Pier Paolo Pasolini and Pan-Meridional Italianness

Despite his ‘Third World’ and Marxist sympathies, Pier Paolo Pasolini showed, throughout his life, strong poetic and political attention for national narratives and the building of Italianness. However, Pasolini’s ‘desperate love’ for Italy and Italianness –which I consider one of the basic elements of his poetic universe – can be fully grasped only if we read it in the light of his fluid, transnational, and pan-meridional approach. The ICI Berlin Repository is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the dissemination of scientific research documents related to the ICI Berlin, whether they are originally published by ICI Berlin or elsewhere. Unless noted otherwise, the documents are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.o International License, which means that you are free to share and adapt the material, provided you give appropriate credit, indicate any changes, and distribute under the same license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for further details. In particular, you should indicate all the information contained in the cite-as section above. 59 P A N M E R I D I O N A L I T A L I A N N E S S PASOLINI AND PAN-MERIDIONAL


I N T R O D U C I N G I T A L I A N N E S S A N D T H E P A N -S O U T H
Despite his 'Third World' and Marxist sympathies, 1 Pier Paolo Pasolini showed, throughout his life, strong poetic and political attention for national narratives and the building of Italianness. In fact, Pasolini repeatedly confronted issues that had been essential for the construction of a sense of Italianness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; such as: the dualistic theorization of the Southern Question (la questione meridionale that he overturned and reused); the issue of the Italian national language and the use of 'minor' languages and local dialects; 2 the strengthening of the post-unification sense of Italianness through colonialism in Africa; and obviously Fascism, which appropriated and distorted many of the narratives and discourses upon which an unstable sense of Italianness had been built at the end of the nineteenth century. However, Pasolini's 'desperate love' for Italy and Italianness 3which I consider one of the basic elements of his poetic universe -can be fully grasped only if we read it in the light of his fluid, transnational, and pan-meridional approach. Thanks to numerous epistemological, poetic, and political tools (including the post-Gramscian discourses on Italian subalternity and the influence of pan-Africanism), Pasolini was indeed able to build a deterritorialized and idealized never-ending South: the Pan-South (Panmeridione), 4 meaning a fluid, non-geographical topos where 'traditional' values are used in non-traditional and subversive ways with the goal of resisting industrialization, mass media, and late-capitalist alienation. 5 Africa and its Diaspora, in particular, played an essential political and aesthetic role in Pasolini's transnational and pan-meridional démarche and his construction of the Pan-South.
This article will focus on the fact that Pasolini's aesthetic, poetic, and political approach was marked by a complementary dichotomy between national and 'local' issues related to the building of Italianness and transnational and pan-meridional topoi marked by different -at times antithetic -factors (such as the pan-Africanist perspective and the colonial memory). This article will also argue that such unstable and fruitful tension between the two elements in these binaries -a tension that also relies on autobiography and a complex relation to subalternity and alterity -is at the core of Pasolini's work as a whole and makes it still open and crucial today.

A F R I C A A N D T H E P A N -S O U T H
Pasolini developed, throughout his life, a pan-meridional perspective that is evident in such works, among others, as the comprehensive 'Third World' project Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo (1968, published in 1981), the anticolonialist and antifascist essay 'La Resistenza negra' (1961), 6  , which refers to Afro-Classicism and Black Diaspora in pan-Africanist terms, with the aim of connecting postcolonial Africa to pre-Hellenic Greece. Starting from his very first 'South' (Friuli) onwards, Pasolini was indeed able osmotically to include, produce, and reproduce multiple 'Souths' (here 'South[s]' is not to be taken literally in strictly geographical terms). He thus constructed the Pan-South, which is an open, never-ending, non-geographical topos that is highly marked by different political, poetic, aesthetic, and erotic urges. The Pan-South is, in any case, Pasolini's repository of 'reality' 7 and summarizes and conveys many of his values and goals, including the sense of sacredness and the search for a non-neurotic sexuality.

and the film Appunti per un'Orestiade Africana
The notion of the Pan-South is able to combine and explainwithin a Gramscian or, better, post-Gramscian frame -Pasolini's multiple and different interests in anticolonialist struggles and the 'Third World', as much as his love for peasantry, dialects, pre-modern societies, Rome's sub-proletarian suburbs, rural Friuli, urban Naples, the Arab world, and sub-Saharan Africa. According to such fluidity, continuity, and transnationality -which constitute important aspects of Pasolini's pan-meridional approach but are also accompanied by other complementary ones -Africa, like the suburbs of Rome, Naples, and all the so-called Third World, become for him a variation on the elemental Italian dialectal and rural world, so dearly loved and frequented by the poet in his Friulian youth.
