Migrant Anxieties

Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame

Aine O’Healy

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253037206
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

During a period of heightened global concerns about the movement of immigrants and refugees across borders, Migrant Anxieties explores how filmmakers in Italy have probed the tensions accompanying the country's shift from an emigrant nation to a destination point for over five million immigrants over the course of three decades. Áine O'Healy traces a phenomenology of anxiety that is not only present at the sociopolitical level but also interwoven into the narrative strategies of over 30 films produced since 1990, throwing into sharp relief the interface between the local and the global in this transnational era. Starting with the representation of post-communist migrations to Italy from Eastern Europe and subsequent arrivals from Africa through the controversial frontier of Lampedusa, O'Healy explores topics as diverse as the configuration of migrant labor, affective surrogacy, Italian whiteness, and the legacy of Italy's colonial history. Showing how contemporary filmmaking practices in Italy are linked to changes in the broader media landscape, O'Healy analyzes the ways in which both Italian and migrant filmmakers are reimagining Italian society and remapping the nation's borderscape.

CHAPTER 1

After 1989

PROJECTING THE BALKANS

IN THE EARLY 1990s several events took place in Italy that would profoundly mark the nation’s social, political, and ideological landscapes in the years to come. Following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the Italian Communist Party—a significant presence in Italian politics during the Cold War—underwent a brief period of internal turmoil that resulted in its dissolution and immediate replacement by two separate parties, Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left) and the much smaller Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation). The year 1991 also saw the creation of the new regionalist party Lega Nord (Northern League), which consolidated several smaller “leagues” in the regions of the North. The Lega’s rhetoric of northern superiority, anti-immigrant sentiment, and secession from the rest of Italy was to become increasingly strident in the years that followed. Moreover, between 1992 and 1993, the country witnessed an explosive corruption scandal involving major business leaders and politicians (a phenomenon often described as Tangentopoli) that led to intense political upheaval and the collapse of the so-called First Republic.¹

In the vacuum created by the elimination of two of the most powerful parties in Italy, the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party, media mogul Silvio Berlusconi quickly established Forza Italia (“Go, Italy!”), a new center-right party named after the national soccer cheer. With sweeping success, Forza Italia drew members previously linked to a wide range of positions on the political spectrum and soon became the most powerful force in the country. Though the party experienced a setback in the elections of 1995, it would repeatedly return to power in the coming years, building strength by entering into coalitions with other parties. In addition to these new elements in parliamentary politics, a modernized right-wing party, Alleanza Nazionale, also rose to prominence. Founded by Gianfranco Fini in 1995, it replaced the Movimento Sociale Italiano and sought to gain national respectability by explicitly renouncing the Fascist ideology of its earlier incarnation. In this rapidly changing panorama, where the voice of the Left no longer constituted a significant oppositional force and where media and political interests were closely enmeshed, Italy’s espousal of neoliberal policies—already underway in the 1980s—became increasingly entrenched.

Pressures exerted by factors originating outside Italy also held considerable sway over the nation’s affairs due to the demands imposed by European integration and the challenges of unprecedented immigration. In November 1990, the Italian government became a signatory of the Schengen Convention, which aimed at dissolving the borders between the member states of the European Economic Community (soon to become the European Union) to facilitate greater freedom of movement of persons, goods, and capital than already achieved by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The reality of this supranational entity, however, was far from borderless as several of Europe’s western nations soon began to implement efforts to halt the growing waves of migration arriving from North Africa via the Mediterranean as well as from Eastern Europe, from which significant numbers had begun to flow after the collapse of state socialism in 1989. Italy passed its first legislation on immigration, popularly known as the Martelli Law, only in 1990.

