Northwestern University
“Mise en vie ” and Intra-culturalism: Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN THE PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
For the degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Field of Performance Studies
By
Raffaele Furno
Evanston, Illinois
December 2008 2
ABSTRACT
“Mise en vie ” and Intra-culturalism: Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy
Raffaele Furno
The dissertation aims to explore the intersection between the artistic performance of blackness in
contemporary Italian theater and the country’s social stigmatization of black immigrants as a
problem or national emergency. I argue that Italians live in a state of “historic forgetfulness”
since they have not been able to absorb the racist discourse strongly implemented during the
fascist regime. Tracing “historic forgetfulness” as an implicit ideology within contemporary
restrictive immigration laws, and in the mass media focus on the illegal aspects of the migratory
phenomenon, I use performance as a methodology and category to analyze the world and
individuate viable alternatives to Italy’s (un)welcoming reaction to African immigrants.
Through archival research, interviews and participant observation, I follow the work of the Afro-Romagnole ensemble Teatro delle Albe. The Albe perceives theater as a tool to show the richness and endless possibilities contained in religious, linguistic, and cultural differences.
The group’s productions raise doubts on any dichotomous separation between right and wrong, legal and illegal, white and black. Working on the specificity of each individual, the Albe brings ethnic background to what it should be: one element of the far more complicated personal identity that encompass gender, sexuality, education, personal experiences, emotions, aspirations, and more.
I contend that the unreasonable nature of the Italian discourse over black migration is threefold. First, migration is not an emergent phenomenon, and it has not surfaced only in the last 3 three decades of the twentieth century. Second, multi-directional economic exchanges, cultural borrowings, and political pressuring have always influenced the nation-building process, determining shifts in the socio-cultural identity of the Italian people. Third, the emergency trope does not consider that blackness is not the product of linear genetic filiations, but rather a contingent expression encompassing a variety of shades of colours: paradoxically blacks are not always as black as they appear. The value of Teatro delle Albe stems from its ability to celebrate hybrid pluralism as a contribution to the notion of national identity, rather than its destruction, as long as it is grounded in local and historical understanding. 4 Acknowledgments
Although I spent many months at my desk writing this dissertation, this is by no mean a solo
work.
First and foremost, I have to thank the community of scholars and graduate students at
Northwestern University. Their work inspired, challenged, and formed my way of analyzing
performance and the world. In particular, I am indebted to Prof. Susan Manning for her insightful comments and for never getting tired of our miles-away discussion on my research. Thank you to
Prof. Tom Simpson for asking me to help with the Mighty Mighty Ubu project, and to Alan
Shefsky for always having a prompt and friendly answer to my never-ending questions, I would
be still figuring out how to enrol in a seminar if it wasn’t for you.
Everyone at Teatro Rasi in Ravenna, you welcomed me home and made my work a lot
easier and cheerful. The beauty and meaning of your artistic creation made my work worth the
long hours of rehearsing, analyzing, and writing.
I was lucky enough to have the support of the talented actors of Compagnia Teatrale
Imprevisti e Probabilità who stuck by me even when I was away and were always there to inspire
me with conversations on the meaning of theater-making.
Finally, to my mother for letting me be who I am: thank you. 5 PREFACE
“Not to know, is bad Not to want to know, is worst” (traditional Yoruba proverb)
In the spring of 2005, I taught a class on Italian experimental theater at Northwestern University.
In that period, I was also working as an assistant on the production of Teatro delle Albe I
Polacchi at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The two experiences merged in the mental mapping of my dissertation project. I had been looking for a performance context which could frame my reading of African migration to Italy, and the Afro-Romagnole constituency of
Teatro delle Albe uncovered a rich site of research for me. Little by little, I built a professional and personal awareness about the contextual forces that shape and direct our ability to look at the world and its diversity. In order to do so, I needed to overcome my limits as an observer of the ways in which global production and consumption of goods, neoliberal policies of inclusion and exclusion, and mainstream media play within the Italian context to impede the full integration of migrants in forms of extended sociability, emphasizing negative connotations of the Other, disseminating biased information about the alleged emergency situation derived from massive immigration, and perpetuating the anachronistic myth of a cohesive nation that stands against the
Other’s assault from without. In the average media representation, Italians have become the oppressed people in their own country, hostage to unregulated minorities. My work sets out to understand the genealogy of this camouflaged racist discourse, and to propose an alternative reading of the role that migrants may and must have in the resignification of Italianness.
I returned home for my fieldwork research in Roma and Ravenna with a newly acquired critical eye. I first moved to the United States in 1999, to purse a M.A. in Asian Studies at the 6 University of California at Berkeley. Before living in California I had rarely been exposed to a truly multicultural society, mostly as a casual tourist visiting one of the many international capitals of the world. Living and teaching within Berkeley’s culturally diverse context forced me to think in comparative terms about my homeland. I was sitting in classrooms with people coming from many continents, while in more than twenty years as a student both in southern and northern Italy I only had white classmates, born and raised in Italy by parents themselves born and raised there. Was Italy really the ethnically cohesive nation that I had experienced? 1
Intuitively I probably knew the answer, but it was in search of epistemological and analytical tools to unpack the question that I embarked on a PhD in Performance Studies. I was aware of the fact that plenty of immigrants from Africa, South East Asia and Latin America work in Italy, yet I had been exposed to them as the average Italian would: as street vendors, or as home workers, who clean our houses and take care of our children and elders. Overall, I had erased the signification of their visibility, and exclusively relegated immigrants to the economic role they occupied (generally in a black market economy). The next logical step was to ask myself why I was guilty of such shortcomings. Part of it was my personal responsibility for never giving a second though to the street vendors in Roma or Napoli, but part of it was due to the introjection of my privileged position as a Catholic white man in a country proud of its religious and ethnic unity. Therefore, my return home in 2005 as a researcher meant the enactment of a strenuous effort to move away from the simplistic reduction of black African immigrants to an annoyance
1 My statement has meaning only if placed within the proper generational context. There is a clear demarcation between the middle and high school I attended back in the late nineteen eighties and today’s classrooms. Especially in major cities, children of non-Italian background account for about 20% of the overall student population. At the University level, not taking into account foreign students who moved to Italy for educational purposes, the number of college-age children of immigrants is still relatively small. This speaks mainly of the average young age of both immigrants parents and children in Italy.
7 or a cheap shortcut towards brandname handbags and sunglasses. I had to learn how to look at
ethnic differences, always keeping in mind that I carried with me the privilege of, and possibly
patronizing, element inscribed in my nationality and ethnic background.
Such contextual positioning constituted my “politics of location” in the fieldwork. I
borrow the term from bell hooks, in so far as the theorist identifies the researcher as a carrier of a
series of subjective signifiers that interfere with the alleged objective scientific mode of research.
In the field, the encounter between the researcher and the subject of research builds a critical
relation that encompasses interpretation, change, interference, resistance, and compliance. 2 My return home prompted the enthusiasm of one who believes that his contribution will have a redemptive aftermath, and the uneasiness of knowing that for too long I had ignored my silent compliance with an uneven system of representation. James Clifford in Routes speaks of contact
zones as metaphors for post-modern ethnography, as sites in which the researcher is no longer the
cosmopolitan traveler from the center who encounters the primitives of the periphery of the
world, but one of the many subjects that circulate in a complex history of permanence and
movement. 3 Ethnographers become interpreters of such heteroglossia, putting their own subjectivity out in the field. Feminism, gay and lesbian theories have altered permanently the idea of the field. In the past the metaphor of home was often used, mostly because the field required the researcher to go somewhere else, leaving home as the site of origin and harmony.
But in the 1970s, identity politics reframed this debate in two ways. First, one did not need to
2 See: hooks, bell. “Is Paris Burning?” Black Looks . Boston: South End Press, 1992, 145-156.
3 Mary Louise Pratt speaks of study of contact zones as “an intercultural space of friction, struggle, and resistance that stimulates new genres of writing that mimic and subvert dominant rhetoric of power.” In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation . London and New York: Routledge, 1991. See also: Clifford, James. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
8 travel to get to the field. The neighborhoods of US cities became legitimate spheres of research.
Second, feminism and gay studies showed home for what it was, a locus of contrast, diversity, difference and not an imaginary golden refuge. This paradigmatic shift placed the spotlight on how people create their own histories and revealed fieldwork for what it is: an interplay of dominance and resistance, or, to quote James Clifford once more, “both a methodological ideal and a concrete place of professional activity.” 4
My fieldwork revealed more complexity than I had expected. I found myself suspended
between an insider position and the need to mediate my subjectivity with communities of
migrants that shared my geographic location but looked at my interest in them with deep
suspicion. For instance, my repeated visits to Lido Adriano, Ravenna’s suburban neighborhood
with the highest percentage of Senegalese and North African immigrants, did not result in much
useful information at first. It was only later, when Mandiaye N’Diaye hosted me at his wife’s
restaurant for a ceebu jén lunch, that I was finally able to sit down and converse freely with other
Senegalese immigrants. Most of them were influential exponents of the community who had
lived in Italy for over a decade. We covered the most diverse topics, from sport to politics,
children’s education, their interactions with Italians and ideas about inter-ethnic relations. I had
been granted access because my presence next to N’Diaye was a mark of acceptance, bestowed
upon me by a real insider, a man whose acting career with Teatro delle Albe, and multiple yearly
trips to Dakar, were signs of his successful inhabitation of both countries and both cultures.
At the same time, I experienced another form of resistance, this time held against me by
Italian institutional representatives of the regional and city councils who were extremely
4 Clifford, James. Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997, 85. 9 suspicious about my movement from Italy to the US academic world, and back. Even though
Emilia Romagna has a long history of leftist political alignment, I believe that many local politicians considered my background too liberal, and feared I would misrepresent their pro- immigration activities. For instance, when I visited Ravenna’s “Casa delle culture” (Cultures
Center) I offered my free service to organize Italian and theater courses for foreigners. The director of the Casa, who directly depended from the city’s Social Policies Bureau, politely yet firmly made it very clear that my status as a researcher might have worried the migrants who attended the events at the Casa. Still, all the migrants I met outside never seemed worried, but actually eager to talk to me about their personal stories. The truth is that Ravenna and a few other cities in Emilia Romagna were among the first to include immigrants in forms of political activism. Each foreign community is assigned a number of elected representatives that sit in the city council and participate with their Italian colleagues to make local decisions. Likewise, economic integration and cultural independence, in the form of radio programs and newspapers published in different languages, are becoming more and more common thanks to the example of places like Emilia Romagna. Most of the limits of local politics are prompted by the latest
National Immigration Act, the infamous Bossi-Fini (law 189/2002), which subjects the immigrants’ social rights - residency permits, access to public schools, housing and health system
- to their contribution to the economy: proof of a work contract is fundamental. The business- minded logic of this law overshadows the human element of migration, relegating personal and family ties to a lesser level of relevance. Local liberal politicians work within the interstices of an imperfect law to reclaim the fundamental contribution of immigrants to society in its entirety.
What made fieldwork research very complex is the fact that discussions of inter-ethnic 10 relations in Italy foreground the notion of race in a very subtle way. Since no one wants to appear blatantly racist, media, political debate, and everyday conversations hardly ever call upon race as the marker of inclusion or exclusion; they tend to focus on outside, superficial markers that signify racial diversity while not necessarily evoking it. For example, many Italians who live in neighborhoods with an increasing migrant population complain about the smells of Asian and
African cooking as the most disturbing element of their presence. The possibility for Muslim women to wear the veil at school or in other situations when it is required that the woman makes herself recognizable, such as when they request personal documents, is an unresolved issue. The discussion of race is lacking also the contribution of immigrants themselves. For the time being, it is unlikely that black Africans may embrace a Black Power ideology, following the steps of the
American civil rights movement of the late nineteen sixties. Self-determination and self-respect still clash against the fact that the majority of immigrants have to make ends meet on a daily basis, and lack the conceptual and material resources to organize a large movement of self- representation. The spaces for such actions must be found inside preexisting white structures of decision-making, such as exemplified by Ravenna’s city council elections. Usually mixing pedagogical intents and leisure, immigrants’ centers and cultural associations offer classes in
Italian, which become a political tool to acquire consciousness of one’s own rights, along with moments of entertainment in which immigrants from different countries experience each other’s music, food and traditions.
Approaching the delicate subject of race, which also constituted a personal journey beyond my limits as a scholar-in-progress, I struggled with the problem of translating ideas across communities. How could I grant both black immigrants and Italian-born nationals access 11 to each others’ life expectations, social roles, political views, and cultural productions across
ethnic boundaries? I chose to accomplish this task by analyzing theatrical creations that implicitly
speak of such translation, involve multiple horizontal systems of signifiers, and do not
necessarily stage Africa for a black audience or Italy for white spectators. Teatro delle Albe
embodies such an approach. The members of the company define it as theatrical métissage - a
socio-aesthetic attack against ethnic absolutism and the perpetuation of racial boundaries of
exclusivism, in favor of narratives that integrate the symbolic and the actual, the productive and
the celebratory, the political and the spiritual.
I am aware that in the American academy the word métissage has been applied extensively to Francophone Caribbean literature, 5 and recalls also the common term mestizaje , which connotes mostly the Latin American and Chicano racial context. 6 For this reason, in the course of my analysis I will not follow Martinelli’s usage of métissage . I prefer to use the notion of intra-cultural encounters that Rustom Bharucha theorizes as the interaction and translation of cultures that coexist in the same national space. First of all, intra-culturalism seems to me an appropriate term because it makes explicit the role of culture in the explicit management of identities and their markers. Bharucha argues that the intra-cultural differs from multi-culturalism and inter-culturalism in so far as the former is a government-sponsored construction of cohesiveness and the latter encompasses spontaneous collaborations of artists whose freedom is limited by the intervention of the state in individuating the modes and spaces of such
5 See for example: Maignan-Claverie, Chantal. Le métissage dans la littérature des Antilles françaises: le complexe d’Ariel . Paris: Karthala, 2005; Liling, Chang. Métissage et résonances: essais sur la musique et la littérature cubaines . Paris: L’Hatmattan, 2002; and Kandé, Sylvie, ed. Discours sur le métissage, identités métisses: en qu Lte d’Ariel . Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999.
6 On the history and value of mestizaje theory in Latin America see: Pérez- Torres, Rafael. Mestizaje . Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture . Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2006. 12 encounters. 7 The intra-cultural is the most independent form of the three. I am uncomfortable with the notion of multi-culturalism also because its advocates defend it as either a celebration of difference that still exists within a more or less ethnocentric project 8 or as a form of de-
contextualized research on the acting body. 9 Bharucha, instead, emphasizes that intra-cultural
exchanges consist of an engagement with diversity that cannot escape the risks “involved in
incorporating and inscribing differences that emerge across regional and linguistic borders.” 10
This is the kind of risk that Teatro delle Albe acknowledges as the foundation of its artistic and political métissage , embracing the fact that culture consists primarily of political-economic
components shaped by the forces of late capitalism. 11
The national level of analysis may not be completely satisfactory because it seems limited
when it comes to discuss the multi-directional yet ultra-local theatrical research of Teatro delle
Albe, in connection with the cosmopolitan lives of immigrants. Since this is a study of blackness
in Italy, references to the geographic boundaries of the country seem inevitable. In such context,
the nation still serves as the framework to individuate borders of authenticity and exclusivity.
Here too I agree with Bharucha that the national level should not be completely disregarded in
7 Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practices. Thinking Through Theater in an Age of Globalization . Hanover and London. Wesleyan UP, 2000.
8 This position is discussed in: Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology . Philadelphia, U of Pennsylvania P, 1985; Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture . New York and London: Routledge, 1992; Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
9 Leading voice of the dangerous a-cultural approach to performance is: Barba, Eugenio. La canoa di carta: Trattato di antropologia teatrale . Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993.
10 Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practices. Thinking Through Theater in an Age of Globalization . Hanover and London: Wesleyan UP, 2000.
11 An engaged advocate of this position is anthropology Prof. Micaela di Leonardo. See: Exotics at Home: 13 any analysis of the cultural, but rather that the contribution of locally grounded movements can
“save the state from capitulation to the demands of transnationalization. They alone can renationalize the state and allow it to gain control over accumulation.” 12 I conceptualize global migration as historical phenomena and contextualize the Italian case in particular. Over time, journalistic reports, academic research and everyday talk have focused a spotlight on migration, increasing the number of representations, interpretations and analyses produced to explain it. As in a dog-who-bites-his-own-tail game, the growing number of migrants elicits the interests of politicians and experts, an interest that has raised awareness but also much anxiety on the scale and social costs of migration, yet inspiring many more to attempt migrating in order to improve their own living conditions. My project intervenes in the debate between those interested in the political economy of globalization and those who choose a culturalist approach to racial issues by foregrounding the ways that history, institutions, and popular culture in Italy imagine, represent and perform immigrants of a different racial background. The dissertation struggles with the necessity to discuss blackness in Italy, against the backdrop of the near total absence of a national vocabulary on immigration, both at the academic level and in the public opinion. My research engages terms such as stereotype, prejudice, nation, performance and race, with the understanding that the working parameters of ethnicity and stereotype overflow from a theoretical consideration of identity construction into issues of emotional investment of immigrants in their life projects.
Teatro delle Albe accomplished such a monumental task, even though some of the shows
Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity . Chicago: U of C Press, 1998.
12 Bharucha, cited work, 4. 14 I will discuss later suffered from the same limits they tried to overcome. What makes the group’s work of critical interest is the fact that it does not intervene with its intra-cultural modality only in the Italian national context. The Albe digests a plethora of cultural inputs and reframes them for different audiences around the world, always reclaiming the central role that local elements play within the performance. Whether the translation process includes hip hop music in the USA,
Wolof idiomatic expressions in Senegal, or traditional food in Emilia Romagna, the intra-cultural reaffirms, by virtue of its own existence, the foundations of a community that can be called nation. The Albe conceives its shows as cultural celebrations and acts of communion among performers, and between actors and spectators, metaphorically reaching outside the theater’s enclosing walls and towards the human community. To what extent such celebrations promote social change will be part of my critical reading of each performance by the Ravenna theater group.
In writing this dissertation, I have in mind an audience composed of Italian-born nationals, African immigrants, and English-language theater scholars. I aim at the construction of a communicative channel that would successfully deal with the process of cultural translation from one to the other. In this respect, though, I cannot escape from a theorization of blackness in relation to whiteness, and vice versa. I believe that the two exist interdependently. At the same time, the history of inter-ethnic mixing, both spontaneous and forced, has given birth to numerous degrees of inbetweenness that debunk the essential monoliths of black and white. In the first place, it is impossible to speak of blackness in Africa as one cohesive block, and of whiteness in Italy as another. Yet national public opinion still understands the presence of black immigrants as an opposing force to a certain inscribed quality of whiteness. After all, 15 intermarriages and mixed children are not yet part of Italian custom. Blacks and whites still live
separately, reconstructing within their own communities forms of social relations, economic
transactions, policy-making, and cultural production.
Chapter One analyzes the intra-ethnic relations between Italians and black Africans, with
a particular focus on two historic moments: the Risorgimento ideological creation of the unified nation-State; and the colonial experience of the fascist era. I mainly argue that nowadays Italians live in a state of “historic forgetfulness” as a consequence of the lack of a serious critical discussion of national imperialism. Drawing examples from political acts and popular culture, I want to demonstrate that the absence of a historicizing perspective has two fundamental consequences: 1. It causes contemporary misconceptions about immigrants as if they were a sudden phenomenon born out of nowhere, an emergency limited to the last three decades of the twentieth century; 2. It reinforces the intentional construction of blacks as the Other: primitive, dirty, poor, uneducated, desperate and dangerous. The latter is a direct filiation of the Western philosophy of progress that merges scientific reasoning about racial differences, the political notion of the nation-State with borders enclosing a homogeneous population, and geopolitical strategies of colonial domination. This combination gave birth to a number of stereotypes on
Africa and Africans, which worked subconsciously to forge a mental map of “us” against “them” up to the point when Italy turned from a land of emigrants to a site of immigration. At that point in time, stereotypes resurfaced to frame immigrants within the rhetoric of emergency that nowadays doubles with the post 9-11 Islamic scare.
