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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Italian Identity

My friend the sociologist Bob Antonio was telling me yesterday that Italian lacked a sense of national identity because of the extreme difference among regions and between North and South. Bob's family is originally from Naples. Spanish identity, too, is a concept hard to get ahold of, given the scattered nature of the country, the strength of Catalan nationalism, etc... All the more striking, then, the attempts to make Spain cohere as a nation state.

1 comment:

Professor Zero said...

Perhaps the extreme exceptionalism comes in precisely when the coherence is not obvious.

I have decided for this week that Spain makes sense as Spain because it is not England and France. Against that leyenda negra they just had to come up with something ... and they were worried about it. Duende is about the dolorida España already made famous centuries earlier by Juan del Encina, (triste, sin ventura) etc.