Fulginiti Disney Dystopia

SF-TH Inc
Degenerate Utopias: Dystopian Revisions of Disneyland in Early Twenty-first-century

Italian Fiction
Author(s): Valentina Fulginiti
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 (November 2017), pp. 455-485
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.44.3.0455
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DISNEYLAND AS DEGENERATE UTOPIA IN RECENT ITALIAN SF 455
Valentina Fulginiti
Degenerate Utopias: Dystopian Revisions of Disneyland in

Early Twenty-first-century Italian Fiction
In the summer of 2015, dozens of reports were written about “Dismaland,” the
controversial art show organized by Banksy in Weston-super-Mare (UK) from
15 August to 27 September of that year. Although the street artist claimed that
the exhibition was not a direct attack on the corporation, there was much
evidence to the contrary. At least ten pieces appropriated Disney copyrighted
material, the two logos were uncannily similar, and Dismaland’s slogan,
“Because life isn’t always a fairy tale,” was stenciled right beside the iconic
silhouette of Mickey Mouse, whose trademark black ears were also part of the
staff’s uniforms. Dismaland thus sublimated the experience of Disney’s theme
parks, remaking them into their opposite: dystopian “bemusements” meant to
shock, awe, and inspire.
Far from being an isolated case, Banksy’s show is evidence of the totalizing
quality of Disney’s entertainment that lends itself to satire, parody, and other
forms of artistic manipulation. Why are contemporary artists so fascinated by
Disneyland that they feel compelled to rewrite it in dystopian terms? Are these
manipulations and rewritings a mere attempt at satire or do they suggest a
dystopian quality latent in the original?
This article examines Disney’s depiction as a dystopian site in three recent
works of Italian fiction: Paolo Zanotti’s novel Il testamento Disney [Disney’s
Last Will and Testament, 2013] and two short stories written by the Wu Ming
collective, “Pantegane e sangue” [Rat Harvest, 2011] and “Canard à l’orange
méchanique” [A Clockwork Duck à l’Orange, 2011].1 Wu Ming has been a
major player in the Italian literary arena since the collective was founded in
1999 (originally as “Luther Blisset”). Known mostly for its historical fiction
(translated into several languages, including English, Spanish, and French), the
collective is also renowned for its history of leftist activism; furthermore, it
launched the practice of collective writing as a political and cultural statement,
later reprised by many other groups in Italy.2 At least on the surface, Zanotti
is a more traditional figure: an accomplished scholar, novelist, and editor who
remained at the margins of the Italian literary establishment until his premature
death in 2012.
According to critic Daniele Giglioli, a first draft of Il testamento Disney
was already complete by late 2003; the manuscript was published only
posthumously in 2013, however, after a long string of editorial rejections and
after Zanotti had debuted as a novelist with another post-apocalyptic novel,
Bambini bonsai [Bonsai Children, 2010]. Similarly, Wu Ming’s short stories
appeared in print in the collection Anatra all’arancia meccanica [A Clockwork
Orange Duck, 2011], but earlier versions had been available for free download
456 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 44 (2017)
on the collective’s website since the summer of 2000. The composition of all
these works thus falls within the early 2000s, a period marked by the
emergence of a strong anti-globalization movement whose utopian tensions
were perfectly captured by the slogan: “another world is possible.”3 These
political forces peaked in the mass protest against the G8 meeting held in
Genoa on 21-22 July 2001. This was a highly traumatic event that ended in
riots, hundreds of arrests, police brutality (as confirmed by a definitive
sentence of the Italian Cassazione in 2012), and two dead protesters.4 Albeit
indirectly, these events loom large in both sets of narratives: Wu Ming makes
a few tongue-in-cheek references to the feverish climate of the anti-
globalization movement in “Canard à l’orange méchanique” (169-70), while
Il testamento Disney is set in a dystopian Genoa roughly during the same
period. Consistent with these political overtones, the works I will discuss are
marked by a strong tension between a dystopian present and a latent utopian
impulse, evident in the characters’ efforts to build an alternative reality.
The convergence of such political themes with Disney characters and tropes
might be surprising to readers unfamiliar with the Italian context. Disney has
enjoyed unmatched success in the country since the first publication of the
comic Topolino [Mickey Mouse] in 1932 and the subsequent founding of the
company’s Italian division in 1938. According to its corporate website, in the
first decade of the twenty-first century the Walt Disney Company Italia was
responsible for two-thirds of the comics published worldwide by the company
and served as the leading development center for new magazines and other
editorial products (see “La magia Disney in Italia” [Disney’s Magic in Italy]).5
Generations of Italian children have avidly consumed comic books featuring
not only the best-known members of the Mickey Mouse Club (such as Mickey
Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy), but also a wide array of secondary
characters that became fixtures of the national imaginary—many of which are
reprised by Wu Ming and Zanotti. In Italy, the Disney universe is a universal
cultural reference and a shared part of the collective imaginary; it is a natural
choice for any Italian-based critique of postmodern entertainment and of
amusement park aesthetics.
While very few Italian authors have engaged with the amusement park in
sf terms, this trope has been a powerful inspiration for sf authors outside of
Italy, particularly in Anglophone contexts. Novelists and film directors have
explored the convergences between the theme park, with its hyperreal
aesthetics, and specific visions of the future: just think of Michael Crichton’s
film Westworld (1973), whose televised remake debuted on HBO on 2 October
2016, or the successful Dream Park series (1982-2011) by Larry Niven and
Steven Barnes, which has inspired its own park franchise. The relation between
sf and theme parks is, of course, a two-way street, as the park’s immersive
experience gains prominence among the other possible modes of transmedia
storytelling such as novelizations, screen adaptations, and game development.
A clear example of the latter tendency is Lionsgate’s planned expansion to
parks inspired by popular YA film franchises such as Divergent (2014) and The
Hunger Games (2012). More specifically, a number of novels and films have
directly engaged with Disneyland and its sister parks: notable examples are
Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), set in
a futuristic iteration of Disney World, and Paul McAuley’s Fairyland (1995),
whose central ten chapters are set in a dystopian rendition of Eurodisney. As
for cinema, one recent example is Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland (2015), a Disney
production that merges the “carnival” aesthetics of its namesake park with a
narrative homage to Walt Disney’s nostalgic vision of the future.
There are striking differences, however, between these sf narratives and
their Italian counterparts. Both in Fairyland and Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom, characters push the boundaries of their “human” nature through
surgery, genetic modification, and artificial consciousness enhancements
resulting in posthuman and transhuman conditions: artificial intelligence,
virtual reality, and genetically modified humanoids are seen as the logical
progression of Disney’s simulated reality. In this respect, both Doctorow and
McAuley use the theme park as a fertile site for the forecasting of future
realities—a theoretical gesture that, Leonie Cooper argues, is grounded in the
postmodernist ethos of these parks. On the contrary, neither Wu Ming nor
Zanotti engages with themes of posthumanism or transhumanism, choosing
instead to focus on utopias and dystopias as political constructions and regimes
of truth. Rather than presenting Disney’s parks as sites of cognitive
estrangement or as “environments that invite a science-fictional mode of
engagement” (Cooper 294), Wu Ming and Zanotti use Disneyland to elicit a
critical reflection on utopia itself, exploring the failures and the limits of
postmodern utopianism. Such concerns with political, ethical, and cognitive
questions are certainly consistent with the specific character of Italian sf,
identified by Arielle Saiber, in an important 2011 article, with an “explicit
literariness and connection to the academic humanities” (“Flying Saucers” 15),
in line with a national canon in which utopia and dystopia are the most
prominently featured of all proto-sf genres (9).
As I will argue in the remainder of this essay, such uses of dystopian and
utopian modes closely recall Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan’s category
of the “critical dystopia”: a self-reflective, radical, and open text that helps
expose capitalism’s devaluation of utopia (or, in this specific case, its
appropriation of utopia) (6-8). More importantly, critical dystopias maintain a
utopian tension, be it through a poetics of openness and ambiguity or through
hybridity and genre blurring (7-8): all of these features can be detected in the
works I will discuss. Zanotti and Wu Ming denounce Disney’s self-
representation as a perfectly realized consumerist eutopia (a term which, for
the remainder of this essay, will be used to indicate the fantasy of a perfectly
realized capitalist paradise, as opposed to the complexity and the critical
potential of utopian paradigms). Furthermore, I will demonstrate how these
authors’ appropriation of Disney resonates with the category of “degenerate
utopia” that both Louis Marin and Darko Suvin have applied to Disney’s
conceptual architecture. By transforming the capitalist fantasy of perfection into
a horrific and inescapable hallucination, Zanotti and Wu Ming implicitly

engage with the problematic legacy of postmodernism, including its co-optation
of utopia.
Degenerate Utopia: A Working Definition. Countless studies have read
Disneyland as a postmodern icon, describing its ruthlessly efficient economic
structure (Bryman), its processes of urban privatization and commodification
(Zukin, Moore) and its nature as perpetual spectacle (Augé). Many of these
interpretations have hinted at the utopian nature of Disneyland, already evident
in the park’s original conception: Michael Sorkin, for instance, traces its
origins back to the 1815 Universal Exposition, which he defines as “the first
great utopia of global capital” (209).
In this critical landscape, a group of theorists stands out for their radical
suggestion that Disney is the embodiment of the postmodern utopia, a
conceptual gesture that conflates the spatial, narrative, and ideological regimes
seen at work in the franchise’s cultural products. This interpretation first
surfaced in Louis Marin’s Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces [Utopics: Spatial Play,
1973], which offers a spatially based theory of utopia. Marin defines the
franchise’s first park in Anaheim as a “degenerate utopia” (301), a spatial
regime that appropriates the fundamental mechanism of utopia but avoids its
political tensions. His argument in a nutshell is that while classical utopia is by
definition an act of radical criticism, Disneyland reproduces the dominant
ideology of capitalism without allowing any critical distance. Therefore “Main
Street, USA” is not simply an allegory of society but also a totalizing
cartography that aims to replace reality altogether. In this process, reality is
“forgotten, neutralized and infantilized,” because the park is all of reality or,
more precisely, its hallucinatory return (Utopiques 306). Yet, as Marin argues,
the very success of this representation relies on the appropriation of key
features of classic sixteenth-century utopian texts, such as its lack of
historicity, its theatrical nature, and its spatial structure that rests on the double
spatial enclosure of the island and the city—and that was also complemented
for many years by the symbolic enclosure of Disney’s artificial currency (301-
02).
In the following decades, Jean Baudrillard built on Marin’s intuitions to
develop his own theory of the postmodern simulacrum. In Simulations and
Simulacra (1981), Baudrillard devotes several pages to Disneyland, which he
considers a clear example of postmodern “hyperreality,” a condition marked
by absolute self-referentiality. In such a condition, images no longer bear any
resemblance to reality whatsoever, nor do they refer to a perversion or
distortion of reality; images are now their own simulacrum (12). Disneyland’s
secluded space would thus exist as a “third-order simulation” (12): its self-
referential fiction no longer represents a symbol, nor does it stand for an
ideological order; it serves to conceal the lack of reality that is haunting all of
American society, which has in turn become a spectacle. Such concealment is
made possible by the park’s reassuring connection to childhood, frozen as it
is in “infantile degeneration” (13). By refusing death and growth, Disney’s
fictional universe seemingly obliterates historical change and, by extension, the

