Nationalism, Colonialism, and Culture

This seminar is devoted to an investigation of the concept of Global South in the imagination of colonizers, explorers, and creative writers beginning in the 19th century  and reaching today’s novelists, poets, filmmakers, and social critics.  To approach the idea of “South,” we’ll focus in particular on the representation of that southernmost frontier of the Americas known as the Patagonia and then consider, within the heart of Europe, the shaping of the Italian South known as the mezzogiorno. Not simply a study of colonial impulses, the course will also be a study of the babelic language crossings that take place on real and imagined borderlands, and the possibilities of resistance that the South offers political subjects.

Starting with Darwin’s observations about Patagonia and Mme. De Stael’s assessments of Italy, we will read about the ways in which the South enters the cultural imagination of those who see in the remote geographic outpost the possibility of challenging cosmopolitan sensibilities and expanding the role of the state. We will take this through the tropes of “barbarism” that are carried in descriptions of the south, along with the potential for resistance that Southern lands encourage (especially the outlaw and the brigand). In the second half of the course, we will address the shifting geographic and political boundaries that allow for discursive claims for secession (vis a vis the Italian North set against the South, and the demands of the “King of Patagonia”) and will conclude with two discussions anchored through a literary lens: on the one hand, the presence of African immigrants in the Italian South who reshape geographical and cultural landscapes; on the other, the emergence of Mapuche indigenous voices in southern Chile and Argentina whose demands for rectifications of land rights and social recognition have become a thorn in the hide of the state. Our work will require a study of the operations of travel discourse, the estheticization of nature, the building of cultural difference (based on race, language, and nation), and the literary and cultural representations of utopias and social justice. Based on the theoretical materials supplied in the first part of the course, students will be invited to report on their own locations of “South” and to lead us in discussion of the cultural and literary dynamics that their research on “South” engenders.