Cherpack Lounge

Writing in 1911 of the crisis facing the olive producers of the Ligurian province of Imperia, Giovanni Boine shares a vision of biocultural entanglement that sees human, plant, and earth intertwined in the production of a culture rooted in agricultural tradition. Published in the pages of modernist literary journal La Voce (1908-1916), Boine’s meditation on Ligurian olive cultivation complements the eclecticism of the journal’s view of Italian cultural modernity, specifically the focus on the local and the regional. Boine’s biocultural vision also invites broader reflection on critical configurations of Modernism as a whole. Traditionally seen as an urban and transnational movement, more recent scholarly work has proposed a greening of Modernism, a sort of critical proposal to reconceive modernist artistic production as the expression of a world that is not exclusively human. Boine’s meditations on Ligurian olives together with his poetics of autobiographical fragments suggest a programmatic challenge to conceptual and narrative hierarchies constructed on the subordination of the natural world to the adventures of human protagonists, and they open the way to a more-than-human Italian Modernism that resonates with developments in the emerging field of Critical Plant Studies.

Deborah Amberson is Associate Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida. Her research and teaching focus on modern Italian literature and film, modernism, ecocriticism, animal studies, Holocaust studies, and crime fiction