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Is the Mediterranean a White Italian–European Sea? The multiplication of borders in the production of historical subjectivity
Abstract
In this essay, I try to view the Mediterranean not only as a sea but also as an excess space of signification, a site of accumulation of discourses centred on Italy/Europe. In particular, it is the Black Mediterranean that interests me: the physical and symbolic realms of memory of several diasporas in Europe. Some scholars have shown the simultaneous presence of different Mediterraneans, some of which are located outside its basin. Others have grasped its function as a “middle sea”, a connection space between cultures, societies and economies, so that even a desert can be a Mediterranean. This essay will analyse the Black Mediterranean – the realms of memory of part of the diasporas from the Horn of Africa: those who have followed the Sahara–Sudan–Libya–Lampedusa route.
... Moreover, we see the sea -in its conceptualisation and its empirical realities -as a product of locations cultivated to a significant degree by (European) imperial projects and projections (Borutta and Gekas 2012;Fogu 2018Fogu , 2020Lorcin and Shepard 2016;Silverstein 2002). Like Proglio et al (2020), Proglio (2018) and Grimaldi (2019) show in their articulation of the Black Mediterranean, regional configurations demarcate lived and remembered paths across space and through time that interconnect migrants' experiences and yet distinguish them from other experiences within a political contested Mediterranean (see also di Maio 2012). ...
Until today, anthropological studies of locality have taken primary interest in local subjects leading local lives in local communities. Through a shift of conceptual emphasis from locality to location, the present volume departs from previous preoccupations with identity and belonging. Instead, Locating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. In doing so, it stimulates debates on the interplay between location and region-making in history as well as anthropology. The volume’s deeply empirical contributions illustrate how historical, material, legal, religious, economic, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located in the geographical space commonly known as the Mediterranean region. Drawing from research in Melilla, Lampedusa, Istanbul, Nefpaktos/Lepanto, Tunisia, Beirut, Marseille, and elsewhere, the volume articulates location through the overlapping and incorporation of multiple social and historical processes. Individual contributions are linked by the pursuit to rethink the conceptual frames deployed to study the Mediterranean region. Together, the volume’s chapters challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and suggest how the ‘Mediterranean’ can function as a meaningful anthropological and historical category if the notion of ‘location’ is reinvigorated and conceptualised anew.
... By choosing to describe this part of the street in terms of its ' Arabic-ness' , I am influenced by recent scholarship on the 'Black Mediterranean' (Hawthorne 2021). The notion of Black Mediterranean was conceived as a way consider to at once explore the subjectivities of racialised immigrants seeking incorporation within Europe and to challenge Eurocentric accounts of Mediterranean crossings (Proglio 2018). Similarly, I suggest that by changing the gaze, and examining from the symbolic and physical spaces often stigmatised in Marseille as populaire and Arabic, from the perspectives of many of those shaping these spaces through their daily practices, we can better understand their use value, and can make visible a form of city-making often unseen or disparaged by urban elites with a Eurocentric vision of desirable forms of Mediterranean living. ...
Until today, anthropological studies of locality have taken primary interest in local subjects leading local lives in local communities. Through a shift of conceptual emphasis from locality to location, the present volume departs from previous preoccupations with identity and belonging. Instead, Locating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. In doing so, it stimulates debates on the interplay between location and region-making in history as well as anthropology. The volume’s deeply empirical contributions illustrate how historical, material, legal, religious, economic, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located in the geographical space commonly known as the Mediterranean region. Drawing from research in Melilla, Lampedusa, Istanbul, Nefpaktos/Lepanto, Tunisia, Beirut, Marseille, and elsewhere, the volume articulates location through the overlapping and incorporation of multiple social and historical processes. Individual contributions are linked by the pursuit to rethink the conceptual frames deployed to study the Mediterranean region. Together, the volume’s chapters challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and suggest how the ‘Mediterranean’ can function as a meaningful anthropological and historical category if the notion of ‘location’ is reinvigorated and conceptualised anew.
... In the contemporary context, the term "Black Mediterranean" has emerged in the context of migration management in the Mediterranean Sea. It was coined by Di Maio (2013), building upon Gilroy's "Black Atlantic" (1993) to emphasise the racial logic underpinning the governmentality of this sea and the growing rate of death in this maritime geography (see also Proglio, 2018). The emergence of this term, Black Mediterranean, signifies the creation of a sea where bodies are lost without political significance. ...
Programmes of migration regulation in the Mediterranean Sea constantly evolve and adapt, changing in accordance to shifting migration patterns and EU policies. Despite the commitment to governing mobility in this sea, migrant death continues to be a significant and indeed growing problem in the Mediterranean. While scholars have examined how the geography of the US-Mexico border is incorporated into an architecture of exclusion ( Doty, 2011 ), this article considers how the sea conceals the violent political workings of a maritime geography that grows increasingly risky for migrants. By bringing the sea to the fore, the article interrogates how the space of the maritime has come to be understood as ungovernable and perilous and what the implications of such framings are in contemporary migration management. The article specifically examines how the maritime geography was framed in early maritime law as unruly and untameable, as well as the way the sea was used to justify the deaths of African captives in insurance law during the Middle Passage. These contexts demonstrate the longer standing logics in contemporary maritime migration management, whereby the assumed fatal materiality of the maritime is used to obscure political violence.
... The third contribution of this special issue is of a more general nature, and has to do with providing a perspective from the social sciences on the emerging literature on the postcolonial Mediterranean, which has hitherto received more attention in the humanities (Chambers 2004(Chambers , 2008Proglio 2018). If, as argued above, the Mediterranean is from the EU's perspective the most salient North-South border, it becomes imperative, especially in the wake of the implementation of ever more exclusionary migration policies on the part of the EU and its member states (Palladino and Gjergji 2016), to explore what a postcolonial gaze tells us about the political, economic and social hierarchies that still structure relations between the North and the South of the Mediterranean. ...
