(Dis)figuring white template vision through Passione
Abstract
This paper suggests that north-normative thought in Italian Studies must be disrupted by recovering the various Souths haunting and inhabiting white template vision. I propose to usefully disrupt north-normative colonial cartographies of vision by disclosing the “fleshy folds” of John Turturro’s complex audio-visual work Passione: Un’Avventura Musicale (2010). Passione is a documentary film which draws on, as it narrates the story of, a broad assemblage of Neapolitan music and theatricalities. Neapolitan music is often conflated with Italian traditional song or confined to the realm of regional music, in both popular interpretations and scholarly analyses (PLASTINO, 2007). This widespread conflation of Neapolitan and Italian traditional song, resulted in the porous Neapolitan voice (always allowing itself to be interpenetrated by an indeterminate other; PLASTINO, 2007) and its embodied performance manifestations (PLASTINO & SCIORRA, 2016) being largely overlooked. Under the legacies of discursive post-structuralist critique, Whiteness Studis largely neglects the sites through which (raced) bodies congeal (PUGLIESE, 2002). Film theorists, also, have inadequately situated the viewer, filmmaker and film as potentially subversive bodies of vision (SOBCHACK, 1992; cf. DYER, 1992). Against the grain of received north-normative and discursive analyses, in its task of Southern critical thinking, this paper deploys Vivienne Sobchack’s term “film’s body” (1992, p. viii), dispensing with the language of analyses which limit Passione’s capacity to signify to Turturro. Instead, I identify the white template bodies of director and researcher-viewer, but also various dissident sotto/terrone’d (allied global and Italian Southern) bodies resembling “embodied shadow archives” of Southernness and mediterraneity (ZACCARIA, 2015).
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