Racialization and counter-racialization in times of crisis: taking migrant struggles in Italy as a critical standpoint on race (original) (raw)
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The introduction discusses the origins of this themed section of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, based on a 2017 interdisciplinary conference about migration and the migrant experience in Italy. The co-editors recognized early on that the U.S. media was paying inadequate attention to migrant landings in Italy during the so-called refugee crisis around 2015–16, and engaged scholars active in Italy, the U.K. and the U.S. to provide further nuance to this particular migratory flow, and in particular to question how the term ‘crisis’ was used in describing it. In response to a public debate increasingly prone to alarmism, the articles produced after the conference investigate the contradictions of the Italian reception system of migrants and refugees; the often glossed-over labour, race, and gender aspects of the flows; and the critical conditions of the Mediterranean crossing as represented in film and theatre. The contributions specifically bring forward the migrants’ voices to challenge the exclusionary practices adopted in Italy and Europe in favour of structured legal channels, and to reveal the growing crisis of E.U. democratic principles.
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This paper examines how regional and national identities are being reshaped through the spatialization of "race" in Italy. Neoliberal globalization expands the spatial mediation of historically layered racialized anxieties. In the context of African in-migration, "black" is emerging as a prominent marker of difference. The state has largely proscribed immigration from impoverished African nations, effecting a shadow economy of undocumented workers. Corporate interests have seized on the presence of these workers and hyper-exploited them. Meanwhile, trade union and feminist organizations are consciously blind to the "race" question, providing inadequate relief to those most in need. In discussing the empirical and geographical realities of racialization, I refine Marx's understanding of disposable surplus labor. In particular, I argue that the racialization of surplus populations must be understood in the context of the regional and global inequalities that have compelled post-colonial populations to migrate.
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