Negotiating Identity in Self-Translation: Stereotyping and National Character in the Speeches in English of Italy's Ex-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi

When Matteo Renzi was appointed Prime Minister in February 2014, he had already served as the mayor of his native Florence for five years and had authored several books in which he advocated a radical change in Italian politics and administration. The youngest Prime Minister in the history of the Italian Republic, who had not been selected among the members of Parliament but among the party ranks, he focused his political campaign on iconoclastic innovation; so much so that he used to define himself as demolition man (Renzi 2011). To carry out his political project, Renzi largely relied on his skills as communicator and adopted an informal style that appealed to feelings and emotions and revealed his familiarity with marketing techniques (Bordignon 2014). As he was used to improvise, he was often not supported by interpreters. Consequently, his communication frequently took a more conversational turn,especially during interactions with the audience, in which he made extensive use of hand gestures, facial expressions, jokes, interferences of the Italian language (calques), mistranslations and allusions. Thus, both verbal and nonverbal resources contributed to reproduce and play with a commonplace view of Italy that stood in dramatic contradiction to his statements of intention. This underlying narration is particularly noticeable in his speeches in English addressed to a general audience. Following the accepted conceptualization that discourse is a social phenomenon that produces and re-produces power relations (Bourdieu 1991; Fairclough 2015), I draw upon Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and adopt a framework for linguistic analysis to investigate the function of the resources Renzi used and foreground implied subtexts. In the following sections I shall briefly introduce the relevant elements of cultural mediation, present the main traits of the Italian national character also with reference to semiotic hand gestures, and concisely discuss the links between stereotyping and nationalism. Finally, I focus on the methodology and the methods, and provide a sample of the analysis that introduce and clarify the conclusions.