I will incorporate in this time frame a discussions of Teatro delle Albe’s I ventidue
infortuni di Mor Arlecchino . Martinelli based the play on a Goldoni scenario and loosely 16 reproduced structures from the commedia dell’arte. In the show, the uncompromising presence of black actors interpreting roles generally embodied by white actors create a short circuit in the spectator’s minds, claiming a normalization of black African immigrants to Italy. The audience’s construed images of the immigrant as an agency-less, backward and illegal entity clashes against
Mor Awa Niang and Mandiaye N’Diaye’s mastery of a performative technique merging personal history and rigorous training, the sending culture and the receiving one. The successful outcome of this alternative mode of intervention depends on how much agents – as spectators and actors of a theater piece, but also as citizens or foreigners - can liberate themselves from the surrounding dominant dialogue and grant access to immigrants themselves to the production of a national narrative on immigration.
The central aspect of Teatro delle Albe’s collective work consists in an intra-cultural encounter that does not juxtapose Italians versus foreigners, as if they were homogenous or cohesive groups. Instead, the research on the poetic material in performance happens on a one- on-one basis, as the unfolding possibilities that one and only one individual, with his/her talent and personal history, can excavate. This constitutes the central argument of Chapter Two, in which I engage an in-depth reading of the group’s artistic view, economic structure, and sociopoliticalal positioning. Even when the Albe’s performances make explicit use on stage of
African drums, dialects, and bodies, it is never meant to address Africa and African immigrants as such, but rather to continue a dialogue of experimentalism that is first and foremost theatrical.
To some detractors this may be a limit of the group’s poetic. If Africa and immigrants are not targets or sought after spectators, then why not perform with an all-white cast? Teatro delle Albe does not work with black Africans because they are immigrants, but because they are individuals 17 with stories to be told that are at once far away from the Romagnole tradition yet uncannily
familiar: sameness within difference. I will address these issues by reading the 1988 production
Ruh. Romagna più Africa uguale .
Moreover, Teatro delle Albe functions as a laboratory of innovative ways to decode the
life trajectory of the immigrants-actors in relation to their Italian counterparts. The group’s work
on the individual helps bringing ethnic background to what it should be: one element of the far
more complicated personal identity, that encompasses gender, sexuality, education, personal
experiences, emotions, aspirations and lots more - all fertile soil in performance. N’Diaye is a
Senegal-born artist, which does not mean than any other Senegalese immigrant to Italy could do
his job. His unique history makes him who he is. The same is true for Ermanna Montanari, or
Marco Martinelli; not Romagnole artists, but two individuals who have followed a unique path
that led them to the acquisition of an irreplaceable aesthetic/poetic point of view. The interplay
between the central relevance of locality and the disregard for closed forms of ethnic belonging marks the terrain for the Albe’s unmediated commitment to its poetic based on two central notions: the mise en vie technique (the resonance between the performance text and the echo of truth that actors bring to it from their personal experiences), and the politttttttical (an enlarged vision of the political, to encompass all the possible, multiple variations of an individual’s commitment to action). Much more is left to be done, because no native-born Italian critic would ever describe Ermanna Montanari as the Italian woman who knows how to act, but many still find it absolutely normal to categorize N’Diaye as a Senegalese immigrant. To them, his talent stands out only because he wasn’t born in Italy, despite his almost twenty years of residency in
Ravenna. In this distinction, which hides an implicit racist ideology, lies the core spark that 18 ignited my fieldwork and that requires the stringent interlocked analysis of whiteness and
blackness that I conduct throughout the dissertation.
In Chapter Three, I detect the multiple incarnations of the emergency trope within media
and politics. The two are strictly related because a hot topic in the news often becomes a public
concern when politicians intervene with official declarations and legislative acts. On the other
hand, political deliberations on matters of social relevance initiate a cycle of media coverage. The
communication business and the political debate feed each other. My main argument is that the
focus media place on immigration reinforces a sense of emergency and danger in the public
sphere. When journalists write about immigrants, they do so almost exclusively in terms of
illegal and clandestine arrivals, crimes, or religious and cultural tensions. Taking into account
editorial ideologies, time constraints, and the absence of the immigrants’ voices versus white
official declarations, the press pays little attention to culturally specific aspects of the
immigrants’ life. Likewise, politicians have managed the various immigration waves by means of
sanatorie - Parliamentary acts that hide the double ideology of filling the gaps of the existing legislation, and bringing to the surface the black labor market of foreign workers. Once again, though, these interventions focus on the illegal aspect of immigration and send to the national audience the message that the State cannot structurally regulate the phenomenon, and limits its actions to a posteriori controls by means of temporary, last-minute solutions.
Presenting both quantitative and qualitative readings of news coverage and official census data, I also demonstrate that the emergency anxiety spreads from sanatorie to the various immigration laws that updated and finally substituted the original fascist law of 1931. Rather than managing the “problem” as a systemic tool, laws take into consideration immigrants for 19 their economic participation to the well-being of the host country and reduce the relevance of
their civil rights and aspiration to citizenship status. It is once again the “us” against “them” logic
that feeds off the emergency trope and reproduces it for easy consumption by the general Italian
audience/ readership.
In Chapter Three, I will incorporate a critical reading of the 2002 production of Sogno di
una notte di mezza estate , Martinelli’s dramaturgical rewriting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream . The show performs diverging subject positionalities that act as a resonator of the emergency trope, staging Oberon’s fairy creatures as an army of young Senegalese kids that invade the space of Theseus’ court. Martinelli organized the stage as a board game space, in which dreams and nightmares collide to question the mutual exclusiveness of blackness and whiteness. Who’s the real owner of the performance space/noble palace/woods? Who’s real and who’s imagined in the white Duke’s reign and Oberon’s nightly world?
Immigration is a two-way street, in which the sending and the receiving cultures start an involuntary yet necessary dialogue. Chapter Four takes into account the neoliberal politics that push people away from their homelands and into Europe. In Italy there is a large web of non- profit organizations that, at various levels, try to intervene in the social sectors where the government seems to be lacking a lucid project. Therefore, immigration is a hot topic not only for the media, but also for the community of people that believes in a more ethical approach to globalization. The transnational flow of people is inextricably related to the allocation of international investments, humanitarian aids, and the use or abuse of local resources for the enjoyment of global consumerism. Against this backdrop, the theorization of neoliberal capitalism attacks the welfare social system that has functioned for years as a form of collective 20 support system. Immigrants are caught in between neoliberal policies that operate both nationally
and trans-nationally, widening more and more the ratio between a shrinking number of wealthy people and an increasing figure of poor and dispossessed individuals. The work of Teatro delle
Albe calls attention to this danger and acts both at the micro and macro levels to address specific needs of the immigrants and more generally the framework constructed for and around them. In this context, I will analyze Teatro delle Albe’s most acclaimed and performed show I Polacchi , in its three reincarnations: the original production in 1998, its restaging in Chicago in 2005 with a cast of African and Afro-American teenagers, and finally the 2007 Senegalese version titled Ubu
Buur . The production is a transnational performance by nature because it has been extensively performed in Europe, the US and Africa each time casting a group of ten to twelve local adolescents. I Polacchi represents the epitome of a contemporary globalized exported good, at
once rooted in the culture that produced it in the first place yet inhabiting the most diverse array
of lives. As a consequence, it also regroups all the possible tensions of an intra-cultural
adaptation in which the white director Marco Martinelli asks black teenagers from the Chicago
public school system or from a village near Dakar to bring and perform themselves on stage.
Under-represented communities gain access to a communicative arena, still under the artistic
gaze of a white man who plays within his culture of origin. How effective and ethical is this
mediation?
In the Conclusion, I will address the solo work of Mandaiye N’Diaye that overcomes the
major limit of the common representation of black immigrants in Italy - the annihilation of all
differences and specificities. Immigrants are illegal, or Moroccan, or criminals, but always by any
means a group ethnically or culturally undifferentiated, and generally silent. To reconstruct a 21 truer discourse on blackness in this historic conjuncture, N’Diaye operates at the micro level. He
does not invoke theoretical human rights, but works in concrete sense for specific needs: staging
personal narratives, searching for housing, dealing with children who cannot eat pork meat at school or wish to wear a veil, providing immigrants with orientation seminars, or socializing the housework of women in a larger public context. There are limits and mistakes in each step, but the core element of this unofficial politics is the desire to “integrate” the Other within the respect for differences.
I will analyze Mandiaye N’Diaye’s trajectory at the crossroad of two worlds: the theatrical and the real, Ravenna and Dakar. N’Diaye is the typical immigrant who remits part of the salary to his extended family in Senegal, while his wife lives with him in Lido Adriano where she gave birth to two babies who speak perfect Italian and Wolof. While the first statement does not cause any particular problem to Italians, in the second lies the seed of that cultural anxiety that the press loves narrating. Proximity often produces diffidence, rather than acknowledgment.
N’Diaye is also the typical immigrant because he travels back and forth from Senegal enacting professional and familiar activities in a circular mode. In his traveling, he accompanies the mere economic support for his community with a larger project: to teach what he learned in Italy about theater-making to a young generation of Senegalese performers. He is struggling both in Ravenna and Dakar to overcome bureaucratic blindness and create a theater space in which the extremely participatory mode of African performance and the Western notion of the separation between those who see and those who act may merge to found a truly intra-cultural theater. To my over- arching argument, N’Diaye embodies the substantial and non-emergent aspect of immigration.
Therefore, I will analyze N’Diaye’s 2006 work on Aristophanes’ Pluto , a show that he staged in 22 his native Diol Kadd by casting all the village and producing the first African Albe version of a mise en vie. 23 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Cultural Performance or Culture as Performance 25
Immigrants, Cultural Contingency and Fictional Representations of National Homogeneity 31
Performance as Methodology 35
Teatro delle Albe - The Poetic of Unwritten Histories 42
Migration: Moving Beyond Economic Reasoning 48
Chapter One – Historicizing Blackness 55
Fascism and Blackness 65
Historic Forgetfulness 69
Blackness in Post-World War II Italy 72
Stereotyping Blackness in Popular Culture 79
I ventidue infortuni di Mor Arlecchino – Parody and the Performance of Migration 90
Chapter Two - Teatro delle Albe: Mise en vie and the poetic of intra-culturalism 103
Ruh. Romagna piú Africa uguale - Blackness as the Agency of Nature 105
The Politttttttical Poetics of Teatro delle Albe 120
Reaching Beyond the Theater Walls 132
Chapter Three – Constructing a National Emergency: Media and Politics on Migration 140
Mass Media and Blackness: Immigration Equals Illegality 142
Immigration Laws and Blackness: The Lack of a Long-Term Planning 152
Sogno di una notte di mezza estate – The Tension between Proper Social Places and Spaces of Independent Agency 159
24 Ethnicity at War and Contested Spaces 163
The Press and Blackness 176
Chapter Four – Grounding Performance in Time and Space: The Politttttttical Resistance of the Albe against Neoliberal Practices 194
I Polacchi - Global Performance in Local Contexts 203
Many Stories through Many Blacknesses 229
Conclusion – Effective Migratory Practices through Multiple Routes 235
Mandiaye N’Diaye’s Pluto : Rethinking One’s Own Migratory Project 243
By Means of Conclusion: Italy and Her Blackness 247
Bibliography 259
25 LIST OF GRAPHS
Graph 1 – Rates of male/female migrants for the ten largest national communities of immigrants. Italian census 2001. 170
Graph 2 – Total number of mixed marriages for the ten largest national communities of immigrants. Italian census 2001. 171
Graph 3 – Total numbers of births for the ten largest national communities of immigrants. Italian census 2001. 173 26 INTRODUCTION – Cultural Performance or Culture as Performance
Every time, I am aware that theater can do nothing against the horrors of the world. I carve myself a space inside the endless violence, I do not ignore it, though... (Marco Martinelli)
This dissertation is a multiple reflection upon feelings of home: being at, returning to or searching for one. First and foremost, I intend to define theater as home. As director, insatiable spectator and engaged scholar, I dedicate my profession, leisure time and theoretical thinking to both the aesthetic enjoyment and sociopolitical implications of theater-making. In the economy of the dissertation, theater-as-home came to delineate the overarching framework to analyze the work of Teatro delle Albe, whose almost three decades of artistic history constitute the main critical lens through which I read, examine, criticize and comment on notions of Italianness, migration and belonging. Teatro delle Albe is a home both metaphorically and practically. Over the course of two years, I spent many months at Teatro Rasi in Ravenna, where director Marco
Martinelli and his muse, wife, and leading actress Ermanna Montanari, bring to life their visually compelling and complex productions surrounded by the energetic enthusiasm of many young collaborators. I spent much time touring with them, in the USA, Europe and Africa. Through my participant observation, professional collaboration and friendship, I have come to realize that theater for the Albe is an emotional space in which to find the inspiration, solace, refuge, energy, motivation and hope to trace artistic and personal trajectories. At the same time, theater is home because Teatro Rasi is not simply a theater where the Albe produces its shows. The fifteenth- century building, centrally located in one of the main streets of Ravenna, is a welcoming space, the locus of a community made of actors, technicians, administrative personnel, intellectuals, and spectators, who in the various rooms at Rasi live, sleep, eat, work intensively, play, listen, look, 27 learn and discuss.
In its theater house, the Albe manages a number of outreach programs that have
occasioned a permeable atmosphere between artists and the city. At Rasi, different generations
and cultural backgrounds meet and confront each other on a daily basis. The most relevant of
these initiatives have been so successful to drastically change the constituency of the Albe itself.
Each year senior actors organize theater programs in the city’s high schools, aptly called Non-
School, whose founding idea is not to teach students what theater is, but to activate their
narrative imagination and merge the teenagers’ lives with the classics. Consequently, Teatro Rasi
fills up with hundreds of adolescents, some of whom become so infected by the impetus of
theater-making that they never leave again. Argno, Roby, Renda, Fagio, Max, and Silvia are only
a few of the young collaborators who grew up artistically and biologically on the stage of Teatro
Rasi. 13 Then, following the encounter with four Senegalese immigrants in 1988, Teatro delle
Albe has become a “theater of stable innovation” 14 to encompass permanent black African
performers in its ensemble. The Afro-Romagnole experiment has not only propelled Teatro delle
Albe from a relatively small circle of critical advocates into wider commercial success, but it has
also given the Albe family its peculiar ethnically mixed appearance. What many critics initially
believed to be the short-lived coexistence of non professional black and trained white actors has
turned into a stable production company that extends its breadth beyond Ravenna. The company
inaugurated and cherishes a communication bridge with theater experiments in Senegal, directed
by Mandiaye N’Diaye, exchanging ideas, poetics, and practitioners. In addition, the Albe has
13 Here, I use the familiar short names that everyone deploys at Teatro Rasi to call each other. In Italy it is generally a common practice, especially among close friends or relatives, to play with the full name of a person and transform it to indicate intimacy and comfortableness.
28 positioned itself as a leading voice of artistic experimentation, and found production partners in all the major European theater festivals, from Venice to Limoges.
The dissertation deals with home also in terms of the presence/absence conundrum of immigrants in Italy. I personally experienced the condition of foreignness as a privileged migrant from Napoli to a prestigious US University. The paradigmatic essence of being foreign necessarily formulates different positionalities of migration itself: not all migrants are the same.
The ways in which migrants remember and reconstruct home away from home involve the implications of experiencing acceptance abroad. In practical terms, how do the personal politics of place inform the migrants’ claims to social rights, to profess their religion, to enact family reunion practices, to vote, to own a business, or to access publicly sponsored housing projects?
Migration always pertains to a double-ended trajectory for which the modalities of its reception account for much of the migrants’ sense of home. How enthusiastically one is received in the new country depends on the identity and positionality that one leaves behind and the power relations that, in comparison, one embodies abroad. Home, in such a case, ends up including a duality between the physical presence in a geographic space and the emotional attachment to a place that is not necessarily the same.
In my thinking, Arjun Appadurai’s notions of de-territorilization and re-territorialization, and Homi Bhabha’s “unhomely lives” become very handy, as both scholars argue for the migrants’ need for recognition that affects those who live in border-crossing conditions. I place my own reading of migration within this theoretical framework, but I also express a pervasive sense of uneasiness with the lack of a proper cultural vocabulary to address ethnic multiplicity in the Italian case. The negotiation of cultures and identities that puts black Africans and white
14 This is how Teatro delle Albe defines itself on its web site and all advertisement material. 29 Italians in contact can only profit in a limited way from postcolonial theory. Italy’s colonial attempts have been incongruous and short-lived, compared to other European countries, and have not produced the degree of power relations between the homeland and the colony that Great
Britain could claim with India, France with Algeria, or Spain with Mexico. One could hardly even speak of an Italian colonial elite, in the strict sense of the word. The lack of an extended colonial past did not save Italians from embracing racist ideologies, while it deprived them of consistent flows of cultural and commercial exchange with Africa. Therefore, for many decades racism in Italy became implicit around the potential coexistence of blacks and whites, rather than on any actual pervasive presence of slaves, foreign workers or immigrants. Having said this, I do not intend to judge the narrative of racial exploitation in terms of degrees of compliance. Italians always constructed their ethnic relations on stereotypes inspired by the mode of the time: primitivism, fascination for the exotic, or Gobineau’s pseudo-scientific phenotypical signification. Contemporary migration connects with this history, therefore pushing for Italy to
“confront postcolonial history [...] as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity .” 15 My intervention focuses on such internalization in order to debunk the perception of complete foreignness attached to the migrants’ body. Therefore, my argument assumes race as an ideological rather than a biological condition. Home becomes a contested realm of inter-ethnic tension among Italians and black African immigrants insofar as ethnicity turns into a shield brandished by media and politics to protect an alleged white and Catholic purity against the
Other. What does this ideology hide underneath its surface? Which economic, sociopolitical and cultural strongholds fear the Other as a possible threat to the preservation of constituted power?
Finally, home assumes a personal meaning in my work. For the last five years of my life,
15 Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture . London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 6. Italics in original. 30 Performance Studies has been home to me. The multi-disciplinary context of the field offered the most logical convergence of my Political Science background and my passion for theater- making. In the seminars led by Prof. Dwight Conquergood, Margaret Thompson-Drewal, Susan
Manning, Micaela di Leonardo and Mary Zimmermann, I learned what it means to conjoin the aesthetic interpretation of an art work with an inquiry into the logics that control, produce, enhance or censor the freedom for individuals and communities to express themselves, access information, and intervene in their self-representations. This dissertation emerged from the academic discourses that I encountered during my course work at Northwestern, emphasizing the acute interest that faculty and fellow graduate students shared for the constructivist approach to identity markers. To quote Stuart Hall’s terminology of a politics of representation: “How things are represented and the ‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role. This gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation - subjectivity, identity, politics - a formative, not merely expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life.” 16
The value of Performance Studies resides in evading the post-structuralist danger of complete de-historicization: an original locus may not exist, but the trajectory of histories of repression, appropriation, and silencing of the Other can and should be traced. We build the interdisciplinarity of Performance Studies on the use of performance as a metaphor for social interaction in Anthropology 17 , Sociology 18 , Linguistics 19 , merging the field with the discourse of
16 Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Black Film/British Cinema . ICA Documents N.7. London: ICA, 1988, 30.
17 Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures . New York: Basic Books, 1973; Turner, Victor. The Anthropology of Performance . New York: PAJ Publications, 1988.
18 Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . Garden City: Doubleday, 1959; De Certeau, Michael. The Practice of Everyday Life . Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. 31 post-structuralism as lacking a locus of original meaning within “a continuing play of
signification, where signs differ from one another but a final, authenticating meaning of any sign
is always deferred.” 20 Incorporating an interest in the artistic production of a community in
relation to its social, economic, and political habitations, Performance Studies embraces a highly
dynamic approach to human behavior and to the forces that both shape it and are shaped by it.
