Unsatisfied with this twisted preventive defense against the Other, Teatro delle Albe produces a counter-narrative that does not attempt to sanctify immigrants as such, but to raise doubts on the dichotomous separation between right and wrong, legal and illegal, white and black. The stage encounters the social context in the common search for ethical answers to questions of who has the right to see what? Who has the right to say what?
Who has the right to speak for whom? In the nineteenth century, Italian intellectuals, politicians and artists gradually built the idea of Italianness, committing their lives to the values of the Risorgimento Unification Movement and the modern European philosophy of the nation-state. Southern migrants to the industrializing cities of the North became marked along with the category of the proletariat. In England, a few years later Edward Wilmont Blyden published Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race , in which the author explained how Christianity had influenced the creation of an inferiority complex among black Africans.
At that point, the Risorgimento values resurfaced to tighten the national unity, mark blacks as outsiders and leave whiteness untouched. Still today, the normative fiction according to which Italians perceive themselves as a homogeneous culture, derives from such cultural background, even if their daily experience speaks of large communities of immigrants broadly distributed in the peninsula. Public discourses fictionally keep alive the ideology of homogeneity. This paradox produces fiercer racialist discourses and a stronger wish to reject the Other, leading to a never ending escalation.
Confuting the position of those who claim that globalization is a contemporary phenomenon tracing its roots to the exploitative system of the colonies, I contend that the circum-Atlantic world described by Paul Gilroy in his much praised The Black Atlantic, perfectly translates into what I would call a circum-Mediterranean reality. The Mediterranean sea of ancient Rome was a world-system made of intense trafficking, constant racial tensions and business-oriented wars.
A historical portray of the relations between Africa and Europe would necessarily shape as a narrative of a two-way street exploitation and violence. Uneven power relations and unbalanced access 33 Pejorative expression used to name immigrants, especially those arriving from Africa. The more politically correct definition, encompassing all the various ethnic cohorts of immigrants, would be extracomunitari namely: The late eighteen century movement of poor Italian farm workers toward Tunisia and Algeria had little to do, in terms of national pride and development, with the fascist colonial attempts of the late thirties.
The former was the cry of a starving nation from which millions migrated hoping for better living conditions, while the latter was a state-sponsored attempt to reformulate the Roman Empire into modern imperialist terms. In the next chapters, this is what I set out to do. Drawing examples from political acts and popular culture, I contend that the absence of a historicizing perspective has two fundamental consequences: The latter is a direct filiation of the Western philosophy of progress that merges scientific reasoning about racial differences, the political notion of the nation-State with borders enclosing a homogeneous population, and geopolitical strategies of colonial domination.
The successful outcome of this alternative mode of intervention depends on how much agents — as spectators and actors of a theater piece, but also as citizens or foreigners - can liberate themselves from the surrounding dominant dialogue and grant access to immigrants themselves to the production of a national narrative on immigration. If Africa and immigrants are not targets or spectators, then why not perform with an all-white cast? Teatro delle Albe does not work with black Africans because they are immigrants, but because they are individuals with stories to be told that are at once far away from the Romagnole tradition yet uncannily familiar: Moreover, Teatro delle Albe functions as a laboratory of innovative ways to decode the life trajectory of the immigrants-actors.
His unique history makes him who he is. In chapter three, I detect the multiple incarnations of the emergency trope within media and politics. The two fields are strictly related because a hot topic in the news often becomes a public concern when politicians intervene with official declarations and legislative acts.
On the other hand, political deliberations on matters of social relevance initiate a cycle of media coverage. The communication business and the political debate feed each other. My main argument is that the media focuses on immigration to reinforce a sense of emergency and danger in the public sphere. When journalist write about immigrants, they do so almost exclusively in terms of illegal and clandestine arrivals, crimes, or religious and cultural tensions.
Likewise, politicians have managed the various immigration waves by means of sanatorie - Parliamentary acts that hide the double ideology of filling the gaps of the existing legislation, and bringing to the surface the black labor market of foreign workers. Once again, though, these interventions focus on the illegal aspect of immigration and implicitly communicate that the State cannot structurally regulate the phenomenon, limiting its actions to a posteriori controls by means of temporary, last-minute solutions.
Presenting both quantitative and qualitative readings of news coverage and official census data, I also argue that the emergency anxiety spreads from sanatorie to the various immigration laws starting with the first fascist law of Immigration is a two-way street, in which the sending and the receiving cultures start an involuntary yet necessary dialogue. Chapter four takes into account the neo-liberal politics that push people away from their homelands and into Europe.
The transnational flow of people is inextricably related to the allocation of international investments, humanitarian aids, and the use or abuse of local resources for the enjoyment of global consumerism. Against this backdrop, the theorization of neo- liberal capitalism attacks the welfare social system that has functioned for years as a form of collective support system. Immigrants are caught in between neo-liberal policies that operate both nationally and trans-nationally, exponentially widening the ratio between a shrinking number of wealthy people and an increasing figure of poor and disposed individuals.
