Introduction: Cross-Cultural Articulations of Italian Ecocriticism

ABSTRACT The title of this special issue, Cross-Cultural Articulations of Italian Ecocriticism, indicates the theoretical framework from which we move — material ecocriticism — and the direction in which we want to take it — cross-cultural exchanges — starting from an Italian viewpoint. According to this framework, matter is densely storied, yet stories are not the same for all human or nonhuman inhabitants of an ecosystem. The narrative patterns they articulate depend on the embodiment of the entities participating in the encounter, the senses and technological apparatuses engaged in interpreting them, and the cultural, social, and political positionalities of the participants. Conversely, material stories affect those who explore them in complex ways contingent upon the encounter, the body and cultural background of the explorers, and their position within power relations. This introduction and the special issue articles expand scholarship developed at the crossroads of Italian studies and ecocriticism in the last thirty years.

In 1847, Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich dismissed Italians' national aspirations by relegating Italy to a mere 'geographical expression'.Far from relying on a long-lasting political unity and having instead hosted a great variety of political forms throughout the centuries, divided into many states and ruled by several different masters, in Metternich's view Italy was hardly more than an idiosyncratic boot-shaped peninsula stretching from the Alps into the Mediterranean Sea.For decades, the Austrian Chancellor's derogatory formula haunted Italian dreams of political stability and reliability, dreams many opposed with more generous alternative definitions.Significantly, Italian poet Giosuè Carducci preferred to see Italy as a 'literary expression', rather than a geographical one. 1 Time, however, as well as the advent of a severe climate crisis and global political instability that fiercely challenge nationalistic thought structures, have turned Metternich's infamous definition of Italy on its head.After all, a 'geographical expression' oversteps fixed economic abstractions and outlives fleeting forms of political power; it is constituted rather by the flows of rivers, the shape of hills and mountains, the curves of coastlines and islandsthus restoring the primacy of material landscapes, in their fluidity and variety, in relation to the superstructures they inform.
To talk in terms of 'geographical expressions', as opposed to 'nations' and 'identities', allows us to read Italian literature and culture in continuity with its ever-changing and multifarious geographical features, which in turn can be interpreted as forms of expression in their own right, as discursive components.Indeed, according to material ecocriticism, material realities are constantly 'enmeshed with meanings and narratives'. 2This theoretical framework establishes a conceptual fluidity able to fruitfully deconstruct a number of problematic dualisms along the way (same/other, human/world, mind/body, tamed/wild), together with the pronounced boundaries and divisions produced within and between scholarly fields.Metternich's use of the word 'expression' with reference to Italy's geography, therefore, results in a particularly appropriate, if involuntary, anticipation of the theoretical approach informing the present work. 3he title of this special issue, Cross-Cultural Articulations of Italian Ecocriticism, indicates the theoretical framework from which we movematerial ecocriticismand the direction in which we want to take itcross-cultural exchangesstarting from an Italian viewpoint.According to this framework, matter is densely storied, yet stories are not the same for all the human or nonhuman inhabitants of an ecosystem.The narrative patterns they articulate depend on the embodiment of the entities participating in the encounter and the senses and technological apparatuses engaged in interpreting them, as well as the cultural, social and political positionalities of the participants.Conversely, material stories affect those who explore them in complex ways that depend on the contingency of the encounter, the body and cultural background of the explorers, and their position within power relations.
This introduction and the articles included in the special issue expand scholarship developed at the crossroads of Italian studies and ecocriticism in the last thirty years.The editors of the Italian Studies special issue Key Directions in Italian Studies (2020) acknowledged the rewarding amount of work done in the field of Italian ecocriticism, yet they also called for further efforts that would establish it as a consistent sub-field with a sound collaboration network, diachronic retrospection, and forward projection. 4y articulating a productive conversation between Italian ecocriticism, cross-cultural studies and transnational approaches, this special issue aims to contribute to this effort.Pioneering studies in the field of Italian ecocriticism may be linked to, in Monica Seger's words, 'a long presence of environmentally attuned literary analysis', 5 yet it is only in relatively recent years that ecocritical scholars fully embraced these methodologies, discussed its philosophical tenets, and examined, for example, how environmental ethics relates to cultural productions; how these productions affect the perception and transformations of the landscape; and how literary canons may or should change as a result of the refined sensitivity of the ethical and political role literary texts and imagination play with respect to environmental issues.
