The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film by Barbara Alfano (review)

Barbara Alfano’s book tackles a fascinating topic: the role of “America” in a wide selection of Italian works of literature and film produced between 1981 and 2006. The task raises a number of difficult issues, which the long introduction attempts to frame. The first issue is the meaning of “America,” which Alfano defines as a space of representation where the real United States and the Italian cultural construction of an imaginary utopian/dystopian America coexist without coinciding but overlapping to varying degrees. The second issue is what Alfano describes as the “spectral process” that the representation occasions. The thesis is that America functions as a mirror in which the authors under consideration seek consciously or unconsciously to find themselves and, more specifically, to elaborate the ethical project that constitutes their subjectivity as left-wing Italian intellectuals. The third issue is the paradox that the Italianness of these intellectuals lies precisely in what Antonio Gramsci would call their cosmopolitanism – in other words, the commitment to define one’s identity as a humanistic ethical project of universal and thus transnational significance. Such a commitment, Alfano insists, is consistent with the post-national and global predicament facing contemporary cultures and societies. The fourth and final key issue is the articulation of subjectivity as a process driven by the irreducible singularity of the individual, which anchors the ethical project understood in a Foucauldian vein as the work of the self on itself. It is precisely this work that Alfano examines in the spaces of representation, spaces that, following Tobin Siebers, are taken to be inherently ethical.

When stated in this concentrated fashion, the task appears in all its complexity. Alfano is juggling very sophisticated and not easily reconcilable theories of representation, subjectivity, and ethics with close textual analyses of a series of works of staggeringly disparate character and merit. It is not easy to see the connection among the feature films Non ci resta che piangere, Caro diario, Lamerica, and Nuovomondo; the documentary The Last Customer; and the novels Treno di panna, Sogni mancini, City, L’arcadia americana, and Vita. In addition, Alfano attempts to trace a historical trajectory that reveals a break in the traditional approach to America by Italian left intellectuals in the years after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001. To successfully manage such a synthesis in 160 pages is probably impossible and would require a focus and clarity of exposition that the book unfortunately does not possess. The result is a series of discussions that raise stimulating and highly pertinent questions but also propose insufficiently developed and problematic interpretations. More important, the logical links between the sections in each chapter, as well as between the chapters themselves, are often difficult to understand. In the end, a truly compelling argument fails to coalesce in spite of the valiant attempts to delineate it in the introduction and the conclusion.

In the first chapter, Alfano discusses Nanni Moretti’s Caro diario and Francesca Duranti’s Sogni mancini as examples of the way in which Italian left intellectuals use displacement and the encounter with America to forge their own identity as committed individuals in contemporary society. In the case of Caro diario, the protagonist encounters a fictional America that he must exorcise in order to embrace his role as a politically progressive intellectual, while in the case of Sogni mancini, Duranti confronts both real (her protagonist lives in New York) and imagined Americas in her struggle to abandon the search for an identitarian essence and accept a fluid selfhood fundamentally committed to the negotiation of cultural diversity. The focus on displacement as a strategy for self-discovery and self-definition is useful, but the discussion is truncated at the point where it begins to become truly interesting. The argument is that Moretti abandons the myth of America to embrace a “global ethics,” but what is the content of this “global ethics”? It is also surprising that...