The discipline exists between the respect for codified institutional powers and a carnivalesque
desire to rebel, between inscribed minds and delirious bodies, between a rigorous need to
understand and a sensual pleasure to feel. None of these exist in mutual exclusion with each
other, but always in a discursive practice of arrivals and departures, translating from moments of
harmonious coexistence to conditions of ferocious conflict. Jill Dolan remarks that
Performance’s genealogy traces its multiple roots in departments of oral interpretation and
speech, but also in literary criticism, folklore, social sciences and the study of performance in
every day life. 21 Diana Taylor agrees with Dolan. According to the Latina scholar, Performance
Studies takes from Anthropology its anti-structuralist approach, from Linguistics the creativity of
everyday speech, from Theater Studies the privileging of avant-garde and experimental artistic
expressions; all merge towards an expanded notion of what constitute knowledge. 22 Italian theater and literature provide engaging examples of all these trends, such as in the multifaceted
19 Derrida, Jacques. The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances . Julian Wolfreys, ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998; Or: Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie . Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1967; Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words . J.O. Urmson, ed. Oxford: Claredon, 1962. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World . Helene Iswolsky trans. Bllomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
20 Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction . New York and London: Routledge, 1996, 135.
21 Dolan, Jill. Geographies of Learning. Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance . Middletown, Wesleyan UP, 2001.
22 Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas . Durham: Duke UP, 32 vernacular tradition that traces back to the knightly epics, and Ruzzante all the way up to
Eduardo De Filippo, Annibale Ruccello, Roberto de Simone, and Dario Fo.
Teatro delle Albe’s multi-vocal commitment to performance builds on this tradition,
giving to its artistic vocation an intra-cultural makeover. In my analysis of the Albe’s work, I
conceive tradition as a process rather than an end or a tactic to regain access to cultural products
of the past. It is not opposed to modernity, but it points to those elements of one’s identity that
emphasize difference, unbalance, and risk. This is what I set out to do in the following chapters,
unpacking the interplay of production and reception of blackness in Italy through theater, media,
politics, and civil society. By “production” I refer to the increasing number of black Africans in
Italy, a presence that renders visible the connecting links of the social fabric and hence produces
both forms of inter-ethnic sociability and a wide spectrum of reactions from locals. At the same
time, the term “production” stands for the material staging of plays with color-blind casts, and
the consequent insertion of blackness into the realm of cultural resignification. Likewise, the
term “reception” covers the fields of sociopolitical interventions into the issue of migration, with
national immigration laws and official political statements setting the parameters in which
Italians operate in favor of or against immigrants. Obviously, theater being the central topic of
my argumentation, “reception” also stands for audience participation in Teatro delle Albe’s
performances.
Immigrants, Cultural Contingency and Fictional Representations of National Homogeneity
“Have you ever thought of living in an airport?” In Bob Wilson’s original production of
Persephone , whose world premiere I saw in Napoli almost ten years ago, a woman’s recorded voice repeatedly addressed the audience with this seemingly innocent question: “Have you ever
2003. 33 thought of living in an airport?” In a time when the word “globalization” had just begun its ascendancy as a mantra to describe every type of human exchange, Wilson’s creative mind envisioned a metaphoric parallel between the Greek myth of Persephone and the transient contemporary identity that, according to many, constitutes the core of a post-modern condition.
Persephone is trapped in a liminal space that condemns her to an eternal split between life and death, the world of the living from which Hades kidnapped her and the afterworld. Likewise, it is possible to theorize airports as the quintessential sites of an unstable existence, not rooted in traditional coordinates of time and space. Airports are geographically located in a country, but the line demarcating the passport control and custom area marks also an invisible separation between those who hold legal rights to be in that country versus those who try, wish, or hope to enter it. There is no correspondence between the physical presence of international travelers in the airport’s premises and their legal right to act within the country for business or leisure, until a stamp on their passport defines them as welcomed visitors. Airports are sites of passage, similar to one another due to their architectural structures and because they abide by codified international rules of aviation. Not many would dream of living in them. Yet, as Hades kidnaps
Persephone, divorcing her from the right to choose freely where to live, in the contemporary global world there is an increasing number of people who find themselves in that same situation: migrants - an army that for the most various reasons decides or is forced into multiple spatial, temporal and cultural crossings. The universe of migrants contains the most diverse galaxies: highly skilled cosmopolitan professionals, students, families, refugees, or people who escape from desperate living conditions towards more prosperous lands.
In my dissertation, I engage with the specifics of migratory movements that cut across 34 ethnic lines to connect and put into conversation/tension Africa and Italy. Black African
migrants, notwithstanding their diverse geographic origins and different backgrounds, share the
metaphorical condition of living in an airport, wherever they reside in Italy. They occupy a space,
but feel often disconnected from it because of their unstable status vis-a-vis issues of legal residency and work permits. I will base my argument on the contradictions between the concrete conditions of black immigrants to Italy and the epistemological perception of blackness as an overarching identity marker which erases any other form of differentiation. In theory, the demarcation between illegal immigrants and those who move to Italy under the auspices of the
State-sponsored foreign workers program should debunk any attempt to speak of immigration as an undifferentiated phenomenon. My research, though, uncovers a different reality. The perception of immigration as a social problem tout court is extremely diffuse, due to a number of interrelated causes. Italian media exclusively focus on the type of sensational immigration represented by illegality and crime. In addition, the Bossi-Fini Law ties the lives of legal workers to their work permit: if the foreign worker is fired or losses his job, he has a very limited time to find a new one; otherwise the residency permit ceases to be valid. This condition creates a permeability in the immigrant’s personal status, since the movement from legality to illegality can, and does, happen suddenly. Finally, a climate of ethnic essentialism, which I will analyze in my historical reconstruction of the contacts between Italy and Africa, contributes to the generalized stigmatization of blackness as danger.
The national level of my inquiry not only answers to the restrictions of the ethnographic work necessarily limited in time and place, but also acknowledges that racial relations are always contextual and operate differently in different spaces. In Appropriating Blackness , Patrick 35 Johnson analyzes black American culture at the intersection of authenticity and appropriation. He
does not believe in a dichotomy expressing the essence of blackness versus its un-authentic
outer-directed construction; rather, he argues that the invocation of authenticity is problematic
because it involves a selective exclusion of opportunities of intercultural dialogue.23 Similarly, the collection Globalization and Race highlights that racial subjectivities are necessarily
contingent and performative because people perceive them in a mix of “local circumstances [and]
the range of ideas and practices that circulate within their public spheres.” 24 I contend that the processes of racial identities are always constituted within specific histories and cultures, even when they have a transnational flavor. African immigrants carry a set of signifiers which assume specific meaning in light of their intersection with the predominant white Italian context, at once producing both introjections of such meaning within blackness itself, and the creation of a parallel perception of whiteness as the reference point against which one’s one identity is determined. As I will highlight in the following chapters, the appearance of black migrants had a double effect on Italian ethnic consciousness: first of all it created a univocal sense of belonging, since southerners ceased to be the racially exoticized Others; consequently it reinforced the equation Italianness = whiteness. Whereas race cannot be detached from other identity indexes that collaborate in making it contextual - gender, sexuality, class, and nationality - it assumes predominance in daily activities because skin color visually sets apart the Other as the different
23 Johnson, Patrick. Appropriating Blackness .Performance and the Politics of Authenticity . Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003. My reading connects Johnson’s assertion that “human commingling necessarily entails the syncretism whereby cultures assimilate and adopt aspect of each other,” (6) with Kobena Mercer’s claim that the “intercultural is ordinary.” In Welcome to the Jungle : New Positions in Black Cultural Studies . New York: Routledge, 1994. On the spatio-temporal contingency of race and its perception, see also: John L. Jackson’s Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
24 See: Clarke, Kamari Maxine and Deborah A. Thomas ed. Globalization and Race . Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006, 4. 36 with immediacy. In and of itself this makes for a complex narrative that discusses, talks about,
and metabolizes inter-ethnic and intra-cultural constituencies.
Given this premise, is it feasible, perhaps even desirable, to strive for the normalization of
inter-ethnic relations in Italy? Or differently stated, what interventions can Italian cultural politics
implement to maintain the difference between blacks and whites, while favoring culturally
specific solutions for the successful co-existence of Italians and immigrants? The constant
mutability of human migrations breaks down the Romantic fictional construction of a national unity built around common ethnicity, language, and religion; it puts into question the social contract that binds citizens to one another and to the State. To belong to a national context, or a cultural community, is as much a matter of birth as of free choice. Such combination makes writing on migration feel like a paradox. How can one fix in a printed text the understanding of the migration experience that articulates notions of internationally unbalanced economic powers, personal desires, individual life plans, family relations, social identity, and intra-cultural negotiation?
Performance as Methodology
Applying the heuristic force of performance as concept, practice, and epistemology, Dwight
Conquergood wrote Chicago street gang members, Hmong communities, and death row inmates into the narrative of American society. His ethnographies reinforced academic rigor and ethics by means of a true dialogical approach that he describes as an encounter in which the self and the
Other maintain their distinctive traits while conversing with each other in search of understanding. Drawing on Conquergood’s work, blackness as cultural performance embodied in minority discourse within Italy serves as the methodological and empirical reference of my 37 argument. I follow the unfolding of the immigration debate in different realms of the host society
that are involved in the management, legislation, welcoming, or rejection of African migrants.
The core of my discussion revolves around the tension between the discourse that pigeonholes
immigrants in an area of danger and social distress, and the actions of artists who think beyond
categories of race, to live the encounter with the Other as an opportunity to grow and enrich both
self and Other.
I do not intend to imply that explicit racist ideology is endorsed by all white Italians, but
it is generally recognized as “normal” or “given” for whites to expect preferment over blacks.
Racial prejudice is different from prejudice towards other Europeans, because the latter does not
revolve around the notion of the inferiority of the Other inscribed in their genes. Stereotyping
becomes central in understanding the obstacles that black Africans face in engaging their own
selves with the predominant white and Catholic constituency of the Italian society. 25 According
to Gordon Allport, a stereotype is a fixed idea that accompanies a category of people, an
exaggerated belief about a human category that serves the function of justifying other people’s
conduct towards that category and of eliminating in-group differentiation. But the habit of
categorical thinking and group stereotyping, however deplorable in some situations, is integral to
human condition, since “orderly living depends on thinking with the aid of categories” and since
the mental process of stereotyping and generalizing is “a screening and selective device” that
enables human beings to “maintain simplicity in perception and thinking.” 26 Racial prejudices are
25 For an overview of stereotyping in racial relations see: Hartmann, Paul and Charles Husband. Racism and the Mass Media; A Study of the Role of the Mass Media in the Formation of White Beliefs and Attitudes in Britain. London: Davis-Poynter, 1974. Also: Quasthoff, Uta M. “Social Prejudice as a Resource of Power: Towards the Functional Ambivalence of Stereotypes.” in Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse . Ruth Wodak, ed. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J.Benjamins Pub, 1989.
26 Allport, Gordon Willard. The Nature of Prejudice . Reading: Adison-Wesley, 1954, 86. Also, from the same 38 specific sub-categories of such mental mapping, which sociologists define as conditions in which
“first, the existence of social structures in which inferior and unalterable roles and rights are
ascribed to a socially defined minority group [...] and in which it is impossible (or practically so)
for individuals of the inferiorized group or their descendants to make a transition to the superior
roles and rights enjoyed by the dominant group in the society, and second, the existence of a
deterministic belief-system or ideology supporting these social structures.” 27 Stereotypes have a cognitive as much as a social function of community building, for they quickly determine where one stands in relation to everyone else. For me, the vocabulary that is useful to speak about ethnic stereotyping and blackness in Italy, to form a compelling body of words for immigrants to narrate themselves, and for Italian born citizens to hear them and interpret them beyond one dimensional categorizations, stems from the analysis of theatrical performances. The analytic vocabulary of performance underscores the inextricable union of poetic theory and lived practice, the co-participation in the event of doers and viewers, and the physical and emotional investment that can initiate a path of critical thinking to address difference.
My use of performance as a methodology of research argues against Philip Auslander’s idea that “the experience of theater (of live performance generally, I would say) provokes our desire for community but cannot satisfy that desire because performance is founded on difference, on separation, and fragmentation, not unity.” 28 From my point of view, community is
not only desirable, but actualized because performance channels the differences existing within
and between spectators and actors towards a unity of visual and emotional sharing, or at least
author: “Attitudes in the History of Social Psychology” Handbook of Social Psychology . G. Lindzey, ed. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1954.
27 Thompson, Lloyd. Romans and Blacks . London and Oklahoma: Routledge and Oklahoma UP, 1989, 17. 39 witnessing the same event at the same time, however divergent responses may be. This union does not erase differences. Nonetheless, the experience brings to the surface an understanding of diversity that functions at the emotional and practical levels. In Teatro delle Albe’s shows, for instance, the multi-linguistic and layered stratifications of cultural signifiers act on the spectators at a personal level, while spectators also confront their own reactions with the ones of other audience members in the theater. Some spectators can understand the Romagnole dialect, and especially enjoy it when Mandiaye N’Diaye uses it, while others appreciate the nuances of
French, English and Wolof. Some people laugh at Montanari’s performance of an angry housewife busy cooking pasadei in te brot 29 in I Polacchi , while others cannot refrain from clapping rhythmically to the familiar sounds of drums that accompany N’Diaye’s dance. Either way, each audience member connects to the performance, and shows other spectators his/her own cultural and emotional understanding of it, which extends beyond the theater walls and engages notions of personal background and history.
My reading here is indebted to Susan Manning’s use of cross-viewing, so that spectators of different ethnic backgrounds at once watch the performance and see others watching it, each maintaining his or her modality of vision, participation, enjoyment or rejection. Yet, the coexistence in time and space of black and white spectators allows for bodies on stage and in the audience to take on meanings that do not necessarily comply with dominant norms outside the theater. Artistic and social forms get complicated and redefined. 30 I am also thinking of Peggy
28 Auslander, Philip. Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized World . London and New York: Routledge, 1999, 32. 29 Traditional Romagnole dish made of hand made pasta and broth.
30 Manning, Susan. Modern Dance, Negro Dance. Race in Motion . Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2004, XV-XVII. 40 Phelan’s analysis of the value of live performance that “resides in its very resistance to the
market and the media, the dominant culture they represent, and the regime of cultural production
that supports them.” 31 She explains her position by stressing that: “Performance, insofar as it can
be defined as representation without reproduction, can be seen as a model for another
representational economy, one in which the reproduction of the Other as the Same is not
assured.” 32 I wish to redirect Phelan’s argumentation, since I believe that performance can be a representation with reproduction. With the latter I do not imply the exact recreation of a live show every night, but rather the implementation of a sociopolitical point of view by means of aesthetics and poetic conventions. Theater and performance can expand what we understand through knowledge as long as it strives for the union of meaning and form. Repetition in performance, intended as the conscious communication of meaning accurately and aesthetically refined throughout the rehearsal process, can form social consciousness, forge ideas and transform trajectories. By means of such repetition, performance can truly act as a constitutive and not merely rebellious or reactionary element against normative enclosures and fixed identities.
Teatro delle Albe’s scope of performance enlarges its breadth to include unfamiliar and hence uncomfortable situations, and brings in oppositional ideologies. The contextual soul of its local roots allows the performance to be always, and increasingly so, inter-textual. “The ways in which a performance text gains meaning for an audience through its relationship to other texts, including the non-theatrical texts which communities produce, in the form of folklore, oral
31 Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance . New York: Routledge, 1993, 7.
32 Ibid., 3.
41 histories, stories, legends and mythologies”33 open it up to the unknown, the foreign, even the exotic. The audience naively discovers alternative readings of that which is visible every day among the interstices of familiar references. Blackness becomes an issue that is worth considering with a critical distancing, in light of its inevitable interactions between the dominant and the dominated. These two realms are never exclusive but engage each other discursively in a
Gramscian fashion.34
The representation of difference introduces an important element in the general economy of my discussion, that is to say the aspect of consciousness, a continuum that within and across communities addresses the very notion of historiography, a present unthinkable without a past.
As Conquergood writes: “Particularly for poor and marginalized people denied access to middle- class ‘public’ forums, cultural performance becomes the venue for ‘public discussion’ of vital issues central to their communities, as well as an arena for gaining visibility and staging their identity.” 35 To reach this goal, the Afro-Romagnole Teatro delle Albe serves a double end. On the one hand, it represents the inscription of black bodies within a framework - in terms of its original conception - created and managed by a white ensemble, and very much operating under the charismatic influence of Marco Martinelli. Every member of the Albe acknowledges the risks implicit in the project, yet believes, as I do, in the possibility to work across differences.
Performed identities, in the sense of subjected to the construction of outer-directed
33 Kershaw, Baz. The Politics of Performance: Radical Theater as Cultural Intervention . New York: Routledge, 1992, 33.
34 See also: Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts . New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990; Rabinow, Paul ed. Michel Foucault. Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth . London: Penguin Books, 1994.
35 Conquergood, Dwight. “Rethinking Ethnography: Toward a Critical Cultural Politics”, Communications Monograph . 58: 179-194, 184.
42 representations and norms, and identities in performance live in that discursive relation between marginality and liminality in which one, according to post-colonial thinker Homi Bhabha, is constantly aware of differences within a vernacular cosmopolitanism. Bahbha contends that “the vernacular cosmopolitan takes the view that the commitment to a ‘right to difference in equality’ as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmation of authentication of origins and ‘identities,’ and more to do with political practices and ethical choices.” 36 My contention is that vernacular cosmopolitanism can concretize not only in thought and activism, but also in Teatro delle Albe’s staged forms of affiliation that engage the body in playful, satirical, and grotesque expressions.
On the other hand, rather than fostering mutually exclusive categories of cultural performances, one for the Senegalese minority community and one for the general Italian audience, the Albe launched its public discussion around identity based on a widened perception of culture, not “as a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns, [but] as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes crisscross from within and beyond its borders.
Such heterogeneous processes often derive from differences of age, gender, class, race, and sexual orientation.” 37 Most importantly, Teatro delle Albe continually plays with the theory of a community sharing cultural traits: its intra-culturalism is always suspended between the textual and inter-textual. The context makes it possible for a performance to communicate and create community among actors, in the Greek double sense of the word, as doers and spectators. The inter-textual facilitates the diffusion of meaning by linking each single performance to a chain of
36 Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994 , XVII.
37 Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis . Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, 20-21. 43 texts, not necessarily theatrical ones. Hence, performance lives in the community that produces
it, or for which it is produced, in so far as it is explicitly or implicitly related to legends, myths,
oral tradition, dances and musical expressions. I position the innovative approach of the Albe in
rethinking community, beyond ethnic and national boundaries, as a welcoming home for those
who wish to find in it their mode of expression. On this note, I agree with Richard Schechner that
performance is “in between. It is intergeneric, interdisciplinary, intercultural - and therefore
inherently unstable. [It] assumes that we are living in a post-colonial world where cultures are
colliding, interfering with each other, and energetically hybridizing. [It] does not values ‘purity.’
[It] is unfinished, open, multivocal, and self-contradictory.” 38 To sum up, my use of performance
is contextual to sites of contestation among multiple interests that consequently negotiate the
boundaries of a community by means of aesthetic enjoyment, intellectual inquiry, affective play,
cultural memory, participatory ritual, social commentary, political action, or psychological
probe. 39 In this space, people and their subjective understandings of reality come together to
question and enrich each other, which Conquergood summarizes as cultural practice, scholarly
and ethnographic methodology, and political activism.
Teatro delle Albe - The Poetic of Unwritten Histories
It should be clear by now that I intend to read the double-edge sword of intra-ethic relations in
Italy through the theatrical work of Teatro delle Albe. Before the inclusion of four Senegalese
immigrants, which constitutes the core element of my discussion, the group had already
undergone a number of rebirths. Marco Martinelli, his wife Ermanna Montanari, and friends
38 Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction , New York and London: Routledge, 2002, 360-361.
39 Fuoss, Kirk W. Striking Performances / Performing Strikes . Jackson: UP of Minnesota, 1997. 44 Luigi Dadina and Marcella Nonni started the very first nucleus of the Albe in Ravenna in 1983.
All four young artists were natives of Emilia Romagna. They still remain nowadays the foundational pillars of the group, even though only Montanari and Dadina still perform on stage.
