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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Selective Kinship in Sicilian Cultural Identity: a Land Posing.

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Sicilian history could be summarized as an endless succession of rulers that came from the sea. Thus Sicilian identity could be consid-ered as the epitome of a postcolonial identity, if there could be one. Its position at the exact center of the Mediterranean has made the island the gateway between European, African and Middle Eastern culture. This mix of insularity and cosmopolitism still dramatically affects the way Sicilians see themselves; in this paper my aim is to under-stand how this mix has impacted the perception of their own history by contemporary Sicilians.This paper seeks to shed light on some of the myths of the Sicilian past that influenced writers and thinkers from Sicily and from abroad, and still today are at the core of Sicilians’ identityFrom the Grand Tour to the recent mass migration from Africa, Sicily is the land of Passage, where people from all over the world come to “build wonderful monuments that we Sicilians will never under-stand”, as Tomasi di Lampedusa famously put in “The Leopard”. The complexity of Sicilian contemporary identity lays in the fact that it is both a land of migration and immigration, an island that natives are forced to leave if they don’t want to be unemployed; but also an island that thousands of people try to reach notwithstanding the risk of drowning or being killed. Those contradictions make Sicily a land of opposites, an island always in pose waiting to be pictured by a foreign artist, whose unspeakable beauties cannot hide the bleak socio-eco-nomic conditions, with the highest unemployment rate in the EU. Is Palermo comparable to Vienna as mythologist Furio Jesi noted in the 1970s? Or it is “proudly a middle eastern city” as mayor Leoluca Orlando recently said? How can we apply categories like post-colonialism, class struggle or subalternity to better understand the way Sicilians see themselves?