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South of What? In Search of Italy’s Others

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Languages of Discrimination and Racism in Twentieth-Century Italy

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the notion of Italy’s Southern Question and asks whether the meridione still represents Italy’s internal Other. The argument put forward is that three factors have significantly transformed the narrative of the North–South duality. These are the growing presence of non-Italian migrants (and of African migrants in particular), the hardening of the Mediterranean border and the transformation of the Lega from a once separatist party into a nationalist/nativist force. I argue that the combined effect of these three factors was the emergence of a new and even stronger Southern “Other”. As the Southern rim of the Mediterranean became Italy’s new South, the Meridione increasingly acquired the characteristics of a liminal space, a zone of transition between Europe and a Mediterranean increasingly seen as a threatening unregulated space.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The journal Meridiana, published by the ‘Istituto per lo studio della società meridionale’, represented the important outcome of historians and social scientists’ mounting reaction against the tendency to use generalizing categories to talk about the South.

  2. 2.

    The new federation included larger movements from Veneto and Lombardy and smaller organizations from Piedmont, Liguria, Toscana and Emilia Romagna. Although the movements run under the banner of the Liga Veneta in 1984, by 1987 the Lega Lombarda had emerged as the leading force among the northern autonomist movements.

  3. 3.

    The Lisbon treaty of 2009 established a common frame “on asylum, immigration and external border control” (arts. 67(2) and 79(2), but left to member state control over the volume of admissions (Art. 79(5)).

  4. 4.

    With a certain level of simplification, it could be argued that the first position adopted a broadly postcolonial perspective, while the second followed Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis, applying it to the Mediterranean. See among others , Chambers (2008), Giaccaria and Minca (2011); for the second, Huntington (1996), Bottici and Challand (2006).

  5. 5.

    Among the most significant political initiatives was the national “migrants strike” proclaimed on the 1 March 2010 with the aim of highlighting the essential economic role played my migrants in Italian economy; see among others, Antonella Cardone, “La prima volta degli stranieri in sciopero”, “La Repubblica”, February 24, 2010, https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2010/02/24/la-prima-volta-degli-stranieri-in-sciopero.html?ref=search, accessed April 17, 2021.

  6. 6.

    “Dalla rivolta verso la rivoluzione: il 7 gennaio 20111 la comunità africana di Rosarno ci ha insegnato la democrazia”, Rete Radici Rosarno, Saturday, January 7, 2012, http://reteradici.blogspot.com/, accessed April 17, 2021.

  7. 7.

    I am here paraphrasing Larry Wolff’s (1994, 4) description of the “invention of Eastern Europe as a product of eighteenth-century Western Europe, as “its complement within the same continent”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium

    Stefania Bernini

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  1. Stefania Bernini
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  1. Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venezia, Italy

    Marcella Simoni

  2. New York University Florence, Firenze, Italy

    Davide Lombardo

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Bernini, S. (2022). South of What? In Search of Italy’s Others. In: Simoni, M., Lombardo, D. (eds) Languages of Discrimination and Racism in Twentieth-Century Italy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98657-5_10

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