Pasolini's construction of the Pan-South is interconnected to another fundamental aspect of his work and life: his search for and rela-tion to alterity and subalternity. From his early Friulian poems to his posthumous novel Petrolio, approaching, describing, and 'living' the 'other' was, in fact, always crucial to him. However, the 'other' was for Pasolini an unstable, multifaceted and, at times, elusive icon that had many intellectual, political, poetic, erotic, aesthetic, and autobiographical connotations. So much so that the primitivistic, ever-young 'other' portrayed throughout Pasolini's works can be, alternatively, the panmeridional subaltern (the peasant, the borgataro, the African, the Jew, the marginal self, etc.) and the mirror of an unreachable and unwanted image of the writer himself, thus initiating a fruitful poetic chain of oxymorons. 8 In 1958, 'Alla Francia' (one of Pasolini's very first 'African poems') opened with a multiple, oxymoronic, idealized, African self-portrait of Pasolini himself, 9 thus prefiguring many of the poetic, political, and autobiographical horizons that would characterize Pasolini's Africa(s). Afterwards, Africa and its Diaspora allowed him to articulate in full his complex relations to subalternity and alterity by providing a wide range of crucial stimuli on marginality, colonialism and anticolonialism, neocapitalism, transnationalism, sacredness, and the Black Atlantic.
Between the end of the 1950s and mid 1970s, Pasolini repeatedly portrayed Africa and Africans in many poems ('La Guinea', 'Alla Francia', 'Frammento alla morte', etc.), 10 the script Il padre selvaggio (1962)(1963)(1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975), 11 12 and some crucial posthumous travelogues, such as 'La grazia degli Eritrei' (1968) and 'Postscriptum a "La grazia degli Eritrei"' (1973). 13 On many occasions Pasolini sympathized with anti-colonialist and antiracist movements, as in the already mentioned Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo, the drama Calderòn (1973), 14 and the sketch La rabbia (1963, part of a homonymous film co-directed with Giovannino Guareschi). But even in his very last works -the film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and the unfinished novel Petrolio -which are apparently far from Southern, pan-meridional, and 'Third World' aesthetics, African images and characters play key roles, at least in terms of self-citation or abjuration (abiura), 15 elements that strongly characterized Pasolini's work as a whole. But Pasolini's Africa and his Pan-South can also present themselves as mirrors of or substitutes for his beloved and corruptible 'wild home village' (natio borgo selvaggio, as Giacomo Leopardi put it), as it is evident in his 1962 'African poem' 'La Guinea', which -apart from referring to Negritude in pan-meridional terms -is first of all a homage to Italian peasantry and the village of Casarola, where the poet Attilio Bertolucci liked to spend his time. Thus, Pasolini's journey through Africa and the Pan-South must at times be read as a nostalgic and fantasy journey through pre-World War II Italy, bearing in mind that -according to him -in post-fascist Italy subaltern classes had been irremediably going through a dreadful and destructive 'anthropological mutation.' 16 Antonio Negri (in an interview with Francesca Cadel) noted that Pasolini's 'aesthetic populism' (populismo estetico 17 ) -based on Franciscan ideal models and a general sense of political and personal defeat -pushed him, particularly from 1968 onwards, to 'invent' the tendency of Italian society to move towards a new Fascism, meaning a completely negative form of postmodernity that Pasolini erroneously called Fascism and summarized in his last film Salò. 18 Although Pasolini (who was born during Fascism and was raised in colonial and imperial Italy) was one of the most active and radical post-World War II antifascist Italian intellectuals, towards the end of his life he ended up casting a nostalgic gaze on how Italian subaltern classes and 'popular bodies' existed and acted before World War II and during Fascism -in other words, before they irremediably started sinking into the 'unreal' and alienated condition proper to late capitalism. 19 Such a 'nostalgic' element and the (up to a certain extent, vain) search outside Italy for Italy's rural, peasant, and sub-proletarian universe and for the 'popular body' are among the basic aspects on which Pasolini's pan-meridional approach was built. 20

T H E S O U T H E R N Q U E S T I O N , C O L O N I A L I S M , A N D T H E B U I L D I N G O F I T A L I A N N E S S