The 2003 anthology Italian Environmental Literature, edited by Patrick Barron and Anna Re, constitutes the first proposal for a revised canon of Italian literary texts where the environment and ecological issues are at the forefront. 6Drawing on the work of Patrick Murphy, Barron and Re emphasize the relevance of cross-cultural approaches to environmental literary studies and ground the publication of the anthology in the need to open cross-cultural windows that would further comparative approaches to literary accounts of environmental issues. 7Yet the editors' selection of texts is also guided by a certain 'deep familiarity with place' and 'rootedness' the texts express when dealing with the connection between specific cultures and their environments, as well as with the relations between humans, other-than-human beings, and their ecosystems. 8oeval and later works have built on the concepts underpinning these two criteria (cross-cultural openness and 'rootedness'), favouring the latter rather than the former, while also going beyond the idea that the 'rootedness' of a text makes its ecocritical meaning relevant only to a specific natural-cultural context.From the early Ecologia letteraria (2006)one of the first introductions to ecocritical theories available in Italian 9 to Ecocriticism and Italy (2016)recently translated and re-elaborated in Italian as Paesaggio civile (2022) -Serenella Iovino has laid the foundations for a constructive synergy between ecocritical theories and Italian literary studies, later projecting the stories concerning Italy's narrated, exploited, fought-for landscapes into the global arena of the environmental humanities. 10As Iovino argues, places like Italy can 'gather experiences, dynamics, and symbols [so] as to also enlighten the life of other places', simultaneously being 'individual sites and cognitive instruments' that, 'in all their complexity, can be assumed as generative of categories' and 'enrich and engage our disciplinary debate as a whole'. 11 series of key contributions has supported this seminal proposal.Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film, by Monica Seger (2015), and Ecocritical Approaches to Italian Culture and Literature: The Denatured Wild, by Pasquale Verdicchio (2016), engage with the nature-culture continuum in ecocritical texts and articulate ontological, ethical, and political reflections across narratives of Italian fetishized landscapes, polluted seas, hyper-urbanized cities, and toxic factories. 12Niccolò Scaffai's investigation of the relationship between Italian literature and ecology, in Letteratura e ecologia (2017), critically analyses ecocentric philosophies, emphasizing the role literary imagination plays in the identification of political metaphors and human responsibilities concerning the environmental crisis. 13The essays of the collection Italy and the Ecological Imagination: Ecocritical Theories and Practices, edited by Damiano Benvegnù and Matteo Gilebbi (2022), broaden this interest in the ecological potential of imaginative processes, using 'artistic, literary, and social representations as a means to imagine more inclusive ways of living together, to search for knowledge capable of offering us alternative entanglements of places and species'. 14Silvia Ross, in Tuscan Spaces (2010), analyses Tuscany as a case study for understanding how the perception of that region, in Italy and abroad, was shaped by its literary representations, while Enrico Cesaretti's Elemental Narratives: Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy (2020) investigates the economic use, transnational narratives and cultural representations of specific materials (i.e.oil, marble, steel, concrete) in order to travel across several Italian regions and study their variety against the background of diverse yet connected environmental issues. 15aterial ecocriticism and Karen Barad's post-humanist ontology deeply affect how ecocritics relate to the bundle of material-discursive components constituting texts, for instance leading them to question the separation of the interpreter from the interpreted.Iovino's Ecocriticism and Italy is animated by a noteworthy self-reflexive attitude that constantly reminds the reader of how writer and object of analysis reciprocally determine each other.Far from a Cartesian understanding of self-reflexivity, this awareness of one's material and discursive entanglements with the text is a way for the ecocritic to make established assumptions vacillate and bring blind spots out in the open.Later scholarly efforts have embraced this attitude, turning the idea of relating to the material environment as a dense bundle of meanings and stories upside down, and looking at the stories and meanings embedded in cultural productions as entities having an environmental impact.In other words, ecocritics started approaching cultural productions as material processes affecting the environment in their making.These efforts have found particularly productive developments in the domain of environmental media or eco-media.Elena Past's book Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human (2019), and the later special section in The Italianist Film Issue, curated with Danielle Hipkins and Monica Seger, combine an ontological, ethical, and political interest in how media texts challenge anthropocentrism with attention to 'the many ways in which extraction, resource use, energy consumption and waste underpin media environments'. 