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Giovanna Trento's article 'Pier Paolo Pasolini and Panmeridional Italianness' engages Pasolini's aesthetic, poetic, and political approach in terms of the complementary dichotomy of national and 'local' issues, on the one hand, and transnational and panmeridional topoi, on the other. Trento argues that despite his 'Third World' and Marxist sympathies, Pasolini showed strong poetic and political attention to national narratives and the building of Italianness. But Pasolini's 'desperate love' for Italy and Italianness, Trento argues, can be fully grasped only if we read it in the light of his fluid, transnational and panmeridional approach marked by different - and at times antithetical - factors, such as the pan-Africanist perspective and the colonial memory. Pasolini was indeed able to build a deterritorialized and idealized never-ending South: the Pan-South (Panmeridione) - that is, a fluid, non-geographical topos where 'traditional' values are used in non-traditional and subversive ways with the goal of resisting industrialization, mass media, and late-capitalist alienation.
Manuele Gragnolati's paper 'Analogy and Difference: Multistable Figures in Pasolini's "Appunti per un'Orestiade africana"' discusses Pasolini's preference for the figure of contradiction and his opposition to Hegelian dialectics by exploring his attempt to look at Africa's process of modernization and democratization in the 1960s as analogous to the synthetic transformation of the Furies into Eumenides at the end of Aeschylus's trilogy. Gragnolati shows that Pasolini is aware of the dangers of analogy, which risks imposing the author's or filmmaker's symbolic order onto that of the 'other' represented in the text or film, and he argues that Pasolini seeks to deal with this danger by constantly shifting back and forth between differing positions. "Appunti per un'Orestiade africana" can thereby be thought as a multistable figure that is left suspended and not only resists synthesis, but also problematizes its own feasibility and challenges its own legitimacy.