Martinelli exclusively dedicates his talent to dramaturgy and directing, while Nonni assumed the role of administrative director of Ravenna Teatro, the production company that since 1991 manages Teatro Rasi and the two independent groups working in it: Teatro delle Albe and
Compagnia Drammatico Vegetale - a children theater ensemble. The four friends originally named the company Albe di Verhaeren and started their performance career with a stage trilogy dedicated to the writer Philip K. Dick - Mondi Paralleli (1983), Effetti Rushmore (1984), and
Rumore di Acque (1985). 40 Dick was a science-fiction writer who gained popularity after his death at age 53, in 1982. Dick’s adaptations brought on stage futuristic worlds revolving around an underlining pro-environment subtext. These two interests remain a signature style of Teatro delle Albe’s poetic that conceives theater as a space of freedom in which possibilities of becoming rather than being, mobile structures of change, and utopian visions come to life.
In the mid-eighties, dedicating time and energy to their green consciousness, Martinelli and Montanari attended a number of lectures on the environment at the University of Bologna, during which they discovered that the geological composition of Emilia Romagna matched that of Northern Africa. In the wake of this information, they started considering black African immigrants, by then a common presence in Emilia Romagna, as long-lost brothers who had come back home. In 1988, Martinelli and Dadina met Iba Babou, Abibou N’Diaye, Khadim Thiam.
40 Because of the high number of shows by Teatro delle Albe, I will give specific details only for the productions that I will analyze in depth in each chapter For all other references, see the Albe’s official website at www.teatrodellealbe.com.
45 The first artistic collaboration with the Senegalese actors gave birth to the Afro-Romagnole Albe.
In that same year, they dropped the unpronounceable name Verhaeren to become Teatro delle
Albe - Italian word for dawn.
Thus started a production history made up of alternate moments: collective or single,
Afro-Romagnole or locally grounded. Ruh Romagna più Africa uguale (1988) was the first intra- ethnic groundbreaking experiment which attracted much critical interest but also many doubts about its possibility to survive. To show critics wrong, two more intra-cultural productions saw the light in the following years Siamo asini o pedanti? (1989) and Lunga vita all’albero (1990).
At the same time, Martinelli conceived the ultra-local projects of Bonifica (1989), with Luigi
Dadina and Ermamma Monanari – about a mother and a son from the rural fields of Emilia
Romagna - and Le due calebasse (1990), the first solo performance by Mandiaye N’Diaye. The group continued developing with alternating projects inspired by the Romagnole roots, such as
Narrazione della pianura (1995) - a solo piece by Dadina - or Lus (1995) by the local poet Nevio
Spadoni, Montanari’s solo performances in Cenci (1993), and Ippolito (1995), and the inter- ethnic shows I ventidue infortuni di Mor Arlecchino (1993) and Griot- Fulĕr (1993). Then in
December 1998, I Polacchi opened at Teatro Rasi. The show complemented the Afro-Romagnole
Albe with the energetic support of a group of wild Italian teenagers, four of whom went on to become stable members of the company. 41 I Polacchi has become the Albe’s longest running performance, still touring nowadays. This is the mixed composition of Romagna, Africa, blacks, whites, adolescents, dialect, and foreign languages that still continues to evolve in Martinelli’s dramaturgy.
41 Alessandro Renda, Roberto Magnani, Luca Fagioli, and Alessandro Argnani. 46 The Albe’s cultural, metaphorical and physical movement between Ravenna and Dakar represents, I believe, the perfect example of the complexity of the migration experience requiring a painful, joyous, paradoxical yet necessary mediation of ideas and investment of physical energy. My re-construction of Teatro delle Albe’s performances evolves in terms of Roach’s
“kinesthetic and vocal embodiment of social memory and self-invention.” 42 The shows always play on multiple levels that evoke familiar atmospheres, yet suddenly shutter them with change of tones, from dramatic to comedic and vice versa, incomprehensible languages, and odd characters. Martinelli pushes the envelope up to the point that one has to ask himself, whose familiarity is being addressed, or put in jeopardy? The intersection between social memory and self-invention speaks to the need, for both performers and spectators, to connect with experiences that they already intimately know. The inter-linguistic use of Romagnole dialect, Wolof and local idioms from each performance location, serves this need. Each spectator can find an element of familiarity, yet has to acknowledge that the same is true for other spectators who sit in the theater, but come from different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, the notions of home and family open up to the coexistence of multiple identities. The Albe’s self-invented Afro-Romagnole constituency connects geographic, mental, visual and cultural boundaries that are local and distant at once. Implicitly focusing on people and practices that carve out spaces of resistance and self-representation, the Albe’s performances engage deeply with the understanding of the role of institutional powers in shaping intra-cultural encounters.
Throughout the process of research and writing, I continually asked myself if there is still a value in using theater as a lens through which to read reality. In Italy, the momentum of theater
42 Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead. Circum-Atlantic Performance . New York: Columbia UP, 1996, 26. 47 as the privileged contestation site has long passed. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, theater
had an effective confrontational role in relation to policy. Governments often considered political
theater as the possible locus of anarchic insurrection and revolt. Undercover policemen often
patrolled Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s performance in the “Case del Popolo” (the Italian
Communist Party’s cultural associations) to censor unwanted explicit references to current
political issues, and to keep updated personal information on spectators attending the events. In
the US, Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino or Amiri Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theater worked
not only as centers of artistic production, but as real political agents fomenting street
demonstrations in favor of Chicano farm workers and the Black Power movement. 43 In Tokyo,
the angura experimental theater voiced dissent against major political issues of the Japan-US relations. 44
In Italy, there are few instances nowadays of such tensions, which speaks of two major transformations. First and foremost the level of social urgency has moved away from direct confrontation in the streets, and into more organized realms (institutional debates, fundraising campaigns) or the cyberspace of the web. People are a lot more reluctant to voice their frustration in mass gatherings, and prefer forms of new democratic participation over the internet (especially blogs), which implicitly suggests that we have reached a level of generalized wealth and complacency. The second outcome is that theater has recessed from center stage as a communication tool, substituted by media and television. Even when theater is still able to produce provocative thoughts, the average awareness surrounding it is very limited.
43 On this see: Elam, Harry J. Jr. Taking it to the Streets. The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka . Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.
44 The most important expert on the issue is: Goodman, David G. ed and trans. Japanese Drama and Culture in the 48 Governmental censoring seems very uninterested, which clearly marks theater as a non-
threatening leisure activity. Part of the blame is to be attached to theater itself. Much
experimentation from the late nineteen seventies onwards has moved away from meaning and
receded into pure form, unconcerned with any political purpose or the possibility to galvanize audience’s responses. Likewise, State-sponsored traditional playhouses have contributed, with classic mise en scènes built around the concept of the fourth wall, to a sleepy audience in need of
relaxation or entertainment but always in the name of pure passive observation. Instances of
attempts to recuperate active participation, and to engage spectators in aesthetically compelling
yet meaningful performance, are often relegated to niche audiences and venues, and limited
engagements.
Nonetheless, I argue that the vanishing of a panoptical censoring eye over theater has
allowed also for many practitioners and spectators to reconsider themselves in a critical manner,
pushing their poetic envelopes towards the unexpected, the desire to explore more, understand
more, say more of who we are and the world we live in. To the question, why use theater to
engage social reality, I answer with an affirmative response. Theater may have lost the ability to
trigger the dominant culture to question itself, and may not represent a threat, but still maintains
the power to influence a critical agenda, remove spectators from cultural provincialism, shape in
front of their eyes a human landscape made of multiplicities, conflicts and resolutions. It is still
capable of insights that open a space for different historical narratives. In addition, theatricality
seems to inform contemporary social movements. The relationship between theater and
theatricality recalls Victor Turner’s diversification of the liminal from the liminoid - the latter
being not the same as the former, but something that acts like it. Therefore, social contestation
1960s: The Return of the Gods . New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1988. 49 translated theater’s intents and practices into a form of collective recognition; it assumed a number of theatrical conventions adapting them to protests: from costuming and props, to exaggerated actions and movements, to sound and unnatural vocal tones. In the following pages I will address the relationship between theater and theatricality in order to reinforce my intertwined reading of performance as an aesthetic production - the outcome of an artistic poetics - and as commitment to a research methodology about identity markers, their construction and implementation. Social movement theory and studies of spectatorship sometimes overlap, analyzing the impetus that push people beyond the exclusively private space of home and into situations of collective gathering where the experience is at once individual and shared with everyone else. I believe that the modalities of experimental theater, at least of the kind that focuses on construction of meaning and audience interaction, is particularly apt to claim a pedagogical intent, as much as a psychological and emotional knot of energy that works as a transformative, generative and regenerative power.
Migration: Moving beyond Economic Reasoning
Browsing the pages of the liberal newspaper La Repubblica , I came across the following short article. On June 4, 2005, Kamel, a 26 year old Algerian man, crossed the border between Italy and France and headed towards Paris. This might sound like a statistical platitude in the tumultuous sea of migration: one less illegal migrant in Italy, one more in France. Kamel was already looking for a job in France, and he had a good chance to start a satisfying career because he speaks fluent Arabic, French, English, Italian and German, and is a trained engineer. The journalist concluded: “In the global era, multilingualism is a precious skill. A private enterprise would not let these talents slip away, and so the questions are: was it worth losing Kamel? Can 50 Italy afford to let these kinds of talent go?” 45 The general tone of the article, which apparently aims at rethinking the categorization of immigrants to Italy as uneducated and desperate beings, contains an implicit disturbing logic. Even to the eyes of an open-minded journalist, Kamel’s biography is not problematic because a polyglot engineer is forced to place his life in the hands of the mafia that controls human trafficking between Northern Africa and Italy, nor because his migration embodies a socio-economic degradation that is ravaging a whole continent. Rather, it creates discomfort since it would be economically savvy for Italy to take advantage of Kamel’s skills. The State should conduct its business according to a stringent logic of profitability since dominant neoliberal jargon naturalized the reduction of human values to a cost-benefit balance.
That Kamel should be granted citizenship because of his potential to enrich the host country recalls the US legal category of aliens of exceptional talents. How then should a State behave towards migrants that do not fall into this privileged group? Shouldn’t notions of human rights rather than use value inform migration laws?
When one looks at mainstream Italian media (national newspapers and television networks), the literature on migration generally falls prey to one of two pitfalls: it either surveys migration as a whole, without going into the specifics of the global political economy and the interplay between race, gender and class in determining migration flows; or it selects individual case studies that turn the immigrant’s life into a spectacle to be used and abused by white spectatorship. This latter form may produce emotional reactions and indignation but does not necessarily foster a deeper understanding of the phenomenon nor affect policy-making at the national level. Small publishing companies and freelance journalists have increasingly produced
45 From La Repubblica , June 6 2005. All translations from Italian are mine, otherwise noted. 51 visual and literary texts that approach migration from a more complex point of view, taking into account the interaction among global forces, local needs in the sending and receiving countries, and the human desire for mobility. Unfortunately, the circulation of these alternative sources of information encounters many obstacles and does not reach a larger audience outside the circle of the “already converted.” Such alternative forms of communication find a wider audience on the internet. Taking into account the generational cohort of internet users, and their average level of formal education, the web-based information still reaches a tiny minority of potential viewers and it can hardly erase common stereotypes on immigrants.
In line with this lesser known point of view, I understand immigration as a combination of individual and communal experiences. Migrants never move in a vacuum, but within a set of intricate personal and semi-official relations that are highly affected by the ways in which transnational economic interests and politics shape and transform Europe. Migration is also strongly gendered, delineating very different modes in which men and women select the targets and the length of their stay. In my analysis, I mainly focus on male immigrants for two major reasons. Firstly, African immigration to Italy is still strongly male oriented and women occupy an almost exclusively private space, augmenting the invisibility effect that blackness produces on the average white Italian citizen. To have followed female migrants would have required a methodological approach to blackness that fell outside of my main focus, that is the public realm in which the latter is perceived and represented. Secondly, Teatro delle Albe has worked solely with male Senegalese immigrants so far. Therefore, there are no examples of the intersections between blackness and womanhood on its stage.
My project bridges the analysis of globalization, gender, and class in order to debunk 52 functionalism – by which I mean the reduction of people to their use value and productive skills -
and understand migrants as individuals immersed in a constant mediation between active
participation in their own lives and cultural representations imposed by the media and national
immigration laws. Personal agency conflates with structural chains of power, which modify
individuals’ migration projects and create a breach between imagined expectations and actual
possibilities of choice. In so doing, I engage a tradition of performance activism, one that
connects de Certeau’s notion of the difference between “the presence and circulation of a
representation” and “its manipulation by users who are not its makers” 46 and Conquergood’s groundbreaking study of “street youth suffer[ing] from both too little visibility, and too much visibility. Either they are willed to disappear or they are rendered hypervisible within the scopic regimes of power.” 47 We may function within a cultural system that emphasizes stratified relations among people and their commodification through a division of labor, but performance as activism reclaims the innovative ways in which “the ordinary man” a-la de Certeau finds space for creativity by refashioning “mainstream symbols for subversive ends.” 48
I contend that black African migrants find in theater-making the space to rework both public stereotyped representations of their presence in Italy and cultural traditions embodied in their transient selves. Theater also works as a pedagogical site in which the inclusion of oral narratives and physical interactions builds into the migrants’ sensibility a consciousness about their presence and rights in the Italian public sphere. Envisioning alternatives to the legal
46 de Certeau, Michael. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984, 35.
47 Conquergood, Dwight. “Street Literacy.” in Handbook of Reserach on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts . James Flood, Shirley Brice, and Diane Lapp, eds. New York: Simon and Schuster MacMillan, 1997, 354-375, 367.
48 Ibid., 356. 53 obsession for written documents as the only proof of the immigrant’s existence, the creation of
texts based on movements, bodies, and orature validates the migration project of each individual
at the crossroad of intra-cultural traditions. The on-stage personas as flesh and blood mementos
of off-stage black bodies occupy that contradictory space between the erasure of black
immigrants from the public view, and their overbearing presence within the system of state
control (work permits and residency certificates) and repression (police abuses and forced
deportation). Blackness marks a body as the Other from which one should be protected.
Invisibility may cause a crisis of recognition in the migrant’s experience, yet his access to
visibility often exclusively develops within policing practices. The upside down logic of the legal
notion that no one is guilty unless otherwise proved informs black immigrants as never innocent
unless they can prove that wrong. Unsatisfied with this twisted preventive defense against the
Other, Teatro delle Albe produces a counter-narrative that does not attempt to sanctify
immigrants as such, but to raise doubts on the dichotomous separation between right and wrong,
legal and illegal, white and black. The stage encounters the social context in the common search
for ethical answers to questions of who has the right to see what? Who has the right to say what?
Who has the right to speak for whom?
In the nineteenth century, intellectuals, politicians and artists gradually built the idea of
Italianness, committing their lives to the values of the Risorgimento (Unification Movement) and the modern European philosophy of the nation-state. 49 Once Italy was born out of this process, and a sense of unitary nationalism had been established, two trends of identity-marking
49 In that same historic moment de Gobineau was publishing in France the four volumes of his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines , (1853-1855) which to many represents the very first systemic analysis of discrimination by means of psuedo-scientific reasoning. In England, a few years later Edward Wilmont Blyden published Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), in which the author explained how Christianity had influenced the creation of an 54 developed: a class-based and a regional-based one. Southern migrants to the industrializing cities
of the North became marked along with the category of the proletariat. Even though blackness
appeared in the national rhetoric for the first time when the Fascist regime attempted a colonial
enterprise against Ethiopia and Somalia, it was only later, when Italians became a largely middle
class population thanks to the American-sponsored post-war economic boom, and migration
increased following decolonization, that blackness turned into a problematic signifier. At that
point, the Risorgimento values resurfaced to tighten national unity, mark blacks as outsiders and
leave whiteness untouched. Still today, the normative fiction according to which Italians perceive
themselves as a homogeneous culture derives from such cultural background, even if their daily
experience speaks of large communities of immigrants broadly distributed in the peninsula.
Public discourses fictionally keep alive the ideology of homogeneity. The vu ’ cumprà is a site of absence, 50 whose physical presence in the street Italians can erase and ignore. Julia Kristeva theorizes that the rejection of the Other as a threat to one’s own self constitutes a conundrum in so far as the rejected always remains in his place and the desire to distance him cannot erase the potential danger for the self. This paradox produces fiercer racialist discourses and a stronger wish to reject the Other, leading to a never ending escalation.51 The complexity of this psychological tension translates into forms of sociopolitical exclusiveness to the detriment of politics of acceptance and openness, exclusiveness that I see in place in various sections of the
inferiority complex among black Africans.
50 Pejorative expression used to name immigrants, especially those arriving from Africa. The mocking slang derives from the allegedly incapacity of Africans to pronounce the utterance “ vuoi comprare ” (do you want to buy?) when they sell merchandise as street vendors. The more politically correct definition, encompassing all the various ethnic cohorts of immigrants, would be extracomunitari (namely: people who come from outside of the European Union). The word doesn’t do much to promote the idea of acceptance and inclusion of immigrants within the Italian society.
51 Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader . Toril Moi ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 55 public realm: governmental decision-making, media, and common sense discourses.
To complement my argument, history provides plenty of examples that disprove the simplistic “us” against “them” logic. Confuting the position of those who claim that globalization is a contemporary phenomenon tracing its roots to the exploitative system of the colonies, I contend that the circum-Atlantic world described by Paul Gilroy in his much praised The Black
Atlantic , perfectly translates into what I would call a circum-Mediterranean reality. The
Mediterranean sea of ancient Rome was a world-system made of intense trafficking, constant racial tensions and business-oriented wars. A historical portrait of the relations between Africa and Europe would necessarily narrate a two-way street of exploitation and violence. Uneven power relations and unbalanced access to resources among countries worked both ways. Ancient
Rome’s conquest of Northern Africa was followed by the penetration of Arabic culture into
Southern Italy, of which many traces still remain today in Sicily’s architecture, food, and dialects.
The late nineteenth-century movement of poor Italian farm workers toward Tunisia and Algeria had little to do, in terms of national pride and development, with the fascist colonial attempts of the late thirties. The former was the cry of a starving nation from which millions migrated hoping for better living conditions, while the latter was a state-sponsored attempt to reformulate the
Roman Empire in modern imperialist terms. Therefore, contemporary African migration to Italy constitutes one more brick set into the circular exchanges which link today’s global system to colonization, and beyond. In the next chapter, this is what I set out to do.
56 CHAPTER ONE - Historicizing Blackness
The idea of an authentic culture as an internally cohesive and autonomous space is untenable except, perhaps, as a useful fiction or a revealing distortion (Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth )
Researching the archives to build a grounded historical framework on the discourse of blackness
in Italy, I came across very few critical studies in Italian that discussed the presence of blacks in
the country prior to the 1970s. This absence speaks to what Linda Hutcheon calls
historiography’s primary characteristics - its gaps, lacunae, and missing traces - making the
writing of history dangerously similar to fiction. 52 I believe that the limited interest in national
historiography on blackness represents a proof of the ways in which Italians conceive their
relations with African immigrants: by acts of what I call “historic forgetfulness.” This chapter
aims to address these relations in a period that starts with the Italian political movement of
Risorgimento of the late nineteenth century, focuses on Fascism, and touches on the post-war
period up to the nineteen seventies. I place the reading of Teatro delle Albe’s I ventidue infortuni
di Mor Arlecchino in relation to this social syndrome because the show is a powerful example of a stage performance that puts Italians in front of their own past as emigrants. The character of
Mor Arlecchino embodies through parody identity signifiers that each Italian can perceive in him/herself, works as an ironic memento of that which we used to be, and traces the lines of continuity across ethnic disparities displaying sameness through difference. The silence of history, that Italians unquestionably chose to accept, gets reworked on stage and finds through laughter a way to be channeled into social consciousness.
