Master of Arts Thesis Euroculture

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Master of Arts Thesis

Euroculture

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Home)

Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Host)

August 2017

Mapping the ‘Black Mediterranean’: Critical perspectives on

race, space and citizenship from Europe’s southern frontier

Submitted by:

John William Trajer Student Number Home University: 21563640 Student Number Host University: S3069524 Permanent Address: 15A Colinette Road, London, SW15 6QG

E-mail address: trajerj93@gmail.com Phone number: 0044 7900 636 327

Supervised by:

Göttingen: Prof. Dr. Barbara Schaff Groningen: Dr Jana Hönke

Göttingen, 1 August 2017

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MA Programme Euroculture

Declaration

I, John William Trajer, hereby declare that this thesis, entitled “Mapping the ‘Black Mediterranean’: Critical perspectives on race, space and citizenship from Europe’s southern frontier”, submitted as partial requirement for the MA Programme Euroculture, is my own original work and expressed in my own words. Any use made within this text of works of other authors in any form (e.g. ideas, figures, texts, tables, etc.) are properly acknowledged in the text as well as in the bibliography.

I declare that the written (printed and bound) and the electronic copy of the submitted MA thesis are identical.

I hereby also acknowledge that I was informed about the regulations pertaining to the assessment of the MA thesis Euroculture and about the general completion rules for the Master of Arts Programme Euroculture.

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Among the diverse and interrelated crises threatening the social integrity of ‘Europe’ and the political foundations of its ‘Union’, perhaps none is more pressing than its crisis of geography. While European decision-makers have sought to gain control over entries across the Aegean Sea through the controversial Turkey deal, the arrival of some 180 000 migrants in Italy in 2016 highlights the ongoing porosity of its southern borders in the Mediterranean basin.1_{It is, therefore, at its southern ‘frontier’ that one finds a particularly}

“heightened anxiety over the meaning and identity of place in contemporary Europe,” where a “geopolitical and biopolitical border between Africa and Europe”2_{has been}

heavily militarised in a bid to maintain “the racial ontology of sovereign territory” through “the symbolic organization of space, place, and political community.”3

As a “story of borders and routes, of distance and proximity, and of location and accessibility,” the ongoing ‘migrant crisis’ has thus been framed in European terms not only as a humanitarian crisis, but as a crisis both of defining sovereign space and of defining the European community that inhabits that space.4 The attendant abolishment and fortification of Europe’s internal and external borders respectively over the last two decades, a process in which the EU’s border agency Frontex has played an increasingly prominent role, has resulted in the creation of a ‘Fortress Europe’. This political and ideological construction, enforcing what Balibar has famously termed a form of “European apartheid”, has been supported by a pervasive media rhetoric that renders these non-white migrants of the Global South invasive, ‘irregular’, or even ‘illegal’ presences in EU territory. 5 As such, the European community thus continues to be defined at the intersection of geography and race. In the context of ‘Fortress Europe’, the migrant therefore occupies an intimate relationship with space which, “as it is closely connected with issues of legality and citizenship […] becomes the contested site of inclusion and

1_{“Italy: Migrant Arrivals Reach Highest in EU,” 19 December 2016, accessed 31 July 2017,} https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/italy-migrant-arrivals-reach-highest-eu.

2_{Heather Merrill, “Postcolonial Borderlands: Black Life Worlds and Relational Place in Turin, Italy”,}

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13, no.2 (2014): 270.

3_{Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London & New York:}

Routledge, 2004), 328.

4_{Michael Collyer and Russell King, “Narrating Europe’s Migration and Refugee ‘Crisis’”, Human}

Geography 9, no. 2 (2016): 1.

5_{Étienne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global}

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5 exclusions, creating borders and regulating movement, providing or denying social recognition and cultural belonging.”6

1.1 Introducing the ‘Black Mediterranean’

Prompted by Europe’s ongoing ‘migrant crisis’ and the ongoing racialisation of Mediterranean geographies, recent years have seen the emergence of what activists, scholars and artists have begun referring to as the ‘Black Mediterranean’ – a critical reconfiguration of Europe’s southern ‘frontier’ as a “relational space” that affords new possibilities for reflecting on black histories, identities, and subjectivities in southern Europe.7 First coined by Alessandra Di Maio to denote “the proximity that exists, and has always existed, between Italy and Africa, separated […] but also united by the Mediterranean,”8_{the term works against commonplace understandings of the}

Mediterranean space as a “facilitator of unidirectional flows” of clandestine migrants from different parts of Africa to southern European countries.9 Instead, it responds to a growing consensus “that the Mediterranean as a border(ing) space has gradually left its stable ground of national checkpoints and territorial lines on maps to make part of a more fluid landscape built on overlapping, and often contradictory, histories of mobility and exchange.”10_{As well as delineating the Mediterranean as a space of ‘exchange’, however,}

proponents of the ‘Black Mediterranean’ also seek “to situate this borderland in the geography of racial subordination black Africans in Europe, specifically in Italy, continue to be subjected to.”11_{This connects European colonial ventures across the African}

continent to modern-day manifestations of neo-colonial violence expressed through a rhetoric of migrant ‘illegality’, the militarisation of southern European borders, and the denial of the rights of global citizenship to migrants looking to reach European shores.

6_{Manuela Coppola, “’Rented spaces’: Italian postcolonial literature”, Social Identities 17, no.1 (2011):}

123, accessed 31 July 2017, doi:10.1080/13504630.2011.531909.

7_{Timothy Raeymaekers, “Introduction: Europe’s Bleeding Border and the Mediterranean as a Relational}

Space”, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13, no.2 (2014): 163-172.

8_{Alessandra Di Maio, quoted in Timothy Raeymaekers, “Working the Black Mediterranean”, Liminal}

Geographies Blog, 21 January 2015, accessed 31 July 2017,

http://www.timothyraeymaekers.net/2015/01/working-the-black-mediterranean/.

9_{Timothy Raeymaekers, “Introduction: Europe’s Bleeding Border and the Mediterranean as a Relational}

Space”, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13, no.2 (2014): 167.