The work of Teatro delle Albe calls attention upon this danger and acts both at the micro and macro levels to address specific needs of the immigrants and, more generally, the framework constructed for and around them. The production is a transnational performance by nature because it has been extensively performed in Europe, the US and Africa each time casting a group of ten to twelve local adolescents. I Polacchi represents the epitome of a contemporary globalized exported good, at once rooted in the culture that produced it in the first place, yet inhabiting the most diverse array of lives.
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As a consequence, it also regroups all the possible tensions of an intra-cultural adaptation in which the white director Marco Martinelli asks black teenagers from the Chicago public school system or from a village near Dakar to bring and perform themselves on stage. Under-represented communities gain access to a communicative arena, still under the artistic gaze of a white man who plays within his culture of origin. How effective and ethical is this mediation?
Common thinking perceives immigrants are illegal, or criminals, always as a group ethnically or culturally undifferentiated, and generally silent. He does not invoke theoretical human rights, but works through concrete actions for specific needs: In his traveling, he accompanies the mere economic support for his community with a larger project: He is struggling both in Ravenna and Dakar to overcome bureaucratic blindness and create a theater space in which the extremely participatory mode of African performance and the Western notion of the separation between those who see and those who act may merge to found a truly intra-cultural theater.
The lack of a serious conversation on the colonial past, the erasure of a millenarian history of cross-Mediterranean exchanges, a pervasive self-representation of Italy as a land of emigrants rather than immigrants, and the internalization of a racial discourse that depicts linguistic, religious and cultural differences as insurmountable barriers: I place my work in line with scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Rustom Bharucha, Abdelmalek Sayad, and in Italy Carlo Landuzzi, Giorgio Fabre, and Guido Bolaffi who look at migration as a multilayered web of historical, economic, political, and spatio-temporal elements, making sense of the complexity of social behaviors that involve individuals and communities, both within and across 35 Hutcheon, Linda.
A Theory of Parody: Migration is never a one-way street, and hardly ever an individual decision. It pertains to personal and collective expectations, initiating a circulation of bodies, goods, ideas, beliefs, and feelings.
This positioning stands against the sensationalistic take on migration privileged by media and politics - that peculiar fascination for the self-victimizing complex which emphasizes the social and economic price Italians have to pay for their open-door policy towards immigrants.
Leftist journalism tends to reduce the phenomenon to a populist form of sympathy for the mass of desperate individuals that cross the Mediterranean sea on board of old and dangerous vessels. Newspapers, television news and politicians talk of Italian-born citizens as the real victims of constant waves of illegal workers, whose arrivals by sea to the Southern costs of Lampedusa or Bari reach its climax each summer and disrupt the lazy sunbathing of vacationers.
The clash between the Ottoman Empire and the Catholic world, the Crusades, or the invasion of Sicily by the Arabs have left traces in popular culture that contributed to the consolidation of an uncomfortable feeling of emergency towards black bodies. These sentences have lost their historical roots, yet they constitute day to day forms of speech 36 Here I use internalization in the meaning that cognitive anthropologists give to the term. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. Laterza, ; Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. Laterza, ; Gli Italiani in Libia.
Dal Fascismo a Gheddafi. Laterza, ; Le guerre coloniali del Fascismo. The author gives numerous examples on peaceful and integrated past relations between people from Islamic countries and Italians. Before the year , many Italian cities had specific burying sites for Islam believers; very often freed slaves of Arabic origin inherited huge fortunes from their former Catholic masters; conversions of servants to Catholic religion were not unusual. Likewise, Renaissance Rome had its visible share of street vendors from the Maghreb. Few Italians are aware that long before North African migrations towards Sicily, there had been a conspicuous Sicilian migration towards Tunisia in the nineteen twenties and thirties; or that Radio Bari, a local radio station from the Southern region of Puglia, inaugurated its broadcasting programs in Arabic years before the more famous BBC service.
They do something in so far as they instill in every day conversations, from an early age, a subconscious notion that black equals evil and danger. Seemingly innocuous sayings, they intervene on the mental map of race relations and shape them along colored splits. For a full account of speech acts, see: Also, on the equation between blackness and evil, and its upside down turn in the black imagination see hooks bell.
Henry Holt and Company, On August 25, while speaking at the national meeting of Comunione e Liberazione, a Catholic association, he said that the Left is aiming at a multicultural and multiethnic society. Opposing this political and cultural agenda, he believes that Italy should belong to Catholic Italians. For a theorization of the impossible coexistence of different cultures on the same national territory see: Simon and Schuster, Viaggio nella seconda religione del paese.
