Postcolonial Europe

Comparative Reflections after the Empires

Lars Jensen, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Christian Groes, Zoran Lee Pecic

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786603067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How has European identity been shaped through its colonial empires? Does this history of imperialism influence the conceptualisation of Europe in the contemporary globalised world? How has coloniality shaped geopolitical differences within Europe? What does this mean for the future of Europe? Postcolonial Europe: Comparative Reflections after the Empires brings together scholars from across disciplines to rethink European colonialism in the light of its vanishing empires and the rise of new global power structures. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the postcolonial European legacy, the book argues that the commonly used nation-centric approach does not effectively capture the overlap between different colonial and postcolonial experiences across Europe.

Chapter 1

Uneven Whiteness: Images of Blackness and Whiteness in Contemporary (Postcolonial) Italy (2010–2012)

Gaia Giuliani

In 2009, the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi stated that Italy is ‘multiracial, but not multicultural’. Focusing on a series of recent events and figures, the main aim of this chapter is to reveal the role that colour assignment plays within public discourse, re-creating racial stereotypes and white, heteronormative privilege in ‘multiracial’ Italy. These events and figures, in my opinion, point to a number of revealing signs pertaining to the European postcolonial framework in which Italy can be significantly included and understood. In particular, it takes into account the hetero-referential construction of Otherness and Whiteness that Italy shares with many European and largely Western national contexts. With hetero-referential construction of a racialized Other I mean – following French sociologist Colette Guillaumin’s theorization of hetero- and self-referential matrices of racism (1972) and US sociologist Ruth Frankenberg’s idea of unmarked whiteness (2001) – the process of racial construction that marks that which is not white, silently and invisibly builds hegemonic whiteness thereby naturalizing it. The events of 2010, I discuss here, unveil a significant set of similarities between Italy and a wider postcolonial European context in the ways they construct their Others. In the first instance, a ‘hyper-signification’ of black male bodies, which in my chapter is thematized by two cases: migrant workers employed in fields in southern Italy and the offences directed at the famous soccer player, Mario Balotelli. In the second instance, the vested orientalization and sexualization of the internal (the Southerner) and non-European brown Mediterranean women, in line with the European colonial tradition – as in the case of Berlusconi’s go-go girls. Finally, the typical association of brown heterosexual men with public danger and sexual assaults, especially after 9/11, which is exemplified here by the repeated targeting of brown men in the police investigations around the kidnapping of Yara Gambirasio.

While Italy’s racializing dynamics is better understood within the European shared colonial and postcolonial hegemonic culture, as I will argue, the racialized and racializing constructions of Self and Other in Italy are specifically related to the symbolic construction of both its cultural and historical past. Constructions of the Self and its Others in Italy derive from an idea of national, cultural, historical and biological heritage that manufactures italianità (Italianness) as both white and Mediterranean, as essentially heterosexual, and virile. This self-representation, as I have argued elsewhere, is the result of a slow process of discursive construction that finds its own fundaments in the Fascist idea of uomo nuovo (new man). According to this idea, Italians are animated by two complementary and apparently opposite/polar features inherited by the Romans’ fine and military/governing arts, Reinassance’s arts and sciences, Catholic moral and patriarchal social rules: passion and rationality. The peninsula’s passion derives from Italy’s geographical position: belonging to the Mediterranean basin, Italians participate in its ‘blackness’. This ‘vice’ becomes a virtue insofar as it is mastered by rationality. In my view, the long-lasting Fascist narrative of the uomo nuovo makes Italians neither completely white nor completely black. Their racial liminality positions them in a very complicated space, in which they cannot neatly distinguish themselves from ‘African backwardness and blackness’. This self-representation grounds the many shifts of Italy’s internal colour lines that sometimes include, and sometimes exclude, those subjects traditionally positioned at the ‘racial margins’ of Italianness – like southerners. Berlusconi’s ‘multiracial but not multicultural’ recalls, as he has made clear on a number of occasions, the Fascist idea elaborated by the endocrinologist Nicola Pende (1933), in line with the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi, that Italians are the ‘result of fruitful interbreeding’ that occurred at the time of the Roman Empire and which is framed within the same (Roman that is supposedly white, Western and at once Mediterranean) culture. At the same time, Berlusconi’s ‘multiracial but not multicultural’ refers to ‘multicultural Italy’ as an impossible outcome: many racial backgrounds can be merged with Italian stamina, but Italian culture needs to be crystallized in an ahistorical figure that includes whiteness and Mediterraneanness. In contrast to the ‘surgical’ idea of the nation in Nazi Germany, the idea of nation Italians have inherited from Fascism is, in my opinion, built on ‘racial anthropophagy’. According to a ‘surgical idea of a nation’, as the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito highlights (2004), Nazism conceived Germany as a body from which corrupted cells and organs needed to be extirpated. In the case of Fascist Italy ‘anthropophagism’, domestic differences are swallowed and digested. I borrow the image of anthropophagism from decolonial studies in Latin America and Indigenous studies in the Pacific and Australia, where it refers to the ‘cannibalistic approach’, respectively, of Spanish and British settler colonialisms (see, for instance, Banivanua-Mar 2007, for the case of the Pacific and Jáuregui 2008, for Latin America). I use it here as a formula that stands for a ‘digesting’ model of racialized citizenship that transforms phenotypic differences into nutrients for the Italian body politic that assimilates them, neutralizing both their differential cultural purport and political subjectivities. According to the anthropophagic model of the Italian nation, a number of subjects can be ‘assimilated’ insofar as they are considered ‘absorbable’. Hence, their race is not pure, but a particular Italian ideal-typical phenotype that needs to be unconditionally preserved. Here, hetero-referential racism merges with self-referential racism where, as I have argued elsewhere, a precise and assertive cultural and racialized idea of Italianness is forged: whiteness is no longer hidden nor silenced nor constructed ‘by contrast’ through its others. It is instead reappraised as Mediterranean, Roman, (heterosexual) and virile.