Colonialism is silently inscribed in the genes of the European integration
project since its origins. This is demonstrated by the incorporation of
Algeria – as part of France – in the European Community and even more
by its subsequent disappearance, leaving virtually no traces, following
Algeria’s independence in 1962. Despite the centrality of the Mediterranean
to this foundational symptom, the literature on the role of memory in
European integration has predominantly had an inward focus. Thus, it has
failed to adequately grapple with Europe’s colonial past and its influence
on the EU’s external relations with the Mediterranean. This Special Issue
aims to fill this gap, and this introduction lays out the analytical framework
informing the contributions to this collective endeavour. The centrality of
the Mediterranean as an epistemic and geopolitical site of knowledge
production is explored with reference to Nicolaïdis’ suggestion that the
EU’s strategies of dealing with its colonial past have historically been
characterized by amnesia, redirection and atonement. This Special Issue
builds on this framework, and expands on it through an explicit
interdisciplinary approach that brings to the fore some of the foundational
sources of anticolonial politics and postcolonial studies, including the work of
Fanon, Touré and Nkrumah. In doing so, it contributes to decentring the EU’s
view of the contemporary Mediterranean, while simultaneously providing a
perspective from the social sciences on the emerging literature on the
postcolonial Mediterranean, hitherto predominantly rooted in the
humanities. Finally, we hope that this Special Issue also contributes to
enabling a broader discussion on the politics of researching institutions
oblivious of their own entanglements, direct or otherwise, with the
histories, states, societies and peoples that they engage with today.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
This contribution is dedicated to analysing oral memories about the Black Mediterranean through interviews with people from or culturally linked to the Horn of Africa. The aim is to consider how the interviewees make use of archives to voice their feelings about the past and present in Africa and Europe. I introduce the concept of a “geography of emotions” as a set of different perceptions of Europe and its past. The mobilization of these memories in new interpretative perspectives is part of a dissonant heritage which is actively working inside the European borders in order to produce new cultural identities, to reiterate forms of belonging to black diasporic communities, and to invent new geographies from liminal positions.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
The chapter discusses how (post-)immigrant activism in the Netherlands currently impacts Dutch and European cultural heritage and their cultural archive and memory complex. The discussion focuses on the Tropenmuseum and the way postcolonial (post)immigrants carried out interventions there, resulting in new ways of visually and textually representing the colonial past. Though the end result is not a final ideal decolonized situation, it did evince de-essentializing processes in which intersectional perspectives are taken up. The interventions coincide with other national and international protests and processes, making it part of a project or movement that produces decolonial counter-narratives to ethno-nationalist discourses. The case indicates how heritage is sought to be transformed by demanding greater visibility for injustices from the colonial past, for the resistances against these injustices, and for their implications for the present.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
This chapter investigates how peace is used in attempts to build a collective identity for the European Union in the context of the European Heritage Label (EHL), a central instrument in the EU’s cultural heritage policy. The official EHL documents and the websites of the EHL sites are analysed using a conceptual approach that particularly focuses on the interconceptualizations between peace and Europe. The ways peace is discussed can be divided into four thematic categories: treaties, institutions, practices, and symbols related to peace. The chapter concludes that heritage related to peace is mainly discussed in a non-contradictory manner, with little space for dissonance.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
Lähdesmäki analyses the heritage-policy discourses of the EU and the Council of Europe. She particularly discusses how these institutions deal with the challenges the idea of heritage faces in today’s Europe and the opportunities that these may present to respond to these challenges. The analysis shows how the EU and the Council of Europe seek to reconcile heritage-related conflicts by approaching heritage as a space for civil participation, interaction, intercultural dialogue, and conversation about divergent values and narrations of the past. However, their policy discourses often relay on a static and materialist notion of heritage. This kind of discourse maintains geographical, cultural, political, socio-economic, and religious power hierarchies and an exclusive understanding of a common European cultural heritage.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
Kaasik-Krogerus scrutinizes the European Heritage Label (EHL) as an authorized heritage discourse (AHD) in the making. She analyses how the discourse is formed in a politics of mobility and stability between the local, national, and European scales resulting from the interplay of europeanization (of the national and local) and domestication (of the European). The chapter asks how this politics of mobility and stability is conducted to manage the scalar dissonance in one of the sites, the Great Guild Hall in Tallinn, Estonia. Kaasik-Krogerus argues that the politics conducted in the exhibitions works in two controversial ways: legitimizing mobility and stability as natural and simultaneously challenging these as problematic. The analysis illuminates the dissonance between the national-scale intents and their consequences on the European scale concerning power relations, multiscalarity, and future imaginaries.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
Trakilović theorizes the airport as a site where cultural/European notions of belonging are negotiated and controlled. Focusing on Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, the chapter approaches both the airport itself as well as its nearby detention center as one complex cultural phenomenon, from which Schiphol emerges as a site of heritage dissonance. Taking a phenomenological approach, the chapter explores what it means to be an embodied subject at the airport, taking the narrative of a Syrian newcomer who is relocated to the detention center as well as the author’s own experience of the airport as its analytical starting points. The selective processes of in- and exclusion at the airport are thereby seen as emblematic of larger exclusionary practices towards the Other in Europe.
It is difficult to imagine a conclusion, to wrap up, gathering the thousand branches that got intertwined, often confused and at times lost in this journey through the present reread and almost retraced onto the filigree of a past history and route. Abandoning many of these rivulets, we limit ourselves to getting back to an overall discussion, inevitably concise and articulated on some points, four or five words on which we can update and build a possible “abolitionist” lexicon: escape, comparison, coalition, and democracy. Let us start from the first one.
Using the election of the far‐right populist coalition government in Italy in 2018 and resultant legislative changes to immigration it brought about as an analytic lens, I examine the material and emotional impact of these changes on young African men, hosted as “unaccompanied minors” in a reception centre in a northern Italian town. I refer to these changes as an “ill wind” and in this paper examine its impacts using Christina Sharpe’s notion of “weathering” to refer to the totality of the ongoingness of the anti‐Black climate and its effect on Black bodies. I contextualise the young men’s experiences within the Italian race landscape, thus drawing attention to the postcolonial legacies of race and racialisation still underpinning Italian society today. I present how historical structures of racial governmentality are integral to the geography of subordination and produce the racialised figure of the migrant, leaving some strangers to remain stranger than others.
