Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
workandsettledinthenorthernindustrialzonesaftertheSecondWorldWarwherethey
encountered substantial prejudice and discrimination from the local populations. Their
children and grandchildren now constitute noteworthy, if not always fully integrated
members of northern cultures.
The idea that Northern and Southern Italy are incommensurable places dates back to
nationalunification,whenthecampaignbytheKingdomofPiedmonttoincorporatethe
South involved both a repressive military campaign and conceptual operationalization
via linguistic references to the South as a distinct moral space. As Allan Pred sugges-
ted, it is in part through language that individual consciousness is given expression and
differentiated perceptions of the world are produced and retained (Pred 1990). In the
North, a racialized, derogatory terminology was employed to describe Southerners as
cafone ,meaning primitive, barbaric, uncivilized, vulgar, and backward (Pugliese2008).
The signifier “Africa” has also been used in the North as a lens through which to make
senseoftheSouth,asifthepeninsulaanditsislandsweresplitalongaBlack/whiteaxis.
As Joseph Pugliese suggests, “the whiteness of the North operated as a priori, in con-
tradistinction to the problematic racialized status of the South, with its dubious African
and Oriental histories and cultures” (Pugliese 2008, 3).
During the l950s and 1960s period of mass migration to Northern industrial cities
Southerners were targeted as terrone , a racialized slur meaning “people of dirt, the dirt
beneath one's feet.” This cultural, economic, and social othering of the South by the
Northhaspersistedinthecontemporaryperiod.Butsincethearrivalofimmigrantsfrom
the Global South two decades ago, Southern Italians have moved up the white suprem-
acist racial hierarchy and what Pugliese refers to as Italy's “caucacentric fantasies of
a pure white/European nation” toward what he calls “proximate whiteness” (Pugliese
2009). As compared with non-European immigrants, Southern Italians who may not
appear white are brought into the fold of whiteness. Several neologisms have recently
emergedtodescribemigrantsfromAfricaandtheArabworld,including sottoterrone ,or
the “subdirt beneath one's feet” and Marocchini , an umbrella term that refers to people
of Sub-Saharan and Arab origin, thereby lumping together a diverse group of people
with a name that negatively signifies “Blackness” and “African” (De Maio 2009).
Blackness is such a pivotal trope of Otherness in Italian society that even those with
the most unequivocally culturally Italian identities may be associated with the “dark
continent” and an imminent threat to national geographies of whiteness. The soccer
player, Mario Balotelli recently became a symbol of the country's apparent resistance to
embracing its growing heterogeneity. Born to Ghanaian parents but adopted by an Itali-
an family and raised in the northern town of Brescia, Balotelli's identity has been seen
bymanyItaliansoccerfansasaprovocation.WhenhewasarisingstaroftheInterMil-
an club, supporters of Turin's Juventus team held up banners with the words, “A Negro
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