University of Amsterdam
The ‘other’ side of the fuga.
Articulations of the contemporary Italian nationalism
through the Italian brain drain
✴ Abstract
The overarching question that this thesis asks is: how does the Italian emigrant narrative of today serve to perpetuate a quite racialized notion of the Italian nation state? As such, the thesis’ methodology constitutes an ethical agenda: to take account of why similar dynamics, what I name ‘fluxes,’ are connoted in such drastically divergent ways, with violent implications to the group de-noted more negatively. That is, the thesis takes account of two parallel fluxes that are rarely read together: that of the immigrant understood as de fact from the Global South and that of the emigrant out of Italy to more affluent spaces in the Global North. The first chapter focuses on representations of immigration to Italy in the past twenty years, with a particular attention to the construction of the concept of illegality through laws, in regards to immigration to Europe more broadly. The chapter further investigates how Italian emigration and colonialism have played a crucial role in the con-struction of the concept of the existence of an Italian race, which still reverberates in the current po-licing of immigration. The second chapter chapter focuses on the role of media in the construction of tropes that inform the production of policies: the first part of the chapter focuses on immigration
to Italy, whilst the second part pivots around the figure of the Italian emigrant and more specifically
around the phenomenon of the Italian brain drain. The third chapter proposes a postcolonial reading of the Italian comedy Fuga di cervelli. The comedy whose name is literally ‘Brain Drain’ presents controversial depictions of the relationships that occur between the (male, heterosexual, white) Ita-lian emigrant and his non normative counterparts, such as non white minorities or women. This ana-lysis aims to demonstrate how the prevailing representation of the emigrant is inextricably linked to the otherized immigrant subject, at the expenses of whom the laws are made.
✴ Acknowledgements
In writing this thesis, I was keenly aware of my privileged position of the Italian abroad in order to look at ‘back home’ with more distance and lucidity. The deep concern for what is happe-ning in the Italian politics urged me to ask the question: should I be held accountable for the evolu-tion of the understanding of what it means to be Italian? In response, I encouraged myself to look for ways through which I might actively denounce how my personal choices were rhetorically ex-ploited at the expense of others. The present thesis is a humble attempt to address that.
As an Italian abroad, it seems to me crucial to address for once not the diaspora itself and the diasporic cultural productions, but instead the implications that my (and of many others’) departure has had. The resonance of our journeys, choices and efforts is now part of the intricate tapestry of what Italy has come to be, yet it is not and should not be the only one.
As a young educated Italian living abroad, I have been often addressed to with that same lan-guage of pitiful proudness, understanding, commiseration, admiration. I have often heard from peo-ple who did not know the reasons why I left, for the sake of chit chat, that they found it awful that I
had to leave, as Italy has nothing to offer, yet so many were coming on boats, in numbers that
remi-nisced invasions. How have these two topics become so important for one another? Is it possible to frame one issue and one set of discourses without taking the other into consideration? I have sought in the present thesis then to show how the contemporary state of affairs in the particular context of Italy demonstrates that it is not possible. I hope that this work shows the relevance of a conjoint scrutiny of the two aforementioned narratives.
Studying abroad gave me access to scholarship of critical race theory and intersectionality that provoked me into thinking of Italianness differently. Reading Gloria Wekker, Philomena Essed, Alexander Weheliye, Vron Ware, Alessandra di Maio to only cite a few inspired my ways of thin-king profoundly.
I am thankful to my thesis advisor Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken for the provocative books she lent me, the insightful comments, the guidance and the excitement she always showed. I wish to
also thank my family for always having my back, my brother Jacopo for being an inspiring and bril-liant person; Carolin for being a friend, a supporter and a role model; Margherita, Tomas and Wes for being there all along.
✴ Table of contents:
✴Introduction: Flux as a critical category p. 6 ✴Chapter 1: Legalities p. 13
✴The construction of illegality: legalities of a ‘crisis’ p. 13
✴Legalities of race. The construction of the ‘Italian race’ through Fascism, forgetfulness and emigration p. 21
✴Chapter 2: The role of media p. 30
✴The racialization of the immigrant p. 30
✴The fuga of the Italian emigrant in the news media p. 34 ✴Chapter 3: The fuga in the filmic image p. 43
✴Conclusion p. 52 ✴Bibliography p. 56
✴ Introduction: Flux as a critical category
In order to situate my thesis within the already very vast fields of media studies, migration studies, border studies, and critical race theory, I begin with a note on the terminology that I am using throughout the whole work. This thesis aims to suggest the possibility of reading the main-stream narrative about current Italian emigration, that is Italians leaving Italy for Northern Europe or North America and referred to in Italian as fuga di cervelli or brain drain as a fuel to the racist turn in the Italian politics. Furthermore, this thesis sees a connection between such narrative and the portrayal of the most recent immigration to Italy. If not specified otherwise, by ‘emigration’ I thus always refer to the ‘new’ Italian emigration, which roughly covers the years 2000-2019, and that sees growing portions of youth (the average age being 30-34 years old, often highly educated) mo-ving outside Italy for diverse reasons, but mostly for economic betterment. When referring to the 1 word ‘immigration’, on the other hand, I think of the growing number of non-European, non-We-stern foreigners who reside on Italian soil (with or without a permesso di soggiorno). This thesis focuses on those immigrants understood by ‘nativist’ or ‘heritage’ Italians as ‘illegal’ immigration: such illegality has been the sole focus of the media in regards to immigration for almost ten years. The Dossier Statistico Immigrazione 2018, an annual socio-statistic report on immigration in Italy realized by the Centro Studi e Ricerche IDOS, highlights how in the Italian case emigration is al-ways perceived to be in the mode of a regretted loss of a valuable asset, while foreign immigration is understood as an incumbrance. In the Italian news many words are used to designate the catego2 -ry of the immigrant: immigrato, migrante, clandestino, rifugiato, profugo, some more pejorative 3
than others. According to the Sesto Rapporto Carta di Roma 2018, a detailed report on the represen-tation of migration in the news media, the term migrante, which has slowly come to substitute the
Elena Caneva “La nuova emigrazione Italiana, cosa ne sappiamo, come ne parliamo” Cambio, Firenze
1
University Press, N. 11, June 2016, p. 195.
Dossier statistico immigrazione, IDOS, 2018, p. 89.
2
Associazione Carta di Roma, Notizie di Chiusura. Sesto rapporto Carta di Roma, 2018, pp. 11-12.
3
term immigrato in the news, appears to be strongly associated with those of African origin. Fur-thermore the report notes how from 2013 to 2018 the presence of the more generic term africano, together with other qualifiers of origin (senegalese, nigeriano, tunisino, somalo, eritreo, ghanese) has risen in the Italian news titles in relation to immigration. Alessandra Di Maio, scholar of post4 -colonial and diaspora studies, notes that the Italian term immigrato is normally used to refer to any newcomer, regardless of their juridical status. According to her the “immigrant is not a juridical fi-gure in Italy, but rather a socially, and, one might say, mass-media-constructed persona.”5
The aforementioned extensive vocabulary stresses the difference that exists among: expats (professionals, skilled workers who legally reside outside of their native country); refugees (deser-ving of international protection); and economic migrants (undeser(deser-ving of free access to Europe as the discourse that shapes their acceptance does not lend credence to how their departure may also constitute a life threatening circumstance) . The two latter categories, especially since the first de6 -cade of the 2000s, have increasingly become the unfortunate victims of the European border enfor-cement. Here, I intentionally stage the terminological disjuncture between the terms ‘categories’ and ‘victims’ to show how mediatic discourse thingifies certain beings (i.e. categories) and humanizes others (i.e. victims). In the Italian case in particular, since the signature of bilateral agreements with Libya in 2003, many potential political refugees were not even given the chance to ask for asylum, and pushed back to Libya. The European Commission reported that between mid-August 2003 and 7 December 2004, Italy financed forty-seven flights which deported 5.688 people from Libya to
Ivi, p. 39.