“Fault Lines: The Mediterranean ‘Burning’ and the Human Rights Debate,” discusses the tension between migration as a fundamental human right guaranteed by various international human rights instruments and the EU’s increasing policies of militarization and externalization of its Southern border(s). Such policies result in an overall criminalization of the migration phenomenon that does not take into account the pressures forcing people on the move, whether the result of wars and/or political persecutions or the devastating consequences of neoliberal global capitalism. By continuing to differentiate between economic migrants, who allegedly leave their countries voluntarily, and asylum seekers, who have no other choice but seeking refuge outside their national boundaries, EU policies deny people the right to move and contribute to exacerbate the differences between EU citizens, with the right to exercise freedom of movement, and so-called non-EU “clandestini/illegal,” abject bodies that need to be contained and ultimately rejected by the body of EU nation-states.KeywordsMediterranean “Burning”Human rightsHuman mobilityFault lines
Zusammenfassung: Die Passage über das Mittelmeer ist in den letzten Jahren zu einer der tödlichsten Migrationsrouten der Welt geworden. Während die Mitgliedsstaaten der Europäischen Union gegen die sogenannte „Flüchtlingskrise“ eine militärische und diskursive Fluchtabwehrpolitik betreiben und die Seenotrettung geflüchteter Menschen aussetzen und kriminalisieren, begreifen normative politische Theorien der Migration Fluchtbewegungen als ein politisches oder moralisches Problem sowie als Krise für etablierte Demokratien. Gegen den Topos der „Flüchtlingskrise“ und die implizite Normalisierung von Grenzen in einem Großteil gegenwärtiger politiktheoretischer Debatten zu Migration und Flucht entwickelt der vorliegende Beitrag eine politische Theorie der Grenze aus der Perspektive postkolonialer und Schwarzer kritischer Theorie. Dazu werden zunächst Kolonialität und Rasse als bislang vernachlässigte analytische Kategorien in die politische Theorie eingeführt, um die koloniale Gegenwart von Grenzregimen und die Rassifizierung von Grenzen zu rekonstruieren. Im Rückgriff auf die Figur des Schwarzen Mittelmeers, die aus der radikalen Schwarzen Tradition stammt und im Kontext gegenwärtiger Migrationsrouten von Afrika nach Europa aktualisiert wird, wird sodann ein alternatives Register für eine politische Theorie der Grenze entwickelt: Erstens wird das europäische Grenzregime als eine rassistische Politik der Vergrenzung verstanden; zweitens werden die postkolonialen Ambivalenzen und rassifizierten Dimensionen einer Politik der Solidarität mit geflüchteten Menschen problematisiert; drittens werden Fluchtbewegungen als widerständige politische Imaginationen und Praktiken nachgezeichnet, die die Widersprüche hegemonialer Konzeptionen von Demokratie und Zugehörigkeit aufzeigen. Abschließend wird die Epistemologie des Schwarzen Mittelmeers für eine Kritik des dominanten Krisennarrativs der Demokratie und für eine selbstreflexive Auseinandersetzung mit den kognitiven Grenzen der politischen Theorie selbst produktiv gemacht.
Contributing to the growing interest in multiperspectival border studies, this article advocates for a re-centring of subaltern geopolitics in the debate. Focusing empirically on Morocco's diplomatic dispute with the EU over the application of trade agreements to the Western Sahara (2015–2019), the analysis considers the geopolitical bordering of the controversy through the concepts of dependency and engagement to explain how the disputed territory both structured Morocco's disadvantageous relationship to the EU, while also giving rise to material and symbolic possibilities for the state leadership to subvert these geopolitical asymmetries in the late 2010s. The events are theorised through the combined lenses of critical border studies, subaltern geopolitics, and the politics of space to bring two complementary insights to the fore: (i) to insist that multiperspectival approaches account for the uneven landscape of borders, and the entities that act upon, animate, and transform geopolitical affairs from outside the dominant nodes of power and knowledge; conversely (ii) to destabilize prevailing binaries of geopolitical marginality and centrality through a reading of borders in an irreducibly multiple sense. Together, the analysis demonstrates the value of centring subaltern geopolitics in emerging debates on border multiplicity in the field today, while also avoiding the tendency to reinforce the spectacle of the border itself.
My aim in this article is to apply Frantz Fanon’s thoughts to problematize the condition of thousands of people at Europe’s borders. In particular, as pointed out in the introduction to this volume, this contribution is positioned within the scientific debate on the Black Mediterranean. In the first section of this article, I introduce and explore Fanon’s conception of violence. In the following section, I analyse symmetries relating to the conditions of natives in the colony and migrant people in the Mediterranean through references to Fanon’s writings. The third section presents an in-depth analysis of the interlinkages between power, history, and subjectivity. In this final part of the article, the voice of Fanon is combined with those of migrant people whom I interviewed.
How do citizenship claims—those, for example, of Italian born migrants with heritage from Italy’s former colonies of Eritrea and Somalia—encourage redefinitions of national belonging? This chapter reflects on a “Reimagining Citizenship” workshop organized by the author in collaboration with the Migration Working Group at the European University Institute in 2015. Aiming to investigate citizenship and national identity in Italy today and paying special attention towards the predicament of migrants in Italy from its ex-colonies, the “Reimagining Citizenship” encounter provided a platform for Italian intellectuals of Somali background Cadigia Hassan, Antar Marincola and Kaha Mohamed Aden to discuss what it means to be Italian with Somali heritage. After a screening of filmmaker Fred Kuwornu’s 18 Ius Soli, Italian MP Marilena Fabbri, Antonio Morone and Professor Anna Triandafyllidou discussed proposed Italian citizenship law reform. This chapter considers the interventions of these writers and filmmaker, drawing on an interview with MP Marilena Fabbri, to critically explore how their representations are in dialogue with Italian citizenship policy and the limitations of such dialogues in the face of populist xenophobia. It highlights the roles that different engagements with citizenship—be they literary, political or historical—play in shaping citizenship law reform. The conclusion reflects on the current state of play in Italy: despite strong citizenship law reform campaigns, more cohesive than ever with a strong media and political presence, proposed jus soli temperato laws (approved by the lower house in 2015) are yet to be approved by the upper house of Italian parliament.