16he dialogue between Italian ecocriticism, media studies and production studies is evidence of the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary encounters ecocritics venture into and, in some cases, programmatically seek.The volume Italy and the Environmental Humanities, edited by Serenella Iovino, Enrico Cesaretti, and Elena Past (2018), originates from one of the first panel series dedicated to ecocriticism in Italian Studies conferences and responds to Rosi Braidotti's call for the combination of creativity and critique across different fields of the humanities.The volume brings together ecocritical scholars, environmental historians, artists, and activists to develop the ability to read world texts from diverse angles and 'articulate what we read in critical narratives that can provide the ground for wider pedagogies in which the human world is an element rather than an end in itself'. 17The commitment to embracing this disciplinary turn brings to the fore once more the idea of questioning one's own methodologies while 'imagining that the human must acknowledge, collaborate with, and curate the stories of the nonhuman others that traverse, compose, and surround us', 18 thus selfreflexively thinking of the boundaries the environmental humanities cross in order to study and create alternatives to cultures of exploitation and marginalization.The 2021 series of seminars on ecology and labour organized by the research group Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail (OBERT), which led to the publication of an edited volume in 2023, 19 is a further example of the transdisciplinary dialogue in which Italian ecocriticism is engaging.This dialogue specifically focuses on how the category of labour can be relevant for reflecting on the complex ethical, social, and political issues increasingly emerging at the intersection of economic development, labour rights, and environmental justice.
Cross-cultural exchanges populate the seminal works presented in this brief overview, yet they often lie at the margins of the discussion, feature in one or two chapters within wider collections and, ultimately, are not fully voiced via a productive conversation with transnational studiesto which, anyway, we prefer the framework of cross-culturality, in order to avoid the pitfalls of (indirect) national discourses and complicate the integrity of monolithic concepts of nation altogether. 20By aspiring to take into account the actual matter of Italian territories and bodies in our ecocritical discourses, this special issue of The Italianist contextually highlights the porosity of such bodies and territories, reading them in light of diverse cross-cultural fluxes which have crossed and shaped them, being shaped by them in return.Italian culture thus emerges as a plural entity: not only a 'natureculture' (to borrow Donna Haraway's view of the inseparability of nature and culture in ecological relationships that are both biophysically and socially formed), 21 but a set of 'naturecultures' that sprawls well beyond the official borders of Italy as a nation. 22If, as Balibar states, border areas play a key role in the process of negotiation of identities, 23 Italy's peripheral position within the European context represents a perfect breeding ground for the investigation of the fundamental interconnectedness of cultures, as well as natures.Even more so, the scattered Italian mountain and maritime frontier lines play a particularly significant role in transcending 'the untimely parochialism of fixed borders and immutable identities' identified by Iovino in Ecocriticism and Italy. 24he aim of this special issue is to focus on the specific contribution that an Italian viewpoint adds to the interplay between cross-cultural exchanges and the representation of (non)human environments.In this endeavour, we engage on a literary level with Alexander Beecroft's proposal to address literature 'in terms of literary biomes […]; that is, in terms of particular patterns of ecological constraints operating on the circulation of literary texts in a variety of different historical contexts'. 25Since Mediterranean climates are among the most represented biomes on Earth, and given the diversity of Italian mountain-and seascapes, it comes as a consequence that Italy shares conditions of landscape, ecosystems, and animal and plant types with many 'naturecultures' across the globe, and that Italian ecocriticism is particularly apt to engage in conversation with various and diversified world ecocritical discourses.