10_{Ibid., 168.}

11_{Timothy Raeymaekers, “The Racial Geography of the Black Mediterranean”, Liminal Geographies}

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6 The term thus seeks to locate the current migrant crisis within a broader historical trajectory of European imperialism, revealing this ‘crisis’ to be “a late consequence of Europe’s violent encounter with the Global South” rather than “a moment of exception or [...] a discrete event in time.”12_{In acknowledging this, it also seeks to expand the scope}

of discussion from ‘emergency’ responses to contemporary migration to broader considerations of how black diasporas in southern Europe are being reconfigured, a process which “involves reflections on identity, subjectivity and political space.”13

1.2 Mapping the Southern Coordinates of a ‘Black Europe’

In its efforts to reintroduce questions of subjectivity and identity within a multigenerational history of black presence in southern Europe, the ‘Black Mediterranean’ intersects with the emergent field of Black European Studies. Whereas ‘race’ and ‘blackness’ have traditionally been considered exclusively North American categories of analysis, the last two decades have seen scholars increasingly recognise their applicability to a European context that has commonly been understood as ‘colour-blind’ or ‘post-racial’.14_{The emergence of ‘Black Europe’ as a field of study with a black}

European diaspora as its object of enquiry, however, have led to debate over “its geographic, its political, and its imaginative boundaries,” and indeed “[w]hat is at stake in the struggle over such definitions.”15_{Despite efforts to “prevent the emergence of}

appropriate, location-specific concepts” of race developing in Europe, however, this field has privileged certain paradigms and geographies of black diasporic identity over others, risking the homogenisation of a multiplicity of black experiences in Europe today.16 This is highlighted in the Black Mediterranean’s self-conscious reworking of Paul Gilroy’s influential formulation of a ‘Black Atlantic’ “expressive culture”.17_{In his}

seminal work, Gilroy calls for the Atlantic Ocean to be treated as “one single, complex

12_{Ida Danewid, “White innocence in the Black Mediterranean: hospitality and the erasure of history”,}

Third World Quarterly 38, no.7 (2017), 1679, accessed 31 July 2017, doi:

10.1080/01436597.2017.1331123

13_{Camilla Hawthorne, “The Black Mediterranean: Liminality, Black Subjectivity, and Post-/Liberalism”,}

panel abstract from ‘Afropeans: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe’ held at University of Tampere (2017), accessed 31 July 2017, https://www.uta.fi/yky/en/6thafroeuropeans/index_en.html.

14_{Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).}

15_{Stephen Small, “Introduction: The Empire Strikes Back”, in Black Europe and the African Diaspora}

ed. Darlene Clark Hine et al. (Champaign: UI Press, 2009), xxvii.

16_{Ibid., xxx.}

17_{Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (New York: Verso Books,}

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7 unit of analysis” that can “produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”18_{Through what has been termed the “Middle Passage Epistemology”,}19

Gilroy argues that the networks of displacement created through the transatlantic slave trade have become the foundation on which to challenge the “racist, nationalist or ethnically absolutist” discourse of European ‘modernity’ through “provocative” acts of “occupying the space between them”, such as claiming subject positions that are simultaneously ‘black’ and ‘European’.20_{Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’s understanding}

of “double consciousness”, Gilroy formulates the possibility of a “black Atlantic expressive culture” that can “move discussion of black political culture beyond the binary opposition between national and diasporic perspectives,” where the former has operated on a removal of black presence from its historical construction, while the latter risks slippage into a ‘pan-Africanism’ that overlooks the local specificities involved in black cultural production.21

Like the Black Atlantic, the Black Mediterranean forwards certain forms of cultural expression as potential vehicles for black liberation. However, while drawing heavily on Paul Gilroy’s insights, proponents of the Black Mediterranean also seek to decentre what is a largely Anglophonic, western-facing tradition in favour of the more politically pressing need to recognise the ongoing racial geographies of violence that are being articulated across the border space of the Mediterranean. While the field of Black European studies is still relatively juvenile, the legacy of Gilroy’s paradigm risks privileging certain geographies and languages of blackness in Europe to the detriment of the multiplicity of black experiences across different European contexts. As such, the recent salience of the Black Mediterranean demonstrates an acknowledgement of the need to map new diasporic coordinates of a Black Europe that stretch beyond the Anglophone tradition, as well as the restrictive geographical coordinates of Gilroy’s Atlantic paradigm. The political and academic relevance of a Mediterranean variant of the Black Atlantic is, indeed, evident in a number of recent symposia held around the theme, such as “The Black Mediterranean and the Migrant Crisis” (2016) and “The Black Mediterranean in Action” (2017) at Birmingham City University, as well as its

18_{Ibid., 15.}

19_{Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minnesota:}

University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

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8 prominence in the papers delivered at the recent conference on “Black Cultures and Identities” held at the University of Tampere (July 2017).

1.3 Purpose Statement and Research Questions

In this paper, I follow on from the insights provided by the critical literature on the Black Mediterranean to take a racial/relational approach to borders in a southern European context. While Lampedusa has come to acquire a privileged symbolic position in the geographical imagination of European borders, a relational perspective allows us to understand how non-whiteness continues to operate as a visual signifier of non-belonging in southern Europe within its internal territory, where I define borders not as lines of territorial demarcation on a map, but rather as ‘spaces’ where the boundaries of citizenship and belonging are articulated largely in racialised terms of supposed ‘Europeanness’ and ‘Africanness’.

To analyse these internal borders of separation between Africa and Europe in an Italian national context, I look at how the ‘post-migrant’ generation of black Italians (born in Italy to migrant parents) comment on the racialised mechanisms of their exclusion within their country of birth by drawing on a wider history of relations between Italy and its former colonies in the Horn of Africa (namely Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea). As Camilla Hawthorne has argued, academics have tended to prioritise first-generation migrants from Africa to Italy in their research, marginalising the experiences of their Italian-born offspring.22_{Today, these black Italians are increasingly mobilising against the}

racialisation of European borders, their exclusion from a national citizenship defined in ethnic terms (through the jus sanguinis principle), and the implicit ‘whiteness’ of Italian identity that renders them outsiders in the country of their birth. As Hawthorne explains, it is by “focusing on the experiences of the children of African immigrants who were born in Italy” that “we can begin to understand how a multigenerational Black community forms, survives, and even thrives when the exclusionary and deadly logics of Fortress Europe would have one believe that it should not exist in the first place.”23

22_{Camilla Hawthorne, “‘Different Waters, Same Sea’: Contesting Racialized Citizenship in the Black}

Mediterranean”, abstract from conference ‘Afroeuropeans: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe’, held at University of Tampere (2017), accessed 31 July 2017,

http://www.uta.fi/yky/en/6thafroeuropeans/abstracts/afroeuropeans_abstract%20book_29062017_2.pdf.