possibility of social conflict.
Marin’s and Baudrillard’s discourses are symmetrical but ultimately
divergent. In fact, Baudrillard’s virtual world produces a paradoxical “reality
effect” which is intrinsically illusory: the simulacrum known as postmodern
America needs an explicit “fantasy” in order to re-assert its pseudo-reality. On
the contrary, in Marin’s reading, Disneyland never ceases to be real: in fact,
it is already all of reality, channeled back through a hallucinatory fantasy.
Visitors are therefore called upon to be active participants in a fiction in which
they have no true agency; they find themselves trapped in a virtual fantasy that
has—so to speak—no emergency exit. There is a conceptual distance between
reality as a nightmarish fiction (as Marin suggests) and the “unreal” quality of
postmodern simulacra (as per Baudrillard’s description); such difference is
explicitly thematized in the analysis of Disneyland as “degenerate utopia”
proposed by Darko Suvin.
In two essays written between 1997 and 2001, Suvin considers Disneyland
as the perfect example of how capitalism appropriates “all it can from utopia,”
effectively presenting itself as a perfectly accomplished eutopia (“Utopianism”
223). According to Suvin, such appropriation takes place through a process of
“transfer ideologizing” (228), akin to the working mechanisms of advertising.
Through the endless repetition of reassuringly familiar images, the infantilized
visitor is involved in the revival of a childish ideology that has now become
a second nature. Visitors are thus trapped in an artificial and endless childhood
from which change, death, and violence are carefully edited out:
“Disneyfication,” as Suvin puts it, “blends out death” (230). Furthermore,
Disneyland appropriates different cultures, erasing their most threatening
features and turning them into sanitized clichés. Such clichéd versions of the
racially other are transmogrified into second-degree realities with the help of
different media: stuffed puppets, plastic, concrete, and, most compellingly,
costumed personnel de facto turned into walking advertisements. In this
respect, reality is in itself turned into a fiction, namely into the actualized
“daydream” of omnipresent advertisement. Suvin thus rejects Baudrillard’s
theory of the simulacrum and espouses Marin’s thesis, claiming that Disney’s
“hallucinatory channeling of reality is itself a terror” (228); it is a “sticky,”
inescapable, and pervasive fantasy that presents itself as a perfectly realized
eutopia.
Building on these different readings of Disneyland, it is possible to
formulate a working notion of degenerate utopia as, in Suvin’s words, “a
hallucinatory channeling of reality” that rests on the appropriation of empathy
and desire, effectively acting as a consumerist paradise. Like its early modern
antecedent, degenerate utopia exists both as a conceptualization of space and
as a mode of discourse. Despite adopting narrative tropes and mechanisms, it
is essentially theatrical and performative in nature: in essence, it is
participation without agency. It is characterized by a suspended temporality,
leading to the annihilation of history, dialectics, and conflict; its markers are
the abolition of aging and death signified by a state of perpetual, artificial

childhood.
Such a notion of degenerate utopia can act as a paradigmatic embodiment
of utopia’s place in postmodern ideology or, more precisely, of utopia’s place
in one of postmodernism’s dominant interpretations—the one that sees it
primarily as the cultural expression of consumer capitalism (a line of thought
most notably championed by Fredric Jameson). Indeed, postmodernity’s
ambivalence towards utopia has long been a subject of debate. Some recognize
a specific (if only potential) role for utopia in postmodernity: for instance, in
Utopia Limited (2004), Marianne Dekoven seeks to reconcile Linda Hutcheon’s
“minoritarian,” “ex-centric,” and “progressive” reading of postmodernism
with Jameson’s negative views (Dekoven 10). Similarly, Robert J. Tally
recognizes a utopian tension in our current globalized moment: in particular,
the crisis of the nation-state (a utopian concept in its own respect) entails a
cognitive remapping of the world that is epistemologically very close to the
regimes of utopian and fantastic fiction (Tally 76; 88-90). Disneyland as a
figure of postmodern utopia most typically appears, however, in the works of
those thinkers who see utopia and postmodernity as two ideologically
incompatible forces.
Both Moylan and Jameson cite Disneyland as the paradigmatic example of
the postmodern rejection of utopia, an idea perfectly exemplified by Margaret
Thatcher’s contention that “there is no alternative.” In his Archaeologies of the
Future (2005), arguably a defense of Benjamin’s utopianism in our present
times, Jameson explicitly links utopia to the question of alternatives—of which,
he writes, “Mrs. Thatcher has famously affirmed that none exists” (212). It is
in this context that Jameson refers to “Disneyfication” as one of two pervasive
processes reshaping our relation to the world, the other being globalized
tourism (216). Jameson claims that Disneyfication is to the First World what
tourism is to the Third World: in both processes, he claims, capitalism has
efficiently replaced the ideological opposition between the subject and its others
with an impersonal and disembodied relation between the global and the local,
thus preventing any possible dialectic or conflict (216-17). Jameson does
indeed see a correlation between the advent of globalized capitalism and a halt
in the production of literary utopias; he also recognizes a new form of critical
utopianism, however, epitomized by Kim Stanley Robinson’s exploration of
utopia’s conflicts in his acclaimed MARS TRILOGY (1993-1996). Jameson thereby
detaches “utopia” (as a secluded space) from “utopianism” (as a thinking
process or an ideology), and he theorizes a role for utopianism in postmodern
times. Utopianism thus appears as a necessary disruption, a thinking mode
defined by its possibility rather than by its link to a definite program. Unlike
“utopia,” which is easily co-opted by postmodern ideology, “utopianism” is
for him a necessity that allows us to think of alternatives by exploring the
limits of our present.
Like Jameson, Moylan observes the crisis of utopia after its flourishing in
the 1960s and 1970s; after having been absorbed in the totalitarian nightmares
of the twentieth century, utopia persists in postmodern times only in corrupted

forms such as advertising or, most strikingly, Disneyland’s and Disney
World’s fantasies of entertainment (8). Moylan also notes, however, that utopia
is always in a duplicitous relation to capitalism, described as the alternative
between “cooptation by a given system and explosion beyond it” (19). For
every time the utopian impulse has been trapped and turned into a fantasy of
efficient global markets, another utopian impulse has carried along the revolt
of other subjectivities (the colonized other, women, the environment):
according to Moylan, such a constant dialectic of domination and oppression
is a driving force of American utopian ideology. Therefore the possibility of
radical utopianism is always latent, as is the risk of its commodification, and
it emerges every time from the ashes of its latest co-optation.
Such ambivalence is crucial to understanding satirical and literary uses of
Disneyland as a (false) utopia. Albeit in radically different ways, both Zanotti
and Wu Ming build on Disneyland’s status as the capitalist eutopia par
excellence: their fictions reproduce most of the working mechanisms identified
by Marin and Suvin. Yet neither Zanotti nor Wu Ming is satisfied with
denouncing either the impossibility of “true” utopia or its reversal into a
dystopian thick fantasy; in different ways, both engage with a quest for
alternatives and yearn for alternate realities, effectively restoring some form
of utopianism to a world that has seemingly eliminated the need for, and the
possibility of, utopia.
Stuffed Animals in the Matrix: Wu Ming’s Anti-Capitalist Dystopia. The
idea of degenerate utopia is prominently on display in “Pantegane e sangue”
and “Canard à l’orange méchanique.” Far from being Wu Ming’s most
representative work, these two short stories nonetheless mark a turning point
in the authors’ aesthetic and political journey. After the success of their first
historical novel Q (1999), the writers’ collective abandoned its previous
pseudonym of Luther Blisset (a blanket identity that was behind a multitude of
countercultural practices, including hoaxes and other acts of psychological
guerrilla warfare) and started a new project under the name Wu Ming, a
Chinese ideogram meaning “nameless.”6
With the new pseudonym came a more markedly literary identity; the
writers remained politically active, however, often lending their metaphors and
stories to the anti-globalization movement that was gaining traction in Italy at
the time. A decade later, the collective would describe this blend of political
action and literary creation in a partially self-critical light:
That was just the beginning of a strange, contradictory, and tormented
relationship between our literary work and the ongoing political struggles. In
the months leading to [the] Genova [anti-G8 protests], the name “Wu Ming”
was more often associated with our “agit-prop” practice than with our fiction.
(“Spettri di Müntzer all’alba” [Specters of Müntzer at Dawn])
Not only is “Pantegane e sangue” the first literary text that the collective
published under its new nom de plume, but it is also inscribed in a practice of
politically engaged literature that the authors identify with the idea of
“mythopoesis” (i.e., the creation of myths through literature or folklore), a
term they borrow from Italian anthropologist Furio Jesi and from the work of
J.R.R. Tolkien. In an interview in 2003 with Amador Fernadez-Savater, Wu
Ming 4, a member of the collective and himself a Tolkien scholar, highlights
the progressive potential of mythopoesis as opposed to the authoritarian use of
myths: “to continue retelling and modifying myths, discovering their new
declinations and adapting them to the present contingency, is the best antidote
to their sterilization or alienation. Which, in turn, means fighting the
sterilization and alienation of entire communities.” Wu Ming’s two stories are
thus rooted in a militant conception of literature: by retelling Disney’s
degenerate utopia, the collective was presumably countering what they saw as
a unilateral and authoritarian use of storytelling; their fiction is therefore an act
of literary resistance.
These stories serve an inaugural function in the collective’s artistic and
political journey, foreshadowing some crucial themes in Wu Ming’s later
production—including its individual members’ flirtations with cyberpunk,
dystopia, and alternate history, as well as their theoretical reflections on
utopia, conceived as the ability to envision radical alternatives to the status
quo.7 “Pantegane e sangue” and “Canard à l’orange méchanique” also display
a strong anti-anthropocentric tension and a very explicit rejection of
postmodernism—two ideas that the collective further illustrated in their critical
work “New Italian Epic” (2008; 2009).8 Such thematic and aesthetic
consonances can explain the inclusion of these stories in Anatra all’Arancia
Meccanica, a retrospective of the collective’s first decade of activity. As its
editor Tommaso de Lorenzis suggests, all the works included in the collection
are directly invested with the question of political, ethical, and ontological
alternatives to postmodernist monism, through a constant reflection on history
and its potential “what ifs” (xix-xx).
“Pantegane e sangue” is set in the fictitious city of Topologna, a
portmanteau of Topolinia (Italian for Mouseton) and Bologna, the Northern
Italian town where the Wu Ming collective was founded. The story follows
private detective Topo Lino (a transparent reworking of Mickey Mouse) as he
investigates a race-supremacist network that aims to create a superior species
through illegal genetic manipulation. In a typically postmodern twist, Topo
Lino becomes aware of his own fictional nature and goes rogue: in the
conclusion he joins the terrorist group, forever abandoning the saccharine
existence of Topologna and embracing his true authoritarian self (88).
The events of “Canard à l’orange méchanique” take place a few months
later in the fictional town of Anatropoli, clearly modeled on Paperopoli
[Duckburg]. Anatrino, a Donald-Duckesque character, misreads the name of
his designer Carl Barks as “Karl Marx”; consequently he starts to develop a
political conscience. Anatrino eventually leads his fellow cartoon characters in
an attack against their corporate owner (transparently named “Byzney.Inc”).
The rebel ducks are opposed by a number of actors, including the CIA and a
fictional Saudi terrorist cell clearly modeled on Al Qaeda—a detail worth

