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Published in:
Mocking the Weak? Contexts, Theories, Politics Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. Blackness and Banal Whiteness: Abjection and Identity in the Italian Christmas Comedy

Author : Alan O’Leary

Published in: Comedy and the Politics of Representation

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The popular Italian comic films released annually around Christmas and known as “cinepanettoni” (“film-Christmas-cakes”) are, along with their audiences, culturally deplored, in part because of the racist characters and representations they contain. This chapter considers whether the cinepanettoni are found to be culturally embarrassing also because they explode “banal whiteness”, a term coined by analogy with “banal nationalism” (Billing 1995) to refer to the way whiteness is typically the unmarked racial identity and reproduced in mundane ways rather than in explicitly racist discourse. Banal whiteness is, arguably, refused in the cinepanettoni: whiteness is de-naturalized and rendered visible, and with it normative masculinities and sexualities. This suggests the ambivalence and even the utopian potential of the cinepanettoni, and by extension offensive popular comedy as such.

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previous chapter Parodying Racial Passing in Chappelle’s Show and Key & Peele
next chapter Sexual and National Difference in the High-Speed, Popular Surrealism of Tommy Handley and Ronald Frankau’s Double Acts, 1929–1936
Footnotes
1
Cinepanettone is a journalistic rather than a technical term and different writers place different films in the category. See O’Leary (2013, 15–19) and Cucco (2013, 476–77) for discussions of definition and lists of films that appertain to the category.
 
2
Though making no mention of the cinepanettone, Duncan (2008, 195) talks of how recent Italian films respond to the “rekindling of memories of Italy’s own history of emigration and colonialism”.
 
3
This is suggested in the film’s representation of Egyptians as almost exclusively male (and referred to as sexually predatory), with the exception of the minor character of a masseuse who, like the Bedouin in the same film, emerges from the image-bank of Orientalism.
 
4
Boldi had defected from Filmauro after Natale a Miami to make a rival series of films.
 
5
The cat is crushed by a thick phone book inadvertently dislodged from a table. There may be an oppositional symbolism at work here between the “rational” and ordered presentation of “facts” in the phonebook, and unruly, “disordered” female sexual desire, as represented (I argue) by the cat.
 
6
She is identified as Haitian to enable two later jokes involving voodoo—again, an assertion of her irrationality and threat to order.
 
7
Sòrgoni (2003, 412) argues that Baartman’s story does not seem to have become “widespread at a popular level” in Italy since its employment by the regime in 1938.
 
8
See Shellene Greene for an authoritative account of how mixed race in Italian cinema functions “as a trope for the country’s negotiation of its internal racial heterogeneity that continues to the present day” (Greene 2012, 3).
 
9
See Pitcher (2014) for analyses of cultural consumption as banal whiteness (even if he does not use the term), an example being the popularity of Scandinavian furniture and Nordic noir.
 
10
Thanks to Stephanie Dennison, Denis Flannery, Gaia Giuliani, Chuck Leavitt, Giacomo Manzoli, and Áine O’Healy for helpful conversations and comments during the drafting of the chapter, which derives from a project, “Holiday Pictures”, supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Leeds.
 
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Metadata
Title
Blackness and Banal Whiteness: Abjection and Identity in the Italian Christmas Comedy
Author
Alan O’Leary
Copyright Year
2018
Book
Comedy and the Politics of Representation

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90505-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-90506-8

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90506-8_6

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