Pasolini's work rotates around a very original and multifaceted (partly autobiographical, definitely political) discourse on alterity and subalternity. His poetic and political démarche was unique, very personal, autobiographically orientated, and often ahead of its time. Besides this, his démarche was also marked by other complementary aspects, being both impregnated with key transnational issues of his time (such as the Black First of all, Pasolini's constructions of alterity, subalternity, and the Pan-South must be read in light of the Italian post-war 'Gramscian renaissance'. Right after World War II, Italy's post-fascist and antifascist political and cultural 'national reconstruction' was strongly marked, at various levels, by the publication and 'rediscovery' of Antonio Gramsci. This original Marxist political thinker -born in Sardinia in 1891 and imprisoned under Fascism in 1926 -died in 1937 and then became Italy's post-war national icon of antifascism. As such, Gramsci had important repercussions in terms of politics, culture, and imagery on Italian society and became crucial for post-war Italy's self-representation in its entirety. Particularly effective was the symbolic appropriation of Gramsci as martyr to Fascism operated by the Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti. 21 In the 1950s, the centrality of Gramsci in Italian society as a symbolic political figure is clearly exemplified by Pasolini's mid-1950s poem Le ceneri di Gramsci (included in his homonymous collection of poems, published by Garzanti in 1957).
Gramsci's massive intellectual work was published in Italy from 1947 onwards. 22 Gramsci confronted many crucial national political issues, including the Southern Question. The notion of the Southern Question arose in the 1860s with the unification of the country from the need to consider the social and economic problems of southern Italy as essential elements of the new Italian state and from the necessity of building up an 'exhaustive' and 'comprehensible' description of the South in a country that was finally unified. However, ever since the nineteenth century, the concept of the Southern Question contributed to emphasizing the gap between North and South -so much so that the image of southern Italy became increasingly homogeneous and the Italian South was finally perceived as the 'other'. 23 Thus, the North-South dichotomy, proper to the dualistic theorization of the Southern Question, finally crystallized the image of Italian alterity in the icon of the southern peasant without land, who became, at the same time, a carrying element of the national identity and the 'other inside the country'. The primitivistic, ever-young 'other' portrayed by Pasolini throughout his life and work certainly bears with it reminiscences of such an 'other inside the country', constructed from Italy's unification onwards. 24 Antonio Gramsci tackled the Southern Question in terms that provided the peasantry and Italian southern peasants with some agency and theoretical strength, not only within the plurality of Italian post-war Marxist discourses, but sometimes also outside Marxist groups. 25 The prominence given to Gramsci's approach strongly affected post-World War II Italian anthropology and ethnography, leading these disciplines to focus mostly upon Italian folklore, particularly that of the South. The 'Italian southern subaltern' thus became the fulcrum of a vast post-Gramscian anthropological and fictional literature that (thanks to Ernesto De Martino and others) devoted much attention to southern Italy, the peasantry, and its folklore. 26 Although Pasolini and Gramsci differed in many ways, 27 this post-World War II 'Gramscian renaissance' -even more than Gramsci's work itself -and the Italian debate around southern issues that stemmed from it had a strong impact on Pasolini's work, in particular on his approach to peasantry and dialects and on his construction of the Pan-South. 28 However, various texts by Pasolini pose the uncomfortable question of the essentialization of subaltern bodies and the crystallization of the 'primitive' pre-modern condition. Nonetheless, Pasolini was able to appropriate, overturn, and reinvent the dualistic theorization of the Southern Question, so much so that the Italian 'other inside the country' (the icon of the landless southern peasant) became for him, alternately, the African deterritorialized within the Pan-South (such as Zumurrud in his film Il fiore delle Mille e una notte) or the pan-meridional icon without class consciousness but endowed with the 'reality' of the 'popular body' (such as his friend and favourite actor Ninetto Davoli). 29 But, besides Marxist, Gramscian, and post-Gramscian influences, Pasolini also showed much interest in pre-fascist Italy, meaning the period during which the country's post-unification national narratives were built. In particular, in the early 1940s Pasolini devoted his university thesis and dissertation to the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli . 30 Later on, in 1947 and 1955, Pasolini published two short essays on Pascoli, respectively Pascoli e Montale and Pascoli. 31 Pascoli e Montale (1947), by setting a trait d'union between these two important and apparently different Italian poets (Giovanni Pascoli and Eugenio Montale), acknowledges Pascoli's contribution to the shape taken by the language of Italian poetry in the nineteenth century. Pascoli (1955) -written for the hundredth anniversary of Pascoli's birth and published in the first issue of 'Officina' -provides a challenging (and to a certain extent political) approach to Pascoli's work that not only takes into consideration stylistic and psychological aspects, but also rotates around issues related to the nineteenth-century building of Italianness and highlights the role played by poets and intellectuals in Italian society. 