https://www.academia.edu/173368504/Review_of_Empire_of_Contingency_How_Portugal_Entered_the_Indo_Persian_World_by_Jorge_Flores?email_work_card=title
for by the "multidisciplinary approach" (10) required to study the forms assumed by a transmedia character like Pulcinella. Transmedial and transnational research, then: we move through preunification Italywith stops in Naples (chap. 1), Rome (chap. 3), and Venice (chap. 4)-and through France (chap. 2), before returning to Naples and Europe (France and England) in chapter 5. Anyone curious to know where America appears in this itinerary will find it, so to speak, in negative form and, with a touch of elegant ring composition, at both the beginning and end of the book: in the opening pages of the introduction and in the concluding postscript, with reference to Eduardo De Filippo's Il figlio di Pulcinella (1957) and the film Non ci resta che piangere by Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni (1984). Raizen's brief yet evocative combined reading of these two works uses the film's counterfactual question-what would have happened if Christopher Columbus had not set sail in 1492-to interpret, in its turn counterfactually, De Filippo's play, in which Pulcinella's secret son, having left for America, returns to Naples and rejects his father's mask and way of life. The result is a reflection on what the world would have been "without the spectre of newness and globalization" ( ), and at the same time an exploration of why Pulcinella proved "all but untranslatable to American ears" (225), fundamentally unable "to pass the Pillars of Hercules" (226), as the book's beautiful concluding phrase puts it. Thus a book capable of moving across national and disciplinary borders-painting, music, theater, literature, and more-closes by emphasizing how, historically, its object of study, Pulcinella, had "geographical and cultural limitations" (225): the very limitations that explain why this figure, aside from a few appearances mediated through the circulation of Punch and Judy shows in early colonies, never truly became part of American culture. This broader reflection, which touches suggestively on the disappearance of local cultures swallowed by the global spread of America and Americanism, is not, however, the focus of the volume, which throughout resists generalization. If there is indeed a broader insight that the book's historical and cultural reconstruction allows-and here we return to the defamiliarization of the perspective of anyone who thinks of Pulcinella today from a generic Italian standpoint-it is that the exclusively popular (as opposed to elite) and specifically local (as opposed to transnational) dimensions of Pulcinella are products of the nineteenth century. This is when Pulcinella loses importance in France and England and becomes fixed in Italy as an essentially Neapolitan figure. The story the public knows today, in short, conceals another story (or many others, actually) in which the relationship between popular culture and elite culture and between the local and the global could be imagined quite differently. That one might now see an oxymoron in a title that brings together Pulcinella and the Enlightenment is therefore proof of how far the possibility of such an alternative narrative has (for now) vanished from the world that has become ours.
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