Migrant Belongings

Memory, Space, Identity

Anne-Marie Fortier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859734056
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180992
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces the formation of Italian migrant belongings in Britain, and scrutinizes the identity narratives through which they are stabilized. A key theme of this study is the constitution of identity through both movement and attachment. The study follows the Italian identity project since 1975, when community leaders first raised concerns about 'the future of invisible immigrants'. The author uses the image of 'invisible immigrants' as the starting point of her inquiry, for it captures the ambivalent position Italians occupy within the British political and social landscape. As a cultural minority absorbed within the white European majority, their project is steeped in the ideal of visibility that relies on various 'displays of presence'. Drawing on a wide range of material, from historical narratives, to political debates, processions, religious rituals, activities of the Women's Club, war remembrances, card games, and beauty contests, the author explores the notion of migrant belongings in relation to performative acts that produce what they claim to be reproducing. She reveals how these acts work upon the historical and cultural environment to re-member localized terrains of migrant belongings, while they simultaneously manufacture gendered, generational and ethnicized subjects. Located at the crossroads of cultural studies, 'diaspora' studies, and feminist/queer theory, this book is distinctive in connecting an empirical study with wider theoretical debates on identity. Nominated for the Philip Abrams Memorial Book Prize 2001.

– 1 –
Situating the Italian Project of Visibility

Borders and diasporas are phenomenon that blow up — both enlarge and explode — the hyphen

Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg

In the Chiesa del Redentore, at the Centro Scalabrini of London, a stained glass window neatly captures the raison d'être of the religious order that runs this Brixton-based Italian Catholic mission. The image in the window depicts John Baptist Scalabrini, the founder of the congregation, encountering emigrants at the Milan train station in 1887. This incident is said to be at the origin of the foundation of this missionary order, which caters to Italian (and other) emigrants world-wide. The railway tracks trace a central line in the scene, drawing our gaze towards a globe that covers the opening of a tunnel. The tracks and the globe meet at the centre of the image, symbolically linking Italy with the world, and the present with the unknown future. In the foreground, stands Scalabrini, and, slightly behind him, two 'pioneers' (sic)¹ of the London Mission-P. Walter Sacchetti, founder of the Centro, and P. Silvano Bartapelle. In the background, to the left of the tracks, stand two figures, a man and a woman, their luggage on the floor, looking towards the globe, their back turned against us. In this pictorial rendition of the foundational myth of the London mission, temporal and geographical differences are fused within a gesture that marks an initiating moment that extends into the present. The anachronism of joining Father Scalabrini and two founding fathers of the Brixton Centro (established in 1968) breaks down the temporal distance and emphasizes the continuity of the congregation's concerns. At the same time, the location of this event in the past is effectively interrupted by the central figure of the railway track. The railway, in Italian immigrant historicity, bridges distinct but overlapping timespaces constitutive of an Italian 'émigré' identity: here/there; now/ then; present/future; Italy/elsewhere. In his account of Calabrian immigrants living in Bedford, Renato Cavallaro alludes to the railway as a hyphen linking two timespaces. He suggests that the railway between the home and the workplace acts as a hyphen that symbolically links Italy (home) and Bedford (workplace), the space of origins and the industrial space, tradition and modernity (Cavallaro 1981: 93).² The railway-as-hyphen runs on the border zone of sameness and difference, of identity and change. Moreover, in spite of its absence, the expected train speaks volumes of movement across and within space. The train is 'something through which one goes, it is also something by the means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by' (Foucault in Probyn 1996: 11). in short, the railway track foregrounds the space of movement and the movement across space (Probyn 1996: 11). In this representation of the Scalabrini mission, the train station symbolically represents a zone between Italy and abroad, a borderzone (Anzaldùa 1987), the poles of which are linked by the tracks. It follows that the identity of the travellers standing on the platform is already shaped by movement and difference, which are located in the 'elsewhere' awaiting them somewhere on the globe. Even before they have left the platform, they are already 'emigrati'.