mentioning since, according to the authors, the story was completed by
September 2000, a full year before the 9/11 attacks (“Postilla” [Endnote] 413).
Despite a crushing defeat, the ducks manage to retain self-consciousness and,
as is hinted in the conclusion, immediately start plotting their next revolt.
The two stories are set in separate but contiguous fictional worlds: this
supports the idea that at the core of both stories lies the unmasking of a reality-
turned-fiction. To this effect, Wu Ming flavors its parody with elements and
citations from sf, cyberpunk, and other popular genres, including the
Wachowskis’s film The Matrix (1999). In particular, Byzney’s virtual
environment, with its back doors heavily patrolled by sunglasses-clad virtual
agents, is very reminiscent of the pseudo-reality portrayed in The Matrix.
In “Unmasking the Real? Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Films” (2003),
Peter Fitting places The Matrix in a group of films whose plot revolves around
the notion of pseudo-reality. According to Fitting, such a trope is intrinsically
critical, because it shifts the focus from the description of a dystopian world
to its mode of production: for this reason, the trope of pseudo-reality is a
figure of ideology par excellence (155). A similar mechanism is at work in Wu
Ming’s parody, transparently modeled as it is on The Matrix.
Consistent with their idea of literature as mythopoesis, the members of Wu
Ming focus on the working mechanisms of Disney’s ideology, which they see
as fully representative of globalized consumer capitalism. Indeed, their satire
operates at three different levels: first, they engage with Disneyfication as a
form of urban planning, entailing processes of spatial reorganization,
commodification, and social control; second, they show the repressive side of
postmodern capitalism; finally, they unveil the ideological mechanisms of
degenerate utopia as well as its symbolic order.
In “Pantegane e sangue,” Wu Ming rewrites Mickey Mouse as a racist
dirty cop turned private investigator: such a depiction respects the conventions
of hardboiled fiction, consistent with the genre crossover typical of critical
dystopias (cf. Baccolini and Moylan 8). A self-appointed defender of law and
order, Topo Lino is a highly contradictory character fundamentally motivated
by self-interest. His interior monologue is laced with racial slurs and offensive
comments against minorities—a label which, in the specific context of
Topologna, extends to any cartoon character with the likeness of a non-
European animal species. His obsession with order applies to every aspect of
life, from urban decor to racial purity:
Walls should be kept in their pristine color. That’s part of my idea of order,
like respecting the evolutionary ladder, keeping women in their place, and so
on. When the walls are covered with graffiti, you can be sure your share of
troubles is waiting for you right around the corner. (56)
According to this view, a well-run city should function as a perfectly
homogeneous organization whose rules are enforced ruthlessly but without any
apparent violence. This idea is indeed coherent with Disneyfication as a form
of urban planning, as described in detail by Charles Moore, Sharon Zukin

(Cultures), and Michael Sorkin.
The attempt to create a safer, idealized, and sanitized version of public
space is evident in the well-known definition of Disney World as “a medium-
sized city with a crime rate of zero,” in the words of its former CEO Jeffrey
Katzenberg (Sorkin 231). Already in 1965 architect Charles Moore described
the original park in Anaheim as a “public space that isn’t free”: behind its
physical and economic barriers, its space would provide the audience with a
public experience otherwise impossible in Southern California (Moore 124-26).
Disneyland thus acts as an ideal model of urban security, while also having a
direct effect on the actual cityscapes of Los Angeles and Miami. Sharon Zukin
in particular considers Disneyland and the other franchise-operated parks as
models for postmodern practices of urban design, in which commodification
is strictly connected to repression and to a socially engineered fear of inner
cities:
The landscape of Disney World creates a public culture of civility and security
that recalls a world long left behind. There are no guns here, no homeless
people, no illegal drinks or drugs. Without installing a visibly repressive
political authority, Disney World imposes order on unruly, heterogeneous
populations—tourist hordes and the work force that caters to them—and makes
them grateful to be there, waiting for a ride. Learning from Disney World
promises to make social diversity less threatening and public space more
secure. (Cultures 52)
The latter description strikingly resembles Topo Lino’s dream of an orderly
and sanitized town, free from any disruptive behavior, in which racial and
class identities are invisible.
Wu Ming’s representation also replicates the social control exerted over
laborers in Disney’s theme parks and in its corporate organization that
constitutes the second layer of the collective’s critique. As Bryman observes,
in the Disney parks social controls are enforced both preemptively (through the
economic barrier of high-priced tickets) and operationally (through discrete but
pervasive surveillance). Both aspects are featured in Wu Ming’s parody: while
Topo Lino’s ruthless repression of deviancy is a clear example of outward
social control, Anatrino and his fellow ducks directly experience labor
repression in the form of surveillance, humiliation, and intimidation. In
particular, “Canard à l’orange méchanique” features some of the forms of
covert resistance and sabotage documented in the real world by ethnographers
and sociologists. In the story’s conclusion, Anatrino and Euclide exchange a
knowing look as they overzealously pronounce their scripted dialogue, thus
implying their retained self-consciousness. This gesture mirrors those acts of
subtle resistance documented by Bryman among the French workers of
Eurodisney, such as mocking customers with “excessive politeness,” fastening
the belts of overly demanding visitors too tightly, and wearing merchandise
associated with villains (Bryman 151).
So far, we have seen how Wu Ming depicts the economic organization of

