Political Violence and National Identity: Trauma, Spectrality and Allegory in Contemporary Italian Film and Literature.

Abstract

My dissertation investigates how the traumatic phenomenon of political violence in Italy has been narrated in novels and represented in films. My aim is to show that a tension persists between the need for a unitary memory and the impossibility of reconciling positions perceived as opposite and problematic collective memory. My analysis draws on the notions of spectrality, elaborated by Derrida; trauma, defined by Freud, Caruth and E. Ann Kaplan; and allegory. In Chapter 1, I analyze films by Pontecorvo, Taviani, Orsini, and Montaldo, to show how they displace the trauma of political violence both temporally/historically and spatially/geographically, providing a reflection on the relation between violence, power and state formation. Chapter 2 investigates how some characters and situations depicted in novels by Ginzburg, Balestrini, and Sciascia can be read as allegories of the Italian body politic dealing with conflicting discourses on political violence. In Chapter 3, I focus on the representation of the trauma of political violence in films by Amelio, Giordana, Calopresti, and Bellocchio, and on novels by Villalta, Colotti, Tavassi la Greca, and D’Aloja. Their works deal with the effort of Italian society to forgive and incorporate in its body politics both former terrorists and their narrations. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate how the specter of political violence is still haunting contemporary Italy by analyzing the noir genre, both in its literary and cinematic versions. I examine novels by Carlotto, De Cataldo e Montanari, and films by Soavi and Placido. Here in particular I follow Deleuze’s idea of cinema concluding that the noir genre is apt to produce a substitute historical experience through its “affective” powers on the audience. My study shows how during the last forty years Italian cinema shifted from an ideological/political narrative to an intimate account, and then to a genre representation. Political violence has traumatically affected not only family and gender relationships but also national identity narrated in fictional writings. If trauma produces new subjects, then the new Italian subject appears to be constructed by a tension between refusal and inclusion of the specter of political violence in discourses of identity and nation/state formation.