While it may still be termed postcolonial, the methodology deployed here, in line with my broader research, can be described as epistemological uprooting: in ‘analyzing continuities and discontinuities from colonial times to the contemporary postcolonial world, also outside the conventional colony/empire axis’, my chapter’s methodology consists of making the concealed visible, against the historically rooted idea (appropriated by mass as well as institutional culture since the approval of the Italian Republican Constitution in 1948) that Italians have no race and no racial memories as both racializing and racialized subjects. In fact, as noted by a number of scholars (see in particular Njegosh in Njegosh and Scacchi 2012), one of the popularized excuses brought against accusations of racism by Italian hegemonic and mainstream culture’s agencies (TV, political elites, culture makers) is grounded in the idea that a people who have experienced racism cannot be racist. As many colonial and postcolonial examples sadly testify (most remarkably Rwanda, Israel, post-apartheid South Africa), the in-between position – between racialized and racializing – does not preserve any hegemonic culture and its public institutions from forging, reproducing and enacting racism. In particular, by using critical race and whiteness approaches, jointly with gender and sexuality theories, and postcolonial, decolonial and cultural studies, my chapter investigates constructions of whiteness in contemporary Italy. The texts explored are mostly visual for their power to influence and mould common sense and popular conceptions of racial, gendered and sexual normativity.

In January 2010, the start of the political season was marked by a riot in Rosarno, Calabria, initiated by a group of migrant seasonal agricultural workers (mostly men from sub-Saharan Africa) in response to inhumane working conditions, and the shooting of two of the group by a local. The same year, a new scandal regarding Berlusconi’s sexual habits broke out. This time, it involved Karima el Mahroug, an underage Moroccan girl more commonly known by her nickname ‘Ruby’. In August 2010, Mario Barwuah Balotelli, a famous Italian soccer player of Ghanaian origins, started playing for the Italian national soccer team. Finally, in November, a young Lombardian girl, Yara Gambirasio, disappeared, possibly kidnapped. Police investigations focused first on a young Moroccan construction worker, then on a number of other ‘brown’ men as probable culprits.

My investigation is situated in the wake of a recent discussion between a number of Italian and foreign intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines related to Cultural Studies, regarding the intersectional models of masculinity and femininity, and the cultural and/or racial constructions that populate and structure Italian popular and critical culture. This work is also informed by the examinations of the forms of heterosexual (and homosexual) male and female desire, as well as the interracial fantasies that dominate the collective imagination of Italian men and women (see Barbara De Vivo’s and Dufour’s 2012, and Colpani 2015). This chapter builds on and extends the analysis I conducted in the volume Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (Black and White. History of the Racial Identity of Italians), co-written with Cristina Lombardi-Diop (2013): its aim is to contribute to an interpretative framework that grasps the symbolic matter of which contemporary racial repertoires are made, unravelling the highly complicated intertwining of processes, loci, dynamics and texts of the daily naturalization of cultural, social, gender, race and religious difference in Italy. This interpretative framework will contribute to unpacking the various and multilayered constructions of particular subjects as ‘exploitable’, ‘subjugable’ or ‘disposable’,¹ and which are part of the discourse legitimizing their actual exclusion, differential inclusion, exploitation and elimination (symbolic or physical) of the racialized Other at the level of society and institutions, both national and European. My chapter, in other words, participates in the larger multidisciplinary- and transdisciplinary and national/international discussion of the relationship between the mechanisms producing racist and sexist stereotypes and ‘white heteropatriarchal hegemony’ in Italy, and the Italian and European cultural backgrounds that are behind regulations regarding immigration, border control,² division of labour on a national,³ European Union and international levels.⁴

In the media coverage of the Rosarno events following the sub-Saharan African migrant workers’ revolt, migrants are described as beastly and lacking decorum and self-control, and their protests were described as the assaults of cavemen. The La Stampa article of 8 January 2010, expresses the efforts to reappropriate ‘Italians’’ wounded pride, ready to defend whiteness, property, women, children and territory from the barbarian invaders who have been ‘tolerated for too long’:

