Postsecular Italy

Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches

Bibliographic Data

ID2746427
AuthorsClodagh Brooks, Clodagh Brook (0000-0001-8399-401X, Trinity College Dublin), Monica Jansen (0000-0002-7649-5295, Utrecht University), Maria Bonaria Urban (0000-0002-0690-0558, University of Amsterdam; KNIR (The Royal Netherlands Institute, Rome))
Year2024
Volume101
Issue3
Pages382-390
Publication date2024-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueItalica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-3020 • E-ISSN: 2325-6672
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5406/23256672.101.3.02
OpenAlexW4409096311
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

Religion has not been displaced by the long process of secularization. Rather, as Clodagh Brook and others have argued, it has become one of the most visible and complex fault lines of the twenty-first century. Today, religious and secular discourses are entangled with each other inside a public sphere in which secular voices mingle and clash with voices from multiple faiths. This entanglement is now a significant aspect of contemporary Italian culture in the age of migration.This special issue, Postsecular Italy: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches, takes as its starting points Jürgen Habermas's definition of postsecularism as the return of religion to the public sphere and sociological studies of the position of religion(s) in contemporary Italy (Cipriani; Garelli; Pace, Religioni). It is also the fruit of several recent endeavors in which we, the editors, have been involved. Firstly, it develops work done at an international research seminar held at the KNIR (The Royal Netherlands Institute, Rome) in 2022, titled Transnational Perspectives on Post-secular Italy: Arts, Media and Religion.1 Secondly, it elaborates the questions raised, and future directions highlighted, in Brook and Monica Jansen's 2022 chapter on the postsecular. Finally, it draws on the experience of a 2022 conference in Warsaw, organized by Marco Zonch, the author of Scritture postsecolari, titled Religioni letterarie II: Literature and Cinema during/after Secularization (1989–2022), which focused on mapping textual and audiovisual strategies in “writings of the postsecular.”2These initiatives indicate that, from an Italian studies perspective, there are many different approaches possible to what we might call “postsecular Italy,” and they reflect on how and where interdisciplinary dialogues can fruitfully hybridize each other. An interesting example of this potential for interdisciplinary hybridization emerged at the research seminar in Rome, where religious studies scholar Pooyan Tamimi Arab suggested looking at the postsecular as a process that is manifest in lived religion, rather than as a grand narrative or -ism. He proposed crossfertilizing the study of religion with that of Italian literature and film by adopting “material religion as a theory and method,” thereby placing “objects, things, and other manifest corporalities” at the center of the cultural studies of religious life and practice (Arab et al. 1). The importance of interdisciplinary approaches is clear in Arab's suggestions and can be taken even further by embracing Achille Mbembe's concept of “pluriversity,” a “process of knowledge production that is open to epistemic diversity” and involves “the radical refounding of our ways of thinking and a transcendence of our disciplinary divisions” (37). In fact, in thinking through this special issue we were influenced by Adriaan van Klinken who takes up Mbembe's argument that “the study of religion/s, precisely because of the boundary-crossing . . . nature of its subject, is uniquely equipped to address, interrogate and indeed transcend the disciplinary, methodological and epistemological rigidity that still dominates much academic inquiry” (149).We have put interdisciplinarity at the heart of this special issue, asking our authors to reflect on how religion is entangled with their disciplinary fields. We bring together multidisciplinary perspectives that range from the sociological (Enzo Pace) to the postcolonial (Charles Burdett), ecological (Florian Mussgnug), and filmic (Clodagh Brook, Pierpaolo Antonello). The case studies in this special issue first and foremost question the utility of the category of the postsecular for the analysis of Italian cultural production. Of course, the selection of case studies is not exhaustive, and we recognize that this issue remains centered on cinema, television, and writing, where most research in Italian studies is still currently being done. Expanding discussion of religion to other artistic media—such as comics and murals, theater and performance arts, installations, and visual arts—in future publications, would be a welcome, and fertile, direction.This special issue also employs a transnational method. Our aim is to use this second lens to