The aim of this book is to uncover the constitutive potency of 'betweenness' in the formation of an Italian migrant belongings. Or, as Lavie and Swedenburg suggest, I propose to 'blow up' the hyphen, that is to both enlarge and explode it (1996b: 16).³ My approach converses with a new strand of social research that is burgeoning around 'diaspora'. An important contribution of this body of work is to mediate the relationship between the constraining local and the inflated global by conceiving of a new surface of identity formation that Avtar Brah has called the 'diaspora space' (1996: 209). Composed of genealogies of displacement and genealogies of 'staying put', diaspora space inserts itself between localism and transnationalism and proposes a conception of identity as a positionality that 'is not a process of absolute othering, but rather of entangled tensions' (Clifford 1994: 307). The space of diaspora weaves new webs of belonging that trouble spatial fields of 'nation', 'home', territory, 'community'. To be sure, 'betweenness', in discourses of diaspora, is commonly defined in terms of two territories, which does little to break down the borders of nation states and their congruence with a culture. Many have stressed the centrality of the homeland in definitions of diaspora (Safran 1991; Cohen 1997; Tölölyan 1996), and suggested that diaspora compels us to examine how 'there' is rearticulated 'here' (Clifford 1994). This argument has been criticized for neglecting the ways in which a number of diasporic populations or individuals negotiate new forms of belonging outside of this two-way geography (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994). In the concluding chapter, I further develop this argument in light of the new geographies of identity that emerge from Italian 'émigré' identity practices.

In recent years, cultural critics have written extensively on the implications of theorizing diaspora (Clifford 1994; Marienstras 1975; Radhakrishnan 1996; Brah 1996; Gilroy 1994, 1995; Kaplan 1996); others have contributed to the debates by focusing on transnational exchanges between dispersed populations (Gilroy 1987, 1991, 1993a, 1995; Bhachu 1991; Van Hear 1998). Yet, because diaspora denotes multi-location and border crossings, it is easy to privilege notions of the multiply-positioned subject and to overemphasize hybridity, difference and diversity (Helmreich 1992) without any considerations for continuity, for what is 'persistently there' (Clifford 1994: 320) beyond the retention of food and folkways. Rather than engaging with a radically pluralist approach, I attempt to move beyond pluralism and essentialism by 'dealing equally with roots and routes' (Gilroy 1993a: 190) or, to be more accurate, by scrutinizing the social dynamics of rootings and routings in the construction of an émigré Italian identity. Migrant Belonging, joins a small but growing body of work that explores how a 'diasporic mode of existence' (Marienstras 1975: 184) mediates the formation of localized cultures, identities or 'communities' (Jacobson 1996; Bhatt 1997; Harney 1998; Gray 1997; Lavie and Swedenburg 1996c; van der Veer 1995). I approach Italian immigrants of London as part of a diaspora and view different versions of self-representation in connection with wider discourses and social contacts. Rather than focusing on the transnational circulation and exchange of cultural practices between dispersed Italian populations, I examine the formation of local particularity in relation to local, national and transnational connections — how here and there, migration and settlement, routes and roots are negotiated and connected in the formation of spaces of belonging. This is a world constituted by the space that brings together 'where you're from', 'where you're at' (Gilroy 1991), and where you're going, and reconfigures them into new webs of meaning.