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9 While promoters of the Black Mediterranean have identified a need to underline the multigenerational nature of relations between Africa and Europe in the context of the racialised logic of the southern frontier, I argue that this call has been answered most comprehensively through the development of a postcolonial ‘turn’ in Italian studies around the turn of the millennium.24 As El-Tayeb has argued, in a European context, “ethnicized Others are routinely ascribed a position outside the nation, allowing the permanent externalization and thus silencing of a debate on the legacy of racism and colonialism.”25_{A postcolonial approach to Italian studies seeks to render this debate}

visible, underlining how the disavowal of racism in Italy is linked to a lack of recognition of the violence of its colonial ventures in the past. As well as an indicator of a chronological phase, postcolonial perspectives offer the critical potential to tell the story of a different European ‘south’ from the perspective of marginalised, subaltern subjects, enabling the formation of epistemologies that allow for a redefinition of Italian and, by extension, European identity from within. As an approach inherently concerned with geography and spatialities of power, a postcolonial reading of Italian state-formation and Italy’s modern-day “geopolitical dislocation” also provides grounds for strategies of resistance, where ‘blackness’ is reinserted into a geography of southern Europe.26

Bringing these perspectives together, this paper analyses the work of Igiaba Scego, an author born in Rome in 1974 to Somalian parents escaping the regime of Siad Barre. As a member of the ‘post-migrant’ generation of writers in Italy, Scego’s literary production interrogates questions of belonging from the perspective of someone simultaneously black and Italian, two categories that continue to be treated as mutually exclusive by the majority population. At the same time, her writing is often included among the ‘postcolonial’ corpus of Italian literature, a polemical genre that seeks to unearth Italy’s repressed colonial legacy to comment on contemporary forms of racism and expand the definitions of Italianità (‘Italianness’). This body of work actively seeks to redefine the ethnic basis of Italian citizenship in both legal and cultural terms, expanding the boundaries of the national community through underlining the interwoven histories of

24_{Sandra Ponzanesi, “The Postcolonial Turn in Italian Studies: European Perspectives”, in Postcolonial}

Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, eds. Lombardi-Diop and Romeo (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2012), 51-69.

25_{Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 13-14.}

26_{Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Rome, “Italy’s Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the Southern}

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10 Italy and East Africa, while commenting on present-day migrations from Italy’s former African colonies and other parts of the continent.

Where my analysis departs from other readings of this genre, however, is in applying a critical geographic approach to address the articulation of cartographies of race and belonging in these texts, focusing on how their subjects make claims on Italian spaces through processes of personal identification and by invoking colonial histories of racial violence. More specifically, I focus on postcolonial urbanism, looking at how strategies of ‘place-making’ across two texts prompt discussions of race and translocal forms of belonging. To do so, I analyse two different types of text by writer Igiaba Scego – her memoir La mia casa e’ dove sono (My Home is Where I Am, 2010)27_{and the non-fiction}

book Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella citta’ (Rome Denied: Postcolonial

Routes through the City, 2014)28, where the latter is the product of a collaborative effort with Italian photographer Rino Bianchi. Both set in Rome, the texts seek to uncover new perspectives on a city that has really been subject to postcolonial critique. For all Italian quotations in this paper, translations are my own.

My reading of these texts is informed by the insights of Fatima El-Tayeb, who has recently argued that non-white populations in Europe occupy a peculiarly paradoxical – or “queer” – positionality in space and time. Regardless of their birthplace or national citizenship, a racialising logic defines these non-white Europeans in terms of migrancy and excessive mobility, whereby they are “perceived as being in transit, coming from elsewhere, momentarily here but without any roots in their ‘host nation’.” The suspension of these ‘European Others’ in time “produces an out-of-placeness,” legitimising the denial of rights based on long-term presence as they are positioned outside the “larger space/time of the nation”.29

My analysis is informed by the research questions: how is the racialised experience of being deemed ‘out of place’ mapped across different geographies of home and displacement, and how are these geographies informed by postcolonial legacies in an Italian context? To answer these questions, I look at two key strategies of ‘mapping’ territory in the city of Rome, the metropolitan centre of Italy’s former colonial enterprise.

27_{Igiaba Scego, La mia casa e’ dove sono (Turin: Loescher, 2012 edition).}

28_{Igiaba Scego and Rino Bianchi, Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella citta’ (Rome: Ediesse, 2014).} 29_{Fatima El-Tayeb, “European Others”, Eurozine, 22 February 2017, accessed 31 July 2017,}

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11 The first, as the dominant strategy in La mia casa e’ dove sono, is a form of affective mapping as a textual strategy that allows for the articulation of multiple geographical frames of belonging, disrupting received understandings of territorialised forms of national citizenship in an Italy, while at the same time transporting memories of the colonial ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’ of the ex-metropolis through drawing on the narrator’s and her family’s experiences between Mogadishu and Rome. A second strategy, more evident in Roma negata, is a ‘mapping’ of the main sites of the city to unearth the traces of colonial violence contained within its streets and monuments. This text, which reads as a diatribe against the ongoing repression of colonial guilt in Italy, uncovers spatial representations of the past to comment on the geographies of exclusion that continue to produce mass deaths in the Mediterranean Sea. In closing, I look at how these texts incorporate different spatial scales to comment on the racialised violence characterising Italy’s relationship with East Africa, and in so doing argue for the right to be “differently European”.30

30_{Francesco Cattani, “New Maps of Europe by Some Contemporary ‘Migrant’ Artists and Writers”, in}

Europe in Black and White: Immigration, Race, and Identity in the ‘old Continent’ (London: Intellect,

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2. Italy in a Postcolonial Perspective

2.1 De-provincialising Italy in postcolonial theory

In recent years, a substantial body of literature has emerged seeking to revitalise postcolonial theory through engaging it with new critical contexts. Anca Parvulescu, for instance, has discussed the general trend whereby “scholars have called for an expansion of postcolonial theory’s reach, beyond its original (and much-debated) anchoring in the postcoloniality of South Asia, into Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, China, the Caucasus, and Europe.”31_{In the case of Europe, however, this project has proven}

particularly fraught. Referencing Edward Said’s concept of “travelling theory”, Parvalescu asks:

[w]hat happens to postcolonial when the ‘postcolonial’ is conjoined with that which it was initially supposed to decentre, ‘Europe’? How does postcolonial theory look like once it travels […] to the former colonial West European metropolis? If the word ‘postcolonial’ designates various forms of resistance and agentive transformation in the aftermath of colonialism and neo-colonialism and if ‘Europe’ is almost synonymous with colonialism, is ‘postcolonial Europe’ an oxymoronic formulation, with potentially regressive overtones?32

These questions caution against reproducing the kinds of Eurocentric perspectives that postcolonial theory was originally developed to undermine, alerting us to the possibilities that a ‘European’ postcolonialism might detract from the theory’s critical potential for ‘resistance’. As Lombardi-Diop and Romeo have argued, the term ‘postcolonial’ is both politically and theoretically contentious as, on the one hand, it threatens the reproduction of Eurocentric positions by “homogeniz[ing] spatial and temporal specificities,” becoming a ‘catch-all’ term that denies the specificity of particular contexts, while the ‘post’ prefix also “renders invisible the continuity existing between colonial and neo-colonial relations of power,” implying a chronological shift in which the ‘neo-colonial’ ceases to inform contemporary regimes of hegemony. 33 As such, not only should the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ signify “continuity rather than fracture,”34_{but it should also be understood}

less as constituting a chronological transition than as “a theoretical tool that aims to

31_{Anca Parvulescu, “European Racial Triangulation”, in Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts,}

Practices and Politics, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 25.

32_Ibid.

33_{Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, “Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy”, in}

Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity, eds. Lombardi-Diop and Romeo (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 2.

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13 critically assess the operations of empires and their lasting legacies and effects in present day society.”35

Where Parvulescu has called for caution in falling into the trap of a methodological Europeanism through new modes of postcolonial inquiry – what Chakrabarty has described as a need to ‘provincialize’ European universalities through critical theory36_–

Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, among others, have suggested a need for a “de-provincialization of Italy […] through the creation of affiliations with other postcolonial and global contexts, while at the same time looking diachronically at Italian history and culture as founded on phenomena such as transatlantic and trans-Mediterranean emigration, the racialization of southern Italians, and contemporary migration.” As they go on to suggest, it is these “temporal and spatial axes that link colonization, emigration, and immigration [that] set Italy apart from other European contexts.”37

While remaining conscious of the need to acknowledge an Italian colonial history of comparable violence to the French and British cases that dominate the academic field, the Italian context thus also presents a relatively unique case for the application of postcolonial theories and studies of race in Europe. To first address the ‘diachronic’ revision of Italian and history and culture, it is necessary to highlight how Italy’s colonial condition, to a much greater extent than that of other Western European countries, is predicated to a considerable degree on internal forms of colonial acquisition in the context of the project of national unification (the Risorgimento), which covered the period 1861-1870. As Mellino has argued, the annexation and economic exploitation of the southern territories by the northern powers of the peninsula “was driven by colonial/imperial logics,” while “the anti-southern racism and the rhetoric of civilization (which also entailed the thesis of the biological inferiority of southern people) [...] were nothing but

Macmillan, 2012), 59.

36_{Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference}

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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14 the local translation of the Western ‘civilizing mission’ discourse and its constitutive colonial racism.”38

The acquisition of the ‘South’ led to the formulation of the ‘Southern Question’ by Antonio Gramsci, which referred to the political, cultural and economic exploitation and subordination of a racialized and provincial ‘South’ by the industrialised ‘North’, and in his discussion of the ‘subaltern’ formed a key theoretical basis for the elaboration of postcolonial theory by critics such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha.39 Rather than being relegated to the historical moment of Unification, however, this ‘Southern Question’ continues to feature centrally in Italian political debate, where the Lega Nord have risen to a position of considerable prominence since the early 1990s through reproducing the stereotypes of a ‘European’, prosperous ‘North’ being held back by a corrupt, lazy, and – importantly – ‘African’ ‘South’.

As well as contributing to internal “colonial fracture” within the space of the newly-formed nation, the annexation of southern territories also marked the first stage of mass emigrations across the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the first stages of the Italian state’s colonial enterprise in East Africa.40 Already by the 1870s, emigration from Southern Italy to the Americas had become a mass phenomenon, while Italy began its acquisition of territory on the Red Sea in 1882 (which would become the first formal colony of Eritrea by 1890). The movement of Italian citizens en masse to the West and to the South attests to the decentring of the Italian territory and the importance of transnationalism in the formation of Italian modern statehood, the legacy of which continues in the definition of national citizenship along ethnic (jus sanguinis) rather than territorial (jus soli) lines today.41

While formal recognition of national belonging continues to operate on a largely biological understanding of Italian ‘whiteness’, efforts to address Italian state-formation through postcolonial theory highlight how racialised geographies have structured North-South relations in Italy, and have played a substantial role in conferring Italy its

38_{Miguel Mellino, “De-Provincializing Italy: Notes on Race, Racialization, and Italy’s Coloniality”, in}

39_{Neelam Srivastava et al. eds., The Postcolonial Gramsci (London: Routledge, 2013).} 40_{Mellino, ibid.}

41_{David Cook-Martin, The Scramble for Citizens: Dual Nationality and State Competition for}

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15 subordinate position in relation to the rest of Europe. In post-war Europe, similar processes of racialisation prevented Southern Italian labour migrants involved in the rehabilitation of Western European economies (such as in Great Britain and West Germany) from entering the realm of ‘whiteness’, as was the case of Italian emigrants in the USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meant that Italian migrants largely occupied similarly racialized ‘subaltern’ positions in relation to economies of labour across Europe, as well as those Italians who migrated from the rural South to the industrial North of the country from the 1950s onwards, a form of intranational migration that has “posed a constant threat to a homogenous Italianness, disrupting a sense of national and racial unity within the peninsula.”42

2.2 Italy’s (Post)colonial Geographies

The field of postcolonial studies is inherently tied up with questions of spatiality. Edward Soja, in reference to Edward Said, has described the postcolonial as “the search for fundamental and egalitarian rights to inhabit space,”43_{while Teverson and Upstone}

explain how the “idea that place plays a significant role in how one defines one’s own identity and, equally, how that identity is defined by others, is continually foregrounded in postcolonial studies.”44

While racialised geographies have characterised North/South relations in Italy, as well as Italy’s subordinate position to the rest of Europe, a more concerted racialisation of space accompanied Italy’s colonisation of East Africa. Here, as with other imperial powers, a policy of enforced spatial segregation between colonisers and colonised was a central feature of colonial settlement, and was particularly strongly enforced in the transition from liberal to fascist colonialism. Along with legislation that outlawed sexual contact between Italian settlers and natives, this explicit effort at demarcating separate ‘Italian’ and ‘African’ spaces “reflected concerns that went beyond standard European justifications for segregation,” exposing insecurities over Italy’s own “ambivalent

42_{Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Rome, “Italy’s Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the Southern}

Frontier of Europe”, Postcolonial Studies 18, no.4 (2015): 370, accessed 31 July 2017, doi: 10.1080/13688790.2015.1191983.

