H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Italy@h-net.msu.edu (February 2004)
Don H. Doyle. _Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question_.
Athens and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. 152 pp. Index.
$24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8203-2330-6.
Reviewed for H-Italy by Marta Petrusewicz, City University of New York
In this deceptively small book, Don H. Doyle, Nelson Tyrone Jr. Professor
of History at Vanderbilt University, tackles two of the most important
questions of modern history, namely the nature of nationalism and the
construction of nationhood. Doyle reflects upon similarities between
American history of the Civil War and Italian history of the Unification,
and the insights to be gained from a comparative view. Indeed, he
formulates bold hypotheses regarding the nature of the national identity of
both Italy and the United States.
Thinking of Italy, says Doyle, helped him to understand how America came to
define its national identity. The topic has been mostly ignored by the vast
recent scholarship on nationalism, which focused on exposing the
"primordialist basis" of nationhood as a constructed identity. The United
States had always been, instead, a nation that was consciously modern,
proud to be born "without a navel," as Ernest Gellner put it; a "civic
nation" founded on common belief not on blood. Doyle points out, however,
that nationalism is not something that elites can foist at pleasure upon
passive masses, but corresponds to needs people feel on their own, among
them a need for primordial ties as a source of identity. American identity,
Doyle states, is in fact rooted in the Civil War, where "the United States
... demonstrated that its brand of civic nationalism could tear a country
apart every bit as viciously as primordial nationalism" (p. 88). But the
Civil War was a result of regional diversity within the United States,
namely, the conflicted relationship between the South and the rest of the
country.
Such was Don Doyle's thinking when this historian of American South found
himself in Italy in 1995. These were the roving years of Umberto Bossi's
Northern League, a "new" political party that defined itself in
geographical and racialized terms, proclaimed its own nation "Padania," and
threatened secession from the Mezzogiorno, seen as backward and barbarous,
feudal, ignorant and government-dependent. In Naples and Sicily, on the
other hand, Doyle encountered the American Confederate battle flag on
bumper stickers, perceived as a symbol of Southern pride. "We too are a
defeated people," his Neapolitan friends explained, "conquered and
dis-empowered" (p. 5). "To an American eye, it all seemed very familiar"
(p. 89).
Thus, the co-author of _The South as an American Problem_ found himself
exposed to Italy's "Southern Question" and national regionalism, and began
thinking comparatively. Historically, the two countries shared the
difficulty of defining nationhood--Italy out of campanilistic and
localistic cultural groups; the United States out of diversity of
immigrants, religions, and cultures. Each found the solution in
constructing an internal other. If "the South [was] an American problem,"
so was the Mezzogiorno for Italy. Both Souths were at odds with the ideals
of the new nation, at least as they came to be defined by Northerners.
"Whatever their many differences, each nation had within it a region that
came to represent the 'other Italy' and the 'other America'" (p. 6). Each
defined itself against the image of this internal other. "Paradoxically,
opposition within nations could produce cohesion" (p. 6).
Some historical parallels in the making of the two new nations are obvious:
Wars of Unification and the Civil War; Garibaldi and Lincoln; industrial
and developed against rural and backward; the two Souths. Once a nation
made, the nationals had to be made in an ongoing struggle, Ernest Renan's
"daily plebiscite." Both nations used the well-known venues of
nationalizing the masses--school as a civil church, heroes and monuments,
national holidays, with differences: for example, America's Independence
Day (July 4), a national holiday experienced locally by all, has no
correspondent in Italy, which has never found a comparable single founding
event (the "Statuto Day," September 20 or April 25 all failed as national
holidays).
But the strongest moment of cohesion in the making of the two nations,
Doyle suggests, has been finding (imagining) an enemy that threatened their
integrity and unity, and against whom the nation could stand as one. To
stand as one, however, you need the other. A foreign enemy is the easiest
other; in fact, the struggle for liberation from foreign rule is one of the
most important sources of national identity. But a struggle against an
internal "other" can play the same role as a conflict with a foreign
nation, as the examples of the United States and Italy demonstrate.