the franchise and its reshaping of urban space; these features are open to a
radical critique of postmodernist ideology. As the collective explicitly declares,
“we believe parody does but reveal the intimate truth of that world” (“Postilla”
412). This intimate truth, the authors suggest, is that of universal oppression
and masked violence. This orientation can help explain the deeply unsettling
nature of such fantasy, a dream-turned-nightmare whose inhabitants engage in
multiple instances of violence and perversion. As Wu Ming seems to suggest,
concealed violence is at the core of the capitalistic enterprise and its toxic
fantasies. Both towns are organized hierarchically, according to the tenets of
a specific ideology: “Pantegane e sangue” is dominated by a principle of racial
segregation, with several nods to Walt Disney’s rumored Nazi sympathies,
while in “Canard à l’orange méchanique” the authors focus on the evils of
economic globalization.
In the segregated spaces of Topologna and Anatropoli, each species exists
in two different and separate forms, an anthropomorphic and a zoomorphic
one. Through this plot device, Wu Ming exploits an incongruence in the
original comics, in which the same species can be represented with different
degrees of anthropomorphism (think of Goofy and Pluto). This inconsistency
provides the starting point for a radical criticism of both human-on-animal
violence and racial segregation. Throughout “Pantegane e sangue,” it is clear
that anthropomorphic cartoon characters apply to their intra-species
subordinates the same degree of violence normally displayed by human beings
toward all other animal species. Anthropomorphic gnus wear suede vests and
leather jackets, anthropomorphic dogs keep their pet zoomorphic dogs on a
tight leash, and anthropomorphic ducks eagerly feast on their oven-roasted
zoomorphic cognates. In this supremacist nightmare, cannibalism appears to
be completely normalized when it is practiced by superior species on their
“inferior” cognates; at the same time, the idea of a world without intra-species
violence is an unspeakable taboo:
For a few seconds I had a strange fantasy. I dreamed of an upside-down world
in which cannibalism was taboo, and in which every superior race treated its
inferior, non-anthropomorphic version fairly and evenly: Douglas Duck didn’t
eat canard à l’orange, Homo Sapiens didn’t keep Neanderthalensis as a pet,
and so on. What the heck was I doing, daydreaming while I was in such a
shitty situation! (PS 84)
By having a fan-favorite character utter an apology for cannibalism, the authors
subtly relate our culturally sanctioned anthropocentric violence to
cannibalism—a connection that resonates throughout their entire production
(Wu Ming “Memorandum” 68; Wu Ming 5 104-05). At the same time, the
authors hint at the connection between racism and pseudo-speciation, defined
by Joseph Meeker as “the adoption of interspecific behavioral patterns of
aggression inappropriately applied to a conspecific” (70). As its first theorist
Erik Erikson has suggested, pseudospeciation is a specifically human behavior
and a powerful enabler of murder, war, and genocide. Notable examples
include the depiction of Jews as rats under the Nazi persecutions and the
comparison of Vietnamese children to cattle during the Vietnam War. Similar
to these examples, Wu Ming’s racist narrator visualizes members of different
ethnicities as members of species from other continents, such as dingoes and
armadillos. Utopia thus turns into its opposite: a never-ending horror ruled by
racist pseudospeciation, anthropocentric violence, cannibalism, and rape.
Consistent with this satirical depiction, Topo Lino frequently voices his
disgust at the thought of interspecies sex—in his bigoted view, this
encompasses both the union between different species (such as canine and
feline characters) and between different levels of the same species (that is,
more and less anthropomorphized versions of the same species):
I am opposed to mixed and interspecies marriages, even between animals of
similar rank. Why should Annabella, a cow, be in a relationship with
Lucretius, a horse? And don’t even let me get started on marriages between
superior and inferior! I’d rather die than be caught sleeping with a barely
anthropomorphic doe, still hairy, with a long muzzle, a protruding bite, and a
thick, worm-like tail! (26)
While such venomous rhetoric mirrors some of the racist arguments
historically used against mixed marriages (cf. Root 33-41), it also reflects the
character’s obsessive desire for order, a central tenet of Disney’s urban utopia.
To further emphasize the link between racism, pseudospeciation, and
normalized cannibalism, Topo Lino’s disgust extends to all situations that
challenge his preconceived idea of order. While he considers top-bottom
cannibalism to be completely acceptable, he is horrified by what he defines as
“cannibalism from below,” practiced only by his own species, mice (PS 29).
Ironically, later in the story Topo Lino is forced to witness his girlfriend
Minna’s simulated rape and murder at the hands (so to speak) of a zoomorphic
rat. In this highly disturbing scene, his character is haunted “by the nightmare
of [his and Minna’s] shared genetic past” (PS 59): the hallucinatory return of
reality could not have taken a more horrific form.
It should be noted that although the authors never mention Marin,
Baudrillard, or Suvin, they explicitly credit Ariel Dorfman and Armand
Mattelard’s anti-colonialist pamphlet Para leer al pato Donald [How to Read
Donald Duck, 1971] as the inspiration for “Pantegane”’s sequel, “Canard à
l’orange méchanique.” The two Chilean theorists describe in detail the political
function of Disney’s clichéd representation of Atzecland, Timbuktu, and other
exotic lands, as well as of the moralistic overtones and reassuring effect of its
childish animality: this particular aspect is directly reprised by Wu Ming. In
the story, Anatrino comments on the “stupid, childish universe that looks very
much like a ghetto” in which he finds himself trapped (CO 129). These words
echo almost verbatim Dorfman and Matterart’s idea that the Disney imaginary
combines the features of normalcy, regularity, and infantilism, further
reinforced by the commonplace association of both children and animals with
“nature” (loc. 572).
The Wu Ming collective takes issue with several aspects of this artificial
childhood, such as its repression of sexuality, linguistic censorship, frozen
temporality, and paternalistic ideology. For instance, whereas Sorkin defines
Mickey Mouse as a “hairless, sexless, harmless” mouse (209), both
“Pantegane” and “Canard” violate this stipulation as several favorite characters
engage in sexual acts and even use their sexual awakening as a political
statement (CO 129). Consistent with such a rebellious streak, in the “Postilla”
to Anatra all’arancia meccanica the authors claim to have been motivated by
an act of linguistic and narrative censorship:
In the early 2000s, a friend and fellow writer known for his noir novels told
us that the Italian division of Disney had hired him to write the script for one
of Topolino’s adventures. He approached the task with justified childish
enthusiasm; yet he soon realized that the corporation had imposed so many
limitations—all of which were aimed to prevent any out-of-character rendition
of Mickey Mouse—that he couldn’t come up with any creative ideas. “Under
no circumstance can Mickey Mouse do this or that …,” “Mickey Mouse
absolutely cannot be seen in this or that situation,” et cetera. Then why contact
an author of noirs in the first place? In their influential definition of the genre,
Borde and Chaumeton describe noir cinema as “nightmarish, weird, erotic,
ambivalent, and cruel.” We didn’t see the point of hiring an author of noir
fiction and then asking him not to be cruel, ambivalent, or erotic and, perhaps,
be just moderately weird. (411)
Their satirical rendition of Disney explicitly sets out to “undo” this alleged
act of censorship, which is challenged in two ways. First, both “Canard” and
“Pantegane” are peppered with crude language and situations, effectively
defacing Disney’s universally popular characters. Such linguistic subversion
closely follows Baccolini and Moylan’s suggestion that dystopian rebellion
often begins with a character re-appropriating his or her own language, acting
against its dispossession and/or semantic emptying in propaganda (6).
Secondly, and more subtly, the authors mimic the language of corporate
censorship: in both stories, an abrupt change of tone and style is used to
signify the temporary re-establishment of order. In these instances, the usual
crescendo of profanities is broken by the irruption of a sanitized and child-
appropriate language, modeled on the child-appropriate language of Disney’s
comic albums (European comics that are longer than US comics but shorter
than graphic novels). For instance, in the final section of “Pantegane e
sangue,” Topo Lino awakens in a racially pure and crime-free alternate version
of Topologna:
Spring was in bloom, and the sky over Topologna was a glorious shade of
blue. Topo Lino was proud to have brought to justice two scoundrels who had
tried to snatch an old lady’s purse right on his street. “You rascals! A few
nights in the slammer will teach you not to pick on the weakest ones.” Mike
the Mouse was the terror of rascals and rogues. (PS 86)
This passage sharply contrasts with the foul language used by the narrator
elsewhere in the story. Particularly telling are old-fashioned expressions such
as “gaglioffi,” “manigoldi,” and “lestofanti” (here translated as “‘scoundrels,”

“rascals,” and “rogues”) that are rarely used in ordinary conversation but are
a staple of Topolino’s child-appropriate language. The same thing happens in
“Canard à l’orange méchanique” in which the ducks’ final defeat is signified
by their sweetened graphic appearances and by a “soft language, suitable for
our youngest readers” (CO 178). Overall, Wu Ming’s disturbing language and
plots are at the polar opposite of narrative and linguistic Disneyfication: instead
of censoring reality to make it suitable for children’s consumption, they undo
the very essence of Disneyland, inserting disturbing elements into its apparent
perfection and mocking its linguistic utopia.
Other facets of Disney’s artificial childhood, such as the suppression of
time and adherence to paternalistic ideology, are also unmasked by Wu Ming’s
dystopian rewriting. Serial repetition traps all characters in a suspended
temporality from which birth and death have been erased. For instance, in
“Canard à l’orange méchanique” Anatrino comments on the eternal childhood
of his nephews Kwi, Kwo, and Kwa: “They’ve been in elementary school
forever. Or in middle school, who knows. But they’d better not think I’ll
support them forever!” (CO 119). Birth, history, and growth are absent from
Disney’s carefully constructed picture of life, as the following monologue
makes clear:
How old was I? When was I born? I felt a chill in my stomach, as I realized
that … I was never born. That was simply impossible. Everyone has to be born
at some point. And yet … I had absolutely no memory of my childhood. Had
I ever been a child? If not, how old was I? At which point should I begin
counting my years? (PS 64)
In this passage, Topo Lino is questioning his own lack of childhood memories,
pointing to a shocking absence of personal history; as seen earlier in my
discussion of “degenerate utopia,” such concealment of individual growth and
change also points to the elimination of social and historical conflicts.
Death and physical violence are also absent from the idealized world of
Anatropoli and Topologna: for instance, in “Pantegane e sangue” Topo Lino
becomes aware of his own fictional nature by contemplating the possibility of
death for the first time: “Plooto’s death was unexpected. I was certain that it
was not even possible to die. Not a single member of the elite had ever died
in Topologna. It was shocking” (PS 58). Similarly, in Anatropoli physical
violence had been present all around and yet its sign become apparent only
after the ducks’ uprising (CO 173).
Unable to experience birth, aging, and death, the characters are frozen in
an artificial and timeless childhood. This is consistent with an omnipresent
ideology of fatherhood, another element modeled on Dorfman and Mattelart’s
analysis. According to the two theorists, the absence of fathers is not a
coincidence, for it strengthens the exclusionary nature of Disney’s childhood
and, ultimately, the paternal hold on the infantile imaginary (loc. 278, 306).
The Wu Ming collective takes a further step by associating such an ideology
of fatherhood with political and economic domination that takes the form of a
paternalistic and authoritarian capitalism in “Canard à l’orange méchanique”