This chapter explores debates unfolding in Italy over racial boundaries of Italian citizenship through the framework of the Black Mediterranean. The deep entanglements of race and citizenship in ongoing debates about the seconda generazione, jus soli, and Black Italianness are inflected by a long history of anxiety and contestation over the racial status of Italy, perched at the geographical and metaphorical edges of Europe and Africa. Who truly “belongs” in Italy as a rightful citizen continues to be shaped by the much-hyperbolized threat of African contamination and Italian racial degeneration. As one illustrative example, I recount the much-publicized story of the forty-two palm trees that were planted in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo in 2017. This event became a powerful incitement to discourse that threw into question the boundaries of Italy in relation to the Mediterranean and Blackness and the forces of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and mass migration. The debates incited by this “urban greening” project dovetailed with political contestations unfolding contemporaneously over the rights of refugees and the expansion of citizenship to the children of immigrants born and raised in Italy. In this context, the Black Mediterranean stages a critical intervention vis-à-vis the resurgence of interest in Mediterranean interconnections as an idealistic, cosmopolitan response to far-right, ethnic absolutist discourses and restrictive Italian migration/citizenship policies. I conclude with implications of the Black Mediterranean not only as a theoretical framework for understanding citizenship struggles, but also as a radical form of political praxis that can inform Black activism across the modern world.
This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Italian reception centre for male ‘unaccompanied minors’. Drawing on the concepts of ‘hostipitality’ (Derrida), the Black Mediterranean, and ‘intimate citizenship’ (Plummer), we examine the political ambivalence of hospitality for young African men as they transition to adulthood and how this is experienced through the intersections of age, gender and race. The biographical transition to adulthood thus offers a unique empirical opportunity to examine the extent of hospitality, as the (uninvited) Black child guest crosses the threshold into being an unwanted, potentially deportable, ‘invader’. Drawing from the young men’s images (art and photographs) and narratives, we discuss their experiences of differential anti-Blackness during
their migration journeys and how hegemonic notions of masculinity circumscribe the quest for legal citizenship and the meaning of adulthood. While capitulation to gender normativity bolsters claims to citizenship, racism is a continuing and profound threat to ontological security.
This article explores the figure of the “migrant slave” that appears to conjoin antithetical notions—migration, often associated with intentionality and movement, and slavery, commonly associated with coercion and confinement. The figure of the migrant as slave has been frequently mobilized by “antitrafficking crusaders” in debates over unauthorized forms of trans-Mediterranean crossings to EUrope. Besides scrutinizing the depoliticized and dehistoricized ways in which contemporary migrant journeys have come to be associated with imaginaries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this article draws other, actual, comparisons between historic slavery and contemporary forms of migration. It argues that there does exist a historical resonance between the former and the latter. By remembering slave rebellions on land and at sea, the article makes the case that if one had to draw comparisons between historic slaves and contemporary migrants, beyond often crude visual associations, one would need to do so by enquiring into moments in which both enacted escape to a place of perceived freedom. It is shown that the fugitive slave escaping on the “underground railroad” resembles most closely the acts of escape via the Mediterranean and its “underground seaways” today.
Music is intimately implicated in racialising discourses. This is particularly pronounced in the case of so-called black music, i.e. the types of music that are commonly associated with African-American identity, most notably jazz and various forms of popular music. Genres of popular music are furthermore constructed continuously on the basis of a notion of their “black roots.” The idea of the “black roots” of jazz and popular music is an essential ingredient of Paul Gilroy’s (1993) analysis of a specific authenticity of blackness. To stress the history and consequences of the pre-twentieth century slave trade and institutionalised racism, Gilroy has coined the concept “Black Atlantic” that builds on the idea of a distinct double consciousness inherent in blackness as simultaneously a fundamental constituent and the ultimate other of the West. In the article, I aim at rethinking the notion of the Black Atlantic in relation to North-Eastern Europe. By way of marine analogy I ask, and building on the notions of the Black Pacific and the Black Mediterranean, how to formulate an analytical design “the Black Baltic Sea.” In addition to addressing the impact of global racialising tendencies in music, this entails considering the cultural dynamics at issue in relation to the dynamics of postsocialism in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and Northern European indigeneity. On the basis of such a consideration, I argue that the styles of “black music” have been appropriated and adopted throughout the BSR, albeit in clearly different national manifestations which for their part imply variegated intersections between postcolonial and postsocialist processes. These intersections become manifest in the discourses over “new Europeanness” in music and the construction of national musical traditions, particularly when juxtaposed with the prevailing Islamophobia as regards treatments of Muslim music in mainstream media.
This article focuses on emerging forms of ethnic identification among Italians of Ethiopian and Eritrean origins. In 2013, in parallel with the so-called refugees’ crisis in Europe, children of immigrants engaged in the Milanese management of forced migrations in the diasporic neighbourhood of Milano Porta Venezia. They legitimated their actions by emphasising a shared Habesha ancestral ethnicity with the asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa. The article considers their ethnic identification in relation to the changes in the public discourse on the Mediterranean route. These ethnic identifications and mobilisations are interpreted as claims for social recognition as Italians rather than a form of the revivification of their ancestral ethnicity in the analysis. The Black Mediterranean represent a privileged analytical and physical space to work on the resignification of Afro-European subjectivities in contemporary Europe.
Lo spazio adriatico ha caratteristiche ambivalenti, sintetizzabili nella combinazione costante di unità e diversità sia in senso ambientale che socio-culturale. La coesistenza di un insieme di somiglianze e differenze in diversi campi fornisce comunque una connotazione specifica a quest'area. Nella loro evidente diversità, i testi che compongono "Immaginare l'Adriatico" riflettono un desiderio comune agli autori e ai curatori del libro: analizzare da una prospettiva multidisciplinare un territorio estremamente diversificato dal punto di vista naturale, culturale e sociale, che tuttavia viene sempre più spesso evocato, in maniera retorica, come spazio di cooperazione e unificazione. L'Adriatico rimane un territorio comune e allo stesso tempo divisibile: su di esso agiscono forme di appropriazione immagi-naria capaci di recuperare un capitale di simboli e immagini comuni, ma che spesso ridistribuisco l'appartenenza secondo tracce diverse e attraverso geografie conflittuali. Tuttavia, una condivisione di modelli istituzionali trans-adriatici non è certo impensabile: forse oggi più che mai sembra essere a portata di mano.