Supplementing the reading of history with a closer look at popular cultural forms - songs, 57 jokes, advertisements - I wish to demonstrate that Italians deal with African migrants within a
framework of “historic forgetfulness.” The lack of a serious conversation on the colonial past, the
erasure of a millenarian history of cross-Mediterranean exchanges, a pervasive self-
representation of Italy as a land of emigrants rather than immigrants, and the internalization of a
racial discourse that depicts linguistic, religious and cultural differences as insurmountable
barriers: all contribute to the idea that immigration in Italy is a recent phenomenon, a fast-paced
multi-directional invasion, and a national emergency. Against this backdrop, I position the
analysis of Teatro delle Albe’s I ventidue infortuni di Mor Arlecchino (1993) as a counter-
narrative that manifests the limits of the dominant discourse, functioning for Italian spectators as
an unveiling mechanism of their generally negative mental mapping of blackness.
I place my work in line with scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Rustom Bharucha,
Abdelmalek Sayad, and in Italy Carlo Landuzzi, Giorgio Fabre, and Guido Bolaffi who look at
migration as a multilayered web of historical, economic, political, and spatio-temporal elements,
making sense of the complexity of social behaviors that involve individuals and communities, both within and across national and cultural boundaries. Migration is never a one-way street, and hardly ever an individual decision. It pertains to personal and collective expectations, initiating a circulation, at times a commerce, of bodies, goods, ideas, beliefs, and feelings. This positioning stands against the most sensationalistic take on migration privileged by media and politics - that peculiar fascination for the self-victimizing complex which emphasizes the social and economic price Italians have to pay for their open-door policy towards immigrants. More often than not, migration becomes a synonym for “illegal arrivals to Italy.” Right-wing exponents use the
52 Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms . New York: Metheun, 1985 58 equation migration = illegality to maintain a high level of social tension and justify restrictive laws on citizenship and access to rights. Leftist journalism tends to reduce the phenomenon to a populist form of sympathy for the mass of desperate individuals that cross the Mediterranean sea on board old and dangerous vessels. Even more often, newspapers, television news and politicians talk of Italian-born citizens as the real victims of constant waves of illegal workers, whose arrivals by sea to the southern costs of Lampedusa or Bari reach its climax each summer and disrupt the lazy sunbathing of vacationers.
The combination of the constructed level of social alert and “historic forgetfulness” has created a phenomenon of internalized 53 victimization for Italians, who have often dealt with their neighbors in the Middle East and Northern Africa following a pattern of crisis. The clash between the Ottoman Empire and the Catholic world, the Crusades, or the invasion of Sicily by the Arabs have left traces in popular culture that contributed to the consolidation of an uncomfortable feeling of emergency towards black bodies. 54 “ Mamma li Turchi !” (Oh my, the
Turks are coming!) or “ Sono preso dai Turchi ” (Turks hold me hostage) are still commonly used expressions for situations of stress, conflict or chaos from which one does not foresee an easy way out. Parents try to obtain their children’s obedience by warning them that if they do not behave “ l’uomo nero ti porta via ” (the black man will take you away). These expressions have lost their historical roots, yet they constitute day to day forms of speech containing micro seeds
53 Here I use internalization in the sense that cognitive anthropologists give to the term. See: D’Andrade, R. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology . Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1995.
54 Angelo Del Boca is the most distinguished historian that for many decades has tried to cast some light on the misdoing of the Italian government and army in the African war campaigns. See: Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. La conquista dell’Impero . Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1979; Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale. La caduta dell’Impero . Roma- Bari: Laterza, 1982; Gli Italiani in Libia. Dal Fascismo a Gheddafi . Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1988; Le guerre coloniali del Fascismo . Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991.
59 of much larger public worries. 55 The current debate over whether or not Turkey is an appropriate
candidate to join the European Union builds on the diffidence with which Italians look at the
descendants of the Ottoman Empire as much as on fear of Islam, that seems almost inevitable
since the post-9/11 rhetoric has equated Islam with terrorism. Many conservative politicians and
commentators evoke an inevitable clash of civilizations between Catholicism, the alleged
inherited cultural milieu of the peninsula, and an invented form of a monolithic and intolerant
Islam. 56
Stefano Allievi debunks this inevitable violent view in his recent book on contemporary
Italian Islam. The author gives numerous examples of peaceful and integrated past relations
between people from Islamic countries and Italians. Before the year 1000, many Italian cities had
specific burying sites for Islamic believers; very often freed slaves of Arabic origin inherited
huge fortunes from their former Catholic masters; conversions of servants to Catholic religion
were not unusual. Renaissance Rome had its visible share of street vendors from the Maghreb. It
was not until 1728 that Pope Benedict XIII emanated the first edict to expel them from
Civitavecchia’s main square. Few Italians are aware that long before North African migrations
55 I believe that this form of speech belongs to the group of speech acts theorized by J. L. Austin. They do something in so far as they instill in every day conversations, from an early age, a subconscious notion that black equals evil and danger. Seemingly innocuous sayings, they intervene on the mental map of race relations and shape them along colored splits. For a full account of speech acts, see: Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. Also, on the equation between blackness and evil, and its upside down turn in the black imagination see hooks bell. Killing Rage. Ending Racism . New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.
56 As I was writing the first draft of this chapter, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the latest politician in a long line of right-wing exponents to warn the country against the rise of a dangerous Islam. On August 25, 2006 while speaking at the national meeting of Comunione e Liberazione , a Catholic association, he said that the Left is aiming at a multicultural and multiethnic society. Opposing this political and cultural agenda, he believes that Italy should belong to Catholic Italians. Declarations of this kind are not new to right wing parties, Lega Nord ’s exponents are probably the most outspoken and directly racist participants to the campaign to save the alleged purity of Italian culture. The idea of impossible coexistence of different cultures on he same national territory seems to feed off the highly controversial work of Prof. Samuel Huntington and his theorization of a post-Cold War world turned into a clash of civilizations. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order . New 60 towards Sicily, there had been a conspicuous Sicilian migration towards Tunisia in the nineteen
twenties and thirties; or that Radio Bari, a local radio station from the Southern region of Puglia,
inaugurated its broadcasting programs in Arabic years before the more famous BBC service.57
Overall, these conditions indicate that globalization and intra-ethnic mixing are nothing new at
all. They both have deep historic roots because movements of people are as old as human
civilizations themselves.
The lack of a serious historical criticism about Italian-African relations has created the
space for misrepresentations of blackness and immigrants. The Italian colonial presence in Africa
lasted from 1869 to 1943. As a latecomer in the group of European countries that pursued the
dream of an overseas empire, the recently unified Italy saw colonialism as a means to reduce
internal social strains by creating employment, and generate a sense of national unity through the
army and the export of surplus farm workers to the fields of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Libya. Once
Fascism had risen to the stage, the regime complemented the internal authoritarianism with a
colonial structure that would push Italy forward in the competition with other European nations.
In the attempt to separate the Risorgimento liberal governments from imperialism, historians
often pass unto silence that Mussolini simply widened a geopolitical plan initiated by liberal
governments led by Crispi and Giolitti. 58
York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
57 Allievi, Stefano. Islam Italiano. Viaggio nella seconda religione del paese . Einaudi: Torino, 2003. Very often Italians show discomfort towards the visible presence of Islamic communities in their cities because they fear mass conversions and the disruption of the Catholic way of life. It is interesting to note that in a series of interviews conducted in Torino in 2000, only 2.4% of the Islamic population declared an interest in converting Catholics to their religion. This is also confirmed by the fact that most of the authors and editors of books on Islam in Italian are authoctonous people converted to Islam, not immigrants from Africa or the Middle East. Proselytism is the inheritance of a national confessional culture, rather than an importation from abroad.
58 The fascist war campaigns in Africa constituted the fourth phase of a national imperialist policy. The first intervention in Africa had already happened under the Depertis and Crispi governments, ending with the disastrous 61 The political mission of Risorgimento went beyond national borders. It contained a universal claim. The Mediterranean Sea and Africa were a natural extension to Italy’s independence and unity in the minds of Mazzini, Gioberti, and Balbo.59 Since the eighteen seventies, the exploration of Africa had created a quasi-pathological interest in the topic: many magazines were born out of the fascination for the exotic; the “ethnic” artifact-collective mania developed as a cross-class and cross-generational phenomenon; a circulation of diary publications and pseudo-scientific conferences developed around the exploration business; Italian explorers became national superstars, often producing intentionally distorted representations of the “black continent” in order to feed the audience’s appetite, to the detriment of scientific reliability. The “savage blacks” were always a little more bizarre and wild, the landscapes always more breathtaking or insidious. Africa and Africans usually appeared as a series of types and situations - a spectacle: rituals and performances, sunsets and wide open spaces, everything contributed to the spectacularization of the continent and its inhabitants. Written reports, visual recordings and live experiences showcased blacks not as human beings but as objects of curiosity, fascination, rejection, and morbid feelings.
The institutionalization of race as a scientific category happened in perfect timing with the euphoria for the power-building strategies of the nation-state. As Hannah Franziska Augstein points out in the introduction to her book on the origins of race, this idea comes out of “a liberal,
military defeat of the Italian army at Adwa, in Ethiopia. There then followed a phase of diplomatic preparation for the Libyan war. The third phase coincided with World War I during which Italy showed a clear hegemonic design over the Adriatic and the Mediterranean.
59 Briani, Vittorio. Il lavoro italiano in Africa. Roma : Tipografia del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 1980. The book contains precious information on the role of Italian workers both within national colonies and in territories occupied by France. Despite this, the general tone of Briani’s analysis tends to be triumphant and lacks a sharper look at the ways in which Italians intervened in situations that had been already pre-set by local governments and workers. Once again, Africans appear as minors unable to manage their own development and modernization. 62 lay, anti-monarchical political look; the rise of the nation-state; biological and zoological investigations; phrenological and physiognomical fortune telling; a political interest in finding a scientific justification for slavery; and the philological investigations of languages as a mirror of natural character.” 60 Political and scientific reasoning contributed to the crystallization of race into the late nineteenth century modern idea of genetic difference and unchangeable qualities that distinguish civilized people from barbarians. According to early-Renaissance scholar Hannaford, intellectuals up to the early seventeenth century individuated civilization not by means of inscribed racial elements, but through the presence of a public sphere (the Greek agora ) in which politics took place and the good of the state was discussed. Barbarians lacked this structure and
were viewed as trapped in the meaningless realm of private life, the structure of which was determined by the necessities of survival: procreation and family, along with economic activity. [...] The public sphere allowed men to give meaning to their lives, to become civilised, while barbarians lived only according to the necessities of survival in the natural world. So, by sheer force of character and talent, by education and a clear perception of what was ‘important’, any man could overcome his racial / societal beginnings to become civilised. 61
Marco Aime reaffirms that the West has privileged the State and citizenship over ethnicity since the era of the consolidation of the nation-state. Western governments based their policies on a territory, with precise borders that came out of negotiations and conflicts with neighboring countries, and required all citizens to respect the same juridical regime. 62 This
60 Augustein, H. F. ed. Race: the Origin of an Idea , 1760-1850. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996, X.
61 Cited in Earle T. F. and K.J.P. Lowe eds. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005, 316.
62 From the Italian preface: Arselle, Jean-Loup. Logiche meticce. Antropologia dell’identità in Africa a altrove . Torino: Bollati Boringheri, 1999, 7.
63 position, though, does not acknowledge the efforts made in Italy by liberal governments at the turn of the nineteenth century to create a sense of homogeneity and belonging by eradicating local differences, implementing Italian as the national language and Catholicism as the only state-supported religion. I contend that ethnicity did not disappear from the picture, but was very much in the mind of those intellectuals and politicians who designed the strategic and military borders of the recently unified Italy. 63
Massive migrations of people obviously place a huge burden on these bourgeois concepts; they put into question the social contract that binds Western citizens to one another and to the
State. They also inexorably affect the collective consciousness of European countries whose populations tend to grow old while feeling the pressure of a younger and restless African continent. Veiled under religious and cultural uncompromising separations, the emergency reaction towards migration shows a deep fear of losing one’s own privileges made more acute in current times by the neoliberal mode of production, a widening spilt among rich and poor, a sense of impoverishment of the middle class, and world terrorism.
Countering these proto forms of ideological racism, Catholicism worked in two distinctive, yet opposing, ways. On the one hand, the predominant approach worked against the institutionalization of race as the defining element of human relations. The Catholic Church cherished a general acceptance of black Africans because the evangelical project was a fulfillment of the Gospels’ preaching that the word of God would reach the end of the earth
(Matt. 28:19) and that there be but one flock and one shepherd (John. 10:16). Moreover, Saint
63 The political issue of Fiume is a case in point revealing how a discourse of ethnic homogeneity became superimposed on geopolitical strategies. For a long time, Italy and Yugoslavia claimed possession over the city. The majority of its population is of Italian descent, yet geographically the delineation of the North-Eastern national border at the end of World War I assigned Fiume to Yugoslavia. By means of diplomatic attempts or military 64 Augustine’s City of God assured that any human being could enter into the grace of God by his/her faith in Christ. Any difference, racial differences included, could be overcome by entering in the superior realm of true Christianity. No separation was cast in stone, neither was it inscribed in physical features. On the other hand, the Church often conducted its missionary task with methodologies that disregarded the Gospels’ word and the theoretical universal equality of all beings. Missionaries and high Vatican hierarchies worked in unison with or tolerated the enslavement of black Africans. These practices were a result of economic interests rather than an ideological subjugation of racially marginalized people. 64
In fact, it was only during the late Renaissance that an ideological Catholic justification for racial distinctions joined the scientific reasoning of immutable ethnic characters. The Church faced some embarrassment when the diversity of physical types and colored skin seemed to question monogenesis - the faith in a single and primary source for all human kind descending from Adam and Eve. To resolve the conundrum, the Vatican’s reading of the Gospel changed accordingly to construct the myth of blacks as the cursed descendants of Noah’s son. The transformation of race into the unchangeable, natural categorizations of human beings was a utilitarian policy to protect the interests of European nations in unison with the constitution of nation-states and world colonization. The Augustinian universal appeal to the city of God became a weapon to justify racial submission in this world in light of a promised salvation in heaven. Utilitarian political and religious reasoning based the construction of difference on
incursions, Italian governments tried to regain the city up until the end of World War II.
64 The Vatican resisted slave commerce only when converted Africans were sold to Islamic traders. More often than not, local priests suggested that the Vatican keep a low profile. Few general condemnations dealt with the cruelty of enslaving practices, but not with slavery itself. See: Gray, Richard. “Fra Girolamo da Sorrento, the Congregation of Propaganda Fide and the Atlantic Slave Trade.” La conoscenza dell’Asia e dell’Africa in Italia nei secoli XVIII e XIX . Ugo Marazzi, ed. Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1984. 65 superficial elements to discern proper behaviors from wilderness: the way one dressed; the
presence of body ornaments, tattoos for example; physical features that were linked to mental
and moral deformity. Blackness became synonymous with ugly, funny, or backward.
My interest in Italian imperialism stems from considerations that track the roots of
contemporary Italian feelings towards African blacks. I underline an ideological and economic
continuity in national colonialism from democracy to the totalitarianism of the nineteen thirties
and forties. The newly born liberal democracy of the late nineteenth century embraced a racist
political view about Africa and blacks, and did not consider the improvement of the
socioeconomic conditions of those at the margins as a priority in their agenda. At the time,
European democracies constituted elitist forms of government, made for the rich and the well-to-
do; they rarely engaged national poverty or civil rights issues. They had even less interest in the
wealth of colonized communities abroad. Italian politicians were no different and looked at what
was left of a free Africa as a land of economic expansion.
Private capital financed much of the imperialistic penetration in Eastern and Northern
Africa. At the turn of the century, exponents of the nobility and the most rampant bourgeoisies formed the governmental elite. They possessed undeniable interests in the economic commissions coming from the army and the construction of colonial infrastructures. In 1882, a
group of investors, intellectuals and prominent figures in the economy and policy-making fields
founded in Napoli the Societá Africana Italiana (African Society of Italy). Its constitutive act
claimed that the goal of the Society was to encourage research expeditions to Africa to gain a
deeper understanding of the continent, and to work with any means to gather geopolitical
knowledge at the service of the homeland’s commercial and industrial progress. Along with these 66 forms of private financing, Mussolini’s geopolitical view inherited the military directions of
expansion that the Depretis and Crispi liberal administrations had planned.
Fascism and Blackness
The Risorgimento expansion plan inspired Fascism, whose ideologists unapologetically embraced the systemic institutionalization of a world view that divided people into races with
different degrees of civilization: a mixture of nationalism and demographic policies that justified
colonialism as a tool to move large numbers of people from depressed areas in the South and
North-East to the open African spaces representing a land of rich and prosperous opportunities.
The demographic reasoning was one of four major arguments circulating in the imperialist
discourse. Along with it, the regime defended an economic, political, and religious principle. If
Italy continued to be excluded from the partition of Africa, the nation was doomed to become a
political lightweight. Likewise, a strong economy, able to absorb internal and international crisis,
required the possibility to use the empire’s resources. Finally, there was a moral duty to bring the
Catholic civilizing mission as far as possible into the “black continent.”
Race made its appearance as a juridical category in the Organic Ordainment for Eritrea
and Somalia promulgated in 1943 to keep under control the frequent phenomenon of mixed
unions and children, which at first the regime had tolerated. Those who equated mixed unions to
a form of genocide, because it polluted the integrity of a biological Italian type, silenced the
position of those who claimed that human beings have always had the will to re-generate
themselves through hybridization. The regime applied a conceptual racialism to the geopolitical
space, classifying peoples of the world in hierarchical order. This classification responded to a
logic of military and economic interests, and had nothing to do with an original locus of 67 ideological representation of the Other. That explains why the Japanese or the British moved up
and down the ladder in reaction to changed military alliances. Fascist scientists categorized race
as a concrete component of a person’s status which determined each individual’s belonging to
the national compound. 65 In 1937, an article in the newspaper La Stampa defined all the children
born from a colonial encounter between an Italian man and a black woman “an error of the past.”
They polluted the white race, were in contrast with the law against concubinage, created an abnormal third social class, and contributed to social disorder because many of them were abandoned children that did not fit into any community. In 1939, mixed unions became illegal with the promulgation of the act Penal Sanctions for the Defense of the Prestige of our Race
against the Natives of Italian Africa . The regime had renamed the colonies “Italian Africa” to
claim its property right on them, but no one in Rome had interest in calling Ethiopians or Somali
“Italian Africans.”
Homeland Italians, having inherited the enduring spirit of the Roman Empire, were at the
top of the socio-cultural ladder, possessing the right to bring civilization to those who still lived
in the darkness. Europe had reached modernity not by freeing itself from its past, but because it
recast this same past, and manipulated it to meet present needs and future perspectives. By means
of this passage, European nations appealed to what Jean Pouillon calls “camouflaged retro-
projections,” the conscious recuperation of the past as a representation of a more or less authentic
65 See: Goglia, Luigi. “Sul razzismo coloniale italiano.” Materiali di lavoro. Rivista di studi storici . 2-3/1991 – 1/1992. Rovereto: Editrice La Grafica, 97-116. The pseudo-scientific origin of this reasoning can be found in Cesare Lombroso’s study of physiognomic traits. See: Lombroso, Cesare. L’uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore: Lettere sull’origine e la varietà delle razze umane . Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1892. On female bodies and mixed unions, see also: Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry , Vol. 12, 1985-1986.
68 cultural inheritance - not so much tradition, but traditionalism. 66 Fascism built a complex ritualistic spectacle that perpetuated the separation among peoples of the world up to the point of promulgating overtly racial laws in 1938. Not just black Africans, but Jews and many other internal and external enemies of the highly masculinized Italian regime eventually turned into targets of bitter persecution. Race, as a manifestation of cultural unity, became object of political action in the moment in which it was defined, brought to public attention and inscribed in
“camouflaged retro-projections.” Yet the 1938 racial laws were not an aberration of a previous healthy system, but rather a further step based on racist seeds pre-existing in the Italian political debate of the late nineteenth century. I am not stressing this point for a personal interest in excusing Fascism for its mistakes, but to demonstrate that the post-World War II Democratic
Christian governments that led Italy for almost five decades did not have a pre-fascist foundation to look at in order to resume and implement structures of universal equality and justice.