An Italian city burns, Calabrians shoot at the immigrants injuring some, the foreigners destroy the town, attacking cars with women and children in them, injuring Italians. And when dark sets in the looting continues, destruction, burning of cars, gutted fixtures, with nine Italians and six foreigners wounded, the people who are terrified and running away spur the officers against the foreigners, ‘Shoot them!’, women in tears, ‘we’ve never seen anything like this even if here we see immigrant protests often’. (A.N. 2010a, author’s translation)

In a video on the broadcasting website Rainews24, an implicit reference to the ‘sexual’ threat that the migrants represent for ‘our women’ (Antefatto 2010) appears when a Rosarnian facing the news cameras singles out the nudity of the black labourers as they showered out of sight behind piled up tires as the (unbearable) event that provoked the shooting of the two migrants with an air rifle. The same woman refers to the immigrants as eventual kidnappers: ‘Because a mother can’t even go to the grocery store that she gets home having left her kid there and doesn’t know if she’ll find him… . We will not give in to this violence’ (Antefatto 2010).⁵ The violence which she refers to is evidently both physical and symbolic and revolves around the barbarity injected by the black body of the migrant into the white body of the Rosarnian society.

The statement of the then Minister of the Interior, Roberto Maroni (Lega Nord [the Northern League]), ties together these fragments constructing the Rosarnians as Italians in danger (‘in all these years illegal immigration has been tolerated without anyone doing anything effective which, on the one hand, has fuelled crime and on the other, has created extremely horrible conditions like the situation in Rosarno’, author’s translation), ending by expressing his solidarity with the Rosarnian citizens.⁶ Two days later (10 January),⁷ he restated the distinction between exasperated Italian citizens and the ‘ndrangheta (the Calabrian traditional organized crime), which he would further mention in his speech before the Senate (12 January 2010).⁸ The reference to ‘fellow citizens in need of defence’ in a situation in which tolerance had been too high (and exceeded the codes that define the racial balance of the Calabrian countryside) is confirmed by a group of Rosarnians, who, meeting with Minister Maroni and the local officials, request that they ‘finally rid Rosarno of all immigrants’ (Vi racconto la rivolta degli immigrati a Rosarno 2010, author’s translation).

The image of a horde of black barbarians, violent, out of control, ‘drunk’⁹ always on the edge of violating the ‘codes of civil society’ (the same paradoxical and racist codes that force them to sleep in sheet-metal huts and large cement tubes), is contrasted with, and constructed against, the image of the Calabrian-as-Italian-in-danger, the honest southern Italian whom Maroni’s words bleach and raise to the status of a ‘fellow citizen’. Against Maroni’s very ideological background, which considers the South of Italy as ‘different (that is inferior) socially, culturally, politically’, and which is in line with a North versus South conception of the nation that has been articulated and publicly stated by intellectuals, scientists and politicians since the unification (1861). The idea of southerners being ‘culturally’ – and ‘biologically’ – inferior and belonging to Hamitic and Semitic kinships was advocated by important scientists, most notably, the internationally known criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and his follower, anthropologist Alfredo Niceforo, author of L’Italia barbara contemporanea (1898). This discourse was popularized through a number of cultural initiatives and social policies by the state and its elites throughout the Liberal Age (1861–1922) and Fascism (1922–1945) and strongly institutionalized in the first decades of the Republic. While it constitutes the xenophobic background of Lega Nord’s federalist ideological fundaments since its early foundation (1983), it is largely shared especially in northern Italy’s popular culture. But in the Rosarno events, the narrative of ‘inferior’ (corrupted, unreliable, lazy, backward) southerners is no longer serviceable: both Minister Maroni’s role as a representative of the state’s regulating power over highly conflicting situations involving Italian citizens and the institutional discourse legitimizing the repression of the migrants’ revolt in Rosarno as an act protecting Italian citizens need Calabrians and southerners to become (at least temporarily) white.

In the Rosarno episode, where the colour line is written on documented and undocumented migrant bodies, Calabrians are thus fully included within the Italian imagined community. Yet in the media coverage of the disappearance and murder of the young Yara Gambirasio in Lombardy, Calabrians are returned to a racialized criminal status. Following Cesare Lombroso’s positivist frenologist theory, Calabrians are depicted as possible suspects (by their nature) in the disappearance of this teenager in the province of Lombardy, after first one and then another Moroccan, and then a Romanian were identified and dismissed as possible culprits. Here, where the colour line is inscribed on the body of a white northern Italian teenager, the Calabrian is returned to blackness.

The contrast with Ruby’s case is quite evident for a number of reasons, which should be analysed through an intersectional perspective that takes into consideration the following factors: the class dynamics, as well as the social and cultural capital, that characterizes Ruby’s biography in contrast with the condition of ‘Rosarnian migrants’; gender that plays a fundamental role in positioning the two figures differently in the Italian imagination; the numbers that is to say her individual story and presence versus the multitude of black fruit-pickers in ‘besieged’ Rosarno; the places where the two events take p...