2017 UCLA Italian Graduate Conference

I feel inadequate to the task of summing up the presentations of the past day and a half. This role is one in which you can be the “voice of God,” as Paolo Chirumbolo yesterday referred to the voiceover narration in some documentaries, or more humbly, as I prefer, something like the “sweeper” (“libero” in Italian), Cesare and Paolo Maldini for AC Milan in football/soccer, who tries to impose some sort of order on an unruly and unpredictable game. The emphasis is on “tries.”

I come from a field, political geography, which was dominated in the years from the 1890s to the 1940s by an essential opposition drawn between land and sea. Classical geopolitics was more or less the ontological commitment to the notion of Great Powers as either sea- or land-powers. It was never simply metaphorical or conceptual.  Yet, geography as a field has always been interested in detailed facts or factoids about places. Tidying up the world around the binary was always uncomfortable for many practitioners. So, historic figures from Mahan and Mackinder to Schmitt have long haunted the field, even though Schmitt was a legal philosopher rather than a geographer. But as Roberto Dainotto pointed out today there is no need to be trapped with land and sea as an ontological opposition. As a pairing or couplet of terms they can serve as a fruitful way of investigating a wide range of ecological and literary phenomena both conceptually and metaphorically. This conference is testament to that heuristic purpose.

In my remarks I propose saying something first about the four registers of usage I detect across the conference papers. I then turn to some more specific comments about how land and sea figure in some of the papers. Finally I offer a few speculative comments about the uses and limits of the couplet of land and sea.

The first register is that of the materiality of land and sea as they enter into literary and artistic production. As emphasized by Serenella Iovino in her discussion of the “porosity” of Naples as a city between land and sea but also with the looming presence of Vesuvius, both the internal and the eternal (the territorial and the relational) must figure in understanding the human memory and the forgetfulness about the environmental contingency and fragility of a place. This register is common across many of the papers. Massimo Lollini’s recent call for a “more than human humanism” comes to mind as a useful adage representative of this ecological sensibility. The second register is that of the betweenness of land and sea. The sense of the littoral is particularly powerful around the Mediterranean where indeed the sea gives its name to a climate on the surrounding land as well as to such phenomena as distinctive crops (such as the olive), diet, and folk practices. As Silvia Caserta said so clearly, the Mediterranean is not just the sea. The third register, apparent in the papers of Roberto Dainotto, Andrea Capra, and Sarah Cantor is of land-being and sea-being as archetypes of behavioral repertoires in literary forms such as poetry. Looking over the very longue dureé, Roberto Dainotto sees the distinction as shifting over time and thus as unstable. The couplet, drawing on the mythos of biblical imagery and longstanding European understandings of the sea as alien and threatening, imposes a structure on what is otherwise an unstable opposition. Finally, a number of the papers, particularly those of Federica Di Blasio, Melissa Melpignano, Silvia Caserta, and Heloisa Rojas Gomez, challenge the fixity of land and sea by focusing on the fluidity of movement across the sea. From this viewpoint, islands become central rather than peripheral and the very motion of people becomes key to choreographic design rather than simply representational of set positions.

With respect to some more specific points, the papers offer some important counters to typical polarized notions of land and sea. In terms of land, it is not always so safe relative to the sea. This is shown very clearly in Serenella Iovino’s rich account of “nature’s agency” in onshore Naples and Emily Antonucci’s account of the mutual fragility of work and nature in Visconti’s film about Sicilian fishermen (La Terra Trema).  The fruits of the land are also not always as straightforward as they seem (as in Viola Ardeni’s discussion of various fruits in Italian folktales). At the same time, though the sea can be dangerous both naturally (as for migrants in Federica Di Blasio’s discussion of the refugees in the film Fuocoammare) and through direct human action (as in Paolo Chirumbolo’s discussion of petrochemical pollution in documentaries about the Bay of Augusta in Sicily), it is also a setting for adventure and the unknown (as in the seductive charms of Sarah Cantor’s sirens and Andrea Capra’s sea poems of Carlo Michelstaeder).

Finally, and more speculatively beyond what the papers have to say, the geopolitical usage of land and sea relies for its power on naturalizing and essentializing them as the macro-equivalents of the elements earth and water. This sleight of hand is what gives them such power as an ontological opposition. Myths, as structural anthropology tells us, rely on such moves for the common sense they then define. Of course, and today, if we needed any reminding, the terrestrial and the maritime are bound together in our anticipation of the likely outcomes of global warming. Declining fisheries, plastic debris in the oceans, and rising sea levels are all evidence for the profound relations between land and sea. Planet Earth is organized across both land and sea and cannot be adequately understood at all in terms of a fundamental ontological opposition between them.  This we should not forget even as we make use of the couplet “land and sea” to inform our thinking.