Key to theoretical definitions of diaspora is forced dispersal, or displacement (Gilroy 1994: 207; Clifford 1994; Safran 1991; Cohen 1997; Van Hear 1998). The mass emigration of Italians over the last century is largely the outcome of severe economic conditions and drastic changes in the economic structure, joined to demographic pressures and lack of political will. Unavoidable 'push' factors forced migration as the ultimate solution to survival. To be sure, differences of class, gender, regional origin and 'kind' of emigration (political rather than economic, for instance) are to be accounted for in order to prevent generalizations that represent Italian diasporization as a homogeneous phenomenon (see below and Chapter 2). But the point is that overall, Italian emigration cannot be compared to the exile of millions of Jews, the enslavement of Africans, or the flight of thousands of Cambodians. Nor can it be assimilated to the voluntary migration of individuals — usually professionals or highly/semi-skilled workers — between countries of the overdeveloped world. Similarly, their settlement in different parts of the world, if once marked by discrimination, ostracism, ethnicism and racism, differs from slavery, indentured labour, or pervasive anti-black racism and anti-semitism. The routings and rootings of diasporas need to be located within specific maps and histories. A useful distinction can be made, for instance, between conditions of dispersal; such a distinction is found in contemporary Jewish culture, where diaspora means scattered, and exile is designated by the term Galut (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994: 343, n5). Such a differentiation is important if we are to consider how particular forms of diasporic imagination connect with historically specific conditions of dispersal and (re)settlement. Hence the material conditions of Italian diasporization — the massive dispersal of Italian from impoverished rural areas — has fostered particular kinds of diasporic imaginations that, in turn, influence the production of locally specific cultural forms, such as those that will be examined throughout the following chapters. In contrast to many displaced people, Italians foster a narrative of return that sustains a vision of Italy as a 'spiritual possibility', as the Italo-Québécois poet Filippo Salvatore puts it (in Caccia 1985: 158). In sum, I want to emphasize the limits of elevating diaspora as the 'exemplary condition of late modernity' (Mishra in Tölölyan 1996:4). Diaspora, as I understand it (in line with Paul Gilroy 1993a), is a heuristic device not a descriptive concept, and as such, it compels us to consider the specific conditions of dispersal and settlement that surround and shape the formation of identity. 'Thus historicised', as James Clifford pointedly argues, 'diaspora cannot become a master trope or "figure" for modern, complex, or positional identities' (Clifford 1994: 319).

In his discerning essay on diaspora as a theoretical formation, James Clifford thus warns against the universalization of diaspora. In spite of this caveat, however, he reproduces a common tendency, in contemporary cultural criticism, to expunge immigration — and immigrants such as Italians — from the theoretical horizon of diaspora. 'Diasporas are not exactly immigrant communities. The latter could be seen as temporary, a site where the canonical three generations struggled through a hard transition to ethnic American status' (Clifford 1994: 311). Though he does not reproduce the difference as absolute, Clifford nevertheless draws a distinction between migrancy and immigration, exiles and immigrants.

Clifford posits European immigrants as gradually participating 'as ethnic "whites" in multicultural America' (1994: 329, n8). In contrast, he adds, diasporic transnationalism breaks down the minority/majority structure whereby a number of 'minorities' have defined themselves in ethnically absolutist ways (1994: 329, n7). This argument reinstates the line of continuum that extends between immigrant and ethnic status, in the US and Canada. Hence Clifford's attempt to distinguish immigrants from diasporas also posits ethnic groups outside of transnationalism. Khachig Tölölyan is even more explicit in his distinction between 'the ethnic and the diasporic'. For him, 'an ethnic community differs from diaspora by the extent to which the latter's commitment to maintain connections with its homeland and its kin communities in other states is absent, weak, at best intermittent, and manifested by individuals rather than the community as a whole' (1996: 16). He cites Italian-Americans as exemplary figures of 'ethnics', but assuredly not 'diasporic', because 'they are highly unlikely to act in consistently organized ways to develop an agenda for self-identification in the political or cultural realm, either in the hostland or across national boundaries' (Tölölyan 1996: 16-17).

Tölölyan's argument is founded on two premises: firstly, that 'consistently organized protest' is the sole measure of people's commitment to self-identification and affirmation of cultural specificity. Consequently, a hierarchy is established between a 'strong' ethnic identity, expressed in mobilized action, and other forms of identification, imagined or symbolic, viewed as expressive of lesser, weaker identities; such was the implication behind Gans' (1979) 'symbolic ethnicity' or Weinfeld's (1981/1985) 'affective ethnicity'. This argument comes out of the legacy of the 'ethnic studies' tradition grounded in reified definitions of ethnicity as something that exists out there, that may be activated or disactivated. Moreover, Tölölyan raises the important question of representation. Who is speaking for whom in the 'organized protests for self-identification'? Who is represented and how?

Secondly, both Tölölyan and Clifford seem to accept that immigration is summed up in the worn-out assumption of a linear process of integration, acculturation and assimilation, whereby immigrants move from one culture into another. Echoes of melting pot discourses resonate through the image of immigrants happily shedding the clothes of the 'old' world to slip into those of the 'new' (see Sollors 1986: Chapter 3). Immigrants, in other words, are seen as sliding into the 'host culture', acquiescing in the demands of an industrial society, rather than actively engaging in shaping and negotiating their immediate circumstances to fit their various needs and projects. Consequently, as Caren Kaplan writes, 'immigrants are seen to replace one nationalist identification for another while diasporic émigrés confound territorial and essentialist nationalisms in favor of transnational subjectivities and communities' (1996: 136).