43_{Edward Soja, “Foreword”, Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture, eds.}

Andrew Teverson and Sarah Upstone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), ix.

44_{Andrew Teverson and Sarah Upstone, “Introduction”, Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in}

Contemporary Culture, eds. Andrew Teverson and Sarah Upstone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

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16 identity position generally perceived as located between Mediterraneanness and Europeanness.”45_{The voiced threat of racial mixing to Italy’s perceived ‘Europeanness’}

receives clear expression in La difesa della razza, a 1938 journal which highlights throughout the menace of ibridismo (‘hybridity’) and contaminazione

(‘contamination’).46

In spatial terms, a national disavowal of colonial wrongdoing – the myth of the Italian

brava gente, or noble coloniser – has facilitated some form of continuity in practices of

racial segregation in the context of postcolonial migration. This is evident not only in the restricted access to substantive citizenship for non-European migrants, but also in efforts to demarcate the national and urban space as Catholic, with the Lega Nord’s concerted efforts to mobilise the population against the building of Mosques.47_{At the level of}

national territory, meanwhile, the “laissez-faire” approach to migration adopted by the Italian governments has given way to “explicitly discriminatory policies [...] in an effort to clearly delineate the borders of the nation,” a development clearly registered by Berlusconi’s government’s 2008 ‘Security Package’ which, among other things, obligated migrants to provide their fingerprints under the suspicion that they would be more likely to commit criminal acts.48

In this sense, the disavowal of a racist colonial legacy in Italy allows ‘racism’ to be displaced from public discussions despite its ever-present role in defining who does and does not belong in the space of nation. As Curcio and Mellino have argued, the ongoing racialization of the Italian South, combined with the regime of racial apartheid enforced in the Italian colonies and the stigmatisation of Jews under the Italian Fascist Regime mean that “the terrain has been prepared for the contemporary racialization of international migration.”49_{Thus, while the rise of racism and xenophobia in modern-day}

Italy has often been linked to its transition from a sending to a majority migrant-receiving country in the 1980s, it is important to situate racial attitudes historically as a constitutive feature of Italy’s nation-building project and its internal, as well as external,

45_{Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan, “Introduction”, in National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian}

Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures, ed. Andall and Duncan (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2010), 4.

46_{Ibid., 9} 47_{Ibid., 6.} 48_{Ibid., 7.}

49_{Anna Curcio and Miguel Mellino, “Race at work – the rise and challenge of Italian racism”, darkmatter}

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17 geographies. In this vein, the very “foreclusion of race in the Italian public sphere” – where the issue of ‘race’ itself is largely absent from discussions of social issues understood in implicitly racial terms (such as immigration) – is largely a symptom of “the almost complete removal of the Italian colonial and fascist experience form second post-war generations: both from the public sphere and common structures of feeling.” 50_This,

Renate Siebert explains, is a “removal […] mainly nourished by a caricaturization or banalization of fascist culture, but especially by a sanitization of the historical national involvement with questions of race, racism, colonialism and anti-Semitism.”51

Here, Nirmal Puwar’s notion of ‘space invaders’ is particularly relevant. In her discussion of the concept, Puwar explains how “[s]ome bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually) circumscribed as being ‘out of place’.”52_{Taking up this definition, Andall and Duncan demonstrate how}

the concept highlights the continuity between Italian state practices of segregation from the colonial to the postcolonial period. As Italian colonisers settled in East Africa from the late nineteenth century onwards, these:

Colonial ‘space invaders’ assumed not only the right to belong, but also to impose a reorganization of the environment they encountered, where they would assume a central and hegemonic position. Africans could be evicted from the cultivated land to make way for Italian settlers for example. Thus even in their own environments, colonized peoples could be viewed as being ‘out of place’ in order to facilitate the process of colonial settlement.

As such, the colonial and postcolonial eras both “involve different forms of ‘space invasion’ and different negotiations about entitlements regarding belonging, inclusive citizenship and nationhood.”53

2.3 Race, Territory and Citizenship in Contemporary Italy

While postcolonial approaches to Italian history highlight the importance of racialised geographies of the ‘South’ and colonialist policies of racial apartheid in supporting the

50_Ibid.

51_{Renate Siebert, “Racism – Historic Memory – Individual Responsibility”, darkmatter 6 (2010),}

accessed 31 July 2017: http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2010/10/10/racism-%e2%80%93-historic-memory-%e2%80%93-individual-responsibility/

52_{Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders. Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 8.} 53_{Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan, “Introduction”, in National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian}

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18 construction of myths of Italian ‘Europeanness’ and a national homogeneity of ‘whiteness’, recent analyses of media representations of African migration to Italy highlight the operation of a similar racial logic in relation to territory and citizenship in a contemporary context.

The increasing racialisation of the Italian territory in the context of immigration has been driven to a considerable degree through Italian mainstream media representations, reflective of a broader shift in popular understandings of immigration in Italy. In a study on the development of terminology used to refer to migrants in Italian media discourse, Sciortino and Colombo note a decided shift around 1989-91 (when Italy began to officially recognise its role as a migrant-receiving country), where terms such as ‘immigrants’ and ‘foreign workers’ became displaced by the increasingly prevalent ‘extracomunitari’ – a nomenclature used to denote someone considered external to the European community (lacking EU citizenship).54_{At the same time, the presence of these}

European ‘outsiders’ came to be increasingly criminalised in mainstream media, demonstrative of a “growing concern over security in Italian public discourse,” as expressed in Berlusconi’s controversial ‘Security Package’ of 2008.55

The spatial dimension of the media’s shifting portrayal of migrant ‘outsiders’ has been dealt with extensively by Marco Binotto. Outlining three figures of the foreign ‘enemy’ in Italian mainstream media – the invader, the alien and the criminal – Binotto argues that each figure is constructed through metaphors that relate to ‘anthropological spaces’, which in turn correspond to specific borders separating inside and outside. While the ‘alien’ references the metaphor of the social body in threat of contamination and the ‘criminal’ the metaphor of the home in threat of intrusion, the ‘invader’ invokes the image of national community expressed in spatial terms through the national territory.56 The image of the ‘nation-as-place’ is both “a physical space concerned with the military management of the territory” and “a symbolic space enlightened by the ‘territory’ of mass media,” where the latter is highlighted through the overexposure of ‘narratives of arrivals’ depicting boats full of African migrants or the moment of disembarkation. The menace

54_{Asher Colombo and Giuseppe Sciortino, “The flows and the flood: the public discourse on immigration}

in Italy, 1969-2001”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9, no.1 (2004): 103, accessed 31 July 2017, doi:

10.1080/1354571042000179209.