32 Although -according to Pasolini -Pascoli possesses an innovative drive (of which he was, by the way, mostly unaware), Pascoli is, ultimately, a 'modern' and bourgeois version of the 'Italian archetype'. Nonetheless Pascoli did provide a new model of the poet and intellectual that would survive for decades. 33 Pascoli is a text that allowed Pasolini to deal in an original way with various aesthetic and political issues that were on his agenda in those years. Towards the end of this short essay, Pasolini quoted a passage taken from Gramsci's Letteratura e vita nazionale that openly refers to both Pascoli and the writer and politician Enrico Corradini, that is to say, two crucial intellectuals of pre-fascist Italy who would articulate, in different ways, the centrality of nationalism in post-unification Italy. 34 In 1955, Pasolini, quoting Gramsci, indeed wrote: Italian writers -Gramsci noted somewhat hastily -have been harmed by an intimate apoliticism, laced with a verbose national rhetoric. From this point of view, Enrico Corradini and Pascoli were more simpatici, with their professed and militant nationalism, since they attempted to resolve the traditional literary dualism between people and nation, though they also fell into other forms of rhetoric and oratory. 35 In the same essay -Pascoli -Pasolini's original critical approach to Pascoli stressed the latter's tensions between centre and periphery and between immobility, obsession, and experimentation. 36 In any case, Pasolini felt close to Pascoli mostly for other reasons: he considered Pascoli's poems very important for the shape taken later on by twentiethcentury Italian poetry; 37 for both poets, the poetica della parola, the 'minor' languages and their musicality were central; 38 Pasolini appreciated and reused Pascoli's falsely ingenuous, magical and highly artificial world; 39 and he felt bound to Pascoli by a 'human fraternity' (fraternità umana) that went beyond Pascoli's stylistic and formal choices. 40 But in Pascoli, Pasolini also pointed out that Pascoli and his 'sentimental life' were irremediably marked by 'a childish and formless goodness that, in order to become somehow plastic, needed Christian or socialist nominal applications'. 41 It should not be forgotten, though, that in 1911 Pascoli, despite his socialist sympathies, delivered a speech called La grande proletaria si è mossa (first published in La Tribuna on 27 November 1911 and often republished), meant to support the Libyan campaign and Italian colonialism in Africa. 42 The occupation of Libya was, indeed, supported not only by Italian nationalist and conservative groups, but also by some groups and individuals with socialist sympathies. Pascoli's La grande proletaria si è mossa evoked Italy's efforts of nation-building through the Risorgimento and colonialism. It praised the ancestry of Rome, recalled the trauma of Adwa (where Italians had been defeated in 1896 by 'barefooted Africans'), and welcomed the Libyan campaign as the 'national' solution for the painful international mass-migration of working-class Italians. 43 Similarly, Enrico Corradini and many rightwing intellectuals supported imperialism. Corradini believed that the welding of 'modernity' with the spiritual values of ancient Rome's heritage was the key trait in the search for a foundation myth for the very young Italian nation. 44 Despite the fact that a massive process of industrialization occurred relatively late in comparison to other European countries, 45 Italy began to accumulate small overseas possessions from the 1880s onwards. The Italian colonial enterprises resulted, to some extent, from British international policies and had 'imitative' motivations related to national and international prestige. Hence in Italy the Oltremare (meaning 'the colonies') did not just play an active role in jump-starting industrial capitalism; first of all, it had a symbolic and 'imagined' role in perceiving 'ourselves' as 'more Italian' and 'more modern' (an aspect that would be shared by Futurism and would be stressed by Fascism). Thus, on many levels, the Oltremare was one of the 'driving myths' of Italy since the unification of the country and before and during Fascism. 46 'Italian Africa' did not only represent the 'elsewhere', since it was also instrumental to the self-representation of Italy. This became quite evident in 1911, when -as has been said -many intellectuals proudly celebrated fifty years of unification and modernization of the country by stressing the myth of the 'greater Italy' (La Grande Italia) and strongly endorsing the Libyan campaign. 47 In Italy's former colonies, the memory of colonialism has remained vivid. Yet for decades, Italian historiography after World War II tended to exclude colonialism from national history, and the country was marked by a general oblivion towards its colonial past. This happened for numerous, complex, and partly still unclear social and historical reasons, 48 including the difficulty of 'digesting' the fascist past and the lack of a proper decolonization process. Starting in the 1970s, historiography on this subject has slowly begun to develop, mostly thanks to Angelo Del Boca's pioneering research. 49 In the last ten years, there has been an increasing international interest in the history of Italian colonialism, as well as in postcolonial studies. 50 However, many of its aspects remain unexplored, particularly those related to the history of culture.