I agree with Clifford that, indeed, the assimilation trope in the US posits white Europeans as the exemplars of standards, values and experiences of minority collectivities. Yet immigrant populations experience 'diasporic moments' (Clifford 1994: 328, n3), which, to be sure, 'could be further plumbed, rather than marginalized, for links between the historical experiences of migration and displacement' (Kaplan 1996: 137). A large number of immigrant populations — not only migrant ones, as Clifford states — share 'forms of longing, memory, (dis)identification' (Clifford 1994: 304) with displaced peoples. Similarly, displaced people inevitably deploy strategies of 'dwelling' within their new living environment that are akin to those of immigrants. What needs to be called into question is the conception of immigration as an end in itself. Following on from this line of thought, I want to consider the extent to which identity in im/'migration is lived and represented in terms of diaspora, and to illuminate how a diasporic consciousness manifests itself and converses with other forms of consciousness (such as nationalism). By casting ¡in/migration in dialogue with diaspora, definitions of identity are understood as the outcome of a number of mediations that weave together multiple locations and histories.

Clifford's differential construction of subjects of displacement poses another, perhaps deeper question: that of the conditions of possibility surrounding the emergence of such constructions. Undeniably, legal and social histories of immigration in the US commonly reveal how they turn around issues of race and class. Put simply, immigration is often the site of struggle over definitions of class, race and nation. Yet Clifford's generalized notion of immigration fails to acknowledge that the ways in which these issues are played out in immigration take different forms in different parts of the world. For example, the status of immigrants as appropriate or inappropriate foreigners, in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, was measured up against the racialization of the domestic space in Britain (McClintock 1995), and the racialization of labour in the US (Roediger 1991, 1994). Though both historical processes share common rhetorical strategies - such as the use of dirt as the key metaphor in substantiating the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion these were staged in different spheres of social life: the domestic sphere in Britain (hygiene and cleanliness), the labour market in the United States ('dirty work' associated with 'nigger work'; Roediger 1994: 191). Furthermore, labels of 'white ethnics' (in the US) and 'white negroes' (in the UK) attributed to some immigrant populations (such as Italians or Irish) testify to different forms of articulation of race, culture, class and nation. It also signals the variability of definitions of whiteness, indeed of the ways in which whiteness is 'seen', a point I discuss below.

It is beyond the scope of this book to engage in greater detail in the analysis of the racialization of Italians and its connection with the shaping of a British 'nation'.⁴ My point is that the study of Italian immigrants in Britain is to be viewed in the context of the historical developments of ideas of race and ethnicity in relation to immigration. In the US, Canada and Britain, ethnicity is equated with immigrant; thus underpinning a notion that ethnicity is the attribute of minority populations, the Other's' humanity (Juteau 1983).⁵ However, in contrast to the American and Canadian contexts, immigrants and ethnics, in Britain, have, from the onset, been identified as 'people of colour'. Ethnic groups, in Britain, are not perceived as 'settled' or 'integrated' immigrants, as they are in the US — the 'white ethnics' — or in Canada-the 'cultural minorities'. Ethnic groups, in Britain, are nothing but foreigners and 'Other'. Moreover, as Paul Gilroy has argued (1995: 27), with the neo-fascist groups being an everyday hazard, and the threat of 'reimmigration' or 'repatriation' being repeatedly raised by governments as a solution to the problems they see as embodied in a black presence that is deemed incompatible with the exalted standards of national culture, the presence of ethnic groups is not invested with the same legitimacy as it is in Canada or the US, even though in the latter countrie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables, map and plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Performative Belongings
• 1 Situating the Italian Project of Visibility
• Part I Histories and Identity Politics
• Part II Spaces, Memories, and Displays of Identity
• Appendix 1: Methodological Considerations
• Appendix 3: Italian-born Population in London, 1991
• Appendix 5: Vote in Italian Senate on New Election Bill, 1993
• Bibliography
• Index