Dottorato in SCIENZE DOCUMENTARIE, LINGUISTICHE E LETTERARIE

Titolo della tesi: Razza: parola, termine, strumento. Storia semantica in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento

This dissertation aims to reconstruct the history of the different meanings assumed by the word “race” as a “special” case of lexical fluctuation for various ideological implicatures, focusing on the nineteenth-twentieth-century Italian context. The research work, divided into three parts, is supported by a basic linguistic theoretical framework and the selection of a reference textual corpus. The first part analyzes the semantic and lexical field of “race” from its origins to its acme (12th-20th centuries), considering its meanings and first attestations in the main Romance and Germanic languages, according to an approach defined as “dictionary-historical.” With due simplifications, seven more or less defined ‘cores’ can be identified in the semantic field of “race”, namely: equine, lineage, qualitative and zoological-botanical (spread from the 13th-14th centuries), human (lineage and human groups and types, from the 15th-17th centuries), anthropological-biological and anthropo-socio-biological (18th and 19th-20th centuries). This framework is corroborated by the reconstruction of the etymological debate, which originated in the seventeenth century, intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with ‘combined’ proposals, and came to a turning point in 1959 with Gianfranco Contini’s ‘discovery’ of the Old French “haras” (horse breeding), a hypothesis later subject to criticism and confirmation. The second part describes the transition of “race” from a word to a technical-scientific term, first considering the debate on ancient Italics and the intertwined relationship between geography, linguistics and ethnology well before their disciplinary establishment. The latter came to fruition with the advent of positivism and Darwinism, without a lack of disciplinary coexistence. The combination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies termed “anthropo-linguistic-geography” (rooted in the idea and various interpretations of the ethno-linguistic substratum) found a ground for greater development in the so-called “ethno-racial” lexicon, the result of the various semantic and lexical relations implying “race” (e.g., race-language-soil) and considered in relation to a “visual” lexicon (related to physiognomic terminology). In the third part, a lexicographic map of “race” is drawn beyond its roles as a word and term, reconstructing its “instrumental” value in major early-twentieth-century dictionaries in relation to pivotal texts of fascist propaganda. By analyzing the various steps in the process of forced resemantization that led the word to assume a normative role (from the Colonial Codes of Eritrea to anti-Semitic racial legislation), the significance of the inclusion of “race” in Article 3 of the Italian Constitution becomes clear. Despite its undeniable problematic nature, which is still widely debated today, this inclusion constitutes a key piece of the process of legal reintegration and constitutional preservation that began with the post-World War II period, which responsibly counter-resemantialized the “old” word with a discriminatory meaning by raising it to a stumbling block for collective memory.