Italians show discomfort towards the visible presence of Islamic communities in their cities because they fear mass conversions and the disruption of the Catholic way of life. In a series of interviews conducted in Torino in , only 2. Proselytism is the inheritance of a national confessional culture, rather than an importation from abroad. They both have deep historic roots because movements of people are as old as human civilizations themselves.
The lack of a serious historical criticism on Italian-African relations has created the space for current misrepresentations of blackness and immigrants. The Italian colonial presence in Africa lasted from to As a latecomer in the group of European countries pursuing the dream of an overseas empire, the recently unified Italy saw colonialism as a means to reduce internal social strains by creating employment, and generate a sense of national unity through the army and the export of surplus farm workers to the fields of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Libya.
Once Fascism had risen to the stage, the regime complemented the internal authoritarianism with a colonial structure that pushed Italy forward in the competition with other European nations. In the attempt to separate the Risorgimento liberal governments from imperialism, historians often pass unto silence that Mussolini simply widened up the geopolitical plan conceived by liberal governments led by Crispi and Giolitti.
It contained a universal claim. Africa and Africans usually appeared as a series of 41 The fascist war campaigns in Africa constituted the fourth phase of a national imperialist policy. The first intervention in Africa had already happened under the Depertis and Crispi governments, ending with the disastrous military defeat of the Italian army at Adwa, in Ethiopia. Then, a phase of diplomatic preparation for the Libyan war followed. The third phase coincided with World War I during which Italy showed a clear hegemonic design over the Adriatic and the Mediterranean.
Il lavoro italiano in Africa. Tipografia del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, The book contains precious information on the role of Italian workers both within national colonies and in territories occupied by France. Once again, Africans appear as minors unable to manage their own development and modernization. Written reports, visual recordings and live experiences did not showcase blacks as human beings but as objects of curiosity, fascination, rejection, and morbid feelings.
The institutionalization of race as a scientific category happened in perfect timing with the euphoria for the power-building strategies of the nation-state. According to early-Renaissance scholar Hannaford, intellectuals up to the early 17th century individuated civilization not by means of inscribed racial elements, but through the presence of a public sphere the Greek agora in which politics took place and the good of the State was discussed. Barbarians lacked this structure and: Western governments based their policies on a territory, with precise borders that came out of negotiations and conflicts with neighboring countries, and 43 Augustein, H.
The Origin of an Idea, Thoemmes Press, , X. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge UP, , I contend that ethnicity did not disappear from the picture, but was very much in the mind of those intellectuals and politicians who designed the strategic and military borders of the recently unified Italy. They put into question the social contract that binds Western citizens to one another and to the State. Migration also inexorably affects the collective consciousness of European countries whose populations tend to grow old while feeling the pressure of a younger and restless African continent.
Countering these proto forms of ideological racism, Catholicism worked in two distinctive, yet opposing, ways. On the one hand, the predominant approach criticized the institutionalization of race as the defying element of human relations. Any difference, racial differences included, could be overcome by entering in the superior realm of true Christianity. No separation was cast in stone, neither was it inscribed in physical features.
Bollati Boringheri, , 7. For a long time, Italy and Yugoslavia claimed possession over the city. The majority of its population is of Italian descent, yet geographically the delineation of the North-Eastern national border at the end of World War I assigned Fiume to Yugoslavia.
By means of diplomatic attempts or military incursions, Italian governments tried to regain the city up until the end of World War II. Missionaries and high Vatican hierarchies worked in unison with or tolerated the enslavement of black Africans. These practices were a result of economic interests rather than an ideological subjugation of racially marginalized people. The Church faced some embarrassment when the diversity of physical types and colored skin seemed to question monogenesis - the faith in a single and primary source for all human kind descending from Adam and Eve.
The transformation of race into the unchangeable, natural categorizations of human beings was a utilitarian policy to protect the interests of European nations in unison with the constitution of nation-states and world colonization. The Augustinian universal appeal to the city of God became a weapon to justify racial submission in this world in light of a promised salvation in heaven.
Utilitarian political and religious reasoning based the construction of difference on superficial elements to discern proper behaviors from wilderness: Blackness became synonym with ugly, funny, or backward. This analysis underlines an ideological and economic continuity in national colonialism from democracy to fascist totalitarianism and beyond. The newly born liberal democracy of the late 19th century embraced a racist political view about Africa and blacks, and did not enlist the enlightenment of those at the margins as a priority in their agenda.
They constituted elitist forms of government, made for the rich and the well-to-do; they rarely engaged national poverty or civil rights issues. They had even less interest in the wealth of colonized communities abroad. Italian politicians were no different and looked at what was left of a free Africa as a land of economic expansion.
Private capitals financed much of the imperialistic penetration in Eastern and Northern Africa. At the turn of the century, exponents of the nobility and the most rampant bourgeoisies formed the governmental elite. They possessed undeniable interests in the economic commissions coming from the 47 The Vatican resisted slave commerce only when converted Africans were sold to Islamic traders.