4
Alessandra Di Maio, “Black Italia: Contemporary migrant voices from Africa”, La Pietra Dialogues, 2005,
5
p. 124.
Fiona B. Adamson, “Crossing Borders”, International Security, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Summer 2006), p. 195.
6
And: Marco Omizzolo, Pina Sodano, “The European meta-borders: the outsourcing and militarization of Eu-ropean borders and the violation of the human rights of sub-Saharan refugees”, REMHU, Rev. Interdiscip.
Mobil. Hum., Brasilia, v. 26, n. 54, 2018, p. 159.
Silja Klepp, “A Contested Asylum System: The European Union between Refugee Protection and Border
7
Control in the Mediterranean Sea”, European Journal of Migration and Law, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, N. 12, 2010, p. 4.
Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Niger, Nigeria, Ghana, Bangladesh, Mali, Sudan, Eritrea. The Italian policy 8 of respingimento, or ‘push back’, was later heavily criticized to the point that thirteen NGOs asked the European Commission to sanction Italy, as collective expulsions represent a violation of the Eu-ropean Charter of Human Rights, not to mention a violation of the non-refoulement principle of the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. As a result, Italy ceased to use charter flights to deport mi9 -grants to Libya. That said, refoulement at sea is still practiced due to patrol boats in Libyan territo-rial waters ; thus, even those who would rightfully benefit from the status of asylum seekers are in 10 fact treated no differently than clandestini. I make an effort not to use any of these terms and in-stead use the slightly more neutral ‘immigrant’ and ‘emigrant’. That said, the negative connotation implied in each of the more degrading terms is very much relevant to understanding the affective implication and differentiated use of all the aforementioned terms.
Another term that I use, to refer in this case to both immigrants and emigrants, is ‘flux’ or ‘fluxes’. As mentioned above, the pivot of the thesis is always Italy as a nation-state, as an ‘idea’ of a certain national ideology to which I refer as both a point of departure and a point of arrival.
Even though I agree with the work of feminist geographers who expose the crucial role of scale in the representational legacies of migrations , the notion of how the state plays into biopoli11 -tical understandings of the body undergirds my thesis. I thus consciously choose to pursue a state-centric analysis, which has at its core the historical implications of laws and colonial legacies.
At the same time, I want to address how the naturalization of the scale of the region, such as the scale of numbers and data, obscures the violence that is perpetrated on the body. I am well
Fabrizio Gatti, “I lager della libertà”, L’Espresso, 5 May 2005. http://espresso.repubblica.it/palazzo/
8
2005/05/05/news/i-lager-della-liberta-1.575 Accessed 31 May 2019. Silja Klepp, op.cit., p. 5.
9
Ibidem.
10
Geographers such as Sallie Martson, Jennifer Hyndman and Megan Cope call for more attention to the
11
scale of the individual body, as it relates to the geographies it traverses.
Sallie Marston, “The social construction of scale”, Progress in Human Geography 24(2), 2000.
And: Jennifer Hyndman, “The (geo)politics of mobility” In, Lynn Staeheli, Eleonore Kofman, and Linda Peake (eds.), Mapping Women Making Politics. London: Routledge, 2004.
aware of how the depersonalization of collectivities and the use of the plural (rather than the singu-lar, the first names and the surnames) have constantly informed discourse of othering. In this re12 -gard, it is to note that often anecdotal personal stories correlated with first names are methodologi-cally present in the representation of Italian emigration, but rarely figure in research conducted in regards to immigrants.
Because of the asymmetrical discursive treatment of the two migrant categories—that is mo-stly white multi-generational Italians leaving Italy and newcomers, I have decided to use the word
flux to designate both flows of people. The word flux and its neutrality works in this thesis to reveal
how the media carries out an obvious double standard, and notably ascribes very different connota-tions to each migration story. By using the term flux I hope to mitigate at least on paper the diffe-rences that hierarchize these groups. According to the Sesto Rapporto Carta di Roma 2018, the most substantial thematic category of 2018 on immigration is that of migration flows. The catego13 -ries identified are six: economy and work, terrorism, criminality and safety, hospitality, society and culture and migratory flows. The category of migratory flows includes news on measures such as border control, the closure of Italian ports to migrant and aid ships and the political debate on flow management. Thus, the report highlights the special consideration that the news currently reserve to the attempt to understand the implications of these flows and therefore the importance that the very concept of flow has at a regional and global scale.
Nevertheless, the reason I prefer the word flux rather than flow has to do with a subtle diffe-rence in meaning: flow may refer to the semantic field of leakage, that often, as I analyze later on in the thesis, has been a metaphor that refers to the hemorrhage, to the loss of co national human capi-tal; whereas flux refers to a state of constant change. I use the term flux as a way to: recognize the encompassing temporal and spacial dimension of migration; acknowledge the political right to be in motion; and underscore the progress that characterizes the pursuit of life projects, indistinctly of the
Gabriele Proglio, “Is the Mediterranean a White Italian-European sea? The Multiplications of Borders in
12
the Production of Historical Subjectivity”, Interventions, 2018, p. 13. Notizie di Chiusura, op.cit., p. 20.
13
country of origin. In using the term flux, I take into account the complexes of relations that bind al-ready settled migrants to potential migrants, the so called networks of migration. Furthermore as 14 sociologist Maurizio Ambrosini suggests, networks, rather than chains, underline the agency of the migrants and aim to be a bridge between structuralist (macro) theories and individualist (micro) theories.15
The pivot of this thesis are therefore the fluxes of immigrants and emigrants as well as the implicit function of race as a constitutive element of the practices of inclusion and exclusion. Race in the Italian context tends to remain implicit (Camilla Hawthorne, human geographer and a voice of Black Italia talks about “Anti-racism without race” ; scholars of the Italian postcolonial Cristi16 17 -na Lombardi-Diop, Gaia Giuliani and Cateri-na Romeo make reference to “racial evaporations” as 18 formulated by scholar of critical race theory David Theo Goldberg ) even thought racism and im19 -migration appear to be closely intertwined. Despite the fact that race mostly remains an unnamed issue in Italy , a growing number of writers and scholars belonging to what has been called Black 20
Italia are challenging the standardized image of Italianness or Europeanness, proposing new
ver-sions of the European/Italian identity. According to Di Maio: “their stories provide more textured 21 details about these issues than are usually provided by sociologists or anthropologists, and by the
Ernst Georg Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration” Journal of the Statistical Society of London, Vol. 48, N.
14
2, 1885.
Maurizio Ambrosini “Delle reti e oltre: processi migratori, legami sociali e istituzioni”, Università di Ge
15
-nova, centro studi Medì – Migrazioni nel Mediterraneo, 2006, p. 4. See further down.
16
Camilla Hawthorne, Pina Piccolo, “Anti-racism without race”, Africa is a Country, 15 Sept. 2016. https://
17
africasacountry.com/2016/09/anti-racism-without-race-in-italy/ 09/15/2016. Accessed 15 May 2019.
Caterina Romeo, “Racial Evaporations”, in Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Caterina Romeo (eds.) Post Colonial
18
Italy. Challenging National Homogeneity, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012. p. 220.
