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6 Infrapolitical verbal styles Fra le onde del mare, posso ancora Amongst the waves of the sea I can sentire still hear Voci antiche, grida Saracene. Ancient voices, Saracen cries. I mercanti di schiavi, orizzonti The slave merchants, the ships on di navi the horizon, Maledetto ritmo di catene. The cursed rhythm of chains. Siamo tutti africani, siamo africani We are all Africans, we are Africans Simm tutt’ african nui napulitan. We are all Africans, us Neapolitans. E batte nero nero nero … And this heart beats black black questo cuore black … E canta nero nero nero … And this heart sings black black questo cuore black … In culo al mondo che in fondo At the bottom of the world which, vorrebbe rubarci anche l’anima deep down, wants to steal our souls. Ci ha preso tutto ma non ci It has taken everything from us but potranno mai prendere l’anima will never take our souls. Extract of ‘Cuore nero’ (1997) written by Enzo Rossi and sung by Franco Ricciardi, featuring 99 Posse (translated from Italian and Neapolitan by the author) ICCIARDI’S ‘CUORE NERO’ (Rossi 1997) meditates upon a key theme in RNeapolitan popular culture: that of the racialised subalternity of Neapolitan people. The extracts of songs and poems that I have shared so far in the book have concerned issues related to the anxiety of southern Italians about their own alterity – their othering through the denial of their language and culture as a result of Italian Unification; paranoias about miscegenation with African American 130 Antonia Lucia Dawes - 9781526138484 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 07:46:54PM via free access Infrapolitical verbal styles GIs; reflections on how precarious work and emigration have connected them to other marginalised people. By contrast, in ‘Cuore nero’ a painful, subaltern and oppressed regional identity is reclaimed as a source of pride and action. The idea of Neapolitans as black can be understood as a political statement that connects southern Italian marginalisation and suffering to the countercultural aspiration to freedom, citizenship and autonomy that Paul Gilroy has described emerging from Black Atlantic cultural traditions (Gilroy 1993). Examples of these kinds of claim abound in parts of the Neapolitan music scene that became heavily influenced by African American blues and reggae from the 1980s. The late Neapolitan Blues artist Pino Daniele dedicated a whole album to the experience of Neapolitanness, which he called Nero a metà, or Half Black (1980). Neapolitan dub and reggae group Almamegretta wrote a piece called ‘Figli d’Annibale’ (‘Hannibal’s Sons’) on their album Migrant Soul (1993), which makes claims about African ancestry in the DNA of southern Italians. Reflecting upon transatlantic slavery, Ricciardi sings in Italian and then repeats in Neapolitan: ‘We are all Africans, we are all Africans / We are all Africans, us Neapolitans.’ In this music, black African diasporic traditions have inspired alternative ways of being that reopen repressed and negated memories of the city’s history of subordination and connect them to contemporary globalised inequalities. Sung predominantly in Neapolitan or a Neapolitanised Italian, they decentre the cultural hegemony of the global north and propose the city as a site of transnational liberation (Chambers and Cavallo 2018: 1– 5). These songs are about the experience of subordination and marginalisation of Neapolitans who, in reality, are racialised as normatively white. It is intriguing to consider how this notion of commonality and fraternity with the Global South plays out in a city that, since the 1980s, has become more and more multicultural in a wider context of increasingly vicious anti-immigr ation politics. Later on in ‘Cuore nero’, 99 Posse rap at high speed in Neapolitan, referencing a line from ‘Tammuriata nera’, about which I wrote in Chapter 4 (Mario and Nicolardi 1944): pecche addo semin o gran o Because where you sow grain, gran cresce grain grows Riesco o nun riesce è semp gran Success or failure, grain always chell ch’esce comes up Semin semin e cresce semin semin Sow sow and it grows sow sow and e cresce it grows O problem vene quann o gran The problem’s when the grain piglia e fernesce. runs out. 131 Antonia Lucia Dawes - 9781526138484 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 07:46:54PM via free access Race talk The fear expressed in the song about an inability to grow and flourish in Napoli was certainly reflected in the discussions and events that I witnessed on the ground. The city street was the place where the breakdown of law and the disastrous consequences of capitalist organisation referenced in the music were lived and negotiated (Chambers and Cavallo 2018: 6– 7). At the time of my research Napoli was in a deep economic recession. Street vending represented an important way in which both Neapolitans and migrants with few resources could make money for themselves. But if they operated without correct licences they were subjected to repeated police