But colonialist intellectual and cultural dimensions are essential to understanding fully the construction and 'destruction' of discourses and narratives on Italianness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As has been said, after the unification of the country and until the fall of Fascism, both colonialism in Africa and the dualistic theorization of the Southern Question had great symbolic relevance for Italy's self-representation, the building of Italianness, and the country's attempts at 'modernization.' These elements influenced, among others, the shape taken by Futurism 51 and Fascism's construction of a national popular culture. 52 Both colonialism in Africa and the Southern Question, explicitly or implicitly, recur in Pasolini's work as well.
Fascism coagulated and stressed many of the preoccupations of post-unification Italy; in the 1930s, it strongly stressed the symbolic centrality of the Ethiopian Campaign. 53 But ever since the nineteenth century, Italians had looked at the Horn of Africa ambiguously and constructed a cultural and scholarly 'Mediterranean Africa' that was based on the legacies of ancient Rome and Latin antiquity, was affected by the age-old presence of a non-Western form of Christianity in 'Abyssinia', was instrumental in 'justifying' Italian colonialism in North and Northeast Africa, and was influenced by the problems posed at home by the dualistic theorization of the Southern Question and by the massmigration of working-class Italians overseas. 54 This was so much the case that the colonial Horn of Africa became the extreme southern Italy of and for a 'greater Italy', where landless peasants were supposedly going to find their pieces of land and become less subaltern. 55 In the 1930s Fascism promulgated, first of all in the Horn, a set of racist norms that opened the path to the wider racist legislation enacted in the metropole starting in 1938. Despite the fact that Fascism, through these norms, tried to stress the complete 'otherness' of Northeast Africa vis-à-vis Italy for political, strategic, and racist reasons, and despite the already mentioned post-World War II Italian 'colonial oblivion', nonetheless, some notions, ideas, and scholarly constructions from the colonial past continued to operate throughout the twentieth century and survived until the 1970s. This becomes particularly evident on a close reading of Pasolini's 'Eritrean texts' (which I will mention below), in particular his 1968 travelogue 'La grazia degli Eritrei', which stresses the 'classical' beauty of Eritreans, contains reminiscences of some nineteenth century missionary writings (Sapeto's in particular), and vaguely alludes to Giuseppe Sergi's early-twentieth-century anthropological theory of the Homo eurafricanus and to Carlo Conti Rossini's 1916 study Principi di diritto consuetudinario dell'Eritrea on forms of land tenure in the region. 56 Pasolini was not only an intellectual who, in post-war Italy, devoted much attention to Africa and Africans, but he was also the one who, after Italy's loss of its African colonies, most continuously and significantly addressed Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa, and dared -exceptionally for his time -to describe Eritrea as a former Italian colony. 57 Pasolini's Africa(s) have multiple facets and different nuances; among them a somewhat homogeneous Eritrean corpus can be detected, one which is particularly far from the engagé and Marxist attitudes that characterize some other African works of his (such as the essay 'La Resistenza negra' and the project 'Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo').