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
19
Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “Postracial/Postcolonial Italy”, in Post Colonial Italy, op. cit.
20
Heather Merrill, “Postcolonial Borderlands: Black Life Worlds and Relational Place in Turin, Italy”,
21
ACME, 2014, 13 (2), p. 266.
nation’s dominant discourse on immigration, mostly led by the media and legal texts.” Black Italia 22 appears to be an apparatus that brings together both the refugee question and the black liberation struggle. Its voices and contributions, even though crucial for the aspired reconfiguration of the Ita-lian national identity, will not be the center of my inquiry, as my focus will mostly be the medial representation of the fluxes (the representation of the emigrant in particular) and the policies they inform. That said, to conduct research on representations of em/im/migrants without making refe-rence to the important scholarship and activist discourses taking place as we speak would not only be remiss. The critical race studies work and activism inform the present thesis even if this thesis does not directly engage with it.
Although the first two chapters of this thesis focus on representations of immigration to Italy in the past twenty years, the overarching question that this thesis asks is: how does the Italian emi-grant narrative of today serve to perpetuate a quite racialized notion of the Italian nation state? As such, the thesis’ methodology constitutes an ethical agenda: to take account of why similar dyna-mics, what I name ‘fluxes,’ are connoted in such drastically divergent ways, with violent implica-tions to the group denoted more negatively. That is, the thesis takes account of two parallel fluxes that are rarely read together: that of the immigrant understood as de fact from the Global South and that of the emigrant out of Italy to more affluent spaces in the Global North.
The first chapter situates Italy within the contemporary EU frame of policies and approaches towards the refugee ‘crisis.’ The first chapter recounts the more recent history of migration in Italy (roughly 2000-2019), so as to follow the legal evolution of policies that constructed the notion of ‘illegal’ migration in Europe. Furthermore, the chapter foregrounds and takes account of important recent scholarship that emphasizes how both Italy’s brief colonial adventure and Italy’s first mass emigration (1861-1829) have played a crucial role in the construction of the concept of the exi23 -stence of an Italian race, which still reverberates in the current policing of immigration.
Alessandra Di Maio, op. cit., p.120.
22
Federica Bretagna, Marina Maccari-Clayton, “Italy, migration 1815 to present”, The Encyclopedia of Glo
23
-bal Human Migration, Blackwell Publishing, 2013 p. 2.
The second chapter focuses on the role of media in the construction of tropes that inform the production of policies. After a first analysis of the studies on mediatic representations of immigra-tion, the chapter further pivots around the figure of the Italian emigrant and more specifically diatic productions that deal with the phenomenon of the Italian brain drain. As far as the news me-dia are concerned, the thesis mainly focuses on online journalism.
The third chapter proposes a postcolonial reading of the Italian comedy Fuga di cervelli (2013). As a cultural object, the comedy whose name is literally ‘Brain Drain’ presents controver-sial depictions of the relationships that occur between the (male, heterosexual, white) Italian emi-grant and his non normative counterparts, such as non white minorities or women. This thesis wi-shes to inscribe these productions within a postcolonial model that takes into account the specifici-ties of the Italian situation. As Caterina Romeo and Cristina Lombardi-Diop theorize, it is necessary to distinguish the specificity of the Italian situation in regards to a postcolonial theory, whose “na-tional paradigm [is] rarely understood within a postcolonial framework [and therefore] compels us to evaluate postcolonialism under a new light.” Thought of as one of the main conditions that sha24 -pe cultural productions and social practices, postcolonialism is here intended as an imbalance of economic power and an influence on culture. That said, this acceptation of postcolonialism signals a continuity with colonialism rather than a rupture with it; this is thus the light under which to read the medial representations and the cultural productions that relate to the histories of migration. The postcolonial approach bridges the subject history with the subject media revealing their interdepen-dence.
Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Caterina Romeo, “Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy,” Post
24
Colonial Italy. op. cit., p.1.
✴ Chapter 1: Legalities
✴Beginning. The construction of illegality: legalities of a ‘crisis’
The IOM Glossary on Migration defines ‘illegal entry’ as an “act of crossing borders wi25 -thout complying with the necessary requirements for legal entry into the receiving State,” but it 26 also states that the word ‘irregular’ is to be preferred from the word ‘illegal’ as “the latter carries a criminal connotation and is seen as denying migrants’ humanity.” Even if we decide to use the less 27 negatively connoted ‘irregular,’ the truth is that today in Italy being an ‘illegal’ migrant represents a criminal offense, as stated by the law 94 of 2009. This law introduces the offense of “Ingresso e soggiorno illegale nel territorio dello Stato” and prescribes a fine from 5.000€ to 10.000€. The28 29 -refore, as previously mentioned, when addressing the question of immigration in and to Italy, I shall refer in this thesis to the so called ‘illegal’ immigration. The Fondazione Ismu estimated that as of 30 1 January 2018 around 533.000 illegal foreigners were residing in Italy. But who is in reality ille31 -gal, and what constructs illegality in the first place? To say those who do not comply with the legal requirements are illegal is self evident: what seems most pressing is to try to understand how mobi-lity across national borders becomes codified into illegamobi-lity. Ultimately, what are the legal ramifica-tions that cast migration to Europe as illegal. According to Federica Mazzara, scholar of gender, migration and intercultural communication, “this process of ‘illegalization’ begins in the characteri-zation of the ‘boat-people’ crossing the Sicilian channel as clandestini, therefore unlawful, even
IOM (International organization for Migration) is an intergovernative organization for migration founded
25
in Geneva in 1951.
International Migration Law N°25 - Glossary on Migration second edition, Oim, Geneva, 2011, p.49.
26
Ivi, p. 54.
27
Illegal entrance and residence in the territory of the [Italian] State.
28
Disposizioni in materia di sicurezza pubblica of 15 July 2009, L. 94/2009, Art 10 bis.
29
Fondazione iniziative e studi sulla multietnicità (Foundation for initiatives and studies on multietnicity)
30
“Elementi per chiarire i dubbi sui numeri degli immigrati irregolari”, Fondazione ISMU, 3 May 2019.
31
http://www.ismu.org/chiarimenti-numero-immigrati-irregolari/ Accessed 31 May 2019.
fore they have been appropriately identified as such.” The public view on immigrant illegality, 32 therefore, depends on the excessive spectacularization of the boat crossings, which saw a burst in 33 2015. According to human geographer and anthropologist Nicholas De Genova the spectacle of 34 migrant illegality is reinforced by a “larger discursive formation that fetishizes ‘illegality’ as a gi-ven, taken-for-granted ‘fact’.” 35
The obsessive alarmist tone with which the media covered the crossings led the public opi-nion to believe that crossings are illegal and furthermore that crossing migrants come to be the ille-gal subjects which Italy is unwillingly hosting. The truth is slightly different: boat landings are only one of the typologies that may cause irregularity. In fact, many of those who have an illegal status today entered by land, and some may have had temporary permits or touristic visas, but overstayed once these expired. Moreover, between 2000 and 2006, only an average of 12% of irregular mi36 -grants entered Italy via its maritime borders. The fear of illegality as a consequence of boat lan37 -dings is far from being a rational fear, especially because the chance of understanding the causes that allow the formation for such condition of illegality is overshadowed by rhetorics of ‘crisis.’