and of a fascist and racially segregated society in “Pantegane e sangue.”
If the characters are trapped in a hallucinatory pseudo-reality, their
awakening can only be experienced as a horror. In this respect, the Wu Ming
collective very closely replicates Suvin’s idea of a “hallucinatory channeling
of reality” by representing the characters’ sudden awakening as a truly horrific
experience. In both cases, horror derives not only from the revelation of
decades-old oppression, but also from the sudden recognition of one’s own lack
of authenticity. This sentiment is evident in Topo Lino’s growing discomfort
as he is forced to watch hours of his own footage: the character cringes at the
display of cheap sentimentalism that he has been forced to sputter for decades,
dubbing it a “perfectly normal horror” (PS 82). The same happens in “Canard
à l’orange méchanique”: Anatrino and his fellow ducks experience horror and
disgust not only at their abject servitude, but also at the sugar-coated and
inauthentic fantasy in which they have been trapped for decades.
In both short stories, the main characters temporarily escape the pseudo-
reality of ideology in order to embrace the complexity of life; the destruction
of a degenerate utopia, however, can only take the form of a full-fledged
dystopia. In “Canard à l’orange méchanique,” revolution ends in carnage;
faced with the choice between servitude and destruction, Anatrino chooses the
latter, quoting a well-known proverb: “a horrible end is better than endless
horror” (CO 155). In “Pantegane e sangue,” the perfect little town of
Topologna gives way to an unnamed landscape ravaged by warlords and
famine: to paraphrase Žižek, the “digitalized First World” perfection turns into
the “Third World’s desert of the Real” (33).
In these stories the Wu Ming collective effectively unveils what they see
as the true face of capitalistic eutopia: a totalizing dystopia ruled by fear, in
which wealth is not bountiful but concentrated in the hands of a few, and that
will eventually result in an ecological, cultural, and economic disaster—this is
a landscape that, after the Wachowskis (and after Žižek) might legitimately be
termed “the desert of the Real.” As the dominant fantasy of capitalist
perfection is shattered, no totalizing utopia is allowed to replace it. No
alternative is left standing after the destruction of Bizney’s headquarters: the
end of capitalistic sugarcoated fantasy reveals dystopia as the true face of our
present, perhaps in line with Jameson’s (and later, Žižek’s) well-known
contention that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism (“Future City” 76).
“Everybody Should Move to Disneyland:” Zanotti’s Ambiguous Utopia.
Zanotti’s reworking of Disneyland is not as explicitly political as Wu Ming’s,
but it is equally dark and unsettling, features that likely contributed to its
troubled editorial history.
An atypical coming-of-age novel, Il testamento Disney is marked by a
melancholic and hallucinatory tone. The novel follows a group of twenty-
somethings gathered in the so-called “Club Pitagorico” [The Pythagorean
Club]. Each member has adopted a nickname taken from minor characters of
the Mickey Mouse Club, such as Paperoga, Paperetta, Eta Beta, and Gastone
(in English, Fethry Duck, Daisy Duck, Eega Beeva, and Gladstone Gander,
respectively); the main character, Simone, goes by the alias Paperoga [Fethry
Duck]. By overlooking mainstream characters such as Mickey Mouse and
Donald Duck in favor of secondary and highly specialized Disney figures,
Zanotti further emphasizes the obsessive nature of his characters’ hobby. All
club members fully identify with their chosen avatars, even imitating their tics
and mannerisms: Roberto, the founder and leader of the club, adds a “p” to
every word that begins with a consonant, exactly like his fictional model, Eega
Beeva; another character, Mario, identifies with Pluto so closely that he only
communicates through wails, barks, and other canine onomatopoeias.
In keeping with a significant trend in present-day Italy, most of the club’s
members are unemployed and rely on the financial support of their parents well
into their twenties.9 They spend their days investigating hoaxes, conspiracy
theories, and urban legends reported by tabloids and local news outlets. This
routine is interrupted by the supposed return of Anna/Zenobia, a former
member of the club and a love interest of Simone/Paperoga who had gone
missing ten years earlier. After recognizing her in a supermarket, the latter
embarks in a desperate quest, eventually winding up homeless and losing his
sanity.
The story is mostly narrated in the first person of the unreliable narrator
Simone/Paperoga; the narration, however, is interspersed with many excerpts
from an apocryphal document titled “Quaderni per il futuro montaggio”
[Notebooks for a future montage]. Part handbook and part book of minutes,
the “Notebooks” sections are written in an impersonal style and printed in a
different font: Comic Sans MS, notorious for its childish connotations and
consistent with Zanotti’s depiction of alienated and escapist youth. With typical
postmodern self-referentiality, the “Notebooks” mirror the story in two ways.
On the one hand, the practice of montage perfectly describes the characters’
own understanding of life: throughout the novel, they can only experience
reality as a succession of different inputs and meaningless fragments, open to
any interpretation. On the other hand, Il testamento Disney is itself a
disorienting montage of heterogeneous materials, open to multiple
interpretations.
If Wu Ming hybridized the narration in their stories with elements taken
from hardboiled fiction and conspiracy thrillers, as well as citations from The
Matrix, a similar phenomenon takes place in Il testamento Disney. The novel
is peppered with references to sf, space opera, gothic, and horror—from Ishiro
Honda’s Godzilla (1954) to Star Wars (1977), and including Sergio Somi and
Carlo Fruttero’s influential sf anthology, Le meraviglie del possibile [The
Wonders of Possible, 1959], which introduced the Italian general readership
to H.G. Wells, Frederic Brown, and Robert Sheckley, among others.10 These
references further enhance the novel’s dystopian tone while also creating an
aura of madness and secrecy that is consistent with its general theme.
Il testamento Disney is dominated by two central impulses: a zealous quest

for truth (no matter how loosely defined) and a deep urge to escape death.
Zanotti’s Pythagoras Club is a blend of secret society, sect, and role-playing
game. Although it ostensibly refers to the character of “Archimede Pitagorico”
(Italian for Gyro Gearloose), the club’s name also alludes to the secretiveness
of Greek societies. Moreover, all characters appear to be consumed by the
pursuit of a dark and mysterious truth, epitomized by their fruitless
investigation of hoaxes and urban legends. Their inane banter oscillates among
childish escapism, paranoia, and a sense of impending doom. By scanning the
most pointless coincidences for patterns and motives, they are, indeed, looking
for signs—signs that are, however, completely self-referential.
The characters’ quest for a secret truth is also mirrored by some of their
chosen professions. For instance, Roberto/Eta Beta, the only gainfully
employed member of the club, is self-employed as a private detective: his
chosen trade is intrinsically defined by an act of enquiry. Similarly, Simone’s
mother, a widow, is a psychic medium: her attempts to contact the dead are
often mentioned in the novel, and they reflect its heuristic tension.
Death, the second recurring motif of the story, is intimately connected to
the characters’ self-imposed exile in Disney’s fictional universe. This
connection is made explicit in the second part of the novel when
Simone/Paperoga attends a conference about the perception of death in
contemporary society (TD 146-54), and even more so in the third part of the
novel, in which the narrator muses on Walt Disney’s lost testament. The latter
episode highlights the central motivation of the characters, even providing a
rationale for the novel’s title:
[I]n the world of urban legends, those on Walt Disney’s testament have their
own evolutionary niche, so to speak. They all originate from the legend of his
alleged cryogenic stasis. There are many versions of his testament, all
downloadable from the Internet; they’ve all been published to demonstrate that
Walt Disney thought often of his own mortality, like everyone else, or on the
contrary that he had an escape plan already in place: cryogenic stasis.
However, the real Disney, Uncle Walt, the man whose rare and sparse mottos
sound like passages from Mein Kampf or a self-help book, he’s really dead. He
died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966. (On that day, coincidentally, the
monthly magazine “Epoca” and a couple of French newspapers opened with
the same headlines: “Mickey Mouse cries.”) His testament really isn’t his: it’s
ours. (217)
The rejection of mortality exemplified by Walt Disney’s falsely rumored
cryogenic stasis is at the core of the story, as the narrator declares: “by
founding the Club, we clearly aimed at some form of immortality: isn’t that
obvious?” (218). Later the narrator claims to be looking for “an immaterial
Anna, who surely would not age, being trapped in an immortality worthy of
a comic book” (219). In this respect, Zanotti’s subversive appropriation of
Disney’s degenerate utopia recreates one of its central tenets: its frozen
temporality and its subsequent rejection of death.
The characters of Il testamento Disney also experience another key feature

of degenerate utopia: everlasting, artificial childhood. See, in particular,
Simone/Paperoga’s musings on the concept of neoteny (i.e, the retention of
juvenile features in adult members of a species), seen as the missing link
between humans and cartoon characters:
Compared to other primates, humanity has partially evolved towards eternal
youth, maintaining to some extent the childish features of its ancestors: human
embryos are almost interchangeable with chimp embryos, but they grow at
different rates: therefore, our heads and brains are larger. Cartoons and
comics, then, have gone even farther. In just half a century (’cause we’re not
talking millennia of natural selection here!), Mickey Mouse’s eyes went from
27% of his head to 42%; his head went from being 42% of his body to 48%.
Basically, Disney’s characters keep getting younger as they age. (TD 219-20)
Rejecting death and growth, the characters seek refuge in a suspended and
frozen temporality consistent with the serial nature of popular comic books:
“finding the door, preventing yourself from aging, choosing the serial time of
comic books, where nothing ends: the candle, the house, the milk bottle” (TD
220).
In addition to the erasure of death and temporality, Il testamento Disney
replicates another feature of degenerate utopias: their all-pervasive hold on
reality. In fact, the Pythagoras Club serves as an alternative reality, eventually
aiming to replace all of it. The all-pervasive nature of this fiction is made clear
in one of the enigmatic fragments of the “Notebooks” (here reproduced in
Zanotti’s font of choice, Comic Sans MS):
World Improvement. We believe that everybody should move to the
Disney world. Among the many advantages, two are especially
noteworthy: 1) the Disney world is stable, while outside everything is
(as mutable as) sun or water; 2) the villains are tamer, relatively
speaking. I mean, would you like to compare Peg-Leg Pete to Sauron,
Cthulu or Azathoth? (TD 215)
This fragment perfectly describes Disney’s degenerate utopia, in which it
seems that nothing can change because danger, death, and violence have been
eradicated. In such a safe haven, even villains are nothing more than a
necessary plot device, instrumental to the heroes’ final victory. More
importantly, the idea that “everyone should move to the Disney world” alludes
to the all-pervasive nature of such a construction. Throughout the novel,
Disney World effectively acts as a pervasive fiction: the fantasy playfully
shared by the Pythagoras Club eventually turns into a clinical hallucination,
robbing Simone of his sanity and becoming the only reality he can ever access.
The spatial architecture of the novel is also consistent with its nature as a
dark utopia. The novel’s landscape is framed by the two circular enclosures of
the city and the island, which Marin identifies as framing devices for
Disneyland (306). Il testamento Disney for the most part is set in the city of
Genoa, but the first and the last chapter are set on an unspecified and probably
imaginary island. The third symbolic enclosure described by Marin, Disney’s
symbolic abolition of money (305), also finds a loose equivalent in the