The fascist rhetoric was also indebted to the shift in ideological reasoning operated by the
Catholic Church to justify imperialism. Mussolini often referred to black Africans as minors, upon whom the Italian civility shall bestow fatherly care, or as savages whose backward utilization of their potentials required the regime’s intervention so that precious resources would not be wasted. Mussolini’s contribution to the racial debate started off when the young politician still professed Socialism as a journalist of the newspaper Avanti . In that context, his writing on the existence of a common Italian race aimed to bring people closer to the Socialist Party. Two brief interventions of Mussolini on the Italian race clarify the quick trajectory that pushed him out of the socialist milieu and into the creation of the fascist party. In 1908, he argued that “Italy is not one. It is a community of different people poorly amalgamated under a ferociously unified
66 Pouillon, Jean. Race et histoire suivi de l’ouvre de Claude Lévi-Strauss, par Jean Pouillon . Paris: Gonthier, 1967. 69 administration. The moral links uniting a Piemontese and a Sicilian are very dubious. The racial
links even more so.” 67 But in 1920, Mussolini wrote: “Among all nations, Italy is the most
‘clearly’ individuated, by any means. Her connotations are categorical. The wide sea separates her on three sides from the world, and in the North the Alps divides her from the continent.
Within her borders, the ‘autogenous’ groups are small and assimilated.” 68 Not a minor shift in the politician’s thinking; a very utilitarian one, though. The Duce needed race to create a sense of
“us” against “them” - the latter being not just the Africans but any other people, Europeans included, which could not praise themselves for descending directly from ancient Romans.
On July 14, 1938 a document signed by ten preeminent Italian scientists appeared on the newspaper Giornale d’Italia - “Fascism and the problem of race.” This document became the
programmatic manifesto of the state ideology about race. Four major points constituted its
backbone: 1. The objective, biological existence of different races; 2. The superiority of the pure
Italian race; 3. The right for Italians to be openly racist; 4. The problem of the Jewish
community, composed of non-European elements which could not be assimilated into the
Catholic framework. The manifesto in itself did not launch a crusade against blacks, but the
ideological structure of its reasoning was easily translatable from the Jewish community to any
other group. First and foremost, the myth of a pure Italian race closed the door to any possible policy of integration and/or assimilation of black people arriving from the colonies. Moreover, stressing that the problem of the Jewish community was its non-European heritage, blacks lost any chance to be looked at as proper citizens.
67 Fabre, Giorgio. Mussolini razzista. Dal Socialismo al Fascismo: La formazione di un antisemita . Milano: Garzanti, 2005, 157. 68 Ibid., 275.
70
Historic Forgetfulness
The psychological phenomenon of collective “historic forgetfulness” consists of a complex
nature rooted in the political milieu I discussed above and extending into the post-World War II period. It finds justification in the reconstruction period of the early nineteen fifties and the logic of the Cold War. At the time, the Allied Forces did not wish to completely wipe out the former fascist establishment from the public sphere. The American strategy was to reinstate many moderate fascist leaders in positions of power in order to balance off a possible leftist swing in the new democratic government and contain the spread of the Red Scare in Italy. 69 The resistance movement, which was fundamental to free the North from the Nazi-Fascist control, had a strong socialist and communist constituency. 70 The US administration could not allow for the new government, led by the Christian Democratic Party, to give too much operational space to the
Communist party. Former fascists found a second life not only in policy-making but also in universities and media. Their presence silenced a genuine self-critical analysis of Fascism from the start. 71
69 Palumbo, Michael. The British-American Cover-Up of Italian War Criminals . Unpublished report present in the archive of the Central Library of Rome.
70 In an article that appeared in the magazine Epoca , on January 27 1988, Fiammetta Nirenstein points out that right- wing parties were not the only ones to express the desire to cover-up Italian war crimes. The pacification policy led by Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Communist Party, also aimed to transform Italy from Mussolini’s country into the glorious nation of the Resistance against the Nazi-Fascist regime. Moreover, the silence over war crimes against the Jews and the people in the colonies was also useful to avoid a critical analysis of the real responsibilities of the Resistance fighters in the killings of many Italians who had kept faith in the fascist black shirts until the end of the war. Both Right and Left needed a general audience able and willing to forget. See: Pavone, Claudio. Una guerra civile: Saggio storico sulla moralità della Resistenza . Torino: Bollati Boringheri, 1991.
71 Del Boca, Angelo. L’Africa nella coscienza deli italiani: Miti, memorie, errori, sconfitte . Milano: Mondatori, 2002, 115. Also, Giorgio Rochet shares a sharp judgment against the Ministry’s enterprise. See: Rochet, Giorgio. “Colonialismo.” Storia d’Italia I . Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1974.
71 In 1952, for example, the Foreign Affairs Ministry launched the publication of fifty volumes entitled Italia in Africa (Italy in Africa). The alleged goal of the collection was to provide an exhaustive analysis of the colonial presence in Eastern and Northern Africa. Fifteen out of the twenty four members of the Scientific Committee of the Ministry were former colonial administrators, and all the others were Africanists who had highly praised the Italian intervention in Africa. Far from being an objective study of the relationships with the black continent, Italia in
Africa came to be “il piu’ colossale e dispendioso sforzo di mistificazione” (the most colossal and expensive attempt to mystify) the colonial history and its legacies. 72 Not one of the 500,000
Italians who participated to the Ethiopian war has ever been arrested or put on trial.
The formation of the post-war cultural atmosphere suffered from the ghosts of guilt and shame inherited from the past. Leftist intellectuals and political leaders had to pay the price for mistakes that their predecessors had committed. They were caught in a sort of intellectual repentance, because the Socialist Party, in which Mussolini had begun his career, had never fully distanced itself from national imperialism. Socialists accused the liberal governments of Depretis and Crispi of engaging in expensive colonial enterprises that were economically unsound, but never condemned colonialism tout court . Giacomo Matteotti, the only Party leader who had the courage to openly criticize the actions of the rising star of Mussolini, was murdered. Up to World
War II, the Italian left seemed unable to take an ideological stand against imperialism.
This historic guilt haunts liberal and leftist intellectuals in contemporary debates over migration. The economic reasoning, the logic of profit and the market ruled over any other form of humanitarian approach, and is still today the master framework of discussion of the topic.
72 Cited in: Briani, Vittorio. Il lavoro italiano in Africa . Roma: Tipografia del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 1980.
72 Accordingly, Italy needs migrants to feed the work force for the industrial system of the North and the field work in the South. National economic interests reduce immigrants to a homo economicus figure, and their market value becomes the paradigm for which they should be accepted within national borders. With the progressive decolonization of Africa, this repeutant attitude gave birth to a general Third World-ism policy connoted by a sharp populist character often devoid of true capacity of intervention. 73 This was the intellectual atmosphere in the circles that produced critical readings of the national past and its culture of racialization.
My discussion of “historic forgetfulness” opens up the question of memory as a selective act which involves personal experiences as much as collective modes of interpretation. Between
1935 and 1941, one million Italians went to Eastern Africa. Many were young men on their first trip outside of their region or city. The fascist regime sold them the colonial experience as a mysterious, fascinating journey, building it, to a large extent, on the nineteenth century narrations of the first scientific and religious missions to the black continent. Fascist rhetoric constituted the framework that accompanied Italians when they occupied East Africa and encountered black people, and within which each colonizer placed his/her own modality of selective remembering and forgetting. Men of adult age constituted a large part of the army. Likewise, many intellectuals proudly participated to the war campaign, having a less naive approach to their involvement in the construction of an overseas empire. Then of course, many were peasants coming from impoverished rural areas to whom the regime had promised fertile lands to improve their socio- economic status. Mario Isnenghi claims that “historic forgetfulness” was due specifically to a collective need to process the loss of the African dream. Very soon the encounter between Italian
73 On this see: Carrilho, Maria. Sociologia della Negritudine , Napoli: Liguori Editore, 1974.
73 colonizers and the black continent revealed its true nature. Whereas the government had promised wealth, colonizers faced desert areas and diseases. The fascist regime constructed
Africa as the somewhere else, the adventurous and exotic challenge, the frontier to be conquered and domesticated. With the end of the war and the decolonization process, thousands of Italians who had invested everything in their across-the-sea lives had to return to their homeland with little or no reparations. The forced repatriation stood as a social wound in the public consciousness and many had to process a sense of loss and betrayal. 74
Blackness in Post-World War II Italy
In1945, Italians were concerned with leaving the war memories behind, rebuilding the country, and taking advantage of the newly found economic support from the Anglo-Saxon allies. When the reconstruction period had ended, and the time could have been mature for a retroactive criticism, Italy was living within the real first economic boom since the beginning of the century.
The new myths of the average family were the television set, the Vespa and the washing machine. Consumerism took by storm a population that had long lived off the economic remissions coming from millions of migrants to the Americas and Europe. Increasing wealth worked against the need to understand and remember what responsibilities Italians had to their colonies.
The rush towards a post-World War II national healing process took the shape of a cultural refashioning of the Italian spirit, in the form of Benedetto Croce’s assertion that Italian
Fascism had not been born out of autochthonous roots, could not be compared to Nazism for its
74 Isnenghi, Mario. “Letteratura e colonialismo.” Materiali di lavoro. Rivista di studi storici . 2-3/1991 – 1/1992. Rovereto: Editrice La Grafica, 177-134. See also: Gillette, Aaron. Racial Theories in Fascist Italy . London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
74 historic guilt, and could not be used as the symptom of national racism. 75 According to Giorgio
Fabre, much of Marxist historiography has to be blamed for this misconception, due to the
impossibility for Marxist scholars, such as Renzo De Felice, to abandon the idea of history as
moved by a class-based tension and to perceive politics as a race-based phenomenon. Early
leftists scholars in Italy failed in becoming the critical voice of post-war culture, and embodied
an implicit complacency with post-colonial structures of racialization. 76 The alleged inability for
Italians to be racist should explain the pendulum-like movement of blackness within the
country’s social consciousness: its emergence as a morbid topic of fascination at the turn of the
19 th century; its pathologization during the twenty years of fascist regime; its disappearance in
the aftermath of the war; and then its slow resurfacing starting from the late nineteen seventies.
Methodologically, invisible racism is a useful analytical tool to understand the reasons why Italy
came so late in promulgating an immigration law that would replace the 1931 fascist law. It was
only in 1986 (law 943, 30 December 1986) that the Parliament discussed a serious legislative
proposal. By then, the country’s migratory history and its human landscape, to borrow Sharon
Zukin’s term, 77 had changed drastically. Politicians were only trying to cope with a legislative
gap, which gave the media a further motivation to embark on the emergency crusade against
immigrants. As David Ward points out
“summed up in the expression ‘Fortress Europe’, government and European Community immigration policies are a striking example of the refusal to recognize the racism that is latent within European societies. It was only after serious outbursts of racist violence in several countries that
75 Croce, Benedetto. Pagine politiche: Luglio-dicembre 1944 . Bari: Laterza, 1944.
76 Fabre, Giorgio. Mussolini razzista. Dal Socialismo al Fascismo: La formazione di un antisemita . Milano: Garzanti, 2005, 57. 77 Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World . Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991.
75 European governments began to tighten up their immigration laws and restrict the rights of immigrants or asylum seekers to cross their borders and establish residence. The implicit effect of this policy was to see cause of the violence not in the European racists, neo-Nazi, and thugs, but in the immigrants themselves. From victims of racist violence, immigrants found themselves as its cause”.78
Including in his discussion a wide post-colonial critique of European Community policies, Ward hits the target very poignantly. In the late nineteen seventies, Italian public consciousness rediscovered the presence of blacks in the country in times of economic recession, internal social unrest and inner-city violence caused by a minority of immigrants. All the dormant tropes of blackness resurrected: the idea of Italians as genuine victims of a barbarian invasion; the black body as a site of danger and fear, carrier of social or physical diseases; the clash between purity of the Italian spirit and the polluted and polluting Other. This awakening caused an acute tension within the country because somehow no one really seemed to possess the right instruments to decode and analyze the immigration phenomenon. Should one manage, control, or shape it?
Block the immigrants from landing? Send them back home? Keep only the useful ones? How to discern one from the other?
What I would like to point out here, as a consequence of “historic forgetfulness,” is the fact that racist and anti-racist groups alike lacked the ability to intervene with proper analytical tools, instead using ideology and indoctrination as methodological practices. The lack of serious critical thinking on the convoluted and painful intersection between Fascism and the Resistance movement brought right-wing conservative groups to appropriate the values of the Resistance itself. The right’s political positioning defined the war against Nazi-Fascism as a national war of liberation, and its advocates ideologically legitimated restrictive immigration laws under the
78 Ward, David. “ ‘Italy? In Italy: Old Metaphors and New Racism in the 1990s.” Revisioning Italy. National Identity 76 rubric of a second war of liberation from foreign invaders. They deliberately passed onto silence
two facts: the first is that the Resistance fighters were inspired by a leftist agenda, and fought a
civil war against fascists as much as one of liberation against Germans; the second is that
immigrants were and are a pervasive connective tissue of the Italian public sphere and nothing
had to do with military occupation. The impossibility of using the discourse of biological
inferiority, which in the nineteen twenties and thirties sufficed to justify the regime’s colonial
and racist policies, forced contemporary anti-immigrant organizations to find their own
sanctification in the historic revisionism of the Resistance ideology. This implicitly racist
discourse stigmatizes difference for bearing unwanted tensions within the national compound
and for creating spaces of highly contested hybrid exchanges which are not easily classifiable and
therefore produce panic and anxieties.
At the same time, anti-racist groups suffered from one of two diseases that David Ward
defines as “psychoanalytic racism” and “easy anti-racism”: “While the former tends to exorcize
the racist and transform racism into a question of sickness, madness, or ignorance, the latter - in
the manner of Benetton clothes, Mulino Bianco cookies, Barilla pasta, and Philadelphia cheese
advertizing campaigns - tends to see the anti-racist struggle as a twenty-four hour multicultural
party and completely ignores [...] inequities of power, command, privilege, and language.” 79 This
superficial multicultural veil created a safe virtual space of commodity, a make-believe trick of
inter-, cross-, trans-, multicultural coexistence that allows Italians to enjoy the on-screen perfect
world and to ignore black vendors on the streets. Fault lines between the imagined and the real
marked the territory of racial relations in the country’s identity politics that still aspires to a
and Global Culture . Beverly Allen and Mary Russo eds. Minneapoli and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997, 88. 79 Ibid., 88-91. 77 monolithic cultural origin. Surface multicultural makeovers confuted the presumption that gaining more visibility is the key to a community’s step towards integration and social acceptance. There is no necessary political empowerment in being represented, transformed into commodities, or used as product-selling tropes. The image of the black person in advertisement campaigns, movies and so on does not erase the marginality that he lives in the streets.
To paraphrase Peggy Phelan, reading physical resemblance is not a way of identifying community. 80 With this reasoning, the presupposition on which gaining access to visibility is built contains an original sin. Both progressives and conservatives believe that “representations can be treated as ‘real truths’ [...] Both sides believe that greater visibility of the hitherto under- represented leads to enhanced political power.” 81 Visibility, which the scholar equates with a phallocentric regime of fetishization of the Other, is the armed hand of neoliberal and capitalistic needs for new consumers and markets. To see something fashioned in a glamorous style is to desire it; and desire moves the focus of the consumer’s attention from the presence of the Other to the fetish of the Other, whether it is ethnic clothing, hairstyles or exotic traveling. The human being disappears behind the product. Black immigrants cannot live up to the coolest drink as refreshing as the breeze of an exotic island, or to the fascination for the latest trendy vacation spot, with ethnically attired workers serving coconut milk by the ocean to white clients.
The psychological reaction to the newly re-discovered black presence was due to interrelated national and international factors. First and foremost, in 1973 the oil crisis changed the immigration policies of many European countries for good. Facing the danger of economic
80 Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked. The Politics of Performance . London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 7.
81 Ibid., 2. 78 recession, France, Germany and Great Britain decided to limit access to their territory, notwithstanding the fact that they had been historically more receptive than other Euopean countries to post-colonial migration waves. Restrictive laws did not stop people from moving; they forced them to do so within the interstices of illegality. Immigrants started gravitating towards the more easily accessible Southern European countries, often using them as a bridge towards Central and Northern Europe. Italy became an immigration site right at the conjuncture between the international economic crisis and the beginning of a period of internal sociopoliticalal unrest which gave way to the so called anni di piombo (led years) - the decade up to the early nineteen eighties of political assassinations and terrorism which almost brought the country to the verge of civil war.
Two other phenomena aggravated the acceptance policy of black Africans: the migratory experience that Italians had accumulated in the past, and the problem of the North-South split. I define the former as an unconscious reaction to the hardships that national migrants had to face when they moved in great numbers to the Americas and North Europe. In 1891, speaking of
Italian immigrants to the United States, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge declared that “Italians are migratory birds. They are not interested in becoming American citizens. Their goal is to accumulate, through a rigid and dangerous economy, a sum of money and go back home. They live as beasts in miserable conditions. What they eat is so repulsive that any American worker would be nauseated by it.” 82 Italians see their own blackness in this description and see themselves looking at African immigrants to Italy today, projecting onto them exactly the same
82 Cited in: Giadresco, Gianni. Dai magliari ai vu’ cumprà . Soneria Mannelli: Rubettino Editore, 1998, 23. I believe Italia cuisine has come a long way from being considered repulsive in the United States.
79 short migratory plan, sub-human living conditions, rejection for their odors and tastes. Italians
were labelled tano in Argentina, macaroni in Germany, guido in the USA. The practice of
naming follows a snowball effect, passing from the subaltern to the dominant to complicate the
notions of victimizer and victimized who both share degrees of compliance with the same
structures of stereotyping. When the Other is the same, it rarely creates community. 83 The Other
has to stay as such, different and corrosive in its un-attainability.
The internal geopolitical unbalance of the North-South split further complicated the
problem. Since its unification Italy has had two economies - the rampant industrialization of the
North, and the slower agricultural development of the South. The former has lived under the
major cultural influence of the Austro-Hungarian, later pan-European, sphere with centers such
as Milano and Torino. The latter has undisputable Mediterranean roots in what used to be the
Reign of Two Sicilies. What is of most importance to my discussion here, is that the two cultural
spheres have always conceived their people as ethnically different. 84 From the early nineteen
fifties, southerners were the blacks of Italy, the working immigrants, backward, smelly, and
uncultured, who invaded the North in search for jobs. 85 They were once again same and Other,
83 In Tristes Tropiques , Lévi-Strauss writes about his uncomfortable feeling while traveling in Islamic countries because he noted too many similarities with western culture. He re-found in those places his own universe and defined Islam as the West of the East. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques . John Russell trans. New York: Atheneum, 1965.
84 This is an oversimplification of a much more stratified national identity composed by the sense of belonging to the Comuni (city-state) of medieval age inheritance, which conflicts with the multiple foreign invasions that have left different socio-cultural and linguistic traces in each region.
85 In his problematic book on Africa in the visual imaginary, photo journalist Paolo Veronese says that Africans are the Neapolitans of the black continent because they are able to enact techniques of making-do that allow them to live in conditions under which any white European would not survive more than one day. Such claim reproduces the equation Southerners = blacks (Southerners as blacks but blacks as never fully Italians) enacting, I believe, a double racism which feeds off the most simplistic reduction ad unum of stereotyping. Veronese, Paolo. Africa: Reportages . Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1999.
80 equal and different: linguistically, physically and morally. In the late nineteen eighties, the consistent appearance on the horizon of a darker “enemy,” whose religious and linguistic structures could not harmonize with Catholicism and whiteness, turned Southerners into full- fledged Italians. This shift happened in a few years and carried with it a complex identity issue of self-recognition. Internal racism reached an emergency escape, the possibility to be projected onto those who are invisible in social terms but clearly visible as objects of violence and fear.
Here, I feel indebted to Dwight Conquergood’s theory of the paradox for which Chicago gang members have either too little visibility, young lost souls whose social costs outnumber any possibility of redemption, or too much visibility, constantly vexed by policemen and put under a
Panopticon-like system of control and punishment. In both cases, there is an unbalanced attitude that questions the right of these young boys to exist in any public space. Likewise, the white gaze can very easily erase African immigrants, or greet them with annoyed stares on sidewalks crowded with fake Gucci handbags and wooden giraffes, 86 while the police system constantly monitors them and equates blackness with illegality and crime. There is nothing objective in the ethnicity discourse, which is not to say that ethnic differences do not exist. The racial problem always activates a notion of contiguity, bringing ethnicity to a symbolic level of tension between spatially and socially similar groups.