The experience of migration from Eastern Europe hit Italy with striking force in the early spring and late summer of 1991, when tens of thousands of Albanians arrived unexpectedly in the harbors of the southeastern region of Puglia aboard dinghies, trawlers, and cargo ships. Although the country admitted over twenty thousand Albanians in the first wave of arrivals in the early months of the year, a subsequent contingent of almost twenty thousand people arriving from Albania in August received a hostile reception, resulting in mass repatriation. The outbreak of war accompanying the dissolution of Yugoslavia a short time thereafter intensified Italian anxieties about the prospect of a further onslaught of mass migration from across the Adriatic. Based on these fears, the Italian government admitted fewer refugees fleeing conflicts in the Balkans than were accepted by other European countries. Yet arrivals from Eastern Europe did not cease; a steady flow of migrants from the former socialist states continued to find ways to enter Italy and make their homes there throughout the 1990s and beyond.

Immigration was not entirely new to Italy in 1991, as smaller numbers of migrants, for the most part from the African continent, had begun to appear in both Italian cities and the agricultural landscapes of the South in the late 1970s. It was becoming clear, however, that the country’s shift from emigrant nation to the receiver of growing numbers of immigrants would not be an entirely smooth transition. Periodic reports of racially motivated conflicts or xenophobic incidents indicated that many Italians resented the unaccustomed presence of foreigners in their midst. But the second surge in Albanian arrivals that occurred in August 1991 unleashed an unprecedented wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, clearly evidenced in the language of press and television reports from the era.²

In the decade that saw the consolidation of the European Union and the implementation of the Schengen Convention, Italians experienced new pressures to embrace a broader sense of citizenship and a European sense of self. Along with these pressures, however, there was a lingering awareness among them that Italy was still perceived by many other Europeans not so much as part of the main stage of European life but rather as a provincial, Mediterranean culture.

In this chapter, I explore how Italian responses to immigration from the east, or, more specifically, to immigration from southeastern Europe, find resonance in a small number of films concerned with the events that occurred in the Balkan Peninsula after the end of the Cold War. These films reveal anxieties about the meaning of Italian identity in the post–Cold War years as well as a subliminal concern about the future of Italian whiteness in the face of the new transnational mobilities. I aim to explore how, through processes of audiovisual enunciation, including narrative occlusions and aporias, the production of (white) alterity in such films enables the modernity of Italian citizens to be foregrounded and reasserted. First, however, I must explore the ways in which Italian whiteness has been historically constructed vis-à-vis the nation’s own internal others (specifically southerners), its emigrants, and its neighboring populations, all of whom—at least to outsiders—may appear to resemble each other to a striking degree.

Concerns regarding the racial status of Italians were deeply imbricated in processes of nation building in the post-Unification period. Several recent studies argue that racist discourses in Italy, which today are directed against immigrants, are not a new phenomenon as racialization was a crucial element in the formation of the nation-state from the beginning.³ Indeed, the project of “making Italians”—or of unifying the country’s various regional populations tied to traditions and dialects that were often incomprehensible to their co-nationals—mobilized discourses of race. The concept of Italian identity was ultimately refined and consolidated around three contentious issues: the so-called southern question, emigration, and colonization.

Despite the popular claims that racism is extraneous to the Italian character and that the racist policies of the Fascist regime were an aberrant imposition, scholars have begun to identify the seeds of contemporary Italian racism not in Fascism but in an earlier moment in the country’s history, pointing to circumstances that developed in the early years of the new nation-state. Immediately after national unification, a group of northern Italian politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals traveled to the South to begin the process of integrating its regions into the new state. This effort to explore and integrate the South—poorer than the regions of the North thanks to a history of semi-feudal government in the southern regions—has been conceptualized since the time of Antonio Gramsci as a process of both exploration and colonization.⁴ Aligning Italian southerners with Africans soon became the dominant metaphor through which northerners began to perceive residents of the South. Anthropologist Alfredo Niceforo posited, for example, that there were two races in Italy, an “Aryan” and “Caucasian” race in the North and a “Negroid” race in the South.⁵ The influence of this and similar classifications ultimately led US immigration officials to question the whiteness of many migrants arriving from Italy in the early twentieth century at the height of Jim Crow segregation in the United States.⁶

