MACMILLAN The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (Mediterranean Perspectives)

This book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or 'making of' Italians. While previous scholarship on the construction of Italian identity has often focused too narrowly on the territorial notion of the nation-state, and over-identified Italy with its capital, Rome, this book highlights the importance of the Mediterranean Sea to the development of Italian collective imaginaries. From this perspective, this book re-interprets key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and thereby challenges mainstream interpretations of Italian collective identity as weak or incomplete. Ultimately, it argues that Mediterranean imaginaries acted as counterweights to the solidification of a 'national' Italian identity, and still constitute alternative but equally viable modes of collective belonging. Review “The fishing net and the spider web provides us with a detailed and broad study on the genesis and development of two fundamental models whose movements have been central since the Risorgimento in order to make Italians. This volume is a highly valuable contribution to the understanding of Italy’s diasporic and colonialist entanglement … .” (Anna Finozzi, Annali d’italianistica, Vol. 39, 2021)“Well-researched and highly elaborated argument ... . welcome and valuable additions to the field of Italian and Mediterranean studies. They deserve high praise for their interdisciplinarity and for providing useful tools for addressing the issues with which they are concerned. ... The most fascinating parts in Fogu's book are not where he delves into theory but where he considers specific historical episodes, sites, persons, or objects.” (Konstantina Zanou, Italian American Review, Vol. 11 (2), 2021) Review “In a series of innovative excursions into the entangled fields of Italian and Mediterranean studies, Claudio Fogu confronts the complexities of the making of modern Italian identity. Snapping the chains that consistently direct Italy north towards the colonising pole of European modernity, these interlocking essays provocatively pull us south into the critically imaginative possibilities provided by the largely negated networks of the Mediterranean. An essential read for rethinking both the Mediterranean and Italian modernity.”―Iain Chambers, University of Naples – L’Orientale, Italy“This meticulously researched study eloquently brings to light for the first time the complex and often contradictory role that the shifting collective notion of a Mediterranean belonging and even identity has played in the political imagination of Italians, in contrast and often opposition to the prevalent, Eurocentric notion of Italy’s ‘Europeanness.’ Claudio Fogu’s bold rethinking of the cultural history of modern Italy will reshape the way we conceive of both Italy and the Mediterranean as a whole in a global and postcolonial context.”―Lucia Re, UCLA, USA About the Author Claudio Fogu is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.