More often than not, local priests suggested that the Vatican keep a low profile. Few general condemnations dealt with the cruelty of enslaving practices, but not with slavery itself. Istituto Universitario Orientale, Fascism and Blackness The Risorgimento expansion plan inspired Fascism, whose ideologists unapologetically embraced the systemic institutionalization of a world view that divided people into races with different degrees of civilization; a mixture of nationalism and demographic policies justified colonialism as a tool to move large numbers of people from depressed areas in the South and North-East to the open African spaces representing a land of rich and prosperous opportunities.
The demographic reasoning was one of four major arguments circulating in the imperialist discourse. Along with it, the regime defended an economic, political, and religious principle. If Italy continued to be excluded from the partition of Africa, the nation was doomed to become a political lightweight. Race made its appearance as a juridical category in the Organic Ordainment for Eritrea and Somalia promulgated in to keep under control the frequent phenomenon of mixed unions and children, which the regime had tolerated at first.
Those who equated mixed unions to a form of genocide, because it polluted the integrity of a biological Italian type, silenced the position of those who claimed that human beings have always had the will to re-generate themselves through hybridization. The regime applied a conceptual racialism to the geopolitical space, classifying peoples of the world in hierarchical order. This classification responded to a logic of military and economic interests, having nothing to do with an original locus of ideological representation of the Other.
That explains why the Japanese or the British people moved up and down the ladder in reaction to changed military alliances. In , mixed unions became illegal with the promulgation of the act Criminal Sanctions for the Defense of the Prestige of our Race against the Natives of Italian Africa. Europe had reached modernity not by freeing itself from its past, but because it recast this same past, and manipulated it to meet present needs and future perspectives.
Not just black Africans, but Jews and many other internal and external enemies of the highly masculinized Italian regime eventually turned into targets of bitter persecution. Rivista di studi storici.
Editrice La Grafica, On female bodies and mixed unions, see also: In that context, his writing on the existence of a common Italian race aimed to widening popular support to the Socialist Party. Two brief articles written by Mussolini on the Italian race clarify the quick trajectory that pushed him out of the socialist milieu and into the creation of the fascist party. It is a community of different people poorly amalgamated under a ferociously unified administration. The moral links uniting a Piemontese and a Sicilian citizen are very dubious.
The racial links even more so. Her connotations are categorical. The wide sea separates her on three sides from the world, and in the North the Alps divides her from the continent. Four major points constituted its backbone: The objective, biological existence of different races; 2. The superiority of the pure Italian race; 3. The right for Italians to be openly racist; 4. The problem of the Jewish community, composed of non- European elements which could not be assimilated into the Catholic framework.
The manifesto in itself did not launch a crusade against blacks, but the ideological structure of its reasoning was easily translatable from the Jewish community to any other group. Dal Socialismo al Fascismo: La formazione di un antisemita. Moreover, stressing that the problem of the Jewish community was its non- European heritage, the manifesto hindered blacks from any chance to be looked at as proper citizens.
It finds justification in the reconstruction period of the early nineteen fifties and the logic of the Cold War. At the time, the Allied Forces did not wish to eradicate the former fascist establishment from the public sphere. The American strategy was to reinstate many moderate fascist leaders in positions of power in order to balance off a possible leftist swing in the new democratic government and contain the spread of the Red Scare in Italy.
Former fascists found a second life not only in policy-making but also in universities and media. This choice silenced a genuine self-critical analysis of Fascism from the start. The alleged goal of the collection was to provide an exhaustive analysis of the colonial presence in Eastern and Northern Africa. Fifteen out of the twenty four members of the Scientific Committee of the Ministry were former colonial administrators, and all the others were Africanists who had highly praised the Italian intervention in Africa.
Far from being an 52 Palumbo, Michael. Moreover, the silence over war crimes against the Jews and the people in the colonies was also useful to avoid a critical analysis of the real responsibilities of the Resistance fighters in the killings of many Italians who had kept faith in the fascist black shirts until the end of the war. Both Right and Left needed a general audience able and willing to forget.
Miti, memorie, errori, sconfitte. La Nuova Italia, The formation of the post-war cultural atmosphere suffered from the ghosts of guilt and shame inherited from the past. Leftist intellectuals and political leaders had to pay the price for mistakes made by their predecessors. They were caught in a sort of intellectual repentance, since the Socialist Party, in which Mussolini had begun his career, had never fully distanced itself from national imperialism. Socialists accused the liberal governments of Depretis and Crispi of engaging in expensive colonial enterprises that were economically unsound, but never condemned colonialism tout court.
