate interests and racist ideologies within academia. Alas this is the point at which such institutions reveal that their inclusive and welcoming ethos does not extend to those who challenge their dominant narratives and worldviews (Watego, 2001: 204).
Concluding remarks: Beyond modern European languages
Many scholars of modern European languages will continue to uphold Eurocentric ideas of western civilisation through the study of canonical, patriarchal and racist texts, as well as the more superficial and easily marketable celebration of culture, heritage and creativity. Other scholars may attempt to align with, and perhaps even influence, counterhegemonic responses to nationalist, Eurocentric, colonial, racist, sexist and neoliberal or neofascist approaches to culture. Yet we perhaps should stop pretending that these two approaches are somehow compatible. Languages such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Russian all have different and potentially productive roles to play in decolonising the curriculum. The long history of European colonialism, and its ruthless implementation of cultural and linguistic genocide, means that these languages remain essential to the study of colonial archives and decolonial and First Nations struggles. Within the Anglosphere, the study of these languages also provides essential opportunities to engage with decolonial, Indigenous and marginalised perspectives developed in other parts of the world, and often by extraordinary scholars, intellectuals and activists. But that cannot be done in the same class or department in which the teaching of these languages supports colonial epistemologies and neoliberal, when not openly fascist, powers. I do not believe that vague references to the intrinsic value of humanities and language studies will help resolve this crucial node. Instead, we need to imagine and support transnational and decolonial structures that centre political resistance to neoliberalism, neofascism, racism, colonialism and sexism, and recognise the crucial role that language studies must play in such a struggle. Transnational, transcultural, intersectional, decolonial and Indigenous ways of being in the world have the potential to radically transform our universities, but not if they are treated as complementary to hegemonic epistemologies. Enriching-through-othering approaches may provide the illusion of increasing diversity and inclusion, but remain consistent with neoliberal and extractive approaches, and therefore hinder, rather than support, decolonisation.
The study of languages, when detached from serious political engagement, is as problematic as the study of diversity and inclusion when it is developed within a monolingual frame – most frequently, and paradoxically, in the very own language of the colonisers. It is at these powerful intersections that a transnational approach to language studies may finally find its most productive location, rather than within language departments still too busy with upholding white supremacy through the celebration of western civilisation and modern European languages. Here is the space in which it might become possible to reconcile language teaching, learning and research with fundamental epistemic ruptures and a genuine decolonial praxis; a space that is not constantly reproducing unjust power hierarchies through conservative or hypocritical pedagogies, and through the exploitation of precarious and often racialised academic workers.