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Reviews of Books
this manner, the author is frequently forced to move
abruptly from one point to another, quite different one
using a telltale phrase such as "we will return to the
earlier point later in the book."
Finally, and perhaps most disturbing of all, the
author incorrectly identifies one of the most prominent
Italian politicians ever, Giovanni Giolitti, as Antonio
Giolitti. And the mistake is repeated, twice in the text
and even in the index! Fentress's editor and readers
should have served him better. Even with these important weaknesses, however, the book does provide an
interesting look at the development of certain mafia
organizations in nineteenth-century Sicily.
CHARLES L. BERTRAND
Concordia University
JOHN DICKIE. Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes
of the Mezzogiorno, 1860-1900. New York: St. Martin's. 1999. Pp. 209. $45.00.
John Dickie is a leading member of a group of young
historians working in British universities with a distinctive revisionist thrust to their work on modern and
contemporary Italian history. They do not shy away
from theory, whether historiographical or broadly social scientific, and are happy to challenge past and
current monstres sacrés, from Denis Mack Smith to
Edward Said. This interpretative study of some neglected dimensions of the attempt by successive generations of the Italian ruling class to define the identity
of their country is attractively well-written, even when
Dickie strays into the semantic thickets of deconstruction.
The exploration of the constraints and possibilities
of nationbuilding by social elites in the modern period
is a constant thorn in the side of historians, who are
always tempted to assume the existence of enduring
national identities rather than lift the carpet of celebratory patriotism. In the case of the nation-state of
Italy, latecomer par excellence, the layers of mystification are manifold and dense. Most of them relate to
the largely unexamined great divides assumed to exist
between the labile entities denoted by "North" and
"South," "modernized" and "backward" (or even "archaic") sectors, "bourgeoisie," "workers," and "peasants." Dickie, taking his stance close to the position of
the "new southern history" (p. 12), joins in the task of
"diluting the differente" implied by such terminologies. He focuses upon "the various ideas of the South
produced at various times" (p. 13) in terms of the
stereotypes they embodied and the uses to which,
consciously or otherwise, the latter were put in the
discourses of Italians about and within the nation. His
work suggests that the generation of stereotypes of the
South was not simply a byproduct of the making of
Italy but functional to it.
The discourses chosen are, inevitably, disparate and
to some extent arbitrary: the still influential works of
the pioneer meridionalisti Pasquale Villari and
Leopoldo Franchetti certainly make an obvious start-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ing point for Dickie's analysis of how the "Southern
Question" was first posed and developed into an
anxious ethnocentric debate about national identity.
Similarly, obvious candidates for scrutiny are the narratives and reflections of Italians involved in the
repression of the postunification "brigandage" in the
South, which powerfully shaped perceptions of the
latter's otherness. Rather less persuasive, perhaps, is
the reliance on a single press source, the Illustrazione
italiana, as the most representative repository of
"bourgeois" attitudes to "darkest Italy." An analysis of
the stereotypes implicit in the discourses of at least
equally influential journals of opinion, for example,
might have revealed a picture contrasting significantly
with this "dilettante anthropology of the picturesque"
(p. 97), and one wonders also what might have
emerged from a closer scrutiny of the almost Spartacist
utterances and symbolic acts of the losers of the social
war of the 1860s. Historical empathy is, sadly, no
longer fashionable.
It is one thing to disinter and dissect stereotypical
topoi, quite another (as Dickie himself reflects, p. 197)
to determine how they lead to or deter from specific
actions. The point is made clear by Dickie's treatment
of the baleful figure of Francesco Crispi, the fiery
Sicilian survivor of the heroic generation of the "makers of Italy," whose two periods of office (1887-1891
and 1893-1896) coincided with (and perhaps resulted
from) the first major crisis of Italy's governability since
the brigandage of the 1860s. Threatened by the collapse of the national banking system, a diplomatie and
trade crisis with France, and a fresh peasant-plebeian
revolt in the form of the Sicilian fasci, the tottering
polity reached for a charismatic leader to pull it
together. The once-radical Garibaldian Crispi, now a
populist-monarchist, appeared to be the only strong
man available. He also preeminently fitted the ambivalent stereotype of the southerner-superpatriot ready
to emulate Bismarckian realpolitik in his nationalist
and colonialist ardor. For once, the stereotype seemed
to converge with the demands of the real situation,
Crispi being "perceived to be both of the other Italy
and a rampart against it" (p. 141).
Crispi's repression in Sicily succeeded, but at Adowa, the feudal army of Menelik destroyed the Italian
expeditionary force. After Crispi's (stereotypically Italian?) downfall and disgrace, the enterprise of making
Italians who would be ready to fulfil the fantasies of
their rulers passed, a generation later, into even more
dubious hands. Today the latter-day lanista who will
probably come to office in 2001 deploys the artifices of
a football manager to promote his motley team. Dickie's stimulating book shows why the stereotypes rippling out from these past and current events should
continue to receive comparable attention as aids to
historical understanding.
ROGER ABSALOM
Sheffield Hallam University
JUNE 2001