Stereotyping Blackness in Popular Culture
Now that I have set the stage, in the second part of this chapter I wish to analyze how tropes of blackness surfaced in Italian popular culture of the 20 th century, and how the 1993 production by
86 For a few days in mid-September 2006, local newspapers in Rome reported the news that a number of tourists in central Piazza Navona were unable to take pictures of the famous fountain by Bernini because of too many street vendors. When the tourists asked them to remove their stuff, the vendors refused to comply. The police was called and the picture finally taken. In instances such as this, the white gaze acknowledges the Other only as a disturbance 81 Teatro delle Albe I ventidue infortuni di Mor Arlecchino unveils such tropes through parody and
the re-invention of tradition.
I argue that “historic forgetfulness” was also the result of stereotyping that had been in
place since the fascist period. As I mentioned earlier, Benedetto Croce helped to perpetuate the
myth of a humane Italian colonialism, very different from the racist forms of abuse implemented
by other European countries in their colonies. 87 Italiani brava gente (good-hearted Italians) became the phrase with which the colonizers produced a powerful and consistent self- representation of fatherly care, goodness and tolerance towards the colonized. As latecomers in the colonial rush, Italians perhaps had fewer chances to create a rational system of exploitation as the French or English regimes had done before. Nonetheless, they also fought the war of conquest without much civility, with tortures, rapes, and bombing the enemy with poisonous gas. 88 Still, the notion of italiani brava gente carried on in the postwar era suggesting that after all Italian colonialism had a real humanitarian intention, inclined towards the development of the
African regions.
The Italiani brava gente trope hid an erotic background. Many folkloric tunes of the time hint at the sexualization of black women. The erotic black woman was one of a fixed number of stereotypes about femininity which constantly appeared in Fascist songs: the blond girlfriend
in its entertaining plan of image consumption.
87 Robert Michels defined the Italian intervention “poor people-style Imperialism. Soviet Union leader Lenin spoke of “ straccione imperialism” (miserable imperialism).
88 The current heated debate on the use of poisonous gases, which many former military leaders and right-wing politicians still negate, exemplifies the difficulty to conduct a mature dialogue over the war in Africa. Indro Montanelli, one of the most respected Italian journalists, always defended the participation of Italians, including himself, to the Ethiopian campaign. From the pages of the newspaper Il Giornale , Montanelli repeated that Italians never used gas weapons during the war, respecting the human rights of the Ethiopian people.
82 waiving goodbye to his soldier who leaves at war; the mother as reproductive machine of fascist
values and as Mother Land; and the prostitute lover who alleviates the pain of all the young men
fighting away from home. 89 Tripoli bel suol d’amore (Tripoli, beautiful land of love) praised the iconic romanticism of love-making under the desert’s starry sky, while Faccetta near (Little black
face) became a generational anthem stressing the missionary role of the Italian colonial army as
freedom and enlightenment bearers. A catchy tune, with a march-like rhythm, sung of a nostalgic
black woman waiting for Italian soldiers to arrive by sea, free her, and bring her to Rome where
she could finally become a true fascist. How this could be possible against the backdrop of fascist
laws that made intermarriage illegal is a question that digs into the inconsistent rhetoric of the
regime in terms of racial and gender crossings. Considering that most of the songs were meant to
accompany the army during overseas campaigns, they focused primarily on the image of the
hyper-masculine Italian man whose strength, sexual power and courage terrorize the male
enemies and fascinate their women. In the following years, the Minculpop (Popular Culture
Bureau) censored the song because it implicitly contained the invitation of a mixed union
between the Italian soldier and the black Abyssinian woman. From 1938, this kind of
relationships, at first looked upon as an example of real Italian masculinity, became inopportune
in time of racial conflicts during the war.
Following Umberto Eco’s theorization, I argue that one of the core elements of a mass culture production is to entertain the audience without revealing anything new. Rather the opposite: its goal is to reiterate what we already know and that which alone amuses us. When
89 See: Cavallo, Pietro and Pasquale, Iaccio. Vincere! Fascismo e società italiana nelle canzoni e nelle riviste di Varietà (1935-1943) . Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2003.
83 repetition happens systemically and systematically, the formula replaces the form. 90 Fascist
entertainment, from radio to live performances, had a diversionary role which increasingly aimed
at the indoctrination of the masses when World War II approached. Parody, for example, was
very common. Song writers would change the lyrics of a famous song so that the new version
would talk about the Italian experience in the colonies, obviously poking fun at European
competitors or enemies such as the Negus Hailé Selassé. Entertainment and state ideology got
married under the easy-listen swing of the truest Italian rhythms.
The italiani brava gente stereotype is not the only one that persisted over time. The
notion of the vu’ cumprá has also crossed the years, even though in a totally different context.
The first literary use of the expression appears in a poem by Neapolitan poet Raffaele Viviani in
1925, O’ tripolino (The man in Tripoli). The text narrates the hardship of the life of a man from
Napoli who migrated to Tripoli to sell clothes and other little handmade objects on the street. In
those years, thousands of Italians from the depressed South, but also from Veneto or Liguria, had
to leave their homeland to look for fortune abroad, which inspired much of the nostalgic and
melodramatic tones of the artistic production of the time. For example, the song Lacrime
napulitane (Neapolitan tears) emphasizes the psychological stress of Southern migrants working
in the US, whose nostalgia for their family and beautiful homeland gave to every bite of bread
they eat the sour, bitter taste of tears and sadness. The vu’ cumprá in Viviani’s poem is only one of the many incarnations of migrants in Italian performance. The expression found linguistic fortune decades after the nineteen twenties. When African migrants moving to Italy replaced
Italian emigrants, choosing a life of street vending abroad, then autochthonous people attached
90 Eco, Umberto. Apocalittici e integrati . Milano: RCS, 1994.
84 the vu’ cumprá stereotype to black vendors as a second skin. The appellative was a projection, from the national collections of multiple identities, of a self-imposed marker onto foreigners. A social type, built on selling and buying, linked the personal experience of Italian fathers and grandfathers to the presence of African migrants in the peninsula. As such, the vu’ cumprá
belonged to a form of popular historic memory, and did not have in and of itself a racist,
pejorative meaning. It acquired an offensive connotations when, starting in the nineteen eighties,
the number of African street vendors from Morocco and Senegal increased vertiginously, and the
media fomented a public opinion’s shift towards the dangers and social annoyance deriving form
vu’ cumprá . The term lost its literary and autochthonous origin. Along with marocchino
(Moroccan), an umbrella term identifying any African migrant, vu’ cumprá came to encompass
all sorts of social negative markers: the inability to speak proper Italian (from the grammatically
correct invitation to buy a product - vuoi comprare - to its distortion); the lack of desire to find
stability within the host society; the reproduction of models of intellectual and cultural
backwardness; the alleged criminal milieu in which street vendors choose to live. 91
The shades of blackness that troubled the fascist regime did not exclusively arrive from
Africa. Since the nineteen thirties, jazz music had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. At first, the
separation between lovers of the fast-paced foreign sounds and defenders of a pure Italian melody
followed a generational gap. Traditionalists attacked jazz for being a Negro music, example of a
corrupted and decadent society. Even calling it music seemed inappropriate; rather, it was noise.
According to its detractors, jazz lyrics were not in English but in a Negro-American idiom which
invited to lust and perdition. In 1938, the regime launched an autarchic campaign to ban anything
91 For a discussion on the permanence of colonial tropes about blackness, see: Barrera, Giulia. A Place in the Sun. Africa in Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present . Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 85 foreigner from the Italian soil: music, movies, words of common usage, names. On the pages of the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia , it became more and more common to read negative judgments such as “American rhythms are a reproduction of wild Negro dances, horrific cacophonies attributable to savage people.”92 Then in 1942, selling and buying American records became illegal. “Not banning this hysterical-Negro music, which fatally penetrates into everybody’s pores and permeates our sensibility and spirit, would be an act of betrayal.” 93 Musical harmony and national spirit were one and the same. A pure race deserved to defend pure national sounds, whose list included mazurka and tango. The fascist administration overlooked the fact that the former was a Polish dance and the latter constituted the pillar of Argentinean music and feeling, and that they both had been originated by means of hybridization from different sources. So much for the purity myth!
In the early post-World War II era, blackness disappeared from the public domain and collective worries to withdraw to the level of folklore: swing music and lascivious dances imported by the American allied forces; sexual encounters among black soldiers and Italian girls.
Once again, music is the most useful performance medium to analyze social changes.
Tammurriata Nera (Black Tammurriata) 94 is an ironic song still widely known nowadays. It narrates the incident of a baby born in Napoli by an unmarried Italian woman. The baby belongs
92 “I ritmi americani sono riproduzioni di balli negri e selvaggi, orrende cacofonie degne dei popoli primitivi.” Il Popolo d’Italia , March 8, 1938.
93 “Non porre al bando queste musiche isterico-negroidi, che per essere purtroppo musica penetrano fatalmente potrebbe dirsi nei pori di tutti fino a permearne la sensibilitá ed anche lo spirito, sarebbe tradimento.” Il Giornale d’Italia , January 8, 1942.
94 Tammurriata is a traditional dance from Southern Italy so called because its rhythm primarily comes from the tammorra , a disk-like percussion made of wood and leather. Women used to perform tammurriata during religious rituals, as acts of devotion and invocation, or in festivities linked to the lunar calendar and the fieldwork.
86 to the category of figli della colpa (children born out of wedlock) whose dark skin accentuates his mother’s guilt. Yet, despite his obvious mixed race, his mother decides to call him Ciro, a quintessentially Neapolitan name for boys. The un-matching relation between the kid’s name and his skin color creates an unusual identity that is fertile soil for parody and social stigmatization.
The euphoria that followed the end of the war, and the need to obtain rare goods that only
American troops possessed and distributed, turned objectively into a baby-boom phenomenon of mixed origins. The figli della colpa , born since the very first day of the Italian colonial enterprise, were usually the fruit of a white man and a black woman. Now, not only did the births happen on national soil but the two terms for the couple were inverted. The female body was a scared space, a product of fascist and Catholic indoctrination who bore life along with all the pure values that constituted the essence of Italianness. The proper fascist woman was “Faithful companion to the colonizer and keeper of the most sacred and genuine tradition of the race.” 95
Songs like Tammurriata Nera had an exorcizing power, releasing through laughter that which
was a national and cultural emergency.
Cinema also lived under the fascination of the dark continent, immortalizing into the
visual the same images popularized by exploration diaries that had become popular since the
eighteen seventies. From the nineteen twenties on, Italian film makers produced a number of
documentaries and movies which very often tried to combine fiction and anthropological study.
The black body and the African landscape were the object of a collective scopophilia that worked similarly to the fascination for the exotic displayed at the Universal Expositions on both sides of
95 “Compagna fedele del colonizzatore e custode delle piú sacre e genuine tradizioni della stirpe.” From: Altini, Giuseppe. “Una piaga sociale: Il meticciato.” Opuscolo di propaganda coloniale del G.U.F. di Forlì . Forlì: Stabilimento Tipografico Pietro Valbonesi, 1939. On the topis, see also: de Grazia, Vittoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922-1945 . Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1992. 87 the Atlantic Ocean. Women performed a delirium that mixed exoticism and eroticism while men
embodied the virile fighter trope. The movies and news reports by Istituto Luce , the national
broadcasting and production company, were the opening act of variety shows and films, and
served disparate ends. They obviously strengthened audience indoctrination, showing the central
role played by colonial Italians in building infrastructures and harmonious relationships between
colonizers and colonized. The vigorous Italian workers would inspire the lazy locals to put
themselves towork and build houses or railroads; and in the well deserved breaks soldiers would
teach them how to play soccer. Images also created a sense of familiarity with the far away
African landscapes. The regime taught Italians to perceive Africa as a natural extension of their
motherland. The point of view of the Libyans or Abyssinians never appeared on screen. Movie
makers concentrated on folklore, bizarre cultural behaviors, stressing the backwardness of local
health or school systems prior to the colonizers’ arrival. In fiction, Africa was never really a
place, but rather the somewhere else where the colonial dream balanced all the tensions existing
within the nation. This somewhere else trope resisted through time, so that many movies
produced up to the nineteen nineties still used the desert landscape of the black continent in an
exotic fashion, as the place of a primordial revelation for the white man, the place of origin, the
place of escape. 96
In his critical essay on race in movies “White,” Richard Dyer assesses that on screen
white is always normal, devoid of any meaning, while black pertains to difference, Other, and has
96 The studies on fascist cinema and songs that I was able to locate seem to share a common limit. They tend to focus on the relationship between the media and fascism in terms of power relation and consensus building. Unfortunately, they hardly ever look at how Africans were represented and constructed as a monolithic category. See for example: Savona, V., Straniero. Canti dell’Italia fascista . Milano, 1979; Brunetta, Gian Piero and Jean A., Gill. “L’ora d’Africa del Cinema Italiano”. Trento: Materiali di lavoro , 1990; Cavallo, Pietro and Pasquale Iaccio. Vincere! Fascismo e societá italiana nelle canzoni e nelle riviste di Varietá (1935 - 1943) . Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2003. 88 historical and geopolitical limitations. 97 The conundrum of that which is visible vs. invisible,
marked vs. unmarked puts into dialogical tensions issues of political power, agency, and
representation. 98 Racial relations connote discontinuity between that which is the norm and that
which is deviant. Inequality stems from value judgments that depend upon structures of power
embedded in social consciousness and ideology-building processes. The fascist projection of
national sociopoliticalal necessities onto blackness demonstrates that racial encounters exist as a
mediation between the real and the imagined, where the latter is already a construction or a
translation of stereotypes and utilitarian inventions. The moving image of film was a way of
reworking visual stereotypes that Europeans had attached to black bodies since the beginning of
commercial advertisement .99
Strikingly, visual artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered a
different perspective on blackness. The three most common tropes of blackness were: the
emancipated slave of the Antilles and the Americas; the savage African; the civilized butler at the
97 Dyer, Richard. “White.” Screen . 20,4 (Fall 1988): 44-64.
98 Here I think of the multidisciplinary discourse with which many scholars approach the issue from merging perspectives. Along with the above-mentioned study by Peggy Phelan, see: Manning, Susan. Modern Dance Negro Dance: Race in Motion . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004; Conquergood, Dwight. “Life in Big Red: Struggles and Accommodations in a Chicago Polyethnic Tenement.” Structuring Diversity . Louise Lamphere ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994: 95-144; Butler, Judith. “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe and Discursive Excess.” Feminism and Pornography . Ed. Drucilla Cornell. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
99 In Renaissance Italy, the heuristic encounter with the Other came out of a stratified tradition merging Aristotelian theories about the marvelous, in which imagination precedes actual knowledge, and classic and Christian approaches to the unknown. Proof of this would be that the portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, first Duke of Florence from 1529 to 1537, shows very clearly that he was the son of a member of the powerful Florentine family and a black woman, making visible his physical features that marked him the progeny of a métissage . Likewise, Mantegna felt free to paint a black female figure along with white ladies in the fresco of the cupola of Mantua’s Communal Palace. Both examples were signs of exquisiteness and distinction that accompanied artistic representations of blackness.On the topic of imagination and wonder in the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans, from which I borrowed this analysis, see: Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991; Todorov, Tsvetan. The Conquest of America. The Question of the Other . Richard Howard trans. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 89 service of Europeans. Analyzing hundreds of advertisement campaigns, from hand painted
postcards to contemporary photographic representations, Raymond Bachollet individuates a
temporal continuum in which blackness seems immutable within a certain European sensibility.
Advertisement dehumanized blacks and reduced them to the role of product-selling tropes. Both when white figures are present in the visual representation, or when whites are simply imagined as potential buyers, blacks always appear as secondary or utilitarian elements. The graphic sign very often parodies blackness by emphasizing a physical element (exaggerated lips or noses), juxtaposing the dark black bare-footed body with immaculate European-style clothes, placing
Africans in their “natural” setting of banana trees and coffee beans. Black bodies do not transude flesh and blood, but rather volumetric geometries that often deform their physical features, by the act of enlarging or substituting them with the advertised goods. Capturing a double psychological reaction of attraction towards that which is exotic and repulsion for that which is abnormal, physical deformity also embodies moral depravation.
In Italian advertising campaigns, the fascist regime used very keenly the tension between
morbid fascination and denial “to create a classless consumer - one who would identify his or her
needs with a national economy rather than with a class-affiliated commodity culture.” 100 The need to overcome the Marxist vision of history passed through the debacle of a class-based social contrast and the pseudo creation of an enlarged middle class that would absorb the proletariat and the rulers into a unified fight for national interests. The ethnic Other was the expiatory goat on which the regime projected its expectations for the formation of an Italian empire and anxieties
100 Pinkus, Karen. “Shades of Black in Advertizing and Popular Culture.” Revisioning Italy. National Identity and Global Culture . Beverly, Allen and Mary, Russo eds. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997, 135.
90 for the presence of cultural differences that needed to be kept under control. The discovery of the black body in visual art and advertisement went hand in hand with the model of Africa as a feminized, virginal continent onto which the average provincial Italian could project all his thirst for discovery and fear of the unknown.
When photography became predominant in advertisement in the nineteen sixties, constructed realism substituted parody. Nevertheless, lips, noses, sexed bodies and bananas did not disappear from the picture. Advertisement reached out to the audience with an immediate, clear, and simple act of communication. It excluded the possibility of any hybridization; it rather represented race in a very codified and easily accessible fashion. Blacks were servants: slaves, porters, or handymen. Blacks were a synecdoche for the product they advertised - chocolate or coffee - because they belonged to each other intrinsically. Blacks were the opposite of what is straight, clean and right, as when they were used to advertise soap and cleaners to wash away the dirt from their own bodies. Blacks were a part for the whole: a huge smile, big dancing feet, sexy colored skin. 101 When blacks acquired the status of consumers in the nineteen seventies and eighties, advertisement rarely produced a change in racial representation. Multiculturalism entered the field as a superficial strategy to sell products to brand new consumers, which will happen again in the nineteen nineties with gays and lesbians, but it never seemed feasible that whites would be able to identify with black testimonials. Bachollet, for example, emphasizes how the trope of the Negro head embodies this uncanny continuity: an abstract, a-sexual, grotesque, mask-like monstrosity which exorcizes difference. Only with the start of the Black
101 Bachollet, Raymond. Negripub. L’immagine dei neri nella pubblicitá . Torino: Edizioni Gruppo Abele, 1997. On the black body and its representations, see also: Diane, Roberts. The Myth of Aunt Jemina: representations of Race and Regions . London and Lousiville: Routledge, 1994.
91 Panther political movement and with the Negritude philosophical claim that black is beautiful,
the Negro head became a sign of resistance and suffering. At the same time, it contains a non-
human allure because God created human beings to his liking and blackness cannot represent
divinity, rather the opposite. The mask has turned into a simulacrum, 102 or, some may argue, into a Europeanized version of the black body in mass culture production to the extent that “blackness has been co-opted by a new youth - oriented target for which being in fashion also means having some relations [...] with issues of world peace, the environment, and multiculturalism.”103 From the nineteen twenties into the nineteen nineties, this visual continuity represented a dangerous permanence of racial constructions within the business-oriented common sense of European consumers. Nothing new under the sun. 104
I ventidue infortuni di Mor Arlecchino – Parody and the Performance of Migration
Teatro delle Albe’s 1993 production I ventidue infortuni di Mor Arlecchino reworked the
plethora of stereotyped tropes of blackness into a theatrical game that hinted both at the stock
102 For a discussion of blackness and simulacra, see: Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies . New York: Routledge, 1994; Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance . Philip Beitchman trans. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991; Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation . Sheila Faria Glaser trans. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.
