See a modernized, English translation of Pliny’s two letters to Tacitus here →.
James Mackay, The Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean History (Verso, 2021), 17–18, 81.
Mackay, Invention of Sicily, 79–80.
The premier example is, of course, The Godfather.
Fernand Braudel, Il Mediterraneo: Lo Spazio, La Storia, Gli Uomini, Le Tradizioni (Bompiani, 2017), 5.
This was before even he began to fall prey to the lusting eye of the European postcolonial and sought to film “real life” in the former colonized worlds. On Pasolini’s “third-worldism,” Gian Liugi Corinto writes that it "was a search for disorientation, of dislocation from the geographical areas where the bourgeoise flourishes and prospers, a search for pure and sincere fragments, scattered far from urban anxieties.” Corinto, L’Etna di Pier Paolo Pasolini (Angelo Pontecorboli Editore, 2020), 18–19. See also Toni Hildebrandt’s “Allegories of the Profane on Foreign Soil in Pasolini’s Work after 1968,” Estetica: Studi e Ricerche 2 (July–December, 2017), where he writes: “Pasolini’s critique of ethnocentrism is therefore threatened by the haste that this same critique rashly seeks to repatriate through translation and equivalence.” Unless otherwise specified, translations from the Italian are my own. Thanks to Ara H. Merjian for pointing my attention to Hildebrandt’s work.
Sebastiano Gesù, “The Desert and the Scream,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini e L’Etna: Il Deserto e il Grido, trans. Ernesto Leotta (40due Edizioni, 2015).
Pasolini shot either all or part of the following films on Etna: The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964), Theorem (1968), Pigsty (1969), and The Canterbury Tales (1972).
Ara H. Merjian, “On Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘The Long Road of Sand,’” Bookforum, June 13, 2016 →; Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Long Road of Sand (Contrasto Books, 2015). See also Merjian, Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
On this note, see Jose Rosales, “Disposable-Time as the True Measure of Wealth: Benjamin, Marx, and the Temporal Form of the ‘Real Movement of Abolition’” →. A longer version of the text is forthcoming in 2022.
Mackay, Invention of Sicily, 5.
George Scialabba, “Introduction,” in Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, trans. Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver (New York Review Books, 2003).
Mackay, Invention of Sicily, 5.
Tarì, There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution (Common Notions, 2021). Thank you to Jose Rosales for pointing my attention to this section of the book, and for sharing his reading of the text with me. For an excerpt from Tarì’s book published in e-flux journal, see →. For a conversation with Rosales, Carla Bottiglieri, Luhuna Carvalho, Giulia Gabrielli, and Matt Peterson about Tarì’s book, see →.
For one recent example of many, see Keti Chukhrov, Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
On how Pasolini exiles bourgeois characters and tropes, see Andreas Petrossiants, “Pox Populi,” Artforum, July 16, 2020 →.
I imagine a scene reminiscent of the “progressive” social reformers entering slums in the early twentieth century in industrializing cities in the US, lamenting the immorality of the inner cities, all the while venerating forms of racist, capitalist value production. This hypocrisy is analyzed in Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019).
Gesù, “The Desert and the Scream,” 33.
Steven Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (Pluto Books, 2017), 7.
That much of the (paltry) investment from the North made it into the pockets of the mafia and wealthy politicians through backroom deals while destroying natural landscapes and forms of life without providing economic stability or growth on the island can only euphemistically be called an “oversight.” For the tragedy of federal “investment” in Sicily, see Mackay, Invention of Sicily, 214–15.
Verónica Gago, “Intellectuals, Experiences, and Militant Investigation: Avatars of a Tense Relation,” Viewpoint Magazine, June 6, 2017 →.
Corinto, L’Etna di Pier Paolo Pasolini, 39. Emphasis mine.
Tarì, There is No Unhappy Revolution, 47–49.
See Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Duke University Press, 2016). Though I single out Pasolini due to his connection with Etna, two great Italian directors of this period who must be mentioned in this political context are Pietro Eli and Liliana Cavani. The former lampooned the inability of the student movement to speak to the working classes with the brilliant La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso (1975) and the latter foreshadowed how the carceral apparatus would be mobilized against militants and students with I Cannibali (1971).
Wright, Storming Heaven, 20.