This historic guilt hunted liberal and leftist intellectuals in contemporary debates over migration. Accordingly, Italy needs migrants to feed the work force for the industrial system of the North and field work in the South. National economic interests reduce immigrants to a homo economicus figure, and their market value becomes the paradigm for which they should be accepted within national borders. With the progressive decolonization of Africa, this repenting attitude gave birth to a general Third World-ism policy connoted by a sharp populist character often devoid of true capacity of intervention.
Between and , one million Italians went to Eastern Africa.
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Many were young men on their first trip outside of their region or city. The fascist regime sold them the colonial experience as a mysterious, fascinating journey, building it, to a large extent, on the 19th century narrations of the first scientific and religious missions to the black continent. Fascist rhetoric constituted the framework that accompanied Italians when they occupied East Africa and encountered black people, and within which each colonizer placed 55 On this see: Sociologia della Negritudine, Napoli: Many intellectuals participated in the founding of an overseas empire.
Then of course, many were peasants coming from impoverished rural areas to whom the regime had promised fertile lands to improve their socio-economic status. Very soon the encounter between Italian colonizers and the black continent revealed its true nature. Whereas the government had promised wealth, colonizers faced desert areas and diseases. The fascist regime constructed Africa as the somewhere else, the adventurous and exotic challenge, the frontier to be conquered and domesticated.
With the end of the war and the decolonization process, thousands of Italians who had invested everything in their across-the-sea lives had to return to their homeland with little or no competition. The forced repatriation stood as a social wound in the public consciousness and many had to process a sense of loss and betrayal.
Later, when the reconstruction period eventually ended, and the times were mature for a retroactive criticism, Italy was living within the first consistent economic boom since the beginning of the century. The new myths of the average family were the television set, the Vespa scooter, and the washing machine.
Consumerism took by storm a population that had long lived off the economic remissions coming from millions of migrants to the Americas and Europe. Increasing wealth silenced the collective willingness to understand and remember the responsibilities Italians bore with regard to their colonies. Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. Early leftists scholars in Italy failed in becoming the critical voice of post-war culture, and embodied an implicit complacency with post-colonial structures of racialization.
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Methodologically, invisible racism is a useful analytical tool to understand the reasons why Italy came so late in promulgating an immigration law that would replace the fascist law. It was only in law , 30 December that the Parliament discussed a serious legislative proposal. Politicians were only trying to cope up with a legislative gap, which gave the media a further motivation to embark on the emergency crusade against immigrants.
As David Ward points out: It was only after serious outbursts of racist violence in several countries that European governments began to tighten up their immigration laws and restrict the rights of immigrants or asylum seekers to cross their borders and establish residence. The implicit effect of this policy was to see cause of the violence not in the European racists, neo-Nazi, and thugs, but in the immigrants themselves.
From victims of racist violence, immigrants found themselves as its cause. In the late nineteen seventies, Italian public consciousness rediscovered the presence of blacks in the country in times of economic recession, internal social unrest and inner-city violence caused by a minority of immigrants. All the dormant tropes of blackness resurrected: From Detroit to Disney World. U of California P, Old Metaphors and New Racism in the s. National Identity and Global Culture. Beverly Allen and Mary Russo eds.
U of Minnesota P, , This awakening caused severe tensions within the country because no one really seemed to possess the right instruments to decode and analyze the immigration phenomenon. The lack of any serious critical thinking on the convolute and painful intersection between Fascism and the Resistance movement, brought right-wing conservative groups to appropriate the values of the Resistance itself.
This political positioning defined the war against Nazi- Fascism a national war of liberation, and its advocates ideologically legitimated restrictive immigration laws under the rubric of a second war of liberation from foreign invaders. They deliberately passed onto silence two facts: This implicitly racist discourse stigmatized difference for bearing unwanted tensions within the national compound and creating spaces of highly contested hybrid exchanges. Such spaces defied easy classifications and therefore produced panic and anxieties.
No necessary political empowerment derived from increasing representations, when black people turned into commodities, or were used as product-selling tropes. The image of the black person in advertisement campaigns, movies and so on did not erase the marginality of migrants in structural social relations. To paraphrase Peggy Phelan, reading physical resemblance is not a way of identifying community.
The human being disappears behind the product. Real immigrants cannot live up to the coolest drink as refreshing as the breeze of an exotic island, or to the fascination for the latest trendy vacation spot, with ethnically attired workers serving coconut milk by the ocean to white clients. The Italian psychological reaction to the newly re-discovered black presence was due to interrelated national and international factors.
First and foremost, in the oil crisis changed the immigration policies of many European countries for good. Facing the danger of economic recession, France, Germany and Great Britain decided to limit the access to their territory, notwithstanding the fact that they had been historically more receptive of post-colonial migration waves. Restrictive laws did not stop people from moving; they forced them to do so within the interstices of illegality. Immigrants started gravitating towards the more easily accessible Southern European countries, often temporarily crossing them to move towards Central and Northern Europe.