Pasolini's 'Eritrean texts' include two posthumous travelogues and a long article that describe Eritrea and Eritreans: 'La grazia degli Eritrei' (1968, published in 1981), 'Post-scriptum a "La grazia degli Eritrei"' (1973, published in 1981), and 'Le mie Mille e una notte' (1973). Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (1974) should be added to this list (as mentioned before, approximately one-third of it was filmed in the Horn of Africa). Moreover (as has also been said), Pasolini's last works -the film Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma and the unfinished novel Petrolio -explicitly or implicitly refer to Eritrea and Eritreans, at least in terms of self-quotation from the three writings mentioned above. 58 Pasolini's 'Eritrean texts' are very original, but also somewhat 'politically incorrect' and disturbing. They bring up complex issues related to the ambivalence of the (apparently) dismissed Italian colonial memory, the use of ethnography and autobiography, Fascism, and much more. Although we won't have the opportunity here to delve deep into this exceptional aspect of Pasolini's work, let us read, for instance, how his article 'Le mie Mille e una notte', somewhere between blitheness and provocation, describes Italians who were still living in Eritrea at the beginning of 1970s, including some 'old fascists' portrayed in somewhat benevolent terms: Among the few 'new' Italians who are now making large fortunes of a 'transnational' type, next to those already famous ones such the Barattolos (cotton) and the Melottis (beer), and the 'old' Italians, who have been here since the time when Eritrea was an Italian colony (and among these we also find the 'very old' who have been Eritrean for generations, that is, since the time of Crispi), there is a group of 'intermediate' Italians with, well, intermediate tasks. For example the teaching body. Or the diplomatic corps. This is a group of people which is strangely likeable (to tell the truth, even any possible 'fascism' of those naively nostalgic 'old' Italians is not among the most detestable: it is a curious and quite funny fossil [...]). 59 But Pasolini problematically ascribes even to Eritreans an almost benevolent gaze onto Fascism, as we read in 'La grazia degli Eritrei': '[Eritreans] judge the wrongs done to them (for instance the fascist ones) without getting involved in them, meaning without becoming partners in rancour'. 60 In any case, these passages, as much as other ones taken from Pasolini's 'Eritrean texts', operate a disturbing but fruitful collision between Pasolini's already mentioned 'reinvention' of Fascism and his representation of colonialism. 61 What is essential in Pasolini's 'Eritrean texts' is the fact that, despite being difficult and disturbing, they provide unique and precious tools to retrace and rewrite the underlying continuity between pre-fascist colonialism, Fascism, and postcolonial representations of Italian colonial Africa.

T H E ' O T H E R ' A N D T H E ' S E L F ' : P A N -M E R I D I O N A L L Y I T A L I A N
In spite of some preliminary difficulties Pasolini faced in finding the appropriate words to describe Eritrea and Eritreans (he stated indeed: 'As far as I know, no words exist in Italian to aptly describe the architecture of Asmara, Keren, and Agordat: the colonial style is perfectly inexpressible.' 62 ), his 'Eritrean texts' did provide accurate and beautiful descriptions of Eritrea and Eritreans -but descriptions which are sometimes ambiguously meant to be also descriptions of Italy, meaning the metropole. Moreover, several passages in Pasolini's Eritrean corpus show the ambiguity existing between Pasolini's complacent (or ironic) reuse of colonial stereotypes and his desire of beauty and surprise in contemplating and describing Eritrea and Eritreans. 63 Although Pasolini's numerous, rich, and problematic forays into the Horn of Africa have been long underestimated, or even forgotten, by most scholars, 64 his expeditions to other 'southern regions' of our planet have been the object of studies and discussions. 65 As far as his descriptions of India and Indians are concerned, 66 in 2004, Pasolini was accused by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri of being Eurocentric and, ultimately, self-referential. According to them, Pasolini was able to grasp the 'other', the 'non-Western', only by recurring to his own Europeanness, seen as the universal standard, starting from which Pasolini was able to notice in India only what could be assimilated to Italy and, ultimately, 'looked like home'. 67 Although some orientalist and paternalistic traits are definitely present in Pasolini's work, I think that Pasolini's regard on alterity is richer and more complex. Indeed, Pasolini was a performer, meaning that he performed and re-performed the poetic universes he was building up. He was engagé in the sense that he engaged himself, even physically, in his work; and in so doing, he managed to combine aesthetics and politics. In fact, blatantly and courageously, Pasolini engaged decisively in autobiography, which, as with Michel Leiris, 68 allowed him to mix levels of anthropological observation and fictional literature, thus avoiding any Manichean simplifications. Pasolini duly manifested the crisis of the 'observer/observed' dichotomy and centred his work on a rapport with the 'other' that was not resolved in clearly distinct categories of 'self' and 'other than one's self'. Thus, the 'other' (the African, the Indian, the pan-meridional self) in Pasolini is a somewhat elusive being, stuck in an eternal primitivism which, at the same time, presupposes as its constitutive element an undesirable identification of the author with the object of his desire; undesirable because, in the moment in which the identification with the 'other', the eternal youngster, should take place, Pasolini would see his own oxymoronic motor of corruption, lack of redemption, and poetry nullify itself.