The notion of illegality is perhaps the most vital in regards to the irrational fears that the me-dia encourages. In what follows, I trace the steps that led the status of illegality as inextricably lin-ked to the immigrant. And, more importantly, I trace how such a status of being a newcomer came to be associated with what it means to be a menace. From the late 90s, and especially after the fall
Federica Mazzara, “Spaces of Visibility for the Migrants of Lampedusa: The Counter Narrative of the Ae
32
-sthetic Discourse,” Italian studies, Vol. 70 no. 4, November, 2015, p. 454. Cfr De Genova and Cutitta, see further down.
33
Dossier statistico immigrazione, op. cit., p. 160.
34
Nicholas De Genova, “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion”,
35
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2013, p. 2.
“Elementi per chiarire i dubbi sui numeri degli immigrati irregolari”, op. cit. http://www.ismu.org/chiari
36
-menti-numero-immigrati-irregolari/
Paolo Cutitta, Lo spettacolo del confine. Lampedusa tra produzione e messa in scena della frontiera, Mi
37
-mesis, 2012 p. 27.
of the Twin Towers in September 2001, the Global North’s has tightened its security measures . In 38 2006 Gianfranco Fini , then vice prime minister as well as foreign minister under the Berlusconi 39 government, praised the “promptness with which Italy ha[d] responded to the terrorist threat in the wake of 11 September, adopting measures and legislative instruments in line with the pertinent UN Security Council resolutions.” Just a few years before, 1997 Italy joined the Schengen space of 40 free movement, the area created through the Schengen Agreement signed in 1985. As such, the 41 outer border of the Schengen space moved southward into the waters of the Sicilian channel. . De42 -spite the legal mobility allowed by the Schengen agreement, scholars such as Alison Mountz, Mar-co Omizzolo and Rutvica Andrijasevic have undersMar-cored the fact that the southern border of Italy, including its islands, is no understood understood as the southern border of Europe. Rather, sou-thern Italy has now become threshold space, a meta border: that is, the border is no longer the coasts of Lampedusa or mainland Sicily, but rather the entire southern Mediterranean region. Whe-reas the southern land borders of Italy and its islands once clearly demarcated the border of Europe, they now mark the northern ends of a thick border: the southern realms of Sardinia and Sicily have come to represent a mega-meta border region. Externalized by agreements and protocols, the aim of the meta-border is to move the selection procedure and detention centers once located within Euro-pe located outside EuroEuro-pe: the strategy is to deal with the ‘problem’ before it Euro-penetrates the verita-ble borders of Europe. 43
Adamson, “Crossing Borders”, op. cit., p. 195.
38
Fini has been defined a “post fascist leader” by scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat in her article “Modernity is just
39
over there”, p. 390
Gianfranco Fini, “Italy’s Role in Mediterranean Security and the Fight Against Terrorism” Mediterranean
40
Quarterly, Duke University Press,Winter 2006, p. 2.
Agreement on the Accession of the Italian Republic to the Convention implementing the Schengen
41
Agreement of 14 June 1985, OJ L 239, 22.9.2000, EUR-Lex 42000A0922(03).
Giacomo Orsini, “Securitization as a Source of Insecurity: A Ground-Level Look at the Functioning of
42
Europe’s External Border in Lampedusa”, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2016, p. 136. Omizzolo, “The European meta borders”, op. cit.
43
The deliberate ambiguity of the geopolitical configuration of the southern border triggers practices of bioselection and politics of inclusion and exclusion. Legal mobility is thus possible wi-thin the internal borders of the Schengen space, for this with EU citizenship. The creation of a 44 space with an alleged unitary identity and borders to be defended allows the condition of possibility for ‘illegal migration,’ incarnated by the movement that follows a trajectory from outside towards the ‘interior’ European space. There is therefore the evidence of the double standard of fluxes that sees mobility as legal and which moves within Europe, whereas migration is understood as illegal, as a massive force which hostilely moves towards Europe. Philosopher and political theorist Stathis Kouvelakis also has identified the explosion of mortality rate as a consequence of the creation of the Schengen space: he notes how “the Europeanization of borders, the construction of Fortress Europe, is a major factor in this callous waste of tens of thousands of lives, a mass mortality without prece-dent in European history in time of ‘peace’.” 45
In this way, the very construction of borders delimitates the political status of people, people who are being categorized as unlawful by their life condition, instead of their criminal record. With the closing of the borders of Europe a new signification to the meaning of mobility has come into being: the freedom of movement shifts dramatically from the notion of ‘mobility’ to that of ‘migra-tion’, as migration comes to signify border crossing, and it emanates by the rippling outgrowth of border enforcement. Migration as we think of it today then is bound to illegality because the auto-nomy of movement is withheld. And yet, this illegality is circumstantial. If there were no borders, there would be no migrations, just mobility. Nicholas De Genova, influenced by Foucault’s work 46
Political theorist Stathis Kouvelakis notes however that even for Europeans there are limitations in regards
44
to freedom of mobility. Citizens of Eastern Europe belonging to minority groups like the Roma people have been subjected to derogatory rules. (Kouvelakis, 2018, p. 9. See next footnote for full citation.)
Stathis Kouvelakis, “Borderland. Greece and the EU’s Southern Question” New Left Review 110, Mar -
45
Apr 2018, p. 20.
Nicholas De Genova (ed.), The Borders of ‘Europe’, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2017,
46
p.6.
on illegalities and delinquencies, maintains that the law and its enforcement creates an apparatus for the everyday production of a durable and enduring migrant ‘illegality.’47
Until 2002, the main route for immigration to Europe from Africa and the south-Eastern Me-diterranean remained the one across the southern Adriatic Sea. Since 2002, it has become the one that from Libya crosses the Mediterranean and goes to Lampedusa. That said, in the past months, 48 due to the austere measures taken by the Italian government in recent years, Spain (along with its North African Ceuta and Melilla), has replaced Italy as the main gateway. For most of the early 49 2000s then, boat landings, in Lampedusa, but especially in other areas of southern Italy, have been ongoing for years, even before the early 2000s. If at first the landings were mainly self organized and the migrants rarely stayed on the site of disembarkation for more than a day, since the late 50 1990s migrants have been intercepted up to 100 nautical miles from the island and made to disem-bark in Lampedusa. In fact, after the introduction of administrative detention with the Turco-Napo-litano Law in 1998, Lampedusa saw the creation of detention facilities on the island, which made 51 it a practical site for disembarkation and immediate detention.
Thus, the creation of Lampedusa as a primary reception site in the Mediterranean is also the reason why the site has become a symbol of current immigration as well as the reason that allowed the news media to exploit the image of these landings and strategically deploy them as ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency.’ At the same time, the current decrease of landings on the Italian territory as of the 52
Nicholas De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annu. Rev. Anthropol.
47
2002.
Nick Dines, Nicola Montagna and Vincenzo Ruggiero, “Thinking Lampedusa: border construction, the
48
spectacle of bare life and the productivity of migrants”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, 2015, p. 432.
Thomas Paul Wiederholen, “Spain: New Gateway to Europe for Mass-Migration”, Gatestone Institute, 1
49
August 2018. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12792/spain-mass-migration Accessed 12 June 2019. Cutitta, Lo spettacolo del confine, op. cit.
50
Dimes, Montagna, Ruggiero, op. cit. p. 432.
