Abstract: Pasolini’s works are connected as much to the past as they are to the future. This essay reinserts these works into the current of Italian culture, demonstrating continuities and ruptures existing among various epochs: pre-fascist, fascist, post-war, and beyond. Themes that, from the Unification of Italy to Post-World War II, were fundamental for the construction of the sense of Italian-ness that emerge from the works. These themes include colonialism in Africa, relationships between Christianity and Marxism, the Southern Question, Gramsci’s legacy, and the “questione della lingua,” and Pasolini confronts them during the Sixties, posing questions about the relationships between language and technology that will become crucial at the end of the 20th-century with the advent of the Internet and mobile phones. Disciplines such as anthropology and “demology” (which considers otherness, diversity and subalternity) were dear to Pasolini. His works give us the chance to investigate, between the lines, the development that these disciplines had in Italy between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century, leaving for us to consider problematic continuities that still persist.
Keywords: Pier Paolo Pasolini, colonialismo italiano, Antonio Gramsci, antropologia, storia culturale, fascismo, demologia.