The articles included in the special issue enter this conversation by investigating environmental relations variously intertwined with cross-cultural exchanges or by creating these exchanges via comparative methodologies.Both approaches lie at the core of Claudia Dellacasa's article.The comparative analysis of the poetic articulation of the relationship with mountain environments in Antonia Pozzi and Nan Sheperd is organized into three sections, each corresponding to an ontological principle of Zen Buddhism (acknowledgement of concrete being, dissolution of the individual self, and communion with all beings).Drawing on Baruch Spinoza's and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of affect, Dellacasa shows how, in Pozzi and Sheperd, the encounter with the mountain environment engenders awareness of the interdependence between self and world.Dellacasa first analyses how the two authors' poems linger on concrete, sensorial experiences in the interaction with the mountain environments.Pozzi and Sheperd's shared investment in material, bodily reality permeates their words, which via synaesthesia, similes, and metaphors crystallize a pre-personal flow of joyful affects.This flow leads Pozzi and Sheperd to express the creativity embedded in the material environment and the dissolution of their selves into the relations with it.If in Sheperd this dissolution ultimately translates into an affirmation of unconcerned affection and love for human and other-than-human beings, the constraints Pozzi experiences as a woman paint her texts with sadder tonalities that, nevertheless, potentially connote the author's suicide as an attempt to seek a final communion with all beings.
The vitalism Pozzi and Sheperd express in their poems is drained by the processes of commodification analyzed by Diana Garvin with respect to the history of banana production in Somalia.Garvin provides a comprehensive historical account of the banana trade that Italy established in Somalia before, during, and after the Fascist regime.Garvin consults a wide range of primary sources, including LUCE newsreels and advertisement materials, to show how the colonization of Somalia by Italy (and later its administration in post-war years) combines the brutal exploitation of human lives and land.The subtle thread connecting, for example, laws regulating the production of bananas, filmic representations of their cultivation, pictures of shops selling them, and governmental campaigns promoting bananas as healthy food is the capillary and relentless commodification of human and other-than-human lives involved in these processes.This commodification is ensured by the material (i.e.deforestation, monocropping, use of chemicals) and discursive (i.e.production policies, advertisement) practices that Italian state and private companies implement in the banana trade.The role of bananas in the agricultural, political, and economic ecosystem Garvin dissects does not affirm sustainable ethical alternatives to anthropocentrism.Rather, it reminds the reader of how networks of capitalist development are able to harness the agencies of human and other-than-human agencies for the sake of hyper-productivity and profit-driven economic development.
Marco Malvestio's article, 'Climate Migrations and Reverse Colonization in Italian Eco-Dystopias', is based on a productive syllogism.If science fiction is a privileged genre for addressing environmental concerns, with its post-apocalyptic and dystopic tradition, and since Italy occupies a privileged position for witnessing Anthropocenic violence as 'slow violence', 26 consequently Italian sci-fi gives voice with particular effectiveness to the many injustices of climate change.Due to its liminal place 'on the interior borders of an orientalizing European space', 27 Italy is also at the forefront of migratory fluxes that attract different critical stances in the four authors Malvestio engages with (Paolo Zardi, Bruno Arpaia, Antonio Scurati, and Tommaso Pincio).Both a target of immigration and a starting point of (climate) emigration, Italyas described in the novels analysedstruggles to define itself as a multi-ethnic hub, despite the opportunity to reactualize its own migratory past in the light of present and future climate change.