In both cases, the other is the South. Its relationship to the nation in
both America and Italy is peculiar: initially included, in time it was
demonized for "being backward, out of phase with the progressive
aspirations of the larger nation, and a threat to national well-being" (p.
66). Wars of the 1860s, claims Doyle, were wars against this internal
other, an imagined enemy. Both, the Brigands War (I shall return later to
the role Doyle attributes to the new Italian state's fight against Southern
brigandage) and the American Civil War, started as struggles of young
nations to subdue rebellious provinces and ended as wars between
civilization and Southern barbarism. Both led to the construction of the
other that, in turn, helped define the ideal nation as "un-South." The
South was an alien place inhabited by alien people, backward and barbarous,
enslaved either by feudalism, despotism and the Church or by slave-holding
aristocracy. It did not belong in the national community. Against it, stood
the un-South, the constitutional, liberal, free-labor North. The North thus
became the repository of the national ideal, while the South became its
perversion. Anti-slavery and anti-despotism quickly evolved into anti-Southism.
Realizing the role the Southern Question played in Italian history helped
Doyle understand the American Civil War. Understanding how the American
South came to be seen as not belonging in the national community, helped
him, in turn, to understand the way in which the Mezzogiorno did not belong.
Doyle's is an interesting way of practicing the comparative approach,
moving back and forth between national cases, from an "outsider" to an
"insider" perspective, with one culture's _emic_ becoming the other's
_etic_. It often permits us to unlock meanings initially hidden, or to
uncover an existing phenomenon by calling it with a collective name.
I am too ignorant of the historiography on the American Civil War to
appreciate what the understanding of the Risorgimento may add to it. But
the other way around, looking at the process of Unification through
American eyes, allows Doyle to formulate the radical thesis of the
Mezzogiorno as the definer of Italy's national identity. Thus, the American
Civil War's parallel in Italy, the foundation moment of national identity,
becomes the "Brigands War" of 1860-64. This was a huge and bloody military
campaign of repression of the brigandage in the South; it counted more
casualties than all the Risorgimento Wars but is mostly ignored by the
Risorgimento historiography. Proposing it as a foundational moment
comparable to the Civil War is decidedly provocative. The elements that
compose Doyle's argument are well known. Another work that compares the two
Souths and the two Southern Questions, by Enrico Dal Lago, also points out
how, from the 1830s and until the Civil War and the Italian Unification,
abolitionists and Democrats prepared to overthrow reactionary regimes that
dominated the two Souths. They came to see and respect the North as
"un-South," and in time it became the "liberator" of the helpless Southern
masses.
The Italian Southern Question has, of course, a long history, from the
meridionalisti of the 1870s, Pasquale Villari and Franchetti Sonnino
through Fortunato, Nitti, Salvemini, Rossi Doria. The last in line is the
neo-meridionalist revisionist scholarship of the 1990s gathered around the
review _Meridiana_. It centered mostly on politics, economy and society,
cultural practices and dissemination of information, but it fed, and
coincided with, a wave of studies--often English or American--within the
framework of cultural studies and influenced by cultural anthropology.
These studies have done much to puncture the prevalent stereotypes of the
South. Anthropologist Jane Schneider analyzed the Southern Question in
orientalist terms, as a discourse about radical, essential difference
between North and South; cultural historian John Dickie showed how the
Brigands War was a breeding ground of the language of negativity; literary
scholar Nelson Moe showed how the other was construed over centuries;
political geographer John Agnew demonstrated how regional divides and the
North/South cleavage continue to determine political behavior of the
Italians; legal historian Roberto Martucci showed that the war against
brigandage was instrumental in the invention of united Italy; and I, as a
historian, have argued that the construction of the Southern Question was
the work of the Southerners themselves.
Italian scholars remain reluctant to study the South as a cultural
construct and even more to acknowledge that a racialized discrimination may
lay at the basis of the Italian historical discourse. But in the recent
cultural climate, when Italians lament the lack of unity among their people
and the weakness or weakening of national identity, when books proliferate
with titles such as _The Death of the Patria_, _Italians without Italy_,
_The Imperfect Risorgimento_, _A Country Manqu_; in such a climate Doyle's
bold thesis could change the parameters of the debate.
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posted by Lloyd at 7:56 AM 