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456 Annali d’italianistica 30 (2012)
sanitized image of the nineteenth-century wars of independence perpetrated by
official rhetoric. Such concerns, however, were not present in the postunification
war against brigantaggio where photographs of brigands and bandits,
often shown through graphic images of decapitated and mutilated bodies,
functioned as warnings against the resistance and uprisings of the South.
Nevertheless, despite attempts at putting photography at the service of a national
pedagogy, contradictory images of Italians emerged, as evidenced by the
photographic archive of Giovanni Verga, which Verdicchio discusses in chapter
four, “Giovanni Verga: Photography and Verismo.”
Verdicchio reminds readers that Verismo is a literary practice that calls into
question the representation of reality and illustrates his point by a close reading
of Verga’s short story “La lupa,” from Vita dei campi. As yet another medium to
represent reality, Verga’s photography is seen by Verdicchio as a natural
progression of the novelist’s literary practice. Focusing on photographs of
Verga’s family and of peasants, Verdicchio points out that these subjects are
often presented in the same shot. By so doing, Verga questions nationalist
agendas inasmuch as he levels hierarchies between social classes while
foregrounding the visual presence of a subaltern group that cannot be erased by
the dominant one. In other words, peasants remain visible, and while they will
be expelled from the national body in the course of emigration, they still
represent an alternative to the normative definition of Italianità.
Chapter five, “Imaging America: The Photography of Lewis Hine and Jacob
Riis,” examines the work of two photographers who played a major role in
documenting the arrival of Italians (and other groups) to the United States in the
early twentieth century. While Verdicchio acknowledges the socially minded
work of both men, he also notes that their images flattened all ethnic and
cultural distinction, turning migrants into faceless others and depriving them of
agency and specificity in the new nation. The sixth chapter, “Imaginative
Contradictions: Van Gloeden’s Disruptive Bodies of Representation,” is devoted
to the well known photographs of the German baron who moved to Taormina at
the end of the nineteenth century where he produced a large collection of
homoerotic male nudes. This collection attracted the attention of members of the
Linked Ring Group, to which belong the photographers Frank Sutcliffe and
Alfred Stieglitz, the actress Eleonora Duse, but also the writers Matilde Serao,
Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Oscar Wilde. Verdicchio contextualizes van
Gloeden’s work within the myth of Mediterranean sensuality and presumed
acceptance of homosexual practices, but notes how the baron made the naked
body more acceptable through a classical garb. In these pages, Verdicchio also
laments that fact that postcolonial critics have tended not to address the other
within Europe itself, that is, the exploited and racialized subject of the First
World that emerges from van Gloeden’s work. While it is undeniable that
postcolonial critics have focused less on Europe than on other areas, there is
nevertheless a growing body of recent scholarship that is addressing these