In Pasolini the construction of the 'other' is thus also the construction of an idealized (although ambiguous) image of the 'self', 69 an image that -as much as his work in its entirety -is based on complementarity, being 'highly Italian' and 'highly transnational' at the same time. Consequently, it is not a surprise that in Pasolini the constructions and representations of the Pan-South happened also through a very close relationship with his native country and through the poetic appropriation and 'reinvention' of it (starting from the Friulian village of Casarsa, fontana di rustico amore).
Even the already mentioned notion of corpo popolare ('popular body'), which is rooted in Pasolini's representations of Italian subaltern classes and the ragazzi, is also highly transnational and pan-meridional, as embodied by two characters interpreted in the 1970s by an African-Italian young woman Pasolini met in Asmara, Ines Pellegrini. 70 In Il fiore delle Mille e una notte the slave Zumurrud is an icon of subalternity: a black African female slave located somewhere in the fluidity of Pasolini's Pan-South. She is assertive and has some agency, being blessed with the joy and the 'reality' that only belong to subaltern classes and are constitutive of the 'popular body'. 71 In Salò, the African servantplayed, once again, by Ines Pellegrini -is the last possible incarnation of the 'grace' of the 'popular body' (her first, brief portrait in the garden of the villa echoes Pasolini's previous travelogue 'La grazia degli Eritrei'). Moreover, she embodies Pasolini's 'Third World' and his interest in anticolonialist struggles, as becomes evident in the scene of her killing. Towards the end of the film, the killing of the two lovers -the African servant and the Italian partisan executed by fascists 72 -proposes a subtle play of self-citations and abjurations. 73 In any case, this important scene, by implicitly referring to Pasolini's 1961 essay 'La Resistenza negra' (which had already established a parallel between anti-colonialist struggles and poetry and the partisan Resistance to Fascism), stresses once again the strong ties between transnational issues and Italian ones, ties on which Pasolini's work decidedly relies -so much so that Pasolini managed to confront 'hyper-Italian' issues (Catholicism included) through a transnational and pan-meridional gaze 74 . This is the case of his script San Paolo (written between 1968 and 1974), 75 which has a transatlantic setting and repeatedly refers to the Atlantic slave-trade. Such transnational elements manage to mitigate and question some conservative traits that, in any case, are present in San Paolo. 76 Pasolini's strong, complex, and sometimes conflicting ties with Italy and Italianness pushed Italo Calvino in 1974 to accuse him of mourning the petty 'Italietta'. 77 Despite such accusation, in Pasolini's work as a whole transnational and pan-meridional elements are fundamental, as becomes particularly evident in 'Sineciosi della diaspora', a rarely quoted poem that was first published in 1970 in the review Nuovi

G I O VA N N A T R E N T O
Argomenti (a few years before Calvino's accusation) and then included in Pasolini's collection Trasumanar e organizzar (1971).