Using the borderscapes concept, this book offers an approach to border studies that expresses the multilevel complexity of borders, from the geopolitical to social practice and cultural production at and across the border. Accordingly, it encourages a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuring regimes in the era of globalization and transnational flows as well as showcasing border research as an interdisciplinary field with its own academic standing. Contemporary bordering processes and practices are examined through the borderscapes lens to uncover important connections between borders as a ’challenge' to national (and EU) policies and borders as potential elements of political innovation through conceptual (re-)framings of social, political, economic and cultural spaces. The authors offer a nuanced and critical re-reading and understanding of the border not as an entity to be taken for granted, but as a place of investigation and as a resource in terms of the construction of novel (geo)political imaginations, social and spatial imaginaries and cultural images. In so doing, they suggest that rethinking borders means deconstructing the interweaving between political practices of inclusion-exclusion and the images created to support and communicate them on the cultural level by Western territorialist modernity. The result is a book that proposes a wandering through a constellation of bordering policies, discourses, practices and images to open new possibilities for thinking, mapping, acting and living borders under contemporary globalization.
Da qualche anno lavoro insieme a un gruppo di volontari, ricercatori e educatori in una rete progettuale tesa a favorire l’ascolto, l’auto-rappresentazione e la raccolta di memorie, narrazioni e testimonianze di persone migranti in provenienza soprattutto dalle regioni del Corno d’Africa. Scopo della ricerca è favorire e diffondere una maggiore consapevolezza delle grandi questioni che si celano dietro la questione migrante in Italia e dare spazio autonomo alle voci narranti dei diretti interessati nella necessaria ricostruzione/ricomposizione delle loro identità in cammino.
The island of Lampedusa is known as an EU border hotspot. Its high degree of 'borderness', though, is less the result of its geographical location than the product of a 'borderization' process carried out through specific policies, practices and discourses. The introduction explains what Lampedusa's 'borderness' consists in: irregular landings and the changed anthropic and human landscape have turned the island into an ideal observatory for all major issues of the current debate on migration-related border controls. The first section analyses the main factors of the 'borderization' process. Specific political choices (establishing a detention centre, concentrating migrants, dispatching border guards, employing patrol boats, involving humanitarian workers etc.) suggest that borders are the result of the placing and interaction of 'spatial bodies', as well as of legislative measures and international relations. The paper also regards Italian immigration control policies as a 'political spectacle', and Lampedusa as the theatre of the 'border play'. The second section therefore analyses the two narratives (the securitarian one of the 'tough' and the humanitarian one of the 'humane' border) prevailing in five different acts of the play, and shows that both are strictly connected and serve the same purpose of governing and managing human mobility.
No analysis of contemporary refugee protection and identity should take place without consideration of historical perspectives. An understanding of historical (and religious) antecedents is crucial to appreciate fully some of the key questions of this volume: who is a ‘refugee’; how that label influences state behaviour towards those seeking asylum; and the broader implications for refugee identity and protection. This chapter has two aims: (i) to provide a foundation for subsequent contributions in this collection and to highlight some of the major concerns with both the Refugee Convention and the framework for international protection in the 21st century; and (ii) to focus on the Middle East, where the majority of states are not party to the Refugee Convention or Protocol, but which currently hosts millions of displaced people. The discussion opens with a consideration of the Refugee Convention and its Protocol (‘the Refugee Convention’) in their historical contexts, briefly describing the change from group-based to individual protection, the emergence of a legal identity of the refugee, and the subsequent shifts in conceptualisation of both refugee protection and refugee identity that have occurred in the past 60 years. The importance of the UNHCR in this development is highlighted. The chapter then moves on to the second, and main part, and addresses the historical context of forced migration in the Middle East, before exploring the current problems associated with law, refugee identity and protection in the region.
Com’è avvenuta la trasformazione di Lampedusa in sinonimo della frontiera
euro-africana? I confini sono fatti sociali, e trasformare un luogo in confine,
o trasformare il ruolo simbolico e pratico di un confine, è sempre frutto di
determinate azioni. Da questa prospettiva l’articolo analizza i principali atti
che hanno accresciuto la “confinità” di Lampedusa, determinando la
“frontierizzazione” dell’isola, tra gli anni Novanta e il 2011. L’analisi tocca
alcune scelte del legislatore, l’evoluzione delle relazioni con i paesi
nordafricani e certe pratiche di controllo e gestione delle frontiere:
l’apertura di un centro di detenzione, la scelta di dirottare quasi tutti i
migranti a Lampedusa, concentrandovi così anche le attività di accoglienza, e la
produzione di emergenze artificiali.2.
This article investigates the reshaping of the military-humanitarian border in the Mediterranean, focusing on the Italian military-humanitarian mission Mare Nostrum, that started for rescuing migrants at sea after the deaths of hundreds of migrants in October 2013 near the coasts of the island of Lampedusa. The main argument is that in order to understand the working of the military-humanitarian border at sea and its impacts, we must go beyond the space of the sea, and analysing it in the light of the broader functioning of migration governmentality. The notion of desultory politics of mobility is deployed here for describing the specific temporality of the humanitarian border working and its politics of visibility. In particular, an analytical gaze on the military-humanitarian operations at sea to rescue-and-control of migrants’ movements shows that what is at stake is the production of some practices of mobility as exceptional. Then, this article takes on Mare Nostrum operation for exploring the ways in which the military and the humanitarian are rearticulated and how they currently work together.
