Italianicity/ness

When writing and thinking about «Studi Culturali», we have often been trapped in a Esher-like picture. The Italian language chosen to name the Journal somehow reflects, from the landscape of a disciplinarily various garden of studies about Italy, or from Italian scholars or else from international scholars for an Italian public, an infinite regression towards a different scenery. As the many volumes of this journal have already testified, it is a scenery populated also by many authors who write in other languages and come from different traditions, notably and quite distinctively the Anglo-American one. Moreover, the eye of the contemporary cultural scholar as he or she writes from Italy and/or on Italian material, is getting accustomed to decipher the shape and even the idiosyncrasies of the English language, stressing even more, in the forceful difficulties and intricacies of necessary translations, the specificity of a situated glance. And a glance from and on Italy is more than situated; we increasingly recognize its being from the «province», a position from where it is more and more difficult to sustain global pretensions and becomes necessary to address the unevenness of globalizing trends. We cannot but place the peninsula on the backdrop of an uneven globalization whose processes appear increasingly centrifugal with respect to the European Nations at large. The special issues addresses italianicity from a variety of perspectives which stress its iconic and phantomatic nature.