51
New Keywords Collective, “Europe / Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe’”, Europe at
52
a Crossroads : Managed Inhospitality, Zone Books, 2015, p. 26.
summer of summer 2018, advertised by Deputy Prime Minister Salvini as a personal success is no-thing but the slow dismantlement of the operating system of Lampedusa.53
Before the 1990s, crossings of the Mediterranean Sea were not illegal. It was the Martelli Law in 1990 which regularized the intake of immigrants from outside Europe and instituted visas for North Africans. So differently from what it may seem, crossings have been happening for a long 54 time, but the general media did not initially or systematically exploit or trigger feelings of insecurity and fear as a means of political propaganda. The deployment of securitizing measures and of eco-nomic resources inaugurated by the Martelli Law as well as the active presence of the Frontex Agency on the southern border of Italy are part of a series of ‘emergency’ policies designed to 55 56 restrain the “‘crises’ relating to the (‘unauthorized’) movement of people.”57
Sociologist Giacomo Orsini notes that: “The contemporary maritime EU border is enforced by complex electronic surveillance devices, big navy ships, drones and helicopters, intelligence de-ployed in the North African coast, Coastguard’s boats, radars, law enforcement officials, and more.” As such, the frenzy around ‘illegal’ immigration has caused an increase of restrictions that 58 allegedly aim to stem moral panic, but which in fact feed it. As a consequence, as scholar of migra-tions Rutvica Andrijasevic explains, the “tightening of immigration policies and strengthening of border controls has resulted in a reduction of legal channels for migration into the EU so that illega-lity has become a structural characteristic of modern migratory flows.” Clearly, illegaillega-lity and re59
Adriano Biondi, “Perché quello dei “porti chiusi” è un pericoloso imbroglio di Matteo Salvini”, fanpage.it,
53
10 Jan 2019. https://www.fanpage.it/quello-che-ce-dietro-il-pericoloso-imbroglio-dei-porti-chiusi-di-salvini/ Accessed 2 Jun 2019.
Nick Dines, Nicola Montagna, Vincenzo Ruggiero, op.cit., p. 432.
54
Frontex is the European Border and Coast Guard Agency.
55
New Keywords Collective, op. cit., p. 8.
56
Ibidem.
57
Giacomo Orsini, op. cit., p.137.
58
Rutvica Andrijasevic, “The southern gate to fortress Europe”, Islam and tolerance in wider Europe 2007,
59
p. 31.
strictions are both the consequence and cause of the other, causing a loop: a teleological tragedy. 60 If teleology refers to events taking place in light of the purpose they serve (rather than taking place organically as consequences of actual events), then creating a panic about immigration feeds to ju-stify the security state that seemingly keeps Europe safe. It appears therefore that the status of lega-lity is just not accessible to immigrants, who, once in Italy, are also often not informed about the modalities for applying for asylum. That is, Fortress Europe, the epithet that many more left-wing 61 intellectual use to describe Europe today does all in its power to prevent immigrants from become legal. More simply, being illegal becomes a means for containing what has become for many Euro-pean citizens, a ‘crisis.’ The reality should be far less worrying: “The number of people residing in an EU Member State with citizenship of a non-member country on 1 January 2018 was 22.3 mil-lion, representing 4.4 % of the EU-28 population.”62
The recent promulgation of the Decreto legge immigrazione e sicurezza wanted by the Mini-stry of the Interior Matteo Salvini aspires to introduce more severe measures against illegal migra-tion, but according to the ISPI (Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale) , the amount of ir63 -regulars residing on Italian ground will most likely double in the two years following the issue of the Decreto (2019-2020) . The Decreto prescribes the abrogation of the permit of residence for 64 humanitarian reason (one of the three forms of protection that the Italian State used to offer) from the 5 October 2018. The decree is not retroactive, meaning that the requests of those who applied for protection before the 5 October 2018 and that have not yet received a response will be judged according to the rules in force before the 5 October. Nevertheless, the decree prescribes that at the
Hein de Haas, “The Myth of Invasion”, Third World Quarterly 2008, p.16.
60
Dossier statistico immigrazione, op.cit. p. 129.
61
Migration and Migrant Population Statistics, Eurostat, March 2019, p. 9. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/sta
62
-tistics-explained/pdfscache/1275.pdf Accessed 12 June 2019. Institute for Studies on International Politics.
63
Matteo Villa, “I nuovi irregolari in Italia”, ISPI, 18 December 2018, https://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblica
64
-zione/i-nuovi-irregolari-italia-21812 Accessed 19 April 2019.
conclusion of the period of the temporary permit, it is no longer possible to renew the request ac-cording to the preexisting rules. 65
Ironically, the same decree whose aim is that of preventing illegality is in fact going to increa-se it. Is migration to Europe ever going to be decriminalized? It is no doubt that it would be benefi-cial for the state coffers, as it would save money that is now employed in the securitization of the border, it would produce taxpayer citizens and erase the widespread and nonsensical condition of illegality, also demonstrated by Clelia Bartoli in the Casi italiani of her book Razzisti per legge. It still remains a crucial question to whom this rhetoric around illegality is beneficial. For now, it is only clear how advantageous this has been for Salvini in the last political elections of 2018.
In this regard, the Italian policy on its maritime border can be summarized by the ubiquitous Salvinian adage: Chiudiamo i porti! The notoriety of this sentence encompasses social media, news media, and political discourses. As a slogan, it has become emblematic of a new chapter of zero to-lerance inaugurated by the Ministry of the Interior Matteo Salvini. In truth, the harbors of Italy are not closed, as there has been no official measure or decree issued by the Minister of Transport that prescribes closed ports for reasons of public order. Though, the Italian disengagement in the re66 -scues allowed Italy to deny access to foreign NGO ships. As the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordina-tion Centre (MRCC) stopped coordinating the rescues starting from summer 2018, Italy denied any responsibility and refused to indicate a place of safety to the NGOs which coordinated the rescues.67
Paolo Cutitta in 2014 elaborated the concept of border play: an ongoing performance of diffe-rent narratives functioning as political propaganda and taking place in Lampedusa, symbol of the southern border par excellence. For Cutitta, Lampedusa is thus the theatrical stage for this border
Redazione portale immigrazione, “Decreto Salvini: la Corte di Cassazione contro la retroattività”, Portale
65
Immigrazione, 11 May 2019.
https://portaleimmigrazione.eu/il-decreto-salvini-la-magistratura-contro-la-re-troattivita/ Accessed 2 Jun 2019.
“Accesso civico ai Ministeri dell’interno e dei Trasporti: nessun provvedimento formale di chiusura dei
66
porti”, ASGI, 10 Jan 2019. https://www.asgi.it/media/comunicati-stampa/chiusura-porti-accesso-civico/ Ac-cessed 2 Jun 2019.
Biondi, op. cit.
https://www.fanpage.it/quello-che-ce-dietro-il-pericoloso-imbroglio-dei-porti-chiusi-di-67
salvini/ Accessed 2 Jun 2019.
play, of which he individuated five acts: toughness, humanness, emergency I, zero immigration, emergency II. The slogan Chiudiamo i porti! can easily be inscribed in this narrative as a variation of the ‘zero immigration’ narrative performed in the fourth act (2009-2010) . Even though the lan68 -dings diminished, this new act is still the proof of an ongoing trend that sees the southern border as spectacle, exploited for the construction of a state of emergency that produces political consensus. 69
✴Legalities of race. The construction of the ‘Italian race’ through Fascism,
forgetful-ness and emigration
To address migration and policies whose effect, and perhaps even intent, is biodisciplinary, it is necessary to examine the specific modes and meanings that race plays in Italian society. The me-diatic portrayal of both fluxes—that is, the supposed brain drain of white Italians emigrating out; and, mostly North and Sub-Saharan African immigrants immigrating in—pivots on an implicit hi-story of the construction of the Italian national fantasy as related to race. It follows then that legal ramifications make critical race theory both a compelling and necessary lens with which to under-stand a racialized sense of ‘the Italian.’