55_{Ibid., 109.}

56_{Marco Binotto, “Invaders, Aliens and Criminals: Metaphors and Spaces in the Media Definition of}

Migration and Security Policies”, in Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media

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19 of the ‘invader’ is defined in terms of “infiltration” and embodied by the figure of the

clandestine (‘clandestine migrant’), and forms “the foundation of fences and borders” that

seek “the tangible separation from the alien, avoiding the risk of being expunged by any external element.”57

The construction of various metaphorical and territorial ‘spaces’ of nationality through the various ‘figures’ of the migrant renders “the category of immigration [...] a substitute of the notion of race.”58_{The figure of the ‘alien’ attests to what has been defined as a}

‘neo-racism’ understood in cultural terms as the incompatibility between civilizations, where “[t]he destructive action of the immigrant enemy” is expressed through the notion of “contamination”.59_{As Nandita Sharma has described it, “as nationalism more firmly}

fixes ‘race’ to place, migration has increasingly come to be portrayed as a form of

miscegenation. For this reason, those constituted as ‘migrants’ are negatively evaluated

not necessarily for being ‘inferior’ to national subjects but for being out of their place.”60

Through neo-liberal reforms, Sharma recognises a shift from a division between ‘national citizens’ and ‘migrants’ to “an even harder distinction between ‘natives’ and ‘migrants’,” where a native autochthony expressed through ‘ethnic’ variants of citizenship are considerably “more impermeable to claims for inclusion than even the racialized category of ‘national’ has been.”61

2.4 Migrant Perspectives on Racialised Places

In a contemporary, postcolonial Italian context, the ethnographic studies of Donald Martin Carter and Heather Merrill mark the most concert efforts to understand the complexities of the experience of this ‘out-of-placeness’ – a failure to conform to the “racialised somatic norm”62_{– highlighting the perspective of those African migrants “still}

coming to terms with what it means to be ‘African’ in a European context seemingly

57_{Ibid., 36.}

58_{Étienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?”, in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identites, ed. Étienne}

Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London & New York: Verso, 1991), 20.

59_{Binotto, 42.}

60_{Nandita Sharma, “Racism”, in Citizenship and Its Others, ed. Bridget Anderson and Vanessa Hughes}

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 109, accessed 31 July 2017, doi: 10.1057/9781137435088.

61_{Ibid., 114.}

62_{Nirmal Puwar, “The Racialised Somatic Norm and the Senior Civil Service”, Sociology 35, no.3}

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20 dominated by the notion that they are outsiders, and not just to Europe and the local market but somehow to modernity itself.”63

The experience of this “queer” positionality in space and time, to return to El-Tayeb’s phrasing, has received little attention in the academic literature on the racialisation of place. As such, the perspective of those directly affected by these spatial processes of marginalisation has remained largely unaddressed. To counter this trend, Heather Merrill draws on two decades of fieldwork with first-generation African migrants in Turin to address the “complex experiences of place among African diasporic populations in relationship to race,” taking Hanchard’s concept of ‘Black life worlds’ to expose the “complex, multiple subjectivities forged through the relationality of African and European places.”64

As ‘place’ has become politically fraught in the context of the geopolitics and biopolitics of migration management in the Mediterranean basin, Merrill’s study brings together critical race scholarship and geographic perspectives to demonstrate how, “in contra-disctinction to political and popular classifications, the national, ethnic, and even racial borders between Africa and Europe are indeed relational. They are porous, overlapping, and ambiguous.”65_{In language reminiscent of the ‘relationality’ of Afro-European}

borders discussed in the context of the Black Mediterranean at the outset of this thesis, Merrill explains how migrant subjects experience place relationally “to racial discourses and practices, and the profound interweavings of Africa and Europe through space and time.”66_{These ‘interweavings’, in turn, are necessarily informed by colonial histories and}

neo-colonial state practices, as “[b]lack experiences are situated in places that are products of past and ongoing interconnected power relations and cultural exchanges.”67 Where implicitly racial understandings of the intersection between national identity and territory deem certain bodies “space invaders”, however, the ‘relational’ experience of place by first- and second-generation Africans “challenge monolithic, Eurocentric

63_{Donald Martin Carter, “Blackness over Europe: Mediations on Culture and Belonging”, in Africa in}

Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie

Aitken (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 201, accessed 31 July 2017, doi: 10.5949/liverpool/9781846318474.001.0001.

64_{Heather Merrill, “Postcolonial Borderlands: Black Life Worlds and Relational Place in Turin, Italy”,}

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13, no.2 (2014): 263, 267.

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21 definitions of belonging, racialized logics, and exclusionary practices,” as “[s]ettlement is not a discrete moment for these newly arrived Africans whose countries of origin have been profoundly connected with Europe. Overturning simple teleologies, they are claiming place in a Europe whose history is theirs, and participating in the making of new histories.”68_{Thus, compared to other migrant communities in Europe, people of African}

descent have a stronger ‘claim’ to a ‘place’ which has a dense network of power-laden connections to where they have migrated from, both through “the legacy of European imperialism and Africa’s integral role in European modernity.”69

The disruptive presence of Africans in Italy thus receives expression through new geographies of relationality informed by ongoing colonial interconnections. As Merrill argues, “African-Italos produce new subjectivities and in the process tacitly or deliberatively stake out territory and redraw boundaries,”70 an assertion of presence that undermines top-down European efforts at “b/ordering” relations with Africa.71_{As a}

fundamentally cartographic exercise, Merrill outlines the rationale behind her project as: Instead of conceiving of Europe as a distinct, geographically bounded discursive place, […] it is crucial to re-imagine its cartography through the ontology of people in the Africa Diaspora with relational corridors to and from multiple parts of Africa, part of a single social formation produced through the continuing legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, cultural exchange, capitalist expansion, and human movement.72

This thesis aims to demonstrate how racialised, ‘out-of-place’ subjects in southern Europe ‘map’ these colonial legacies, forming subversive geographies that seek to expand restrictive definitions of national and European belonging. As Merrill’s study demonstrates, first-generation African migrants are, through their very presence, claiming ‘space’ in Europe by articulating their ‘place’ in a history from which they have been marginalised.