challenge the Eurocentric model of “national distinctions which follow geographic, historical and linguistic boundaries . . . modelled on 19th- and early 20th- century maps of the world” (Burdett and Polezzi 15). In using the term transnational, we follow especially Serena Bassi, Loredana Polezzi, and Giulia Riccò in their introduction to the special issue Critical Issues in Transnational Italian Studies. There they write, “When we talk of the transnational we are not referring to an object, or even a set of objects, but to a theoretical approach, a set of questions and ways of seeing the world” (274). This is precisely how the postsecular is adopted in our own issue, and how it becomes a “lens” like the “transnational lens” that helps us “to untangle the political message that is being vehicled through the ‘Italy’ sign” (281). In our case, the “Italy sign” is wrapped up in its Catholic cultural heritage. We also follow perspectives exemplified by Emma Bond and Stavroula Pipyrou in their special issue on Futures in Post-Displacement Italy. They look at “what happens after displacement, the meaning-making that works to imagine new and different futures within the national space of Italy” (405). While their focus is on a “post-migratory” space, it is our contention that the future is also “reconfigured” in a “postsecular” space and is the result of not only “entangled waves of displacement in all their complexities” (405) but also of the uneasy copresence of religious and secular discourses, which can no longer rely on their normative exclusionary values (Parmaksiz).Our focus, therefore, will fall on a transnational, postsecular Italy, which is home to an extraordinarily successful global religion, with more than a billion faithful worldwide, and which is also, and increasingly, a multireligious country (Pittau and Paravati). The peninsula's geography plays an important part in how religion travels, as Italy is positioned at the center of the Mediterranean, close to an Islamic world, from which migrants regularly reach its shores. Historically, Italy's long imperialism “contributes to its place as a locus of religious mobility and mixing that belies the common narrative that Italy is a mono-religious nation” (Brook and Jansen 95). This special issue endeavors to play its part in the process of extending the transnational to models outside Europe to challenge, and possibly decolonize, the Western-based postsecular thesis. With examples from Italian cinema, television, and various modes of writing, it will ask how cultural productions might mobilize religious/secular tensions, and what they can tell us about postsecular Italy in the light of religion in global society.Philosopher Paolo Costa argues that the Habermasian paradigm shift should also be interpreted as the urge to begin reasoning from contemporary spiritual transformations to evaluate where the debate on the postsecular can lead us beyond the Western discourse on secularization. Costa edited the special issue of La società degli individui titled Secolarizzazione: A che punto siamo? (Secularization: At Which Point are We?), which contains an interview with José Casanova, a leading figure in the debate on the postsecular and author of Public Religions in the Modern World. Casanova says that one of the main epistemic gains is the so-called “provincialization” of Europe, which leads scholars of religion to review “eurocentrism” and to study the global from a “glocal” point of view (18). To provincialize secularization also means, according to Debora Spini in the same issue, to assess the debate on secularization and postsecularization from a post- or decolonial perspective, and to investigate how this “decolonial glance” could offer more “genuinely inclusive and pluralist models of democracy” (75). We think that choosing a transnational and interdisciplinary approach to study postsecular Italy resonates with these new approaches and critically values transformations that are easy to overlook if one uncritically adopts the keywords of a Western-oriented framework limited to the discourse of secularization.We have divided the special issue into two parts, both of which consider the transnational issues discussed here: (1) the postsecular from different disciplinary perspectives (Pace, Mussgnug, Burdett) and (2) the postsecular as located in cinema and television (Brook, Antonello). In the first part of the special issue, we asked scholars to consider the following questions: How is religion now treated within the field in which you are working? What might your field bring to questions of the postsecular? What questions do you think might need to be answered? What does the word transnational mean to you in the context of the “contact zone” between your field and postsecular theories? How would the “contact zone” between your field and postsecular theories contribute to Italian studies? What material might be particularly useful to explore