In order to follow the genealogy of racialized thought in contemporary Italy, I briefly touch upon the selective forgetting of the colonial history of Italy and upon the colonial imprint that was
Paolo Cutitta “Borderizing’ the Island. Setting and Narratives of the Lampedusa ‘Border Play’”, ACME,
68
2014.
It is important to note that violence is present not only in practices of exclusion, but also at the moment of
69
entry. Once disembarked, the migrants are confined in the so called CIEs (Center for Identification and Ex-pulsion). These centers are supposed to host the migrants while their identity is investigated and (eventually) their expulsion is organized. Several surveys noted how the migrants enter these camps without receiving adequate information on their rights, on the reasons why they are kept and on the amount of time they will have to spend inside. These camps are places of confinement for people who did not commit any crime, though they are not so different from prisons: overcrowded, poorly cleaned and organized, where the migran-ts are enclosed until the time they get an answer, which most times exceeds the limimigran-ts prescribed by law. (Cfr Fabrizio Gatti “Sette giorni all'inferno: diario di un finto rifugiato nel ghetto di Stato”, L’Espresso, 12 Sept 2016. http://espresso.repubblica.it/inchieste/2016/09/12/news/sette-giorni-all-inferno-diario-di-un-finto-rifu-giato-nel-ghetto-di-stato-1.282517. Accessed the 13 Feb 2019.)
given to the first Italian mass emigration, which dates circa 1861-1929, since the unification of 70 Italy and its birth as a monarchic nation. 71
As previously mentioned, scholars (Lombardi-Diop, Giuliani, Hawtorne, Romeo) highlighted how the concept of race in Italy is problematic as it is for the most part an unnamed issue. Never72 -theless, it is possible to say that the colonial legacy, even if largely a failed one from the perspective of the Italian nation-state, is still crucial to the perception of italianità and the current approach to-wards immigrants.
The imagination of Italian national homogeneity is a byproduct of the mythological narrative of the wider Europe, however, the Italian case presents particularities that have to do with its own 73 postcolonial specificity. Gaia Giuliani’s work on the construction of the Italian racist thought notes how the Fascist rhetoric (before the Arianist turn of 1938), even though not openly mentioning co-lor, constructed the razza italica as a way to exorcise the internal alterity: by including the raciali-zed southerner in the project of a unified fascist Italy, and by displacing the ‘Other’ outside the bor-ders of Italy, and therefore in the colonies. The racial identity of the razza italica was formulated 74 as both mediterranean and white (and therefore different from north European whiteness): the result of the mixture of the best mediterranean ancestry. The presumption of the Italian racial continuity 75 throughout its past and present is intertwined with the idea of moral characteristics that forge the Italian cultural identity. These qualities, in the Fascist rhetoric, were mainly inscribed in the body of
Federica Bertagna and Marina Maccari-Clayton, “Italy: migration 1815 to present” p. 2
70
Choate Making of Italy abroad (1874 Italians were speaking of emigration as a form of imperial expansion) The Regno d’Italia lasted until 1946, after which Italy became a democracy.
71
Lombardi-Diop, “Postracial/Postcolonial Italy”, op.cit.
72
Gaia Giuliani, “Afterword: The Mediterranean as a Stage: Borders, Memories, Bodies”, in Gabriele Pro
73
-glio (ed.), Decolonising the Mediterranean: European Colonial Heritages in North Africa and the Middle
East, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, p. 95.
Gaia Giuliani, “La sottile linea bianca. Intersezioni di razza, genere e classe nell’Italia postcoloniale”, Stu
74
-di Culturali- Anno X, N. 2, Il Mulino, August 2013.
Gaia Giuliani, “Mediterraneità e bianchezza. Il razzismo italiano tra Fascismo e articolazioni contempora
75
-nee (1861-2015)”, Iperstoria – Testi Letterature Linguaggi, Issue 6, Fall 2015, Università di Verona, p. 169.
women, who best incarnated the idea of ‘Roman’ beauty, eteropatriarchal catholic morality, at the service of family and homeland (through procreation), at the same time motherly and sensual com-moners, popular, instinctual, open. These characteristics, first articulated by Fascism, were then reinforced the following years by visual devices such as news broadcasters, statues, school text-books, cinema, which continuously confirmed Italy in its whiteness.76
Italy shares with other former colonial nations the difficulty in recognizing its colonial re-sponsibilities and the legacy of its colonial culture. But, its discomfort with the colonial past is of a different being than that of other nations.
Italy’s process of decolonization, as Lombardi-Diop and Romeo note, “was not the result of local uprisings and wars of independence emanating from the colonies, but rather of military defea-ts” which contributed not only to the possibility of selective forgetting, but also to the voluntary 77 suppression of the whole colonial adventure. The idea of a substantially harmless colonialism and 78 of the italiani brava gente (the soldiers who, because they were Italians, were incapable of doing any harm, were inherently good and were beloved by all populations) entered the popular con-sciousness in the aftermath of World War II. Furthermore from the beginning of the colonial era, Italian propaganda boasted about the difference of its own colonialismo buono as distinctly more moral than the colonial processes of other European colonial powers. This literal whitewashing of 79 colonial violence, together with the fact that Italy did not have to face massive immigration from its former colonies (which on the other hand France or England did) has caused a relative lack of deba-te in different cultural fields and a considerable delay for the rise of postcolonial Italian studies.
Ivi, pp. 169-170.
76
Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Caterina Romeo, “Italy’s Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the Southern
77
Frontier of Europe”, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 18, N. 4, 2015, p. 369. On this note, see the work of Angelo Del Boca.
78
Marco Bernardi, Lia Bruna, “La memoria del colonialismo italiano tra divulgazione storica e antifascismo.
79
Due casi: Resistenze in Cirenaica (Bologna) e Ora e Sempre (Cuneo)”, Il presente e la storia, Giugno 2016, p. 2.
The construction of the ingrained kindness of the Italian population thus has its roots deep in the colonial propaganda, which together with Fascism managed to promulgate laws against racial contamination and at the same time self-exculpatory justifications to its biopolitical ambitions. This attitude that fails to recognize the violence the law does at the expenses of the immigrants is some-how alignable to today’s anti-immigration rhetoric that states “let’s help them in their own homes.”
“Aiutiamoli a casa loro” is a notorious phrase which comes from the book Avanti (2017) written by
the former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. After a controversy on social media, the phrase has been appropriated by the now Ministry of the Interior Matteo Salvini, who used it widely in his po-litical campaign. With this phrase it is made clear that Italy does not mean to disengage with huma-nitarianism as long as it does not entail any more immigration.
Italy suffers thus from colonial amnesia: this self-absolving process coincided, at the end of the Second World War, with the demonization of Germany, Italy’s Axis ally. Italy’s adoption of ra-cial laws in 1938 was looked back as being a consequence of the pact stipulated in 1936 between Italy and Germany. The insistence on Germany’s crimes during the Second World War helped Italy to rehabilitate itself at the expenses of Germany, which became the sole responsible for the horrors of the war in the imaginations of official and popular culture. 80
The particularity of the Italian amnesia entails a particular meaning for the suffix ‘post’ of the word ‘postcolonial’: in the formulation of Cristina Lombardi-Diop, it signals an operation of remo-val, which she applies to the concept of race too and which brings her to the conclusion that post81 -colonial Italy is then also a postracial space: oblivious to race and the whiteness it presumes, que-stions of race are at once ubiquitous and invisible. Caterina Romeo further develops the concept 82 into an ‘evaporation.’ By denying the possibility of race, Italians deny the possibility of racism. In 83
Ivi, p. 1.