The fourth novel Malvestio analyses, La seconda mezzanotte by Scurati, is set in an 'after-the-flood' version of Venice, transformed into a dystopic amusement park and kept in shape by geoengineering technologies.Ilaria Serra, on the other hand, guides us on a sentimental tour of contemporary Venice, seen through the perceptive eyes of Moldavian poetess Eugenia Bulat, who worked for many years as a badante (or caregiver) in the Serenissima.Through Bulat's outsider point of view, Serra develops the concept of 'geometaphor', steeping poetic metaphors in their geographical and physical location, at the same time reflecting on the ecological resonances of personal dislocation and deterritorialization.In 'Eugenia Bulat's Poetry and the Geometaphors of Venice', the amphibious ecosystem of the city on the Lagoon inspires a polysemous reading of the geography of a poem vis-à-vis the poetics of a place, both informed by the acute gaze and perambulatory style of a migrant woman.
Matteo Gilebbi decentres human gaze and language altogether in 'Botanica postumana: Incontri dis-antropocentrici con culture indigene e vegetali'.He investigates multiple kinds of intelligences that co-habit within biological systems, at the same time challenging the so-called human ontological privilege and bringing to the fore the role of plants in multifarious interspecific communities.By scrutinizing the scientific contribution of Italian researchers Stefano Mancuso and Monica Gagliano in the field of plant behaviour and cognition, Gilebbi highlights the key importance of cross-cultural encounters (for example with Peruvian shamanic cultures, Californian Lakota, and Australian Aboriginal communities) in their understanding of biological life as a veritable cultural mix, as a contamination of knowledge systems to which every 'organism-community' contributes.
If Gilebbi's article is an example of the interdisciplinary dialogues ecocriticism enables and encourages, our interview with director Chiara Sambuchi demonstrates how we share the commitment to collaborating with artists, filmmakers, creatives, and activists external to what is traditionally referred to as 'academia'.We talked to Sambuchi after we saw her documentary Spirits I've Called (Più forti dell'acciaio, 2021).Travelling across Brazil, Italy, and Germany, the documentary tells the story of three characters: a Brazilian farmer, a paediatrician from Taranto in Italy, and an engineer from the Ruhr area in Germany.These characters respectively fight against the appropriation of their land by a steel industry giant; deal with the bodies contaminated by the pollutants steel factories produce; and work towards the restoration of dismissed industrial areas.In her answers, Sambuchi reflects on the affective and bodily connection these people have with their land, deeply analysing how the documentary leveraged its images and editing to show how these three culturally and geographically different locations share the experience of being or having been exploited by the same profit-driven system.Other questions address the role cinema, art, and beauty should play in this situation, making the most out of a conversation between ecocritical scholars and a remarkably self-aware filmmaker.The question the documentary askswhich Sambuchi reiterates in the interviewlingers, expecting an answer from each of us: what are we ready to renounce and sacrifice to invert the apparently ceaseless trend of increasing pollution and degradation?
Sambuchi's question and the articulations of natureculture phenomena the articles investigate bring us to reflect on a few concluding points.The aim of these points is to broach how Italian ecocriticism and cross-cultural studies may benefit from each other and foster future investigations developing at the crossroads of these two fields.
Although informed by different approaches, the essays included in the special issue are all grounded in relational conceptions of human and other-than-human entities.On top of that, the relations determining these entities are, as Barad would put it, simultaneously material and discursive.We believe that cross-cultural twists to ecocritical methodologies productively function as reminders of the significance of discourse to analyses, a priority that tends to get lost in the relational lingo that at times excessively emphasizes the material side of relations over the discursive.To be sure, we are not arguing for a return to post-structuralist approaches that were later, and rightly so, revised by the neo-materialist turn.Rather, we express the need to constantly contextualize the material relations in which texts and cultural productions co-participate.For example, the crystallization of an environmental ethics in the poems of Sheperd and Pozzi takes different paths because of the different material ecosystems they emerge from and the authors' gender and social status.The geometaphors theorized by Serra emerge from the encounter between the history embedded in the stones of Venice, their materiality, and the social and political marginalization inscribed in the body of an immigrant.Bananas, Somalian farmers, chemicals, and seawaters are all interconnected, material entities in a network; yet this does not erase the fact that their agencies, while all enslaved, occupy different positions in the power relations of banana production.In other words, approaching human and other-than-human entities as relational entities does not mean to naively wave an egalitarian flag and disregard the discursive, hierarchical forces that discriminate, marginalize, and, ultimately, exploit them.Rather, embracing this approach means to deal precisely with these differences and bring them to a critical point where patterns of discrimination, marginalization, and exploitation are understood in both their material and discursive ramifications.We believe that focusing on cross-cultural exchanges in the study of environmental relations will catalyze this understanding.
