ABSTRACT
For while the rhetorical figure of externalized alterity reveals continued victimization and with it immobility, the figure of an internalized other demands the recovery of its historicity. The power of the rhetorical configuration of Southern Italy as continually menacing separation from a radically different North goes unremarked, subordinated to the co-dependence between southern peasants and the northern capitalist economy that Gramsci emphasized. Significantly, moves to replace the outdated political elite with a new and forward-looking political class have been accompanied by the revived topos of "two Italies" an organized and hardworking North opposed to a chaotic and dangerous South. It was only during that historical fragment, that brief period of twenty years, that intellectuals and political leaders came to construct a representation of a unitary national identity. The Southern Question gave way to the rhetorical figure of Italy defined as the direct descendant and inheritor of Imperial Rome.