Italy became an immigration 62 Phelan, Peggy. Two other phenomena aggravated the acceptance policy of black Africans: I define the former as an unconscious reaction to the hardships that national migrants had to face when they moved in great numbers to the Americas and North Europe. They are not interested in becoming American citizens.
Their goal is to accumulate, through a rigid and dangerous economy, a sum of money and go back home. They live as beasts in miserable conditions. What they eat is so repulsive that any American worker would be nauseated by it. The practice of naming follows a snowball effect, rolling down from the subaltern to the dominant to complicate the notions of victimizer and victimized who both share degrees of compliance with the same structures of stereotyping.
When the Other is the same, it rarely creates community. Similarly, recognizing oneself in the Other pertains to the realm of death, socially and culturally inscribed. Narcissus fell in the lake because he was too attracted by his own image. The internal geopolitical unbalance of the North-South split complicated the problem furthermore.
Since its unification, Italy has had two economies - the rampant industrialization of the North, and the slower agricultural development of the South. The former has lived under the major cultural influence of the Austro-Hungarian, later pan-European, sphere with centers such as Milano and 64 Cited in: Rubettino Editore, , I believe Italia cuisine has come a long way from being considered repulsive in the United States.
He re-found in those places his own universe and defined Islam as the West of the East. The latter has undisputable Mediterranean roots in what used to be the Reign of Two Sicilies. These two cultural spheres have always conceived their people as ethnically different. They were once again same and Other, equal and different: In the late nineteen eighties, the consistent appearance on the horizon of a darker African foreigners, whose religious and linguistic structures could not harmonize with Catholicism and whiteness, turned Southerners into full-fledged Italians.
Internal racism reached an emergency escape, and was projected onto those foreigners who are invisible in social terms but clearly visible as objects of violence and fear. In either cases, there is an unbalanced attitude that questions the right for these young boys to exist in any public space. Likewise, the white gaze can very easily erase African immigrants, or greet them with annoyed stares on sidewalks crowded with fake Gucci handbags and wooden giraffes,68 while the police system constantly monitors them and equates blackness with illegality and crime.
There is nothing objective in the ethnicity discourse, which is not to say that ethnic differences do not exist. The racial problem always activates a notion of contiguity, bringing ethnicity to a symbolic level of tension between 66 This is an oversimplification of a much more stratified national identity composed by the sense of belonging to the Comuni city-state of middle-age inheritance, which conflicts with the multiple foreign invasions that have left different socio-cultural and linguistic traces in each region.
When the tourists asked them to remove their stuff, the vendors refused to comply. The police was called and the picture finally taken. In instances such as this, the white gaze acknowledges the Other only as a disturbance in its entertaining plan of image consumption. Stereotyping Blackness in Popular Culture Complex tropes of blackness surfaced in Italian popular culture throughout the 20th century.
Benedetto Croce helped to perpetuate the myth of a human Italian colonialism, very different from the racist forms of abuse implemented by other European countries in their colonies. As latecomers in the colonial rush, Italians perhaps had fewer chances to create a rational system of exploitation as the French or English regimes had done before. Nonetheless, they fought the war of conquest deploying tortures, rapes, and bombing the enemy with poisonous gas. The Italiani brava gente trope hid an erotic background. Many folkloric tunes of the time hint at the sexualization of black women.
The erotic black woman was one of a fixed number of stereotypes about femininity which constantly appeared in Fascist songs: Indro Montanelli, one of the most respected Italian journalists, always defended the participation of Italians, including himself, to the Ethiopian campaign. From the pages of the newspaper Il Giornale, Montanelli repeated that Italians never used gas weapons during the war, respecting the human rights of the Ethiopian people.
Cavallo, Pietro and Pasquale, Iaccio. How this could be possible against the backdrop of fascist laws that made intermarriage illegal is a question that digs into the inconsistent rhetoric of the regime in terms of racial and gender identity markers. In the following years, the Minculpop Popular Culture Bureau censored the song because it implicitly contained the invitation of a mixed union between the Italian soldier and the black Abyssinian woman.
From , this kind of relationships, at first looked upon as an example of real Italian masculinity, became inopportune in time of racial conflicts during the war. Considering that most of the songs were meant to accompany the army during overseas campaigns, it should come as no surprise that they focused primarily on the image of the hyper-masculine Italian man whose strength, sexual power and courage terrorize the male enemies and fascinate their women. When repetition happens systemically and systematically the formula replaces the form.
Parody, for example, was very common. Entertainment and state ideology got married under the easy-listen swing of the truest Italian rhythms. Italiani brava gente was one of many racial stereotypes that persisted over time. The text narrated the difficult life of a man from Napoli who migrated to Tripoli to sell clothes and other little handmade objects on the street. In those years, thousands of Italians from the depressed South, but also from Veneto or Liguria, had to leave their homeland to look for fortune abroad, which inspired much of the nostalgic and melodramatic tones of the artistic production of the time.