In the new nation-state that emerged in the final phase of Italian unification, poverty was widespread, even in parts of the North. Thus, in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the new century, millions of Italian citizens—not only from the South but also from other impoverished pockets of the peninsula—were driven by destitution to emigrate across the Atlantic. Upon arrival in the United States, they were initially considered inferior to those originating from northern Europe, and, subsequently, some Italian immigrants were subjected to treatment similar to that experienced by African Americans in the American south, including acts of racially motivated brutality and lynching.⁷

Italy’s creation of colonies in Libya and in the Horn of Africa was conceptualized in part as a way of redeeming the racial standing of Italians as a whole, which trans-Atlantic emigration had problematized. In the colonies, the discourse on race was formed on a binary axis that posited the superiority of all Italians—as “white” Europeans—over the purported degeneracy of the native occupants of the conquered territories. These historical circumstances contributed, in turn, to Italian understandings of racial hierarchies that endure up to the present. As Anna Curcio and Miguel Mellino have argued, emigration, colonialism, and the “Southern question” collectively constitute the archaeology of racial discourse in contemporary Italy.⁸ In the broader global context, however, Italian racism is profoundly linked to discourses of race at work in other settings. As Curcio and Mellino contend, “The modern notion of race, like the different historical forms of racism to which it has contributed, represents a disciplinary apparatus constitutive of all modern capitalist formations.”⁹ They also point out that “the discourse of race cannot be treated as mere representation or manipulation; it is not a simple fiction: it is the material result of different regimes of practices and policies that have their roots in the very makeup of modern colonial capitalism.”¹⁰

Albanian Fantasies

Several prominent politicians, including representatives of Lega Nord and the constituencies of the right, contributed to the spread of xenophobia in the 1990s by appealing to Italian citizens’ concerns about the impact of immigration on their safety, economic well-being, and cultural traditions. The racializing rhetoric adopted by these groups echoed in uncanny fashion traditional northern Italian prejudices toward Italians of the South. In the 1990s, Umberto Bossi, then leader of Lega Nord, argued that the values of northern Italy (labeled Padania by Lega members, in reference to the territories surrounding the Po River) were characteristic of “European culture,” a category that implies integrity, efficiency, and hard work. In contrast to the “Europeanness” of these regions, the south of Italy was cast as closer to a Mediterranean culture of questionable honesty and parasitic dependency, with which many of Italy’s new arrivals were implicitly associated.¹¹ In this way, as Jaro Stacul has noted, Lega Nord reinvigorated the long-standing prejudice that “northern Italian culture” was being undermined by the presence of racialized southerners in the North. Simultaneously, it encouraged similar fears about the arrival of new migrants from non-EU countries. As Stacul argues, a (northern) Italian understanding of what it means to be European entails “[not only] emphasizing the distinction between West and East, Christianity and Islam [but also] contesting the inner ‘cultural’ boundaries of Europe by casting southerners as the ‘other.’”¹² This process of othering, based on perceived cultural differences rather than verifiable somatic distinctions, builds a framework that casts southerners and immigrants as less than fully white.¹³

More than a handful of Italian films representing contemporary mobilities between Italy and the countries of southeastern Europe directly engage the issues of cultural boundaries and differences. They also implicitly raise the question of Italy’s historical links to its immediate neighbors to the east, including the invasion and occupation of significant areas of the Balkan Peninsula between 1939 and 1944. The Italian military presence in these territories and in the Dodecanese Islands had, in fact, been largely ignored by Italian filmmakers throughout the Cold War, only to emerge in somewhat sanitized fashion in the Oscar-winning Mediterraneo (Gabriele Salvatores, 1991). Notably, the dialogue in this film also mobilizes the popular adage “Same face, same race,” which is uttered, not without irony, on two distinct occasions in the film to draw attention to the somatic similarity between and among the Greek, Italian, and Turkish characters who show up on the Aegean island where the film’s wartime story is set. Indeed, one of the tropes that emerges in several cinematic constructions of migration to Italy from the Balkans—and in some representations of migration from...