Many names have been attached to regional spaces of migration around the edges of the European Union, including the Mediterranean, Africa-Europe, EU, and Schengen. These regional distinctions and the image of contiguous boundaries assume certain territorial stabilities that can be known, mapped, and policed: the African continent, the European Union, the Mediterranean and even the notion of territorial waters. Yet, territoriality itself is an unstable concept, and the many crises unfolding in the interstitial spaces in the Mediterranean signal precisely the fluidity of the region. Regional solutions are popular within the current panoply of enforcement strategies used to manage migration, but they function to reify and stabilize the concept of the region and obscure violence happening at other scales. In this paper we build on political geographers’ examinations of the social construction of scale to investigate the ways in which the region has been created through “migration management.” Building on the work of feminist geographers, we contend that attention to the scale of the migrant body shows the violence obscured by regionalized migration management and opens up spaces and strategies of political engagement. This approach highlights the multiple places where the EU-Africa borderlands are constructed and shifts the conversation from a state-centric discourse of migration management enacted at the region to one of embodied migration politics that addresses violence transpiring at finer scales.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Migration in the Mediterranean offers a unique multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework, bringing together scholars from different subject areas. This book aims to address the following research questions: What are the main characteristics of migration movements in this region? What are the most important theoretical challenges? What are the perspectives for the future? This book begins with an overview of the economic perspective of the Mediterranean migration model, with a particular focus on labour market outcomes of migrants. It then presents the original results of field studies on the unintended effects of the EU's external border controls on migration and integration in the Euro-Mediterranean region, before addressing the themes of mobility, migration and transnationalism.
This volume focuses on migration with a multidisciplinary approach, with scholars from various areas including sociology, economics, geography, political science and history. This book is well suited for those who study international economics, migration and political sociology.
The European Union and the Italian state have currently implemented a state infrastructure enabling to govern the migration flows towards Europe. This infrastructure has involved the formation of an ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections that raise the efficiency of migrants' reception, integration or expulsion. Expertise on intercultural communication has been celebrated as a key resource of this infrastructure. In this article, I discuss the status of expertise on intercultural communication within an infrastructure managing migration in Italy. I focus on the circumstances by which expertise on intercultural communication has emerged as a crucial technology of this infrastructure and on ways this knowledge contributes to the regulation of migrants' access to the life projects migration stands for.
Sixty years on from the signing of the Refugee Convention, forced migration and refugee movements continue to raise global concerns for hosting states and regions, for countries of origin, for humanitarian organisations on the ground, and, of course, for the refugee. This edited volume is framed around two themes which go to the core of contemporary ‘refugeehood’: protection and identity. It analyses how the issue of refugee identity is shaped by and responds to the legal regime of refugee protection in contemporary times.
The book investigates the premise that there is a narrowing of protection space in many countries and many highly visible incidentsof refoulement. It argues that ‘Protection’, which is a core focus of the Refugee Convention, appears to be under threat, as there are many gaps and inconsistencies in practice.
Contributors to the volume, who include Erika Feller, Elspeth Guild, Hélène Lambert and Roger Zetter, look at the relevant issues from the perspective of a number of different disciplines including law, politics, sociology, and anthropology. The chapters examine the link between identity and protection as a basis for understanding how the Refugee Convention has been and is being applied in policy and practice. The situation in a number of jurisdictions and regions in Europe, North America, South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East is explored in order to ask the question does jurisprudence under the Refugee Convention need better coordination and how successful is oversight of the Convention?
Foucault’s shift from an analytical focus on discipline to governmentality saw the theme of visibility move into the background of his attention. In this article we ask how the debates about governmentality and visibility can be brought into a mutually productive relationship. Building on recent arguments for greater rigour in conceptualising visibility, we proceed to examine what visibility means and does in the context of migration control in Europe. Focusing on the EU’s recently deployed programme of border surveillance, EUROSUR, we elaborate how multiple forms of visibility are at play. We conclude that the politics of visibility is an important theme for future studies in the governance of migration.
The migration route towards Italy, which, from various African regions, converged to Libya to reach the Sicilian coasts, reached substantial proportionsbetween 2005 and 2009 and has been, on the Italian media, highly spectacularized and misrepresented at the same time. Migrants and asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa formed an important part of this flow of people coming through this "Libya-Lampedusa route". The article questions the prevalent representations of this route and of migration corridors in general as unitary phenomena by highlighting their time-specific processes of formation, the social categories generated in them as well as the emerging socio-political dialectics of migration corridors from Africa to Europe.
The first part of this article discusses the different approaches to Mediterranean history. People talk of the Mediterranean and refer to the waters that stretch eastward from the Straits of Gibraltar, linked to the Red Sea by the man-made channel of the Suez Canal and to the Black Sea by the natural channel of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. The discussion insists that the study of Mediterranean history encapsulates many important aspects of world history: it involves the investigation of connections between societies separated by extensive physical space, focusing on commercial networks, the building of empires, and the movement of peoples, These phenomena can be traced across the surface of the sea across which Europe, Africa, and Asia meet one another and over which Christianity and Islam have vigorously competed for dominion. The second part of this article focuses on the development of the 'classic Mediterranean' over time.
Talk of a ‘migration crisis’ calls forth three related spatial renderings of the Mediterranean Sea. Their social production involves a particular politics of visualization. First, the Mediterranean is but one leg of a longer migration corridor, yet as such substantiates a geo-racial border zone. Second, scenes of rescue at sea have functioned as border spectacles, naturalizing migration politics. Third, expanding surveillance infrastructure has undermined a firewall between border patrolling and search-and-rescue, thereby helping to create and sustain an ethical landscape of response-ability to routinized emergency. Visualizing and disseminating this landscape has, for the moment, created a political space between wanted and unwanted mobilities.
This paper presents the island of Lampedusa as the theatre stage on which the “border play” of immigration control is performed. The paper first introduces the performers and spectators of the play, outlining their roles and places with respect to the architecture of the theatre space as well as the dramaturgy of the play. Next, the paper analyses the five acts of the play, notably examining the time period in which each of them transpires and the most marking or spectacular events. Each act is analysed with regard to its dominant narratives. The war against irregular migration is waged and justified in resorting to two different narratives: one being security, and the other humanitarian. On the Lampedusa stage, while both narratives take turns commanding the scene, they both are in fact always present. The two rhetorics are intertwined with one another, and together they contribute to constituting and strengthening the policies and practices of migration and border control.