68_{Ibid., 271.} 69_{Ibid., 281.} 70_{Ibid., 271.}

71_{Henk Van Houtum, “Prologue”, B/ordering Space, ed. Henk van Houtum et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate}

2005), 1-17.

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22

3. Transgressive Geographies of Memory

3.1 The ‘Europeanisation’ of colonial memory at Europe’s southern border In globalised world of the contemporary moment, the racialised logic of segregation that informed the construction of a supposed Italian ‘whiteness’ is untenable where “[t]he boundaries of nation-states [...] are increasingly permeable by all kinds of flows. Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields of colonial boundaries. The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion.”73_{It is, therefore, in a global context that migrants from the}

former colonies are making their presence increasingly felt on Italian soil, where this influx “has rekindled anxieties about the integrity of Italian national identity and culture that indicate that memories of the colonial period and attitudes are integral to it.”74

In bringing ‘repressed’ colonial memories to the surface, these migrants, through their presence in the Italian national space, are forcing a re-evaluation of the very foundations of Italian citizenship. As Lombardi-Diop and Romeo explain, “the postnational, migratory dimension is an essential component of the postcolonial condition in Italy,” where “[m]igrants to Italy both from former Italian colonies and from other formerly colonized territories are today articulating the shifts of meaning in the process of signification that subtend postcoloniality.”75_{As this statement suggests, and as Merrill’s}

study demonstrates, new positions of ‘subalternity’ across Europe’s southern frontier are forcing not only a reevaluation of Italian identity, but also European identity more generally. As Andall and Duncan argue, “[i]n the postcolonial era, Italy’s status as a ‘late-comer’ immigration country has contributed to a novel typology of postcolonial space, which reflects a range of European colonial histories and legacies, rather than a uniquely Italian one.”76

Italy’s “geopolitical dislocation” as the “Southern frontier of Europe” has rendered it a gateway for migratory flows from across the African continent and thus multiple former European colonies. In this regard, postcolonial approaches to contemporary migrations to

73_{Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press,}

2000), 136.

74_{Jacqueline Andall and Derek Duncan, “Introduction”, in National Belongings: Hybridity in Italian}

Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures, ed. Andall and Duncan (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2010), 10.

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23 Italy occur within the wider neo-colonial context of Afro-European relations that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state. As Lombardi-Diop and Romeo explain:

Contemporary transnational migrations – which are the consequence of the disparities that the colonial system has created – are at the core of both Italian and European postcolonialities, since the presence of migrants and postcolonial subjects on European soil reactivates memories, fantasies and imaginaries related to that legacy. They also reinstate relationships of power created by colonialism – such as processes of racialisation and racism, for instance – which are reproduced and reinforced in contemporary postcolonial societies to defend a white, Christian, European identity.77

In its unique positionality at Europe’s southern ‘frontier’, therefore, postcolonial theorisations of Italy have an important role to play in exposing the colonising logics that underpin enduring efforts to ‘defend’ a ‘threatened’ ‘white, Christian, European identity’. On the one hand, the postcolonial project that has emerged in Italy has sought to point out that, while shorter-lived and more limited in geographical scope than the French and British empires, Italian colonialism nonetheless “had a significant impact on the development of metropolitan conceptions of race, national identity, and imagination.”78 At the same time, a postcolonial approach to the case of Italy is therefore not simply a case of establishing ‘parity’ between the colonial legacies of Italy and other Western European colonial powers. Lombardi-Diop and Romeo have explained how, while “[a] postcolonial approach to Italy’s uneven entry into modern statehood and colonial history helps to identify the elements of the past that are reactivated in the present,” as in the case of suppressed racial prejudices that re-emerge in the context of present-day migration,

the multiple mobilities and cultural affiliations that are at play in contemporary Italy interrupt a model of postcolonial studies that remain centred around Europe, its ex-colonial empires, and the power relations established by linguistic models and definable cultural categories deployed by colonial and imperial hegemony.79 In this sense, the Italian case study allows encourages a decentralisation of Anglophone theories of the postcolonial as elaborated on the Indian sub-continent, but also facilitates

77_{Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, “Italy’s Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the}

Southern Frontier of Europe”, Postcolonial Studies 18, no.4 (2015): 367, accessed 31 July 2017, doi: 10.1080/13688790.2015.1191983.

Macmillan, 2012), 51-69

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24 a theoretical ‘break’ from “the uneven dichotomy between centre and periphery that has been the hallmark of [the] British postcolonial paradigm.”

Indeed, the demographic diversity of migration flows from Italy to Africa since the 1980s has largely been considered a form of “indirect postcoloniality”, where most migrants arriving on Italian shores are nationals of countries that did not fall under direct Italian colonial rule, but have rather come from former British and French colonies such as Nigeria and Senegal. Not only did Italy become a majority migrant-receiving country much later than its colonial counterparts, but these migrations followed global, rather than strictly colonial, trajectories. This means that the Italian postcolonial “situates itself not in relation to the British and French histories of empire, in which the migratory fluxes were almost exclusively coming from previous colonies, but rather to the post-Cold War reconfiguration of Europe and its emerging postcolonialities.”80 It is the unique “Southerness” of Italy’s position, in cultural and geographical terms, that forces reconsiderations of neo-colonial ties between Africa and Europe that can no longer be contained within the specific national dichotomous contexts of colony/metropolis or centre/periphery.

3.2 ‘Archiving’ the Colonial Present

3.2.i Subversive Histories of a Different ‘South’

Efforts to theorise Italy ‘postcolonially’ are thus symptomatic of a chronological shift, whereby the globalisation of migrant trajectories are forcing reconsiderations of Italy’s identity in relation to its own colonial venture, as well as its positionality in relation to the legacies of the other European imperial powers. This shift demonstrates how colonialism is increasingly framed as a European, rather than a national experience, an argument that has recently been taken up by Bhambra and Narayan in their discussion of the colonial logics of the European integration project.81

81_{Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Narayan, European Cosmopolitanism: Colonial Histories and}

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25 As Sandra Ponzanesi explains, the application of postcolonialism to the Italian context has significant “epistemological”, as well as “chronological” implications. In this instance, it offers the opportunity to:

1. Reassess and evaluate the colonial past from new critical perspectives, accounting for subaltern positions but also offering new insights into the colonial encounter.