80
Lombardi-Diop, “Postracial/Postcolonial Italy”, op.cit., p. 175
81
Ivi, p. 176.
82
Romeo, “Racial Evaporations”, op. cit., p. 220.
83
particular for Romeo: “Strategies that occlude the category of race from critical and theoretical de-bate range from the evaporation of race (by means of which episodes of racism are minimized or labeled as something else) to the automatic assimilation of race discourse with other discourses (illegal immigration, citizenship, class, religion, and, more in general, cultural differences).” 84 Scholar of cultural anthropology and migration studies Caterina Miele also sees a conjunction bet-ween the current denial of racism and the removal of the colonial past.85
The historical construction of Italy as a non racial space is therefore not an accident, but the careful arrangement of a fantasy of coherence and the effort of political biology, strengthened by the mainstream culture of movies and advertisements. Furthermore, according to historian Alessandro 86 Portelli, the racial oblivion from which Italy suffers has been consolidated by broadcasting pro-grams and the progressive Americanization of daily life: an ubiquitous whiteness that is associated with beauty and modernity and that erased i all previous contacts with blackness from the Italian consciousness. The idea of erasure of race operated by media is particularly important for my the87 -sis as it foregrounds and strengthens once more the negotiation of relationships that exist between medial representations, identity formation and policy making. Nevertheless, the shaping of (non) racial thought is characteristic of contemporary Italy and has been possible not only through the me-thodization of internal politics and culture, but also by superintending emigration.
Before Italy became a country of immigration, it was prominently a country of emigration. Its early stages, between 1880 and 1915, saw the emigration of 13 million Italians: “the largest emigra-tion from any country in recorded world history.” As historian Mark Choate demonstrated in Emi88
Ivi, pp. 220-221.
84
Caterina Miele, “Per un’archeologia del discorso razzista in Italia”, La Razza al Lavoro, curated by Anna
85
Curcio and Miguel Mellino, ManifestoLibri, 2012.
In Postracial/Postcolonial Italy Lombardi-Diop analyses blackness in two Italian commercials and links
86
them to an ideology of cleanliness.
Lombardi-Diop, “Postracial/Postcolonial Italy”, op. cit., p. 177.
87
Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation. The Making of Italy Abroad, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
88
Massachusetts, 2008, p. 1.
grant Nation. The Making of Italy Abroad (2008), it is possible to trace a connection between
emi-gration and colonialism. Choate bases his argument on the first study on Italian colonialism made by Leone Carpi (1874), who suggested that emigration was a “spontaneous” type of colonial ex89 -pansion. As Choate points out, Carpi’s narrative of spontaneity runs counter to the fact that Italian emigrants were highly incentivized to migrate. As it became clearer that Italy’s efforts in affirming itself as an imperial and colonial power were not as effective as those of others European nations, politicians started to talk about emigration as part of the imperial expansion as a way to maintain international power. Italy thus aimed to keep ties with its citizens abroad (setting the basis for what still is the Italian legislation on matters of citizenship, wherein second and third generation foreign based citizens can apply for and be accorded Italian citizenship, even if they have few ties to the ‘motherland’). Given the notion that Italy sent its poorest to the richest countries, it is also possible to understand emigration under imperial Italy as a sort of ‘emigrant colonialism’: as Italian commu-nities abroad, whether in the USA or Ethiopia, were employed rhetorically to strengthen the colo-nial narrative, being framed as part of imperial expansion into the world at large. Choate places 90 under the definition ‘emigrant colonialism’ all practices and policies which aimed at reaping eco-nomic benefit: whether colonial or that of poorer Italian moving to more wealthy nations. Importan-tly, Choate is also interested in how Italian communities abroad put forward the concept of
italiani-tà, an idea that became mythology at the service of the nation, so that every citizen of the
transna-tional Italy, regardless of his geographical position (for the ultimate Italian migrant was male), knew what it meant to be part of ‘Greater Italy.’ Thus Choate shows how emigration became cen91 -tral to the shaping of the ideas of nation and citizenship in Italy.
Even though contemporary Italian politics are not officially focused on expansionism anymo-re, I suggest that it has not been a hazard to the Italian state that its diaspora and its chauvinistic
Ivi, p. 23. 89 Ivi, p. 315. 90 Ivi, p. 6. 91
tion of nationalism remain to this day intertwined narratives. The project of this thesis, which is to think through immigration to and emigration from Italy together, needs to be addressed so as to de-nounce a radicalizing and deeply racist discourse. More simply put, the narrative around the brain drain is symptomatic of a nationalistic nostalgia which posits itself dangerously close to the raciali-zation of the immigrant, through the attachment to the emigrants. To use the words of comparative literature scholar Pasquale Verdicchio, it is thus pressing to “rethink nationalism through the Italian diaspora.”92
Historically, because of the tremendous emigration that Italy has suffered over the decades, Italy always aimed to keep ties with its citizens abroad, since the first Nationality Law of 1912. In 93 1992, the principle of jus sanguinis was reinforced, and it is still the predominant method for the acquisition of Italian citizenship, through a bloodline. Italy viewed these nationals, which were first and foremost co-ethnic citizens, as “demographic capital to activate selectively,”94as demonstrated by later governments. The historical attachment to the Italian emigrants, the development of the concept of italianità and the lack of naturalization campaigns in Italy point to a racialized access to the Italian citizenship, as identified by scholar of migration Guido Tintori. Tintori claims race then as a legitimate critical category which allows him to elaborate on the Italian concept of nationhood that he sees as being based on the belief of a common ethnicity. Subsequently, because of such a construction, the legal apparatus that regiments who is Italian is based on the privilege of whiteness and the disadvantages of brownness and blackness. Tintori’s focus is centered on the privileged 95 political status of the descendant of Italians abroad as a consequence of the convergence of the con-cept of Demos (“the populace of a democracy as a political unit” ) with the concon-cept of Ethnos: a 96
Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism Through the Italian Diaspora, Fairleigh
92
Dickinson Univ Press, 1997.
Guido Tintori,, “Italian mobilities and the demos,” Italian Mobilities, Routledge, 2015, p. 113.
93
Ibidem.
94
Privileged in relation to other categories of migrants which are not Italians.
95
Oxford dictionary.
96
community characterized by shared ethnicity. What results is the notion that those who move 97 away from Italy remain mobile, while those who move to Italy, or at least try to, remain arrested in development. Tintori’s focus on Italian mobilities rather than on immigration to Italy, is original as well as pivotal in the exposure of the depth of the marginalization of racialized groups. He demon-strates how such marginalization exploits the ties with Italian (co ethnic, at least as interiorized by the public thanks to media representations) citizens who reside abroad. The construction and the stress of such ties transcends the physical creation of an Italian Nation State, but comes together in the creation of an idea of nationhood that has little to do with territorial sovereignty and the exercise of democracy, but rather of an abstract set of cultural ties whose conglomerate produces a new set of borders for the discernment of what is Italian and what is not.
As demonstrated above, among the characteristics or ingredients which allegedly constitute the Italian idea of nationhood, race, as an organizing principle is always, but tacitly there: that is the ‘the absence of race’ serves as a secret force that shapes Italian society. Many scholars have elabo98 -rated on the complexity of the concept of race in the Italian context, and underlined the multiple meanings that racialization had in the Italian scenario: from the racialization of the ‘Other’ during the colonial experience to the racialization of the Southerner. To this day, Italy remains a perceived nation populated by ‘heritage’ (i.e. white, nativist) Europeans, which fails to recognize its internal diversities as integral, instead of just integrated. As Hawthorne notes, “blackness specifically func-tions as a symbol of non-belonging in Italy.” As a consequence, it is crucial to ask the question 99 Alessandro Portelli poses, transposing the Du Boisian question: is it possible to be black and Ame-rican at once: is it possible to be both Italian and black?100 It is a hard question. The report Ius soli.