This article deals with this ongoing spatial and political recrafting of the Mediterranean sea as a space of migration governmentality.
It retraces the recent political and spatial transformations occurred with the starting of the military-humanitarian operation
Mare Nostrum in the channel of Sicily and then the handover to the Triton operation coordinated by Frontex. The two specific
angles from which it tackles this issue are the politics of and over life that is at stake in the government of migration
at sea and the politics of visibility that underpins it. In the first section it analyses the politics and the scene of rescue
that has been put into place with the start of Mare Nostrum, tacking stock of the re-articulation of military and humanitarian
technologies for governing and containing migrant movements. Then, it discusses the recent transformations occurred with Triton
operation and the effects on the level of political actions undertaken by activist migrant groups. The article moves on by
taking into account the peculiar politics of visibility that is at stake in the government of migration in the Mediterranean.
By adopting the borderscape as "method", the paper inquires into the Euro/African border nexus by assuming a multi-sited approach, able to combine not only different places where borderscapes could be observed - both in borderlands and wherever specific borderscaping processes have impacts, are negotiated or displaced - but also different socio-cultural, political, economic, and historical settings. From this viewpoint, the paper proposes a shift from exclusively national borders between EU member states and African countries to the multiplying material as well as epistemological borderlands at the interface of their dis-location and re-location, which are producing new forms of borderland in Africa originated by the externalization of European borders.
In today's Europe, migrant domestic workers are indispensable in supporting many households which, without their employment, would lack sufficient domestic and care labour. Black Girls collects and explores the stories of some of the first among these workers. They are the Afro-Surinamese and the Eritrean women who in the 1960s and 70s migrated to the former colonising country, the Netherlands and Italy respectively, and there became domestic and care workers. Sabrina Marchetti analyses the narratives of some of these women in order to powerfully demonstrate how the legacies of the colonial past have been, at the same time, both their tool of resistance and the reason for their subordination. © 2014, Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.
The emergence of Italy as a receiving country of postcolonial immigrants from all over Africa and other parts of the economically developing world involves the reproduction of deeply rooted prejudices and colonial legacies expressed in territorial concepts of belonging. Yet geographical discussions of borders seldom begin their explorations from the vantage point of what Hanchard has called, "Black life worlds", complex experiences of place among African diasporic populations in relationship to race. This paper examines situated practices, negotiations, and meanings of place, identity and belonging among first generation African-Italians in Northern Italy whose experiences suggest that the borders between Africa and Europe are far more porous than they appear to be. This essay develops a theory of relational place to study the meaning of place in Black life worlds as indexed by the everyday materiality of bodies in relation to racial discourses and practices, and the profound interweavings of Africa and Europe through space and time. The essay examines African-Italo experiences in relation to the transformation of political culture in Turin, the rise of ethno-nationalism, and legacies of Italian colonialism.
In the aftermath of the Jasmine revolution, one of the main concerns of European leaders in the summer of 2011 was to find collective solutions on ‘managing’ rapidly evolving migratory fluxes. Although migration and refugees are not a new phenomenon in the region, the Libyan and Syrian conflicts have further increased uncertainties for populations fleeing unemployment, conflict and poverty. Since March 2011, 9 Million people have fled Syria, going mostly to neighboring countries with 6.5 million in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Migrants leaving mostly from Libya to reach Europe are also more likely to die in the Mediterranean Sea, which has become sadly an open-air cemetery. Solidarity amongst European Union (EU) countries has proven to be difficult, with difficulties to relocate and resettle people, while countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have to cope with huge numbers at times of economic, political and sometimes security difficulties. So far, research on migration and refugees in the Euro-Mediterranean area have been scarce, focusing either on Palestinian refugees or border management. Evolving migratory practices and geopolitics in the region however necessarily call for new ways to think about this common challenge for the European Union and MENA countries. The three books under study fill this gap by providing different, yet refreshing and complementary analyses of the current situation.
In this final contribution to this theme issue on Luisa Passerini's important scholarship, the guest editors and Passerini discuss her current EU Research Council-funded collaborative project, BABE, which is meant to bring together oral and visual forms of memory that reformulate the concept of Europe (and Fortress Europe) in more inclusive ways. Its distinctive features are discussed, including the collection and analysis of drawings and other visual itineraries by artists and other subjects, including students, from the global diaspora in Europe. Other topics include the importance of conversation in oral history work, the ‘mobility turn,’ and the gendered nature of mentorship.
Post-Orientalism is a sustained record of Hamid Dabashi's reflections over many years on the question of authority and power. Who gets to represent whom and by what authority? Dabashi's work picks up where Edward Said's Orientalism left off. Said traced the origin of the power of representation and the normative agency that it entails to the colonial hubris that carried a militant band of mercenary merchants, military officers, Christian missionaries, and European Orientalists around the globe. This hubris enabled them to write and represent the people they sought to rule. Dabashi's book is not as much a critique of colonial representation as it is of the manners and modes of fighting back and resisting it. He does not question the significance of Orientalism and its principal concern with the colonial acts of representation, but he provides a different angle that argues for the primacy of the question of postcolonial agency. Dabashi uses the United States as an example of a country that initiated militant acts of representation in Iraq and Afghanistan. He attempts to unearth and examine the United States' deeply rooted claim to normative and moral agency, particularly in light of the world's post-9/11 political reality.
Migration controls are more and more transforming borders. In this regard, this paper is a border case study focusing on the Strait of Sicily. It analyzes the border regime between Italy and its North African neighboring countries Tunisia and Libya from the point of view of the transformations of territorial borders in space and time. It provides an inventory of border control measures and instruments, and analyzes the way they actually work. The evolution of policies and practices of migration controls results in transformations of territorial borders not only in terms of their location (inward and outward flexibilization of the border) but also in terms of their shape (from boundary lines to border zones or points) and operational modalities (from fixity in space and continuity in time to mobility and intermittency). Border transformations are analyzed before the background of Ratzel's idea of Grenzsaum, that is of a borderland both in the sense of a border strip straddling two bounded territories or lying on just one side of a territorial linear border, and in the sense of a buffer zone lying between two territories.
