Certe cose non si dicono (certain things are not said): histories of race, colonialism and resistance in Southern Italian diasporic art

The overarching research question of this thesis is: How do selected examples of diasporic Southern Italian cultural production work to expose complex and contradictory histories of race, colonialism and resistance in the context of the Australian settler colonial state? In the course of my thesis, I specifically focus on the work of the diasporic artists Pietro Capogreco, Angela Cavalieri, and Dan and Dominique Angeloro (SODA_JERK) in order to examine how their art functions to interrogate both hegemonic Italian and Australian settler colonial iconographies and colonial mythologies. I argue that this body of Southern Italian diasporic cultural production addresses questions of colonialism and race, while simultaneously mapping otherwise hidden relations between hegemonic notions of Italianness and the Australian settler colonial state.

Drawing on Capogreco’s paintings and photography, I argue that, while the classicising tradition of Western painting mapped the white body as the universal human body in the fields of art and anatomy, Capogreco’s importation of Southern racialised features back into the smooth non-striated space of the Aryan-Apollo works to perform a Nietzschean Dionysian refusal of anatomic depth and the racial myth of the white body as the template body. In the context of the settler state, though, Capogreco’s problematisation of questions of race, sexuality and gender through tactical acts of queering, fragmentation and ambiguity, can be seen as enacting its own erasures and blind spots.

In my analysis of Cavalieri’s work, I discuss how she powerfully interrogates the narrative that Italian “pioneers” founded Melbourne’s “Little Italy” on a “wasteland.” Cavalieri’s Dadaist lino-cut work, I argue, alerts us to the violent displacement of the Wurundjeri and how Northerners and Southerners alike continue to benefit from the contemporary dispossession of Indigenous people under gentrifying migrant heritage scripts founded on Indigenous displacement. While the Dante Alighieri Society sought to transform “uncivilised” Southern emigrants into “real Italians” via monolingual/monocultural language programs, Cavalieri uses the words of Dante to articulate Bhaktinian multi-voicedness and she performs the Dadaist failure of her assimilation under Menzies-era migration policies. Rejecting John Howard’s binarisation of exemplary assimilated Southern European migrants versus unassimilable migrants (for example, Muslim Australians), Cavalieri articulates the Bakhtinian addressivity that connects Southerners, whose painful assimilation has ultimately resulted in settler privilege, to the horrific legacies of Indigenous assimilation and the consequent consolidation of the power of the settler state.

In the final section of my thesis, I examine how the film TERROR NULLIUS: A Political Revenge Fable (SODA_JERK, 2018) remixes the Australian film canon with other sampled texts, demonstrating how the moving image has translated terra nullius into a vast “white possessive mythology” (Moreton-Robinson, 2005). Rejecting the Australian 1970s film revival’s reinvigoration of Australia’s nineteenth-century colonial amnesia, SODA_JERK reveal how Indigenous Australian history has been repeatedly buried by the settler film canon. TERROR NULLIUS, I argue, marks how Australia’s militarisation of its borders is rooted in the violation of an unceded Indigenous sovereign right to offer hospitality to asylum seekers and refugees and it also opens onto complex questions of non-Anglo migrant (specifically Southern Italian), and settler queer (homonationalist; Puar, 2007) complicity in the settler state, and particularly its frontline institution of policing.