Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean by Franco Cassano (review)

A collection of essays by the same author risks appearing like a makeshift text for the purpose of publication. The book of the Italian intellectual Franco Cassano, on the contrary, reveals immediately its seamless Logos, made even more so by the editors’ decision to add scripts that do not appear in the original Pensiero meridiano. (Furthermore this choice renders immediately visible the content of the book, seeing that the mere translation of the Italian title, Southern Thought, could misleadingly bring to mind plantation houses and mint juleps.)

“It has been many centuries since the South has spoken in the first person” one reads in “Preface to the English-Language Edition” (xxvii). Cassano offers to the reader a remarkable effort to give back to the South its lost voice while at the same time providing instruments to comprehend it.

The discovery of America has opened the Atlantic route, whereas the industrial revolution has endowed northern Europe and North America with economic and military hegemony in the world. As a consequence the South came to be perceived as an imperfect North, an area that can find its way of development only by imitating northern models. (In passing, while tackling this topic, Cassano draws the line from Said’s Orientalism inasmuch as the Mediterranean, especially the southern European shores, is seen as a North in potency unlike the “Orient” of Said, a zone with its own specific “exotic” identity.) Cassano challenges the assumption that stronger levels of production of an area automatically entitle that area to be deemed a unique model in full. The South, rather than pursuing socioeconomic models developed elsewhere, needs to find in itself the source of its own rescue. The southern “pluriverse” constitutes an alternative to the North. (Similar positions are shared by many intellectuals of Islamic belief who [End Page e-1] argue that the premises for a sustainable development can be found in the sacred texts, if correctly interpreted, with no need of transforming the South into a sequacious follower of the North.) No model is perfect—Cassano is the first to acknowledge that—and thus he proposes a culture of dialogue, in the Mediterranean sense of dialectic (i.e., thesis–antithesis–synthesis) as the only antidote against monolithically conceived ideologies purporting a clash of civilizations. Cassano’s repositioning of the angles of vision does not engender radicalism and demagogy. On the contrary, it invites us to rediscover the balanced features of the Mediterranean culture and to use them to interplay with those of other provenance, not in a wrestling attitude but in an embracing spirit.

This is a Mediterranean book because such an area is taken as a paradigm for the many “Souths” of the world vis-à-vis a “North,” the latter defined as “the place that rules from above” (116). At the same time, for the large spectrum of issues that it embraces, the writing turns into an overarching meditation on the art of coexistence in a globalized world. Cassano’s view averts “neo-meridionalism,” that is, the reaction against the North voiced with the same intellectual categories of the hegemonic power put in discussion. Radical revisionism does not constitute the essence of the book, although fringes of revisionism—of the kind that arrives to reevaluate latifundia estates in name of economic criteria that are fundamentally northern—tempted the author at a certain point of his intellectual quest, as foreshadowed in the section on slowness. Even when Cassano’s argumentatio dismantles potential criticism, the position of the author is never absolutist, except for the denial of absolute visions. Cassano truly embodies the need for limit and measure around which he builds his Mediterranean theory, and in the name of which he raises warnings against the two fundamentalisms “of the land” and “of the sea,” as he calls the ethnocentric ideologies (which lead to theories of genius loci, motherland, and xenophobia) and the unbridled mobility...