2. Acknowledge texts, voices and images by migrants (either from former colonies or not) and other minorities; revise the literary canon and redefine the notions of cultural value and aesthetics.

3. Rethink theory and epistemology in accordance with perspectives of alterity and dissonance.

Together, this drive to accommodate new, dissonant perspectives can result in the inclusion of “the history of a different European south,” one which “refers to Italy and its ambivalent relationship with Europe and Africa, alias the Mediterranean, as a new trope of ambivalence and subaltern histories.”82

My paper is particularly concerned with how these ‘subaltern histories’ are manifested in the subversive geographies articulated by subjects who are ‘out-of-place’. Here, the work of cultural theorist Iain Chambers has been particularly influential. In a manner reminiscent of Gilroy’s discussions of a “black Atlantic expressive culture”, Chambers, together with Curti, defines the Mediterranean as a postcolonial ‘space’ that “is interrupted continually by a vulnerability that accompanies the encounter with other voices, other bodies, other histories.”83_{In a discussion of contemporary art practices that}

exhibit an “Afro-European postcoloniality”, Chambers reinforces the point that the postcolonial in this sense does not merely refer to a “chronological stage”, but rather that it “poses the altogether more unstable configuration of history and knowledge that emerges from an ongoing critical evaluation of the modern world that engendered colonialism on a planetary scale.”84_{Indeed, if we consider ‘modernity’ in line with the}

development of the nation-state and its attendant socio-cultural norms (namely community expressed at the intersection of ethnicity and territory), the postcolonial

Macmillan, 2012), 59, 56.

83_{Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, “Migrating modernities in the Mediterranean”, Postcolonial Studies 11,}

no.4 (2008), 388, accessed 31 July 2017, doi: 10.1080/1368879080245607.

84_{Iain Chambers and Celeste Ianniciello, “Migration and the Mediterranean Matrix”, Critical}

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26 deployed in migrants’ art practices afford the opportunities for “those modernities, memories, and migrations once set in the periphery that today irrupt at the center [sic] of that very logic that seeks to maintain such distinctions.”85

These ‘interruptions’, figured as violent ‘irruptions’ of the periphery into the colonial centre, force reconsiderations of “the relationship between repressed narratives, unrecognized subjectivities (poor migrants, exiles, refugees), and new forms of citizenship.” Moreover, they force a reconsideration of the neat separation of ‘natives’ and ‘others’ as they make:

a breach in the walls of our ‘home’, creating an opening in our time which can be traversed in order to review the categories, premises and protocols that sustain ‘our’ world. Here, beyond the obvious discomfort disseminated by displacement, it becomes possible to renegotiate the very sense of cultural, historical and political belonging.86

To do so, these works stage a violent “irruption of unwritten histories” in which Africa functions as an “archive: not one to be mined and exploited, but rather as one to come – that is, as an unacknowledged but central component in a modernity that tends to exclude its presence in the narrative.”87 In this sense, an understanding of the Mediterranean as a postcolonial site of crossings and unstable significations disrupts “the exclusivist and racialized culture of nationalism and the predatory and neo-colonial framework on which it is traditionally constructed.”88_{Migratory flows into Italy establish “a space where such}

notions as identity and belonging, cultural memory, heritage, and the sense of community and citizenship assume more fluid and mutable connotations.”89

3.2.ii Migrant Memory Projects

But what might such a disruptive colonial ‘archive’ look like in the present day? And how might it achieve these transgressive ‘irruptions’ in space and time that reconfigure the boundaries of ‘community and citizenship’? One example lies in the establishment of the “Archive of Migrant Memories” (AMM) in Rome, emerging as an offshoot of the

85_Ibid.

86_{Chambers and Curti, 390.} 87_{Chambers and Ianniciello, 45.} 88_{Ibid., 48.}

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27

lettera27 “Confini/Borders” Project in 2008.90 This initiative marks a significant recent development in civil society efforts to address the stigmatisation of migration in Italian legal, media and government discourses. Rooted in participatory methods, the “Archive” brings together volunteers, researchers and media operators to produce written, oral and audiovisual testimonies of migrant experiences in Italy, placing emphasis on the self-narration of these accounts through the active involvement of the migrants themselves in their production and dissemination. In this way, the operators of the “Archive” seek to create a public space that empowers migrant voices through ‘bottom-up’, personalised representations of their transnational experiences. To date, it has facilitated the production of internationally-acclaimed documentaries dealing with migration from Africa to Italy, including Soltanto il Mare (Only the Sea, 2010), Benvenuti in Italia (Welcome to Italy, 2012), and Mare Chiuso (Closed Sea, 2012).

The AMM project draws attention to important questions of empowerment and subjectivity in articulating migrant experiences through participatory methodologies. At the same time, it is significant in addressing the varied, and indeed global trajectories of migration to Italy through an explicitly national postcolonial framework. Despite the ‘indirect’ postcolonality of contemporary migration from various parts of Africa to Italy, the pioneers of the AMM project seek to draw attention to Italy’s colonial past by focusing on the testimonies of migrants from Italy’s former colonies in the Horn of Africa – namely Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. The initiative is described by founder Alessandro Triulzi as “a joint project aimed at collecting and archiving memories, stories and testimonies of migrants arriving in Italy mainly from the Horn of Africa,” while the impetus of the initiative, he explains, is an attempt “to refashion public representation of a highly complex migratory process by looking at its ‘totality’, specifically linking the here and

there – the place migrants left and the one they came to inhabit” (emphasis in the original).

This, he explains, is “all the more relevant in the case of foreign subjects roaming between former colonies of a distant Fascist Empire and a much more present postcolonial ex-metropolis.”91

90_{“Archive of Migrant Memories” website, accessed 31 July 2017,} http://www.archiviomemoriemigranti.net/.

91_{Alessandro Triuzli, “Roaming to Rome: Archiving and Filming Migrant Voices in Italy”, in}

Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative, ed. Emma Bond et al.

Master of Arts Thesis Euroculture