in the future?Enzo Pace, in his contribution “Il rebus dell'Italia postsecolare,” responds to these questions when he speaks of a “puzzle” that he believes characterizes postsecular Italy. He describes Italy as a secularized, “post-Catholic” society, which, nonetheless, continues to use Catholicism as the cultural horizon of common sense. He uses the metaphor of Achilles and the tortoise, which he himself formulated in a 2013 article (Pace, “Achille”), to capture contemporary Italy's cultural and religious superdiversity (Vertovec): if Achilles is the symbol of a Catholic Church that believes itself to be invincible, the migratory movement is like a tortoise which slowly (and incredibly) starts to compete with Achilles.While Pace begins from secular, post-unification Italy to analyze the historical process of secularization, he links the process of postsecularization in Italy directly to the issue of migration, which he traces back to the beginning of the 1970s. He also reflects on the consequences of religious pluralism for the Constitution of the Italian state which is still anchored on the Lateran Pacts (1929). Reforming the legislation, which, even in the 1984 Concordat, was still limited, in order to realize a horizontal principle of equality of all religions before the law would imply a cultural, or even “Copernican,” revolution, he argues, thus recognizing Italy's long and difficult relationship with religious freedom (Ferrari).Although Pace mentions the growing phenomenon of the individualization of religion, and of religious “bricolage” (Altglas), his approach does not deal with the ramifications of the spiritual dimension of the postsecular, which instead can be found elsewhere, including the rise of apocalyptic ecocritical thinking in the light of the threat of extinction. Florian Mussgnug, in his contribution, “Anti-Apocalyptic Optimism,” provides examples of contemporary thinking through a postsecular framing that rests on theological concepts. He takes as his starting point Carla Benedetti's critique, voiced in her La letteratura ci salverà dall'estinzione, of the Christian eschatological interpretation of the apocalypse, which only allows for extreme solutions and hampers political activism. He contrasts her Eurocentric view with that of theologians such as Catherine Keller and Jakub Kowalewski, who have been more attentive than Benedetti to the intrinsic plurality of eschatological belief systems. Mussgnug also questions Benedetti's belief in the role of literature to disclose alternative scenarios. He asks why we are still fascinated by narratives of apocalypse and reflects on whether its continuing popularity in a postsecular world is “the expression of a deep-seated desire to come to terms with life on an unpredictable, dangerous, and heating planet.”Charles Burdett tackles another important aspect of the postsecular: the growing multifaith environment in which Italy now exists. Burdett, author of Italy, Islam and the Islamic World, reports the figures of the Pew Research Centre, according to which Italy's Muslim population numbered 2,870,000 in 2017, representing 4.8% of the country's total population, and he references Maria Bombardieri's work on the obstacles surrounding the building of mosques in Italy. From these contrasting facts, he concludes how difficult it is to recognize that “Islam and the Islamic world are not separate realities from the West but an integral part of the West just as they are key internal actors in the ongoing construction of postsecular societies.”With his corpus of nonfictional and fictional texts that represent Italy and Islam after the attack of September 11, 2001, Burdett shows how journalists such as Oriana Fallaci, Magdi Allam and Vittorio Feltri have used their first-person narratives to advocate fear and opposition to Islam, and how, on the contrary, writers such as Randa Ghazy, Amara Lakhous, and Alessandro Perissinotto “have used the novel and the fictional autobiography as a means . . . of bringing the effects of Islamophobia to public awareness.” It is Burdett's contention that to deal with Islam in Italy in the present, it is fundamental to go back to the treatment of Islam during colonialism and Fascism (Humayun Akhtar). He highlights the example of Ramzanali Fazel's Islam and Me as a personal account of how Italy's history as a colonial power is inevitably and inextricably intertwined with Italy's relation with Islam. Burdett also contextualizes his readings in the light of Italy's turn to the Right, referring to Matteo Salvini's and Giorgia Meloni's declarations of Islamophobia. This final point makes clear that to speak of the postsecular also means engaging with the way in which populist parties manipulate religion to their own political ends (Marzouki).In the second part of the special issue, we asked scholars who are already working on religion in Italian culture specifically to explore how postsecular theories might be