The second point we want to make lies at the intersection of epistemology and ethics.The articles discuss environmental relations involving cross-cultural exchanges that question the grounds of critical enquiry characterizing the Western tradition.The analyzed experiences of poets, scientists, and authors indirectly challenge the idea that the result of the relations and exchanges they engage in is the acquisition of what we would usually identify with rational knowledge.Affectively charged, catalyzed by bodily practices, and historically determined, these relations are rather grounded in the willingness to reject epistemological assumptions and to fully give oneself to an experience of listening.Paraphrasing Gilebbi's words, this ethical opening to otherness seems to be an effective articulation of a desire for respect and care for the other, rather than for knowledge, mastery, and control.Nevertheless, from what we read in these articles, rejecting assumptions and giving oneself to othernesses of different kinds does not seem to be a painless process: Gagliano must go through fasting and loneliness in order to let the environment familiarize with her; Bulat's entanglement with the city of Venice is characterized by experiences of absence, loneliness, and claustrophobia; and Pozzi's communion of being is ultimately sanctioned by death.
Having said that, with these examples we do not mean to say that cross-cultural encounters with human and other-than-human others are necessarily troublesome experiences.Dellacasa also shows how Sheperd's and Pozzi's poems account for the joy experienced in these encounters, while Serra underlines how Bulat's poems record instances of intimacy and kinship.Both painful and rewarding, experiencing cross-cultural exchanges in environmental relations does not prevent poets, scientists, and authors from trying to make sense, in their own way, of their experiences.Mancuso, as well as Bulat in her poetry, needs to look for metaphors that would help him communicate (in the etymological sense of sharing) his findings.These cross-cultural journeys denote commitment and the flexibility to change, regardless of the degree of disappointment this change could imply.
Ultimately, what we detect in these articles is an attempt to say that, in order to enact a radical change in our relationship with the environment, lifestyles based on consumerism and exploitative practices need to be sacrificed, and that making the effort of engaging in cross-cultural exchanges to explore alternative and more ecologically viable lifestyles is a step in this direction.
Finally, our third point concerns time.When speaking of environmental relations experienced through cross-cultural exchanges, the most immediate association may be with the different geographical locations where cultures and ecosystems are located.However, both cultures and ecosystems are temporal phenomena that change and mutate through time.The exchanges analysed in these articles are evidence of how thinking of environmental relations in temporal terms, rather than just in spatial ones, is also productive.The eco-dystopias investigated by Malvestio constitute the most relevant examples of the productivity of this approach, as they push readers to think of both migrations and climate change as phenomena that entangle and co-evolve in time.The narrative structure of Arpaia's text, divided into two storylines respectively accounting for the slow path to environmental collapse and its effects on society and individuals who migrate as a result of this collapse, is a creative exploration of the connection between causes and effects that, because of their slow evolution, are extremely difficult to see and make sense of.In Bulat's poems, Serra detects geometaphors that are co-determined by the poet's encounter with Venice on a specific day and time.The plant intelligence Gilebbi investigates in conversation with indigenous and marginalized cultures is preserved and brought to the future by the quiescent embryo that plant seeds host.Linked to our first point about the significance of historicization in relational conceptions of the individual, the emphasis on time ultimately discourages any analytical approach anchored in essentialist definitions of identity.Environmental relations, whether involving more or less evident cross-cultural exchanges or not, mutate with time.As these relations mutate, we change as human or other-than-human entities co-constituted by them.