See Mario Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” New Left Review 73 (January–February 2012). Available here →.
Pasolini was expelled from the PCI branch of Pordenone. The statement was published in l’Unita on October 29, 1949. See Corinto, L’Etna di Pier Paolo Pasolini, 15.
In the ’50s, there were dissident readers of Marx all over the country—Luciano Della Mea in Milan, Galvano Della Volpe in Sicily, and in Rome a circle led by Mario Tronti, part of “the PCI’s long-troublesome cell at the university.” Wright, Storming Heaven, 18. Though Pasolini’s interest in Catholicism is mostly in the background of this text, it is interesting to compare his attention to Catholic myth and scripture with some Marxists who came “from dissenting religious families, part of the local Valdese or Baptist communities” in Turin. In the ensuing two decades, thinkers like these went beyond Hegelian appreciations of development, progress, and accumulation to instead articulate “the technical and political aspects of class composition,” to develop post-Marxist notions of autonomy, and in some respects set the stage for the insurrectionary, autonomous, and post-workerist social movements that would characterize Italy’s “hot autumn” and the “years of lead.” See Andrew Anastasi, “A Living Unity in the Marxist: Introduction to Tronti’s Early Writings,” Viewpoint, October 3, 2016 →.
Quoted in Wright, Storming Heaven, 26. The context for the 1961 formation of Quaderni Rossi, a magazine based on workers’ inquiry, also opened the field for analyses of the lives of workers stripped of Stalinist fetish. Initiated by Panzieri and others in Turin, these analyses appropriated capitalist notions of sociology as an antithesis to the cultures of “reformism and Stalinism," which are "based upon a fatalistic conception of progress and on the premise of a revolution from above” (20). Before this, sociology “was largely confined to studies of the ‘Southern question’ which, apart from the accounts of peasant life by Ernesto De Martino, tended to present themselves primarily as workers of ‘literature’” (19). Wright, Storming Heaven.
Another key work documenting the impoverished interior of the island from an anti-fascist perspective is Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily (1941), a decidedly modernist novel that follows a Sicilian living in the North as he travels back South to visit his mother. He is unable to live with “abstract furies” spurred by the “massacres in the posters for the newspapers”—those perpetrated by Mussolini’s army in Ethiopia.
Sciascia, quoted in Albert Mobilio, “Introduction,” in Leonardo Sciascia, The Wine Dark Sea, trans. Avril Bardoni (New York Review Books, 2000), xiii.
Mobilio, “Introduction,” xiii.
Mackay, Invention of Sicily, 82–83. Emphasis mine.
Leonardo Sciascia, Candido (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 45.
Take two representative examples. After the unification of Italy—which can really be described as one Northern royal family’s success in colonizing the entire peninsula, setting the stage for fascism six decades later—promises of local self-rule made to Sicily for its participation in the war for nationhood were not kept, of course. Sicily continued its steady economic decline, purposefully underdeveloped and extracted from by the new centralized state. In the late 1890s, however, a major working-class social movement called the Fasci dei Lavoratori erupted, fighting against the new goliath autocracy. It was violently put down by armies from Rome. Another example: In 1967, when the Communist Party won 21.3 percent of the vote in Sicily, the police and mafia worked together to kill trade-union activists and investigative journalists, instilling fear about worker organizing. Four years later the Communists polled at 12.5 percent. In both cases, working-class power was effectively eviscerated by the ruling classes using corrupt local officials and organized crime. The Church was similarly to blame. The history of the Sicilian Mafia and its collaboration with local and federal officials is too long a story to tell here. See Mackay, Invention of Sicily, 173–238, and John Dickie, Blood Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias (Sceptre, 2012).
Sciascia, Candido, 73.
Sciascia, Candido, 123. On Pasolini’s critique of the student movement, see Wu Ming, “The Police vs. Pasolini, Pasolini vs. The Police,” Verso blog, June 29, 2016 →.
In Sicily, the Church was mobilized by many different regimes, from the Inquisition to Mussolini’s fascists, as a form of social control. But Catholic rites and rituals were at times also a form of refusal. As Mackay writes in Invention of Sicily, throughout Spanish rule “the Sicilians experienced a complex process of adaptation and integration which combined public devotion and apparent obedience with private subversion” (108).