applied in studies of cinema and television, asking them to provide a few sample case studies.Brook deals with Islam in film and television series through the case study of Bangla by Phaim Bhuiyan. Unlike Burdett's historic approach, which is embedded in societal debates, Brook analyzes these “accented” productions to understand how a dialogue between secular and religious positions might be staged in an intradiegetic narrative. She formulates some important questions that could open new perspectives on interreligiosity in Italy. Her analysis also interrogates the distribution of films centered on Islam, a point which she has also addressed in her monograph, Screening Religions in Italy. The visibility of Islam in audiovisual media appears to be increasing, as demonstrated by the success of recent television series that target teenagers and young adults, such as the popular Netflix series, Skam Italia, directed by Ludovico Bessegato, and the teen drama, Crush: La storia di Tamina, directed by Valentina Bertuzzi, both dealt with in Brook's article.While both Burdett and Brook analyze the representation of Islam in cultural production, taking as their starting point the postsecular in the Habermasian sense of it as the return of religion to the public sphere, another take on film and religion can be found in Pierpaolo Antonello's comparative analysis of Federico Fellini's La dolce vita and Paolo Sorrentino's La grande bellezza. Antonello argues that these films testify to two different moments along the historical and social process of transition defined as postsecular. Taking as his theoretical paradigm Giorgio Agamben's Profanations, Antonello explores how the sacred is approached differently through the practices of secularization and profanation. While the former can be seen as “a form of repression” that leads to the displacement of the religious categories in the mundane, profanation instead “neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use” (Agamben 77). Antonello argues that these opposing trajectories emerge in the two films: Fellini's work can be read as a “revelation of the processes of secularization that degrade into profanation” whereas Sorrentino's film represents a “reversal of that process” as the sacred is re-established through “individualized, immanent forms of nostalgia.”In Antonello's reading, the fragmented narrative of La dolce vita conveys the idea that the sacred has been preserved in postwar Rome, albeit in “degraded . . . ‘shades’” through the forms of secularization. Crucial to this process of resignification are media and the media as of new forms of and forms of the idea of which to in his Antonello points “the material of the religious “the of the of into a in of the secular and the religious can also be found in Sorrentino's La grande but with a different Antonello shows how the as sacred and order to for the and he also makes to and that open the way to to it is indeed the construction of the sacred as a of that represents a of contemporary postsecular the La grande for a embedded in an immanent the sacred in or can only be through Antonello's analysis of the postsecular and its in La grande also shows with Monica Jansen and Maria of another of Sorrentino's The the successful television series by in The of the fictional who the of has been by the two scholars as a postsecular as it questions the position of in contemporary as as the practices of religion through which to approach the sacred and and This material dimension that is staged through Sorrentino's makes of The an research to explore the of postsecular to in fact, religion should be a form rather than a as it is the that makes it possible to experience the She also in to the as as a and of the focus on the of religious practices us back to Pooyan Tamimi Arab's at the about the potential of between religious studies and Italian literature and films studies (Arab et al. Sorrentino's artistic not only testify to how Catholic practices and are in Italian culture even that can be in Brook's as the of also the contemporary for a that is postsecular as it is no longer by or a religious but is on an through religious film history from the of religious as some of the scholars in this issue thus to how the postsecular of the has from the the these how, from a range of different “postsecular Italy” can become a lens to analyze the difficult in the public sphere between and secular discourses, as as being the “material of the representation of religion in textual and audiovisual The transnational and interdisciplinary approaches adopted by the authors tell us more about “postsecular Italy” because they in and the Italy as a Catholic as the of this special issue, that these and this introduction offer material that can open new directions to be in future interdisciplinary and transnational research that into into and into theories that go beyond we

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