For example, the song Lacrime napulitane Neapolitan tears emphasized the psychological stress of Southern migrants working in the US, whose nostalgia for their family and beautiful homeland gave to 72 Eco, Umberto. However, the expression found linguistic fortune decades after the nineteen twenties. The appellative was a projection, from the national collections of multiple identities, of a self-imposed marker onto foreigners. A social type, built on selling and buying, linked the personal experience of Italian fathers and grandfathers to the presence of African migrants in the peninsula. It acquired an offensive connotations when, starting in the nineteen eighties, the number of African street vendors from Morocco and Senegal increased vertiginously.
The term lost its literary and autochthonous origin. Since the nineteen thirties, jazz music had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. At first, the separation between lovers of the fast-pace foreign sounds and defenders of a pure Italian melody followed a generational gap. Traditionalists attacked jazz for being a Negro music, example of a corrupted and decadent society.
Even calling it music seemed inappropriate, it was rather noise. According to its detractors, jazz lyrics were not in English but in a Negro-American idiom which invited to luxury and perdition. In , the regime launched an autarchic campaign to ban anything foreigner from the Italian soil: A Place in the Sun. Berkeley and Los Angeles: A pure race deserved to defend pure national sounds, whose list included mazurka and tango. The fascist administration overlooked the fact that the former was a Polish dance and the latter constituted the pillar of Argentinean music and feeling, and that they both had been originated by means of hybridization from different sources.
So much for the purity myth! In the early post-World War II era, blackness disappeared from the public domain and collective worries to recess to the level of folklore: Once again, music is the most useful performance medium to analyze social changes. Tammurriata Nera Black Tammurriata 76 is an ironic song still widely known nowadays. It narrates the incident of a baby born in Napoli by an Italian unmarried woman.
Yet, despite his obvious mixed race, his mother decides to call him Ciro, a quintessentially Neapolitan name for boys.
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The euphoria that followed the end of the war, and the need to obtain rare goods possessed and distributed by American troops, turned objectively into a baby-boom phenomenon of mixed origins. The figli della colpa, born in Ethiopia or Somalia since the very first day of the Italian colonial enterprise, were usually the fruit of a white man and a black woman. Now, not only did the births happen on national soil, but from white Italian women seduced by black men. Women used to perform tammurriata during religious rituals, as acts of devotion and invocation, or in festivities linked to the lunar calendar and the fieldwork.
Cinema also lived under the fascination of the dark continent, immortalizing the same images popularized by exploration diaries that had become popular since the eighteen seventies. From the nineteen twenties on, Italian film makers produced a number of documentaries and movies which very often tried to combine fiction and anthropological study. The black body and the African landscape were the object of a collective scopophilia that worked similarly to the fascination for the exotic displayed at the Universal Expositions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Women performed a delirium that mixed exoticism and eroticism while men embodied the virile fighter trope.
The movies and news reports by Istituto Luce, the national broadcasting and production company, were the opening act of variety shows and films, and served disparate ends. They obviously strengthened the audience indoctrination, showing the central role played by colonial Italians in building infrastructures and harmonious relationships between colonizers and colonized people. The vigorous Italian workers would inspire the lazy locals to work hard and build all sorts of necessary infrastructures.
In the well deserved rest time soldiers also taught them how to play soccer. Moving images also created a sense of familiarity with the far away African landscapes. The regime taught Italians to perceive Africa as a natural extension of their motherland. The point of view of the Libyans or Abyssinians never appeared on screen. In fiction, Africa was never really a place, but rather the somewhere else where the colonial dream balanced all the tensions existing within the nation. Stabilimento Tipografico Pietro Valbonesi, On the topic, see also: How Fascism Ruled Women: Inequality stems from value judgments that depend upon structures of power embedded in social consciousness and ideology- building processes.
The fascist projection of national socio-political necessities onto blackness demonstrates that racial encounters exist as a mediation between the real and the imagined, where the latter is already a construction or a translation of stereotypes and utilitarian inventions. The moving image of film-making was a way of reworking visual stereotypes that Europeans had attached to black bodies since the beginning of commercial advertisement. In Renaissance Italy, the heuristic encounter with the Other came out of a stratified tradition merging Aristotelian theories about the marvelous, in which imagination precedes the actual knowledge, and classic and Christian approaches to the unknown.
They tend to focus on the relationship between the media and fascism in terms of power relation and consensus building. Unfortunately, they hardly ever look at how Africans were represented and constructed as a monolithic category. Materiali di lavoro, ; Cavallo, Pietro and Pasquale Iaccio. Along with the above-mentioned study by Peggy Phelan, see: Modern Dance Negro Dance: U of Minnesota P, ; Conquergood, Dwight.
