Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and expanded throughout Africa, the Atlantic World, and eventually all over the globe.
Every year over 43 million people visit the country to discover a little of their own his-
tories instantiated in architectural and artistic achievements and to experience a sense of
unity with humanity through Italian cooking and the warm and friendly people whom
a first generation of transcolonial Africans when they first arrived in Italy as they are
to the continuing flow of visitors who claim diverse European descent. All identify in
varying measure with an Italy of creativity, achievement, and human warmth. And ar-
riving on national soil most visitors discover this, in various degrees. However, visitors
who remain in the country permanently and do not demonstrate biological or heredit-
mined from without” (Fanon 1967), or perceived via their physical appearance, speech,
and association with the Italian South or Africa, and they may be treated with suspicion
and as out of place, kept at a social distance, and quite possibly ruthlessly exploited in
the labor market.
Over the past two decades, the refashioning of racial hierarchies have effectively re-
positioned racialized subjects so that the South is no longer the absolute Other to the
North that Africa has come to signify. The dominant images for instance of boatloads
of nameless people landing on Lampedusa, an island off the coast of Sicily proliferate
the idea of Africa as the cradle of unwanted and illegal immigration. These and other
dominant tropes have worked as images of mass distraction (see Pred 2006), diverting
attentionfromthegrowingmilitarizationoftheItalianbordersandurbanspaces,andthe
ongoing weakening of worker rights (Merrill 2011). The climate of insecurity and un-
certainty that foments anxiety about newcomers blamed for the country's social ills and
the emergence of a zeitgeist that rejects the antiracist norms established after fascism
doesn't make it easy for people like Maria, Malik, Fatima, Amu, Saba, and many others
to express openly the multiple dimensions of their identities, their polymorphic being as
participants in an ongoing transcolonial histories. The binary narratives that divide Italy
from Africa don't even begin to describe the complexity of Black life worlds, situated
practices and self-understandings.
Europe's frayed narrative of itself as the closed space of phenotypical ethnic and cul-
turalwhitenessisbeingprotestedandtransformed.InItalyitselftherehavebeennumer-
ous demonstrations over the past two years demanding social and legal recognition for
Africans and other immigrants (Merrill 2006). The assassination in December 2011 of
two Senegalese street vendors and the wounding of two others in Florence by a member
of the neofascist social center, Casa Pound, triggered a national outcry as Senegalese
leaders called for mass antiracist protests all over the country. A flyer distributed by the
Senegalese Association in Pavia in the northern region of Lombardy, called for “Un-