characters’ history of perennial under-employment and their reliance on an
informal economy of barter, temporary gigs, and parental gifts.
Both the island and the city are depicted in a fantastic way.The name and
location of the island are never specified. Simone indicates it as
Anna/Zenobia’s final destination and possible refuge, strongly suggesting its
nature as hallucination. Its location is made even more uncertain through a
double process of spatial and temporal estrangement, as in the following
description in the novel’s opening sequence:
The sea is like a vast prairie, the sea was like a vast prairie. Temperatures are
on the rise; pollution is on the rise. Corals are dying, their colors slowly fading
as they are being buried by rubble—heaps of dead corals, deserted skyscrapers,
and my old collection of dried starfish. The coral reef has been there for 20
million years, and I’ve never seen it. The first coral polyp dates back 600
million years. Back in the Tropics, where water is warm and crystalline. In the
open sea facing Liguria, there’s the embryo of a new coral reef. It’s
somewhere in Albenga, I think. (TD 14; emphasis added)
Picturing a coral reef near Albenga, a small coastal town in Eastern
Liguria, the narrator delocalizes a very specific landscape: the Ligurian Sea is
simultaneously itself and an exotic tropical land. At the same time, this
description alludes to the possibility of an extreme scenario caused by climate
change in an unspecified future: Zanotti thus brings dystopia straight into the
familiar geography of the Italian province. A similar masking takes place in
time, as it is marked by the shift of tense in the very first sentence (“The sea
is like a vast prairie, the sea was like a vast prairie”). Today’s present is
simultaneously linked to the immensity of the geological past (“six-hundred-
million years ago”) and to the uncertain future shaped by climate change.
Finally, when Simone/Paperoga reaches his island this is described in a
contradictory way: what Simone sees as an exotic and faraway land is, in
reality, an human-made hill formed by debris, rubble, and rust. The degenerate
utopia is brought to its logical conclusion: the capitalist cycle that goes from
nature to commodity to trash is summarized in the powerful image of an
artificial island made of garbage.
Urban space is depicted in an equally contradictory way. The novel is set
in Genoa; despite a few accurate references to its topography, however, the
city is mostly depicted with fantastic overtones. Throughout the novel, Genoa
is referred to by the Anglicizing portmanteau word “stuntown,” or “a stunt
city, built for action shots: as in stuntman, stuntown” (TD 18). With this
neologism Zanotti is also referring to cities such as Vancouver and Toronto,
often used as locations for films set in Los Angeles and New York. Such
practice is appealing to the narrator precisely because of its evocative nature;
things retain their primary identity while also serving as supplements to reality:
What’s so special about stuntowns? Basically, you can turn them into anything
you want. You can make Toronto more New-York-Citiesque than New York
City itself, or you can remake it into yet another town. You can remake it into
a crossover of Zanzibar, Mouseton, and Timbuktu, whose roads mysteriously

lead to Africa, where muezzins come out of attics and the old people hanging
out at the local bar are really spies from another dimension, hired by the Great
Mogul or by the Emperor of Mongo. A stuntown is a city of apparitions. A
stuntown, you know, has no meaning of its own. (TD 19)
This passage is worth citing not only because of the orientalism that is fully
consistent with Disney’s sanitized representation of the exotic other (cf. Zukin
Cultures 52; Suvin “Utopianism” 234), but also because it blurs the boundaries
between reality and fiction. In the novel, characters perceive and experience
their everyday reality primarily as fiction, influenced by the urban
representations popularized in thrillers and B-movies: such simulacral
geography informs their overall perception of life. At the same time, things are
also more than themselves; this kind of hallucinatory supplement to reality is
consistent with the inner nature of degenerate utopias.
While in Wu Ming’s satires Anatrino and Topo Lino become self-aware,
eventually revolting against their corporate owners, no such rebellion takes
place in Il testamento Disney. In fact, Zanotti’s aging and aimless youth do not
strive for freedom, instead seeking refuge in a nostalgic replica of childhood.
There is no apparent violence in Il testamento Disney; death is mostly shown
indirectly and negatively, as a disappearance or a mere lack of presence; and
even suicide (a tragic event that marks the story’s conclusion) is never
presented directly but only mentioned by means of allusion. Furthermore,
while Wu Ming’s parody of Disney is instrumental to a militant conception of
literature, Zanotti’s fiction explicitly rejects such uses.
Such neutrality has not gone unnoticed by Gabriele Pedullà, a leading
Italian literary critic and one of the novel’s few reviewers. In a review
published in the Italian business newspaper Il sole XXIV ore, Pedullà notes that
Il testamento Disney is very distant from the typical style and content of the
Italian neo-workerist narrative of the late 1990s and early 2000s (the so-called
“narrativa del precariato”), despite having been written at roughly the same
time and despite featuring characters in the same demographic (underemployed
or unemployed youth in their late twenties). Pedullà maintains, however, that
Il testamento Disney is neither apolitical nor escapist: “Zanotti’s exodus is even
more radical than an escape from reality itself—for he is seeking refuge in an
artificially preserved childhood that is presented as a utopia, as the
quintessence of anything good life has ever offered us” (Pedullà). According
to this view, Zanotti is simply rejecting the naïve illusion of objective realism,
choosing instead a transgression of a different kind.
Several moments of Il testamento Disney support this interpretation. For
instance, early in the novel several members of the club have a confrontation
with a bartender, Detective Casey, whom they have secretly nicknamed
“Manetta”:
The first round usually comes with a side of Detective Casey’s preaching, and
today is no exception.... “Guys, I know I’m going against my own interest
here, and I’ve told you this a gazillion times already. Seriously, though ... you
don’t have the right to waste your time like this.” “Gladstone, da’hling, would
you please pass me a fag, so I can answer Miss Daisy’s question properly?”
“What do the Kurdish people mean to you?” “Come on, don’t tell me you’re
still smoking these crappy cigarettes!”... “What about Chiapas, then? Does
Chiapas mean anything to you?” (TD 85-86)
The frustrated bartender embodies the perspective of an older generation of
leftist militants: in particular, he mentions the Kurdish struggle for self-
determination and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation led by
Subcomandante Marcos in Mexico, evoking two political causes fervently
embraced by the Italian radical left in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His pleas
fall on deaf ears, however, as the conversation turns into a nonsensical
juxtaposition of voices once again, a “montage” without any apparent meaning
or direction. With this exchange, the other characters explicitly reject political
engagement and any involvement in historical or social conflicts. Later in their
exchange, another member of the club mocks Manetta’s militant perspective:
“Are you implying that you hate Disney because it’s ... a cor-po-rat-ion? Are
you trying to imply that Disney is a corporation?” (TD 86). This remark
implicitly targets the criticism against multinational corporations, a main theme
of debate among anti-globalization movements. With this conversation Zanotti
clearly detaches his characters from the horizon of politically engaged literature
openly embraced by Wu Ming.
The conversation ends with a cutting remark by Eta Beta/Roberto: “Casey,
pmy pdearest Pcasey, how can we change the world if we are not even sure
it exists?” (86). In spite of its jesting tone, the question points to the novel’s
radical gesture: the idea that by rejecting reality as one knows it, one can
somehow subvert it. It still remains to be seen whether such a rejection of
reality is a complete adhesion to Disney’s self-proclaimed eutopia, in keeping
with the characters’ childish rejection of adulthood, or if it represents an
entirely different alternative. Despite the novel’s ambiguous and open finale,
a possible clue can be found in the object of the narrator’s quest, Zenobia.
As repeatedly stated in the novel, Zenobia is a character created and drawn
by Romolo Scarpa for the Italian series of Topolino. A one-time love interest
for Pippo (Goofy), Zenobia is designed as an African princess, consistent with
the orientalist stereotypes of Disney’s early comic albums. The character is
featured in just three issues, making them a collector’s rarity: indeed, such an
evasive quality is consistent with Zenobia’s nature as an evanescent object of
desire in the novel. Zenobia is also the name of one of Italo Calvino’s
“invisible cities,” a fact of which Zanotti, a talented academic and a Calvino
scholar in his own right, was undoubtedly aware.11 With this reference, the
author points to another work that is both serial and utopian, and that also
engages with the construction of space—Invisible Cities (1972), one of the
foundational works of literary postmodernism.
In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Zenobia is a contradictory space, built on dry
land but raised on stilts like a floating platform:
[T]hough set on dry terrain, it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of
bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various
heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks,
surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes,
jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes. (35)
With its vertical and suspended architecture, Zenobia is akin to Zanotti’s
(and Calvino’s) own Genoa.12 Together with Isaura (a subterranean city made
of wells), Armilla (an aquatic city made of pipes), Sofronia (a partially
disposable city), and Ottavia (a city made of spiderwebs), Zenobia belongs to
the group of “thin cities.” As Letizia Modena has argued in her monograph
Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness (2011), “thin cities” are the strongest
embodiment of Calvino’s “architecture of lightness,” considered by Modena
to be the utmost expression of the book’s utopian drive (131). Indeed,
Calvino’s description of Zenobia is informed by figures of desire, utopia, and
happiness. Following the binary structure so typical of Calvino’s semiotic
approach, the city is marked by a double dialectic—between Zenobia’s original
project and the actual stratification of its signs on the one hand, and between
the original impulse behind its creation and its inhabitants’ utopian fantasies on
the other. The city of Zenobia is as evanescent and intangible as desire itself,
however:
That said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified
among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities
into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years
and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which
desires either erase the city or are erased by it. (35)
Calvino explicitly refuses to categorize Zenobia in either positive or negative
terms: we do not know if Zenobia is a realized or unrealized utopia, or if its
perfection is achieved or even achievable. With its constant reshaping, Zenobia
appears to set the scene for a quest without end—in other words, for pure and
absolute desire or, perhaps, utopianism without an end.
By nesting a reference to Calvino's Invisible Cities within a nightmarish
hallucination, Zanotti thus gestures to the possibility of utopianism as pure,
inchoate desire. The artificial “utopia” sought by the Pythagoras Club is
nothing but an escapist fantasy; while it is still perhaps preferable to the
illusion of objectivity and realism, it ends up being equally totalizing. Yet
Zanotti also indicates a radical alternative, one that is nondescript, ambiguous,
and open; it is neither utopian nor dystopian, but a third way in which
utopianism exists as a constant tension rather than as an achievable fantasy.
Whereas Wu Ming’s denunciation of capitalism’s false eutopia gives way to a
militaristic dystopia, Zanotti leads his readers to an open and ambiguous finale
that exemplifies the only potential space for rebellion in postmodern times: a
slippery and splintered utopia as ambiguous and contradictory as the present
from which it seeks to break.
Beyond the Postmodern: Is There a Future for Italian Utopia? So far, this
article has sought to demonstrate how Zanotti and Wu Ming have based their
fictions on a subversive reading of Disney’s peculiar brand of utopia. Their
stories can be read as “time capsules” from the late 1990s to the early 2000s,
the years immediately preceding and following 9/11’s historic demarcation; this
is a very short period that nevertheless acts as a critical juncture for
postmodernity, seen in its constitutive relation to globalized capitalism.
Given the penetration of postmodernism into the Italian cultural scene—a
fact clearly demonstrated by the international resonance of Gianni Vattimo’s
“weak thought” and by the popularity of Calvino’s and Umberto Eco’s fiction
outside of Italy—and its persistence as a topic of debate, it should not be
surprising that these authors writing from Italy (arguably on the periphery of
today’s global literary market) chose to engage with one of global capitalism’s
best-known icons.13 Furthermore, by tackling one of the most iconic symbols
of twentieth-century America, these stories are more or less consistent with the
American influence on Italian sf, a common idea discussed in a number of
critical accounts, including the special issue of SFS (July 2015) devoted to the
genre’s Italian tradition in Italy.14 Although “Pantegane e sangue,” “Canard à
l’orange,” and Il testamento Disney may not strictly be works of science
fiction, they do resonate with some of the most recent tendencies of Italian sf,
such as its prevailing dark tone (well exemplified by the works of Nicoletta
Vallorani, Laura Pugno, and Tullio Avoledo) and its political significance. As
realism, a narrative mode often associated with politically and socially engaged
literature, is forced to update its expressive tools, speculative modes of fiction
such as sf, cyberpunk, alternate history, utopia, and dystopia come to the
forefront of the literary scene, providing spaces in which to question the status
quo and to think about alternatives.15
In a contribution originally published in Le Monde diplomatique in 2000
and included in the aforementioned special issue of SFS, prominent slipstream
author Valerio Evangelisti provides an account of international sf from a
strictly Italian perspective: he criticizes highbrow writers for their lack of
concern with the large-scale transformations wrought by information
technologies and global capitalism (245-46). Evangelisti traces a binary
opposition, contrasting the inanity of mainstream narrative (which he qualifies
as both “intimist” and “realist”) with the emergent force of “fantastic”
literature—which, he argues, “has managed to grasp, better than any other
narrative form, the evolutionary (or devolutionary) tendencies of contemporary
capitalism” (248). Evangelisti concludes his essay with more praise for his
genre of choice:
[W]e should not expect that mainstream literature—so indifferent to its own
society that it has made self-indulgence and lack of political engagement marks
of quality—will lead the resistance against the colonizers of the imagination.
We need a maximalist, self-aware fiction that disturbs and does not reassure.
Science fiction used to be like that. It can be so again. (249)
This reconstruction, dismissively conflating naturalistic narratives and