Struggles and Accommodations in a Chicago Polyethnic Tenement. Feminism, Mapplethorpe and Discursive Excess. Oxford and New York: The Wonders of the New World. U of Chicago P, ; Todorov, Tsvetan. The Conquest of America. The Question of the Other. Harper and Row, Both examples were signs of exquisiteness and distinction that accompanied artistic representations of blackness.
Strikingly, visual artists of the late 19th and early 20th century offered a different, more reductive perspective on blackness. The three most common tropes of blackness were: Analyzing hundreds of advertisement campaigns, from hand painted postcards to contemporary photographic representations, Raymond Bachollet individuates a temporal continuum in which blackness seems immutable within a certain European sensibility.
Advertisement dehumanized blacks and reduced them to the role of product-selling tropes. Both when white figures are present in the visual representation, or when whites are simply imagined as potential buyers, blacks always appear as secondary or utilitarian elements. Black bodies do not transude flesh and blood, but rather volumetric geometries that often deform their physical features, by the act of enlarging or substituting them with the advertised goods. Capturing a double psychological reaction of attraction towards that which is exotic and repulsion for that which is abnormal, physical deformity also embodies moral depravation.
The ethnic Other was the expiatory goat on which the regime projected its expectations for the formation of an Italian empire and anxieties for the presence of cultural differences that needed to be kept under control. The discovery of the black body in visual art and advertisement went hand in hand with the model of Africa as a feminized, virginal continent onto 82 Pinkus, Karen. Beverly, Allen and Mary, Russo eds.
When photography became predominant in advertisement in the nineteen sixties, constructed realism substituted parody. Nevertheless, lips, noses, sexed bodies and bananas did not disappear from the picture. Advertisement reached out to the audience with an immediate, clear, and simple act of communication. It excluded the possibility of any hybridization; it rather represented race in a very codified and easily accessible fashion.
Blacks were a synecdoche for the product they advertised - chocolate or coffee - because one belonged to the other intrinsically. Blacks were the opposite of what is straight, clean and right, as when they were used to advertise soap and cleaners to wash away the dirt from their own bodies. Blacks were a part for the whole: Multiculturalism entered the field as a superficial strategy to sell products to brand new consumers, but it never seemed feasible that whites would be able to identify with black testimonials. Bachollet, for example, emphasizes how the trope of the Negro head embodied this uncanny continuity: Only with the start of the Black Panther political movement and with the Negritude philosophical claim that black is beautiful, the Negro head became a sign of resistance and suffering, turning the mask has turned into a simulacrum.
Edizioni Gruppo Abele, On the black body and its representations, see also: The Myth of Aunt Jemina: Welcome to the Jungle: Routledge, ; Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Semiotext e , ; Baudrillard, Jean. Sheila Faria Glaser trans. The overtly sexed black body traces back to a medieval Catholic culture which associated all sorts of moral and physical temptations to dark skin. Actually, it goes further back to ancient Rome. Iconographic and written material showed that upper-class Romans had a keen fascination for macrophallic blacks and for turbid stories of sexual encounters between citizens of the eternal city and black slaves.
Yet, as Professor Lloyd Thompson demonstrates in his work Romans and Blacks, one could hardly say that ancient Romans were racist. For a review of it aspects and the scholarly debate around it, see: The Science of Buffoonery: El Hadji Niang, Michele Sambin. Giancarlo Cottignoli, Enrico Isola.
Set and costume design: Teatro delle Albe, Ravenna Teatro, Tam teatromusica. It opened in Ravenna, Teatro Rasi, on January 28, Also, when speaking of the commedia character, I will retain the Italian spelling Arlecchino. I base my reading of the play on the archival video containing selected scenes, which I watched at Teatro Rasi, and on the original script published by Marco Martinelli in Teatro Impuro.
Danilo Montanari Editore, Martinelli adapted the script. The show was a co-production of Teatro delle Albe and Tam teatromusica. Therefore, Michele Sambin, founder of the latter, directed the play. Finally, two more Albe actors completed the cast: While the latter represents the canonic staging of a written text, by mise en vie Martinelli means the synergetic co-presence, both in rehearsal and performance, of the script as it was originally conceived and the life experience that actors bring into it. I will return to these concepts in more depth in chapter two.
It is his last night in Milan before finally traveling back to Senegal for the first time since he migrated to Italy. The suitcases contain gifts for his extended family; a hyperbolic list that includes clothes and toys but also stereos, refrigerators and washing machines. Mor finds a hostel managed by another fellow Senegalese immigrant, and hopes to get free hospitality for the evening.
When Scapino, the hotel owner, refuses to play by the rules of Muridic brotherhood and denies Mor free room, the latter prefers to sleep outside rather than spend money. During the night, two thieves steal all his gifts and cash. The stock character of Arlecchino had evolved in the 16th century into the poor servant from Bergamo, a rural city, visiting Venice, the center of culture, elegance and luxury. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?
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