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Italy's "Southern Question": Orientalism in One Country. Jane Schneider, ed. New York: Berg, 1998. 299 pp. As a specialist of Northern Italy, I began reading Italy's "Southern Question" with interest but some detachment. I was thus unprepared for the exceptionally stimulating content of this rich, varied, and provocative collection of essays. Its aim is to understand how and why the rhetoric of a North/South divide became part of "an everyday symbolic geography for Northerners and Southerners alike" (p. 1). The contributors are North American and Italian scholars drawn from a range of disciplines: anthropology, history, Italian cultural and literary studies, and political science. The essays are ordered historically and cover a chronological range of some two hundred years, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day.
The overall argument of the book is historical: the "Southern Question" is a discourse about radical, essential difference between North and South that emerged as Italy modernized economically and politically during the nineteenth century. The enduring efficacy of this discourse into the twentieth century (most recently, in the rhetoric of Northern regionalist movements) is linked to more general representations of "Southern" backwardness and of essentialized North/South difference and opposition formulated in the wider contexts of colonialism and, now, of "global" capitalism, both by foreigners and by Italians, including Southerners themselves (Schneider). The complex interplay of local, regional, national, and global viewpoints that coalesced into the notion of a "Southern Question" is the unifying theme of the volume.
The book opens with an account of discourse about the South during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, that is, before Italy's unification and before the South became seen as a national "question," when social and economic problems in the Kingdom of Naples were recognized and earnestly discussed by local intellectuals and scholars, but their causes were not seen as especially "Southern" (Petrusewicz). The gradual definition of the South as a...