psychological themes, can be fully understood only in light of the specific
predicament of Italian sf—namely, the mutual diffidence between the literary
canon and popular genres, and the heavy legacy of Italy’s hegemonic realist
tradition, spanning from the nineteenth-century poetics of Verismo to postwar
Neo-Realism (Saiber, “Flying Saucers” 15). Yet it is possible to argue that
these stories by Wu Ming and Zanotti participate in such a resistance: they
certainly are anti-realistic, self-aware, and disturbing.
From an aesthetic point of view, “Pantegane e sangue,” “Canard à l’orange
méchanique,” and Il testamento Disney demonstrate many important
similarities, well beyond their common reliance on Disney’s characters and
tropes. Both Zanotti and Wu Ming capture the fundamental mechanisms of
degenerate utopias, such as frozen temporality, artificial childhood, and the
concealment of death and violence. Furthermore, they share a poetic of genre
hybridization, a predilection for open or ambiguous finales, and an explicit
debt to popular genres such as conspiracy thrillers, on the one hand, and
dystopia, cyberpunk, and other subgenres belonging to the sf field on the
other. These features are consistent with Baccolini and Moylan’s description
of critical dystopia and, indeed, these works pay attention to the dystopian side
of Disney’s perfectly enclosed utopia. At the same time, these traits are also
associated with the non-genre known as slipstream (Frelik; Sterling);
consequently, these works can also be read against the backdrop of Italian
slipstream fiction, which Somigli and Rossi have identified as a particularly
fertile space from which to reflect critically about globalization (Rossi 347–48),
as well as about history and its many potential counter-histories (Somigli 294;
Rossi 342, 354). Either way, both Zanotti and Wu Ming show a deep
engagement with a quest for alternatives—a titanic endeavor in the early 2000s,
the age of a triumphant global capitalism—as they walk the thin line between
dystopia and utopia.
There is, however, a fundamental difference among the examined works:
this is their relation to postmodernity, which unfolds in diametrically opposite
ways. In appropriating and subverting Disney’s familiar icons, the Wu Ming
collective creates a political satire of what they see as false utopia; their
ultimate targets are the ruthless organization of neoliberal, globalized
capitalism as well as postmodern ideology, which the authors identify with
reactionary, self-referential, and irrelevant playfulness. Such criticism will
become explicit in their “New Italian Epic” (24) a decade after the online
publication of the two Disney parodies; yet its main elements are already
present in these stories. If postmodernism is to be denounced as simulacrum,
escapism, and entertainment, critical dystopia emerges for Wu Ming as a
necessity: it is the only way to escape both the illusory fantasy of a
consumerist paradise and the looming risk of totalitarian political utopias.
In contrast, Zanotti’s escape from reality is a splintered, contradictory, and
ambiguous rebellion, fully within the political and aesthetic horizon of
postmodernism. Consistent with the teachings of his mentor Remo Ceserani
(who introduced Italian academic audiences to the theories of Jameson and