Tintori, op.cit.
97
Peter Wade, “The Presence and Absence of Race”, Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 44, Routledge, 2010.
98
Camilla Hawtorne, “In Search of Black Italia: Notes on race, belonging, and activism in the black Medi
99
-terranean,” Transition, Issue 123, Indiana University Press, 2017, p. 160.
Alessandro Portelli, “Sulla linea del colore”, Alessandro Portelli Blogspot, 10 Oct 2010 http://alessandro
100
-portelli.blogspot.it/2010/10/web-dubois-sulla-linea-del-colore.html. Accessed 2 Jun 2019.
Storie di italiani in tutto e per tutto. Tranne che per la legge (2013) made by fanpage.it and visible
on Youtube shows amongst others Davide (eleven years sold), a young black boy who speaks to the camera with a thick Neapolitan accent: “Spiritually I feel Neapolitan, but physically I don’t. I’m alright… Ch’aggio a dicere?”101
“Ius soli. Storie di italiani in tutto e per tutto. Tranne che per la legge.”, fanpage.it, 2013, min 1:05,
101
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3ajYI23a8k Accessed 2 Jun 2019.
✴ Chapter 2: The role of media
✴The racialization of the immigrant
As a geographical space that in the constructed mainstream memory used to be only ‘ours’ and is now filled with ‘others,’ Italy has become the figurative locus of the revelation of the recogni-tion of the colonial narrative of the ‘emptying and filling’ a semantic space.102 In what follows, I argue that the migrant ‘crisis’ functions for Italy as a Freudian - postcolonial return of the repressed. That is, the migrant ‘crisis’ allows for the resurface of the suppressed Italian colonial past in Soma-liland. In the Italian subconscious, violence had become oblivion and is now reactivated in crucial moments, revealing its power and rootedness in the common conscience. Furthermore, the migrant ‘crisis’ and the fear of an invasion may represent the unwarranted recognition of European’s colo-nial drives and violence in the hands of ‘others’.
The alleged threat of an invasion of immigrants (as we saw, increasingly of African origin) recognizes itself in the legitimization of centuries of colonial appropriation of an equally alleged no man’s land and imagines a mirrored invasion, attributing inclinations that are typical of the Euro-pean past to lawless subjects, and incarcerates them in detention centers all over the Mediterranean. The moral panic generated by the entrance of the ‘other’ onto the Italian nation-state is strengthened even more by the fugue or eradication of ‘our’ youth from the space that is supposed to be ‘ours’ too. What follows is the fear of colonization of Italy meant as the substitution of one religion with another, one moral with another.
What remains unsaid and, I argue, is the most crucial point in the dispensation of fear is the substitution of one ethnicity with another. As Derrida points out in his work on the meaning of ho-spitality,103 to enter a space also means to come “not only toward me, but within me: occupy me, take place in me, which means, by the same token, also take my place.”104 The construction of the
Giuliani, “Afterword: The Mediterranean as a Stage” op. cit., p. 100.
102
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, Stanford University press, Stanford, California, 2000.
103
Ivi, p. 123.
104
absolute ‘other’ renders impossible the performance of absolute hospitality, and renders integration and miscegenation not only absolutely impossible, but also a threat. Scholars such as Giuliani and Bartoli claim as well that the category of the migrant is suffering from a process of racialization. Lombardi-Diop as well highlights how:
Most recently, a new wave of scholarship has extended the study of racism beyond the Fascist period to contemporary forms of institutional discrimination and individual racist practices against immigrants (Dal Lago; Mezzadra; Curcio and Mellino).105
In the case of Bartoli,106 migrants’ ‘otherness’ is produced on the basis of the idea of constructed illegality which I previously discussed, which sees migration to Europe as inherently illegal (or of the realm of the destructive unconscious). Thus, the mere fact of being migrants stigmatizes them as illegal. Such a label ends up embracing the totality of their identity. Bartoli’s argument is precise and explanatory, and lingers on concrete examples of the effects of discrimination that is produced by such institutionalized racism.
Giuliani’s claim on the other hand is that cultural and racial incompatibilities with italianità are visible in the policing of the risky bodies of the immigrants. The visual representation of mi-grants’ bodies through the media is racialized, and their racialization is in turn gendered: the male bodies are associated with deadly sicknesses (ebola, tuberculosis), terrorism, Islam, rape and vio-lence. Women’s and children’s bodies are victimized and patronized. On the bodies of the migrant is therefore inscribed the color line which justifies their detention as preventive of potential criminal behavior, a biased attitude which resonates with of racial profiling and criminal anthropology.107
Therefore, we could say that the mere association with the migrant category contributes to the racialization of the immigrant, but it is also not its sole constitutive aspect. Race, or the color line, is still the core ingredient of the racializing assemblage from which the migrants suffer, and the proof
Lombardi-Diop, “Postracial/Postcolonial Italy”, op. cit., p. 176.
105
Clelia Bartoli, Razzisti per legge, Editori Laterza, Bari 2012, p. 52.
106
Giuliani, “Mediterraneità e bianchezza”, op. cit., pp. 173-175.
107
can be found in the fact that more recent Italian citizens who are not from Eastern Europe are often failed to be considered fully Italians.108 Instead, they are considered as multi-generational immi -grants. The jus sanguinis principle also legalizes such estrangement, even if many young person born, raised, and schooled in Italy are more familiar with Italy and speak better Italian than many of the, for example, North American italianized national subjects who only were accorded their citi-zenship thanks to laws privileging the North American diaspora.
The role that the media plays in perpetuating radicalized narratives of Italianness serves as the point of intersection between the immigrant and the emigrant. That is, the dialectic encounter of two narratives around present-day Italian fluxes finds its node in the role that the media has played in the production of frames. Here, I draw on the work of Marco Binotto, referring to mediatic
fra-mes109 as the deployment of specific visualizations, linguistic choices and metaphors so as to dictate the symbolic horizon which limits meaning and assigns new signifieds to a set of existing and even age-old signifiers. Furthermore, the production of the aforementioned frames is contingent on a pro-cess of selection that in turn results in the hierarchization of issues. Such dynamics set the agenda of social problems which has a catalyzing influence on political decisions. Medial representations of the ‘illegal’ migrant, the clandestino, and of the young (middle-class, multi-generational, nativist, heritage, typical, and white) Italian abroad, become pivotal frames through which to read the latest events.
As Paolo Cutitta notes in his study of the ‘borderness’ of Lampedusa, the southern border incarnates the perfect theatrical stage for the representation of the spectacle of the alien ‘other.’ Thus the proscenium of exceptionality and the promulgation of insecurity only serves to further ju-stify and buttress the securitization of borders. As is by now general knowledge among scholars of genocide studies and the state of exception, the production of a politics of fear has constantly been
Camilla Hawtorne, “In search of Black Italia: Notes on race, belonging, and activism in the black Medi
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-terranean”, Transition, Issue 123, 2017, p. 167.
Binotto, Bruno, Lai (Curated by). Tracciare confini. L’immigrazione nei media italiani, FrancoAngeli,
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Milano, 2016, p.15.