'Sineciosi della diaspora' is the product of Pasolini's interest in the Jewish and Black conditions -an interest he had already developed in the 1960s in his collection Poesia in forma di rosa (1964), above all in the poem 'La realtà'. 78 'Sineciosi della diaspora' first associates Blacks and Jews; then, towards the end of the poem, it depicts a diasporic, oxymoronic, and transnational image of 'steady instability': 'la pianta trapiantata, dalle radici scoperte' ('the transplanted plant with exposed roots'). 79 In so doing, Pasolini managed to perceive that the transatlantic slave trade and the Jewish wanderings were comparable to one another, to foresee that these collective experiences would later be considered essential for the (re)reading of 'modernity', and to prefigure the centrality assumed by the diasporic condition in the late-twentieth century. Thus, 'Sineciosi della diaspora' anticipated the late twentieth-century broader use of the notion of Diaspora (as articulated by social scientists Paul Gilroy and James Clifford, among others 80 ) by referring to both the Black and the Jewish conditions in transnational terms. 81 The complex tension existing in Pasolini between Italy and the Pan-South -a tension that has at its core the problem of time, history, and the Black Question in transnational terms (as would also occur a few years later in Appunti per un'Orestiade africana 82 ) -was highlighted by Pasolini himself in 1966 in his article 'L'altro volto di Roma': The problem of shacks, mud, destitution and dust, is not a specifically Italian problem: it is one associated with the culture of Neorealism only because it was Neorealism which first discovered it, but then left it as it was: that is, a specifically Italian problem. Instead it is a problem facing more than half of humanity, that humanity, which today is beginning to impact on history, bringing enormous imbalances, both in terms of practice and in terms of ideas. This humanity's war was fought in Russia in 1917, and now in Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and perhaps, above all, in the heart of the United States of America, where, indeed, the Black problem is not a specifically American problem, but sums up a situation which is typical of the modern world as a whole; a situation whose historical significance is not less than that of industrialization, the employment of technology, automation, mass culture. 83 As this article argues -and as highlighted in the above quote -in Pasolini we experience an original, fruitful, and sometimes problematic coexistence of 'local' Italian issues and transnational and pan-meridi-onal topoi. The very idea of 'Italy' (or even 'Rome') seems unimaginable and ungraspable in its fullness within a merely national perspective, as just stated in 'L'altro volto di Roma'. Indeed, to avoid the essentialization of any 'specifically Italian problem', Pasolini demands that we should place Rome, Italy, and, implicitly, Italianness in a wider panmeridional context in which Africa, its Diaspora, and 'the Black problem' play crucial roles.
However, Pasolini's pan-meridionalism is marked by different (sometimes even opposite) characteristics that make his poetic, intellectual, pan-meridional universe somewhat unstable and thus open to further fruitful elaborations. On the one hand, fluidity and continuity are essential to Pasolini's Pan-South, which (as has been said) is a non-geographical topos based on transnationality. Without mentioning additional, problematic, autobiographical urges that, during the 1970s, would become pressing in Pasolini's work, 84 in very general terms we can say that, during the 1960s, Pasolini became increasingly disillusioned with Italy because of the massive industrialization that led the country to a major 'anthropological mutation'. 85 The more disillusioned Pasolini was to become with Italy and Italians, the more he would look southwards, to Africa in particular. So, starting from an early Friulian, rural, and dialectal vocation which had already been asserted, Pasolini's device for the creation of the 'other' brilliantly, but problematically, ended up encompassing, almost by osmosis, the African interlocutor. Africa, like the suburbs of Rome, Naples and all the so-called Third World, was indeed a variation on the elemental Friulian dialectal and rural world.
Nonetheless, Pasolini's oeuvre as a whole can be schematized as a series of binary oppositions, without ever envisaging (in particular in his last years of activity) any form of Hegelian synthesis. 86 Hence, numerous aspects must be taken in consideration to grasp the complexity of Pasolini's pan-meridionalism. As has been said, some 'local' Italian cultural and historical factors remain visibly at the core of Pasolini's panmerdionalism. Moreover, his 'Third World' and anticolonialist sympathies testify to the influence of leftist, international, and pan-Africanist discourses, widespread around 1960. In any case, all the elements on which Pasolini's pan-meridionalism relies do not necessarily find a harmonious resolution, since they can most effectively manifest themselves through oxymoron and abjuration (abiura), meaning a radical, recurrent, and regenerating rejection of a phase of his intellectual past. 87 In the mid-1970s in Salò, we observe an important abiura in the shape of the death of the black servant and the communist partisan, who make love and are killed by fascists. As has been said, their love references Pasolini's 1961 'La Resistenza negra', which highlighted the ties between anti-colonialist struggles and poetry and the partisan Resistance to Fascism. Hence, Pasolini here performs the killing of the universes and references that belonged to 'La Resistenza negra' and thus kills his 'Third World' (embodied by the African servant), which throughout the 1960s had been one of his richest sources of intellectual, political, and poetic inspiration. But, such murder, being an abjuration, is also a ritual and, possibly, regenerating execution that takes place within Pasolini's work itself, in order to push his work and his panmeridional horizon constantly and infinitely further.