Eagleton, and who kept advocating for the progressive function of literary
postmodernism until his recent death), Zanotti never breaks with the
postmodern aesthetic, instead opting for a poetics of indeterminacy and
openness that defies the limits of readability.16 Indeed, Il testamento Disney is
laced with postmodern structural and thematic elements, including narrative
ambiguity, juxtaposition of voices, an open-ended finale, and a constant
mélange of highbrow and lowbrow references from Godzilla to Italo Calvino,
from Captain Harlock to Frances Hogson Burnett. While Wu Ming uncovers
dystopia as the true face of capitalism’s false eutopia, appropriating the
powerful image of the “desert of the real,” Zanotti’s lunatic protagonist seeks
refuge in one of Calvino’s invisible cities—producing a literary manifesto for
postmodern utopianism. With their specular but opposite gestures, Zanotti and
Wu Ming have indicated two divergent but equally powerful strategies for the
survival of utopia, effectively carving out a new role for fiction as a breeding
ground for the alternative, the potential, the utopian.
NOTES
1. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. I use the following
abbreviations in my text: PS = Wu Ming, “Pantegane e sangue”; CO = Wu Ming,
“Canard à l’orange méchanique”; TD = Paolo Zanotti, Il testamento Disney.
2. Other examples of writing collectives are Kai Zen, formed in 2003 by Jadel
Andreetto, Bruno Fiorini, Guglielmo Pispisa, and Aldo Solliani, and mostly known for
its novel La strategia dell’Ariete [The Aries Strategy, 2007]; the group Babette
Factory, formed by leading Italian novelists Francesco Longo, Francesco Pacifico,
Francesco Piccolo, and Christian Raimo, best known for its political thriller 2005 Dopo
Cristo [2005 AD, 2005]; and the group Scrittura Industriale Collettiva [Industrial
Collective Writing], founded in 2007 by Gregorio Magini and Vanni Santoni and
including up to 150 collaborators recruited online. These different groups share several
traits, such as their common reliance on the Internet and their preference for the
thriller and detective genres.
3. For a general overview of the structure and specificities of the Italian anti-
globalization movement in the years between 1999 and 2003, see the useful account by
Chiara Fonio. Fonio clarifies the different nuances conveyed by the movement’s
various names (such as No-Global, New Global, and “movimento altro-mondialista”).
4. On 21 July 2011, 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani, a protester, was shot dead by 20-
year-old carabiniere Mario Placanica during clashes between protesters and police in
Piazza Alimonda. On the same day, Susanne Bendotti, a French protester, was struck
by a car while attempting to cross the French-Italian border in Ventimiglia to take part
in the protests.
5. Founded in 1938 as Disney Creazioni S.P.A., the company was later renamed
“The Walt Disney Company Italia” in 1988 (see “La magia Disney in Italia”). In 2013,
the company’s comic division was acquired by Panini, Italy’s leading publisher of
comics (see “Topolino alla Panini!” [Mickey Mouse Switches to Panini!]). The
longstanding fascination of Italians for Disney and all things Disney has been celebrated
and documented in Marco Spagnoli’s documentary Walt Disney e l’Italia: una storia
d’amore [Walt Disney and Italy: A Love Story, 2014] and in a recent exhibition titled
“Topolino e l’Italia” [Mickey Mouse and Italy, 2016] that toured Milan, Rome, Turin,
and Naples, among other venues.
6. In a monograph titled Wu Ming: Non soltanto una band di scrittori (2009),
Italian critic Gaia De Pascale chronicles the collective’s journey from Luther Blisset
to Wu Ming. De Pascale suggests that by changing its name, the collective went from
being “everyone” (i.e., having a “multi-use” identity with which anyone can identify)
to being “nobody,” a far more radical posture that entails a rejection of identity tout
court (De Pascale 35-36).
7. Wu Ming has never engaged with cyberpunk or any other sf subgenres in their
collective novels, exploring instead political utopianism in historical novels such as
Manituana (2007), Altai (2009), and L’armata dei sonnambuli [A Sleepwalkers’ Army,
2015]. Individual members of the collective, however, have abundantly engaged with
dystopia, cyberpunk, and other cognate genres. Examples include former member Wu
Ming 5’s Free Karma Food (2006), a climate-fiction and food dystopia, as well as the
political utopia Libera Baku Ora [Free Baku Now, 2000], published under his real
name, Riccardo Pedrini, before he joined the collective. Other examples are Wu Ming
2’s solo novel Guerra agli umani [War on Humans, 2003], a survivalist parody laced
with dystopian and post-apocalyptic themes, and Wu Ming 1’s climate-fiction short
story “Arzéstula” (2009), a cautionary tale included in translation in the collection I’m
With the Bears (2011), which also includes stories by Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley
Robinson, and Paolo Bacigalupi, among others. In 2011, Wu Ming 1 tackled the
subject of sf, utopia, and dystopia from a critical perspective in a public lecture titled
““L’occhio del purgatorio, la rivolta e l’utopia” [The Eye of Purgatory, Revolt and
Utopia]; a podcast of the lecture is available on the collective’s website, Giap!
8. Wu Ming 1 first presented his “Memorandum: New Italian Epic, 1993-2008”
at Montréal’s McGill University. The text was published online in May 2008; a revised
version was published, also online, in November 2008; the third and final version
appeared in print in March 2009 in a collection of essays titled New Italian Epic.
Largely misread as a manifesto or a declaration about poetics, the “Memorandum”
offered a retrospective reading of Italian fiction written between 1993 and 2008. Wu
Ming 1 identified eight common traits: a rejection of postmodern irony and
detachment; the adoption of unusual narrative perspectives; a blend of narrative
complexity and pop-culture sensitivity; a penchant for alternate history, relying on the
idea of fiction as a history of potential what-ifs; a subtle linguistic experimentalism; the
use of non-fiction registers; and transmedia storytelling (“Memorandum” 22-46.).
9. According to Italy’s National Statistical Bureau (ISTAT)’s yearly “Rapporto
Giovani” [Report on Youth], 6,914,000 Italians aged between 18 and 34 were still
living with at least one parent in 2014; of these, at least 3.1 million are aged 25 and
above. This number amounts to 61.2% of all unmarried young people. The full report
is available on ISTAT’s webpage.
10. For a detailed analysis of the anthology’s reception and legacy, see Pagetti’s
important article, “Twenty-five Years of Science Fiction Criticism in Italy,”
Antonello’s “La nascita della fantascienza in Italia” [The Birth of Italian SF], and
Iannuzzi’s informative volume, Fantascienza italiana [Italian SF].
11. Paolo Zanotti wrote his doctoral thesis on Calvino’s intertextual references at
the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. It is very likely that his use of the
name Zenobia represents a conscious homage to the author of Invisible Cities.
12. Calvino spent his formative years in Sanremo, a small town in the Riviera
Ligure, whose hilly landscape appears in his first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests
(1948), and in the short story “La speculazione edilizia” [A Plunge in Real Estate]
(1963), an early denunciation of the ecological devastation that took place in the years
of the so-called “economic miracle.” A native of Genoa, Zanotti often took inspiration
from the city’s maze of alleys (as well as its surrounding areas) in creating the fantastic
and post-apocalyptic cityscapes of his debut novel Bambini bonsai (2010). Their shared
fondness for Liguria and for its rural and urban landscape is one of many links between
Zanotti and Calvino.
13. In Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia, Monica Jansen provides a valuable
account of the Italian debate on postmodernism. She classifies the main reactions to
postmodern hegemony in the 1980s and 1990s, ranging from Remo Ceserani’s
favorable views to its stern rejection by Marxist critics Alberto Asor Rosa and Romano
Luperini. More recently, conflicting interpretations of Italian postmodernism have also
emerged among Anglophone scholars of Italian literature. Jennifer Burns and Pierpaolo
Antonello have variously argued for the persistence of a postmodern political
engagement marked by subversive strategy and a refraction of subjectivities; on the
opposite side of the spectrum, one can find Alessia Ricciardi’s After La Dolce Vita
(2012), a vitriolic attack on prominent postmodern figures such as Calvino, Eco, and
Achille Bonito Oliva. She accuses them of having legitimized an escapist idea of art,
thus paving the way for Silvio Berlusconi’s cultural hegemony.
14. The American influence on Italian sf is discussed at length in this special issue.
See, in particular, Saiber and Rossi’s introduction, “Italian SF: Dark Matter or Black
Hole?,” in which they suggest a number of factors that contributed to this influence:
a widespread resistance to Italian-sounding names of authors and settings (resulting in
a regime of pseudo-translation in the 1950s and 1960s); the struggle for survival
experienced by many editorial venues in the 1980s; a lack of academic interest in sf
among Italian scholars; and a lack of interest in translations by Anglophone publishers
(211-13). In the same issue, several Italian sf writers featured in Proietti and Saiber’s
“Symposium” credit various Anglophone authors with influencing their own work.
Nicoletta Vallorani cites Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kurt Vonnegut, while
Gianfranco de Turris credits Fredric Brown, J.G. Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Lucius
Shepard, China Miéville, and Ken MacLeod (237-38).
15. Outside the sf community, realism is still largely identified with politically
engaged literature, and the question of a new realism has dominated the Italian
academic debate since the early 2000s. Prominent scholars such as Raffaele
Donnarumma, Vittorio Spinazzola, and Gilda Policastro have identified a return to
realist modes of narrative in the non-fiction of Roberto Saviano and in the neo-
workerist narratives of authors such as Andrea Bajani, Aldo Nove, and Giorgio Falco,
to name just a few. More recently, Maurizio Ferraris promoted a similar view in
advocating for his “New Realism.” A competing view has been expressed by Pierpaolo
Antonello, who criticizes the identification of postmodern anti-realism with political
escapism and moral decline (“Di Crisi in Meglio” [From Crisis to Better], 172-75).
16. In 1997, Ceserani penned Raccontare il postmoderno [Telling Postmodernism],
an influential volume that offered the first and most complete account of Anglophone
theory then available to Italian academics. Following Jameson’s cultural theory of
postmodernism, Ceserani identifies the main features of literary postmodernism as
ambiguity, openness, and a mélange of lowbrow and highbrow. At the same time, he
argues for the separation of literary and political postmodernity, advocating for a
clearer Italian nomenclature distinguishing postmodern ideology, the aesthetic practice
of postmodernism, and the sociological and historical circumstances of postmodernity.
In 2013 Ceserani returned to the topic with an article titled “La maledizione degli ‘-
ismi’” [The Curse of –Isms]. In it, he rebuffed fellow critic Donnarumma, who had
recently argued for the end of postmodernism and its permanent replacement with the
notion of “hypermodernity.”
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ABSTRACT
In 1973, Louis Marin described Disneyland as a “degenerate utopia,” a concept that
Darko Suvin reprises in his Defined by a Hollow (2010). Here I apply this notion to
two short stories written by the Wu Ming collective, “Pantegane e sangue” [Rat
Harvest, 2000] and “Canard à l’orange méchanique” [A Clockwork Duck à l’Orange,
2000], and to Paolo Zanotti’s novel Il testamento Disney [Disney’s Last Will and
Testament], originally written in the early 2000s and published posthumously in 2013.
Under the guise of a satirical but ultimately escapist divertissement, the authors
represent the “degenerate utopia” of late capitalism, revealing the dystopian side of
capitalism’s self-proclaimed eutopia. On the one hand, these works can be read in light
of Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini’s category of “critical dystopia” for their self-
reflective, radical, and open quality, as well as for their multiple genre crossovers. On
the other hand, their critical gesture is best understood against the backdrop of Italy’s
rising slipstream, which both Umberto Rossi and Luca Somigli identify as a fertile
ground for reflecting on political and historical alternatives. Finally, I will demonstrate
how, by reversing the capitalist fantasy of perfection into a horrific and inescapable
pseudo-reality, Wu Ming and Zanotti implicitly engage with the problematic legacy of
postmodernism, still a controversial topic of debate in today’s Italy.

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SF-TH Inc

Degenerate Utopias: Dystopian Revisions of Disneyland in Early Twenty-first-century

Degenerate Utopias: Dystopian Revisions of Disneyland in

a horrific and inescapable hallucination, Zanotti and Wu Ming implicitly

fictional universe seemingly obliterates historical change and, by extension, the

the abolition of aging and death signified by a state of perpetual, artificial

of the twentieth century, utopia persists in postmodern times only in corrupted

fictional Saudi terrorist cell clearly modeled on Al Qaeda—a detail worth

of urban planning, as described in detail by Charles Moore, Sharon Zukin

So far, we have seen how Wu Ming depicts the economic organization of

as “gaglioffi,” “manigoldi,” and “lestofanti” (here translated as “‘scoundrels,”

paternalistic and authoritarian capitalism in “Canard à l’orange méchanique”

Il testamento Disney is dominated by two central impulses: a zealous quest

The characters of Il testamento Disney also experience another key feature

symbolic abolition of money (305), also finds a loose equivalent in the

a crossover of Zanzibar, Mouseton, and Timbuktu, whose roads mysteriously

This reconstruction, dismissively conflating naturalistic narratives and

(who introduced Italian academic audiences to the theories of Jameson and

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