crackdowns and risked both their living and, in the case of migrants, their legal status. The fear people felt about their own sur- vival in this context raised questions about solidarity and entitlement that, at their core, were racialised. Many Neapolitans relied on a corpus of ‘racist formulae’ (Back 1996) about street vending, illegality and, above all, black African street vendors as undocumented, criminal and dangerous, in order to argue for the pri- oritisation of their own marginalised status as Neapolitans. At the same time some people – both Neapolitans and migrants – produced a countercultural response through which they sought, in small and subtle ways, to protect each other in recognition of a common precariousness, vulnerability and desire for autonomy. This response was not explicitly tied to direct action or organised resistance, but formed part of the everyday life of the pavement. Veiled public expressions of transcultural fraternity and solidarity – which often took the form of gossip, jokes and coded warnings – formed what James Scott has called an ‘infrapolitics’ that created a disguise of ‘ideological insubordination’ from which people could con- struct an antihegemonic ‘imaginative capacity’ (Scott 1990: 19, 90– 92). People in Napoli often reproduced the hegemonic public transcript about street vending through performances of dominance, on the part of both the powerful and the marginalised. However, at the same time, infrapolitical verbal styles allowed in small ways for dignity, entitlement and, occasionally, transcultural solidarity to be expressed as part of daily intersubjective processes. As is common with humour and codes, these infrapolitical verbal styles were frequently double-edg ed, ambiguous and contingent. With jokes, hier- archies could be both subverted and reinstated. For example, untrue warnings addressed to African street vendors about police coming to seize their goods and arrest them often appeared as a ‘collective sneer’ (Passerini 1987: 67– 106) that further reinforced their subordination. The totalising power of the State in the lives of migrants was undermined by the performance of the Neapolitan speakers showing themselves coming to the migrant street vendor’s aid. But, at the same time, they took on the hegemonic persona of the forces of law and 132 Antonia Lucia Dawes - 9781526138484 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/27/2021 07:46:54PM via free access Infrapolitical verbal styles order, recreating the anxiety of being hounded by the police and also sending the street vendors up for being afraid. However, this banter, as with other sorts of aggressive joking in contexts of racial terror and hierarchy (Smitherman 1977, 2006, 2007), also defused tension and allowed transcultural conflicts around belonging and entitlement to be transformed into a sort of social commentary that could be worked through relatively safely. Nevertheless, these humorous negotiations took place almost exclusively between men, whereas women in street markets, as I explored in Chapter 4, were subjected to forms of violence that were more difficult to speak back against. This ritualised, ludic and com- petitive talk relied on an understanding of a local form of the masculinity of the guappo – a man of the people who was hardworking but also knew how to protect his own dignity and honour. Acting like a guappo was both part of a collective struggle and a weapon of differential control that had gendered, ethnic and racial referents. Black, male street vendors were the particular targets of racial terror and their survival depended on an ability to engage in an affective and aggressive verbal word- play that granted them respect and protection from Neapolitan men on the pavement. An exploration of the verbal infrapolitics that took place across transcultural boundaries in street markets allows critical questions to be asked about what the claims made about Neapolitan blackness actually mean for a local, transnational politics of liberation in the city street. Racist formulae about unruly street vendors I often heard people complain about street vending in Napoli. They were gen- erally referring to the unlicensed stalls that lined city pavements and they were almost always talking about the migrant and, above all, black West African street vendors selling fake branded bags, accessories and DVDs. Regulated markets such as the one at Poggioreale were not painted in the same light. However, Via Bologna market, the only regulated market in the city where the vendors were predominantly West African in origin, was considered to be a problem. This litany was often heard issuing from the mouths of Italians as they passed by Via Bologna market next to Piazza Garibaldi: Get all this stuff out the way, move it! God, this is Africa here now! This is Africa here – it’s not Europe any more! Most of the time, though, the fact that the vendors were foreign wasn’t expli- citly stated in people’s objections to street vending.

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