Events in the Somali regions on the Horn of Africa beginning with the establishment of the U.N. Trusteeship Territory of Somalia under Italian Administration in 1950 and culminating with the introduction of a written orthography for Somali in 1972 and the subsequent influences and aftermaths of this event on language and literacy in Somalia make a study of this region ideal for generalizing to some degree on the subject of orality and literacy. In this paper, I wish to give a brief overview of literacy in Somalia and address the relationship between literacy and orature (oral literature). I will also comment on two theoretical issues concerning orality and literacy in Africa, namely whether literacy adds complexity to human thinking and whether or not it truly influences human mentality. Only a brief overview of the history of literacy in Somalia is required, as detailed descriptions have already been published outlining the vernacular literacy movement that culminated in the development and legalization of a writing system in the Somali Democratic Republic on 21 October, 1972, and the multifaceted activities leading up to it as well as its political aftermath. Part of this movement resulted in a nationwide literacy campaign in 1973, the results of which easily rival the historical literacy reforms of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s. Moreover, the orthography adopted by the Somali government in existence at that time has survived civil strife and the resulting breakdown of organized government in Somalia. The Latin script adopted in 1972 can be found in the various current Somali governments on the Horn and in the diaspora of Somalis worldwide. Furthermore, the decision to employ Latin script for the politically dominant dialect for the country in 1972 may well have determined the choice for Latin based scripts developed for other Cushitic dialects (languages?) spoken in the regions between the two main rivers of Somalia.
This paper is concerned with the portrayal of conflict through the written word and oral recollection, and the popular perception of war over time, with particular reference to Ethiopia and Eritrea between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. It seeks to explore the roles played by the regional chronicles and traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by orality and literacy in the modern age of armed struggle and revolution, in the creation and assertion of identities. The basic aim of the paper is to demonstrate continuity between apparently distinct forms of ‘war and remembrance’. The first is the chronicle tradition of the Ethiopian highlands, dating back several centuries, both contemporary and retrospective in composition, and in which the seminal role of conflict is continually emphasised. The second is the rhetoric and symbolism of the modern era of liberation struggle in Eritrea, as represented by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. In this context, the memory of war, and the articulation of that memory in various forms, is as crucial as war itself in the creation and consolidation of identity, most dramatically in nationalist discourse.
The paper explores the oral origins and political motivations of two written documents drafted by the Oromoo rulers of Leeqaa-Naqamtee in western Ethiopia at the turn of the nineteenth century. The first document, the ‘Chronicle of the Warra Bakaree family’ is the history of the ruling family of Wälläga-Naqamtee written by Kumsaa Morodaa, alias DÄJJACH Gäbrä Egzi'abehér, who ran the western Ethiopian province under Ethiopian administration from 1889 till 1923. The second document, titled ‘Boräna Geneaologies,’ was drafted by order of the same Oromoo ruler who put into writing genealogies collected by local elders as a way to claim legitimacy for his family rule over the region. The two documents, and the correspondence exchanged between the Ethiopian court and the western Oromoo rulers, reflect the intricacies and ambiguities of the semi-autonomous rule of Wälläga-Naqamtee under Ethiopian administration. They also show the gradual inroad of centrally-imposed rules and regulations (mainly concerning land, taxes and tributes) inevitably eroding local prerogatives (and consensus) and discouraging accumulation of local wealth to comply with the growing needs of the central Ethiopian state at the peak of its territorial expansion. The paper reconstructs the history of these documents and explains the motivations of the ‘unequal exchange’ which led the Naqamtee court to preserve into writing what had been presumably conceived and transmitted till then within the traditional bounds of an oral discourse.
In treating memory as a cultural rather than an individual faculty, this book provides an account of how bodily practices are transmitted in, and as, traditions. Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written, or inscribed transmissions of memories. Paul Connerton, on the other hand, concentrates on bodily (or incorporated) practices, and so questions the currently dominant idea that literary texts may be taken as a metaphor for social practices generally. The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that performative memory is bodily. Bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected. An innovative study, this work should be of interest to researchers into social, political and anthropological thought as well as to graduate and undergraduate students.
Terry Eagleton once wrote in the Guardian, 'Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha in his exhilarated sense of alternative possibilities'. In rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity, one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. A scholar who writes and teaches about South Asian literature and contemporary art with incredible virtuosity, he discusses writers as diverse as Morrison, Gordimer, and Conrad. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
The essay intends to contribute to the current debate on the failure of Italian public memory to come to terms with its colonial past. Several authors have argued that Italian public memory is under the weight of an oppressive historical amnesia which seals off the country from its colonial past. Yet the present reconfiguring of Italy's colonial memory conceals displacements and dislocations which are no less pervasive or disquieting. Colonial memory in Italy may be described as a sort of ‘pendulum’ oscillating between an all-out desire to forget and the nostalgic recollection of a past which is selectively remembered and re-enacted to suit Italy's new role in the postcolonial age.Given its oscillating nature, colonial memory and its renewed positioning are like back-up files which can be accessed according to convenience or factuality. The recent influx of African migrants trying to break into the fortified European citadel offers an example of this process. As wave after wave of ex-colonial subjects escape difficult situations at home and seek refuge in present-day Italy, an idealized and assertive colonial memory is being revived among the Italian public. Feelings of cultural and racial superiority are thus re-emerging within Italian society and dictate the terms of the new postcolonial encounter between the ex-metropolitan citizens and the disenfranchised ex-colonial subjects who have come to live among them.In many ways, the ‘striking back’ of the empire is no less controversial for Italian society than it is for ex-Italian Africa, where the debate on the colonial past has been revived, particularly during the recent conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea over the old colonial border separating the two countries. The essay discusses a few examples of the ambiguous displacements of colonial memory within both Italian society and Italy's ex-colonies. It discusses in particular forms of whitewashing the colonial past aimed at creating an all-endorsing and sanitized ‘shared memory’ to suit feelings of belonging and national unity in both the Italian metropolis and its ex-colonies.