103 Pinkus, cited work, 148-149.
104 Such continuum finds its roots in a long history of fetishization of the Other. The overtly sexed black body traces back to a medieval Catholic culture which associated all sorts of moral and physical temptations to dark skin. Actually, it goes further back to ancient Rome. Iconographic and written material showed that upper-class Romans had a keen fascination for macrophallic blacks and for turbid stories of sexual encounters between citizens of the eternal city and black slaves. Yet, as Professor Lloyd Thompson demonstrates in his work Romans and Blacks , one could hardly say that ancient Romans were racist. “The written material on the whole suggests the absence (among the educated and leisured classes of Roman society) of a preoccupation with blacks as social objects. [...] It would seem that interest in blacks on the part of such persons depended on some personal connection with a given black (as personal servant or dependant), or was otherwise aroused only by some glamorous activity such as the achievements of a successful black performer in the circus or arena, or scandalous reports about the relations of black gigolos and prostitutes with sexual partners of high rank.” Romans may have not been racist, especially in consideration of the fact that the notion of race as a sociological category did not exists at the time, but Thompson’s analysis demonstrates that in ancient times much of the stereotyping about blacks was already at place: naturally born performers and sex machine. See: Thompson, Lloyd A. Romans and Blacks . London and Oklahoma: Routledge and 92 characters and familiar situations of the commedia dell’arte ,105 and at the discovery of strangely common yet oddly exotic performative traits between the Italianness of Arlecchino and the black body of the Senegalese actor Mor Awa Niang who interpreted him. 106 Mor Arlecchino embodied a wittily critical reading of the objectification of blackness through the redefinition of its significations into a modern commedia dell’arte-style comedy of errors. The play’s title immediately set the humorous complexity of the theatrical game, since Mor was both the real name of the leading actor and the Venetian word for Moro - umbrella term that used to indicate blacks, mostly Arabians, in 16 th century Venice. 107 This doubling effect is not an exceptional case in the writing of Marco Martinelli, whose core poetic speaks of mise en vie rather than mise en sc Pne . While the latter represents the canonic staging of a written text, by mise en vie
Martinelli means the synergetic co-presence, both in rehearsal and performance, of the script as it
was originally conceived and the life experience that actors bring into it. Therefore, Teatro delle
Albe always perform storie , an Italian word that has the double meaning of history and personal
Oklahoma UP, 1989, 6-7.
105 The bibliography on the commedia is endless. For a review of it aspects and the scholarly debate around it, see: Pietropaolo, Domenico ed. The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell’Arte . Toronto: Dovehouse Edition, 1989.
106 Comedy in three acts by Marco Martinelli. On stage: Pierangela Allegro, Luigi Dadina, Laurnet Dupon, Ermanna Montanari, Mandiaye N’Diaye, Mor Awa Niang. Live music by: El Hadji Niang, Michele Sambin. Lights and sound: Giancarlo Cottignoli, Enrico Isola. Set and costume design: Michele Sambin. Director: Michele Sambin. Production: Teatro delle Albe, Ravenna Teatro, Tam teatromusica. It opened in Ravenna, Teatro Rasi, on January 28, 1993.
107 In order to make my analysis clear, I will use Mor to talk of the character in the play, while I will call the actor by his last name Awa Niang. Also, when speaking of the commedia character, I will retain the Italian spelling Arlecchino. I base my reading of the play on the archival video containing selected scenes, which I watched at Teatro Rasi, and on the original script published by Marco Martinelli in Teatro Impuro . Ravenna: Danilo Montanari Editore, 1997. Martinelli adapted the script. The show was a co-production of Teatro delle Albe and Tam teatromusica. Therefore, Michele Sambin, founder of the latter, directed the play. The leading roles were equally divided among two Albe actors – Ermanna Montanari as the cross-dressed driver Spinetta, and Mor Awa Niang as Arlecchino – and two Tam actors – Pierangela Allegro as Angelica and Sapienza, and Laurent Dupont in the double role of Lelio and Dottore. Finally, two more Albe actors completed the cast: Luigi Dadina as Pantalone and Orazion, and Mandiaye N’Diaye as Scapino. 93 narrative, a past that is at once collective and individual. I will return to these concepts in more
depth in chapter two.
An eighteenth century Carlo Goldoni scenario inspired the play, which recounts “the
misfortunes of a contemporary Harlequin who, after two centuries, has been transformed from
the Bergamasque foreigner in Venice, into a Senegalese immigrant who has been forced to leave
his country in search of work, but who finds himself the poor, exploited stranger in a hostile
Milan full of thieves and oppressors.” 108 Mor appears on stage with many pieces of luggage. It is
his last night in Milan before he finally returns to Senegal for the first time since he migrated to
Italy. The suitcases contain gifts for his extended family; a hyperbolic list that includes clothes
and toys but also stereos, refrigerators and washing machines. Mor finds a hostel managed by
another fellow Senegalese immigrant, and hopes to get free hospitality for the evening. When
Scapino, the hotel owner, refuses to play by the rules of Muridic brotherhood and denies Mor
free room, the latter prefers to sleep outside rather than spend money. During the night, two
thieves steal all his gifts and cash. Left with nothing but his own resourcefulness he enters into
Pantalone’s service but his dream of returning home is crushed.
This synthetic plot description elucidates many elements of Martinelli’s parodic
intention. 109 His writing addresses migration from a historic perspective placing it in the context
of the genealogy of commedia dell’arte , and at the same time, forwarding the social reality made
108 Picarazzi, Teresa L. and Winley Feinstein eds. An African Harlequin in Milan. Marco Martinelli Performs Goldoni . West Lafayette: Bordighera, 1997, 1-6. the book is a collection of critical essays on the play and contains the English translation of the script.
109 I use the concept of parody theorized by Linda Hutcehon as a mode of representation of “repetition with critical distance […] Its range of intent is from respectful admiration to biting ridicule.” A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms . New York: Metheun. 1985, 1-29.
94 of multiple cross-national movements of contemporary African immigrants. The stock character
of Arlecchino had evolved in the sixteenth century into the poor servant from Bergamo, a rural
city, visiting Venice, the center of culture, elegance and luxury. He was a migrant himself,
speaking a foreign dialect, and for this reason he was the object of general grimaces and jokes. In
the sixteenth century, when Goldoni codified commedia dell’arte into the style that has been passed onto us by tradition, 110 the Italian peninsula was an assemblage of small states often unfriendly to each other. People could not communicate with inhabitants of neighboring states because they spoke as many languages as there were villages. This basic notion demystifies the mono-cultural ideology that stresses a homogeneous source of Italianness traceable back to ancient Rome.
Mor Arlecchino updates the original figure of the servant whose body and language excite laughter and whose history necessarily leads to misfortunes. However, Awa Niang’s black body is a site of a complex interaction in which issues of nationalism, race, responsibility and hegemony merge in a game of inversions. A black Arlecchino is the protagonist of previous works by Martinelli. In Siamo Asini o Pedanti? (1989) the second act contains a carnivalesque
sequence in which a masked character similar to Arlecchino persecutes the nightmares of an
unscrupulous man who buys young African girls from poor immigrant families. In Lunga vita
all’albero (1990) the Senegalese story teller wears a colorful dress and a white hat taken from
Arlecchino’s iconography. In I ventidue infortuni Martinelli brings the link between the
commedia dell’arte mask and Mor Awa Niang to its completion, and the Senegalese actor
becomes an explicit commentator, both on the theatrical tradition and on the immigrants’ social
110 Critics and scholars unanimously acknowledge that Goldoni reformed the commedia , turning it into a canon. See, for instance: Ortolani, Giuseppe. La riforma del Teatro nel Settecento e altri scritti . Venezia: Istituto per la 95 condition in Italy; his body performs as an inter-textual signifier within the play’s structure.
Critic Antonio Attisani described Awa Niang as:
Woyzeck in Buchner’s work, the apparition that radically interrogates a civilization, an abyss of diversity; that is what the mask of Arlecchino was in the history of theater. When Goldoni discovered the mask and its mysterious origin suspended between life and the underworld, the degenerative moment that seemed to lead towards a complete surrender turned upside down to become a full regeneration. That is the reason why Arlecchino cannot be excluded or exorcized from the world; his troubles can only find a solution through a transformation of the world itself. 111
Traditionally, Arlecchino is a masked character friendly, but untrustworthy. He is a proto- proletarian conscious of his own social marginality, who exorcizes the power that controls him by embodying the inverted signs of that same power. Arlecchino is constantly hungry, always moving and gesturing with vitality, “sometimes a kind of beastly vitality.” 112 The animalistic connotations of the mask recall the racist discourse built around the extreme bodily desires of black people, whose hunger, for food or sex, and whose ability to dance and perform in sports are real life counterparts to the theatrical categories of commedia dell’arte . Inverting the terms of this racial stereotyping, Martinelli inscribes the themes of hunger and voracity on the white bodies of
Pantalone, Dottore, and Sapienza. For instance, when the young Angelica – Lelio’s naïve and attractive fiancé – arrives at Pantalone’s house, the old man and the doctor who’s there to visit him turn their infatuation for the young lady into an unconscious act of cannibalism, eating her little by little, hand by hand. The action at once encompasses a long history of male violent devouring of the female, and ridicules white power as bestial, trivial, brutal and aggressive. One
Collaborazione Culturale, 1962. 111 Attisani, Antonio. Scena Occidente . Venezia: Ca’ Foscarina, 1995, 156.
112 Nasi, Franco. “The Fathers Whispering Under the Table.” An African Harlequin in Milan. Marco Martinelli 96 of the things Ermanna Montanari recalls of touring with I ventidue infortuni is that Awa Niang
used to eat a full roasted chicken before going on stage to perform a very physically straining
show. Although the actress narrated to me the anecdote because it triggered her incapacity to eat
or drink anything before a performance, the association between voracity and the male black
body held meanings that went beyond her intentions.
Popular culture metonymically associates the mask to the batoccio , a wooden stick that in
the course of the centuries lost scenic use but retained its phallic symbolism. The batoccio stands
for the commedia ’s lascivious jokes and lazzi , the physical interaction with the elements of the
earth, the indecent exposure of bodily parts. Even though Mor Arlecchino does not carry the tool,
the mask is such a powerful repository of collective knowledge that the phallic symbolism
transfers ideally from the wooden stick to Awa Niang’s oversexed blackness, entrapping the
external form of the mask into the social status of the actor as immigrant. The transfer of this
trapping from one fictional character to another can topple the entire social order because it
unveils its construction of visual and cultural stereotypes. 113 Martinelli created a multilayered text in which the relationship between the beastly iconography of Arlecchino and of the black body produces an ironic, implicit interplay. He also implicitly entered in critical dialogue with those artists and scholars who argue that lazzi - the gestural texture of the commedia - represented the quintessential Italianness of the genre, its original purity and unmistakable trademark. 114 On the contrary, Mor’s blackness cannot be reduced to a mere communicative or
Performs Goldoni . Picarazzi, Teresa L. and Winley Feinstein eds. West Lafayette: Bordighera, 1997.
113 Here, I am indebted to Andrea G. Labinger’s articulation of the study of external trappings in Las dos caras del patroncito by Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino. See: “The Cruciform Farce of Latin America: Two Plays.” Themes of Drama: Farce . James Redmond ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
114 See: Mariti, Luciano ed. Alle origini del teatro moderno. La commedia dell’arte. Atti del Convegno di Pontedera . 97 denotative textual language. The artistry Awa Niang invests in embodying lazzi , and the physical
pleasure he communicates by performing them over Senegalese drums played live on stage,
engage the re-signification of socio-cultural identity markers rendered indistinguishable from one
another. Spectators cannot tell any more where the performance of commedia begins or ends,
where blackness defines Italianness or is defined by it, where the dual reference to hunger and
violence, desire and death, stems from the reframing of Arlecchino’s character or from the
experience of Awa Niang as an immigrant.
In the words of the Corriere della Sera reviewer: “Poverty, hunger, being foreign, the three qualities of any self-respecting Arlecchino, Mor has them in his blood and does not have to learn them for the stage.” 115 This critical position highlights the difficulty of reading the multiple
layers of the Arlecchino / Mor Arlecchino / Mor Awa Niang performance. Faced with this
uncomfortable feeling, the reviewer drew upon his map of stereotypes and found it easier to call
attention on the black body as the obvious locus of deprivation. Mentions of Mor Awa Niang’s
talent and of the quality of his work were always secondary to his categorization as the
immigrant. Mandiaye N’Diaye, who played Scapino, recalls that most critics hardly ever
addressed the performance of the Senegalese actors according to a measure of artistic
achievements. After a career spanning over fifteen years, it is still difficult for him to be
acknowledged as an actor and not as a Senegalese actor. During the 2005 artistic residency of
Teatro delle Albe in Chicago, I witnessed an episode that left me quite astonished. After
Montanari and N’Diaye had performed a scene from I Polacchi at the Italian Institute of Culture,
Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1980; Farrell, Joseph and Paolo Puppa eds. A History of Italian Theater . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
115 Manin, Giuseppe. “Sono l’Arlecchino nero.” Il Corriere della Sera . December 21, 1992. 98 the Institute’s director approached N’Diaye to genuinely compliment him with these words: “I
am pleasantly surprised. I have to say that Marco and Ermanna educated you very well.” She
lightheartedly objectified N’Diaye and denied him any agency in his own acting talent; all he had
done on stage was an ability bestowed upon him by the white director. 116
On the Albe’s website Martinelli describes Arlecchino as “a political image of
contemporary Italy. It is the image of an outlaw in a context where the law has a negative, violent
side. [....] It should be also pointed out that the mask is, by definition, outside of history, it cannot
write it, or it can convey a vision of history as masquerade.” Most of the characters embodying
such repressive law are white: Pantalone and Dottore as the older, corrupted generation insanely
obsessed with accumulation of wealth; Sapienza as the virago who inhabits a masculine hunger
for power; and Lelio as the lazy and spoiled heir of a rich family. However, race is not the only
connotation of such power, and I ventidue infortuni escapes a reductionist binary dichotomy
between good and evil. Scapino’s unwillingness to host Mor Arlecchino for free, triggers his
misfortunes. Scapino not only breaks the implicit rule of brotherhood among Senegalese
immigrants, but he expresses a rude dismissal of Mor’s dream of returning home. The hotel
owner found his Africa in Italy, with his flourishing business, and has no care for the “stretch of
desert where I came from” or for his family. The two immigrants may share racial identity, but
one is a product of assimilation while the other speaks of resistance. Nonetheless, when Scapino
116 Confronted with such distorted and inherently racist compliment, I believe that N’Diaye must have felt very much like James Baldwin, when the author of Stranger in the Village recalls his appearance in a Swiss village as the first man that had ever set foot there. Comparing his own experience to the one that he imagines welcomed the first white men to Africa, he says: “The white man takes astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned, whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture control me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.”
99 becomes victim of a fraud because Lelio leaves without paying his bill, he defends his rights as a taxpayer before the governor of Milan. Rather than receiving legal support, the police shuts down his hotel because it lacks the required permits and he eventually joins Mor Arlecchino as a servant in Pantalone’s mansion. The final twist forcefully reconstitutes brotherhood between the two immigrants.
On the one hand, Awa Niang calls attention to the situation of African migrants in Italy by interpreting a character who is traditionally described as the oppressed, though clever, servant.
On the other hand, the fact that Awa Niang portrays a character removed from his own background, in a play written by a white author, for a predominantly white audience, may raise the objection of a post-colonialist operation. A scene in the play that is at the same time oddly comedic and tragic exemplifies this tense double embodiment, whose resolution cannot happen once and for all, but requires the participants’ honest desire to mediate their contingent “politics of location.” At the opening of the second act, Mor, who has lost everything, arrives at
Pantalone’s house to talk to Lelio and obtain from him some money to buy a plane ticket to
Senegal. While he is strolling around the mansion, Pantalone angrily storms in. Mor hides in the fireplace, but sadly for him Pantalone feels cold and lights the fire up. Even though Mor escapes before burning to death, the hypothesis of a burning black body evokes terrific recollections of torture, slavery and lynching. The audience’s laughter at Mor’s funny flight fades into a provocative message that excite historic guilt.
The show has other moments in which the action is suspended between on-stage comedic jokes and metaphorical recollections of the real-life hardship of those who live away from home, different among alleged sameness. As Teresa Picarazzi puts it, this points “to the question of 100 whether or not people from the hegemony can be a part of counter-hegemonic movements.” By
means of answer, Martinelli says that: “politttttttical theater does not mean persuading and convincing; [....] its purpose is to maintain its own otherness with respect to the Neanderthal brain-crunching mechanism.” 117 The aesthetic implied in this point of view constitutes an act of intellectual honesty in search of differences within similarities. Martinelli prefers the metaphor of métissage to describe the trans-cultural contribution of Teatro delle Albe to the social debate, encouraging the idea of an equal meeting among people and against the relationships that separate cultures into the dominating and the dominated, the mainstream and the marginal, the global and the local, the central and the peripheral. Martinelli’s politttttttical theater works in synergism with Gramsci’s idea that hegemony is a dynamic force, a constant process of creation of new equilibriums that has to “take into account the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised.” 118 The ironic hybridization of I ventidue infortuni maintains the same pace with hegemonic dynamism and nullifies the rhetoric of static subordination of the dominated to the dominant.
A couple of servants, called zanni , one of which is astute and clever, the other clumsy and
inept, are a pillar of scenic actions in the commedia dell’arte . Martinelli intervenes on the
servants’ figure more radically than simply repeating this dualistic contrast. Both servants are in
drag: Mor Awa subsumes the essence of a white mask, while Ermanna Montanari as Spinetta
wears the clothes of Lelio’s limousine driver. According to Pamela Stewart “[d]isguise is a kind
of theater within the theater, a play within the play. But while the play within the play usually
117 Martinelli, Marco. Ravenna Africana. Il teatro politttttttico delle Albe . Ravenna: Essegi, 1988. Martinelli spells political with seven t’s to indicate that any act of resistance against the abuses of power consists of a complex choice of one’s own position in the world.
101 serves to reinforce by contrast the realistic credibility of the framing play, disguise in the Italian
comedies of the sixteenth century strengthens and reinforces their illusory character, their
tendency towards the condition of a sophisticated game.” 119 In I ventidue infortuni , disguise adds
one more layer to the complex critique of tropes of blackness. The performances of Mor
Arlecchino and Spinetta call into question the superficiality of people’s values when these are
founded merely on exterior signs and appearance. Identity’s construction undergoes the
scrutinizing gaze of the audience that exercises a discerning critical distance to integrate what is
seen, when what is seen invites to reflect on the relation between masquerade, disguise and truth.
Mor Arlecchino and Spinetta convey their messages of resistance while, at the same time,
complying with the same culture of images that they criticize. Two examples will explain my
interpretation.
When Mor enters stage for the first time he encounters Spinetta and Scapino. He
immediately mistakes the former as the male owner of the hotel, and the latter as a fellow
immigrant in search of cheap housing. Racial and gender hang ups drive Mor’s judgments into a
typical theatrical device of mixed up identities. After a few exchanges in which spectators enjoy
Mor’s confusion, everyone returns to their proper role. Likewise Spinetta showcases her
compliance with stereotyping in the following monologue:
That black man is such a pain! But I would have to say that black people in general... in general, I mean... I like them. The blacks in commercials: tall... slender... smooth... with really white teeth. The other night on television there was a girl who was engaged to one of them. She said that when she changed... from white to black... she came out ahead! They sure
118 Forgacs, David ed. The Antonio Gramsci Reader . New York: New York UP, 2000, 211.
119 Stewart, Pamela. “Disguise and the Mask: From the Commedia Erudita to the Commedia dell’Arte .” The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell’Arte . Domenico Pietropaolo ed. Toronto: Dovehouse Edition, 1989, 199-208.
102 know how to treat a woman... even if she’s wearing pants... even if she’s small. They sure know how to say just the right sweet sweet words; the words our men don’t remember any more. 120
Advertisement, the industry of imaginative creation at the service of economic corporations, produces desire towards objects as much as it creates an ideal view of a race that is generally ignored in daily life. The African sellers in the streets do not trigger Spinetta’s senses.
She needs the visual key of a fictional character on the television screen to dream of sensual pleasure. Blackness, erased in the everyday discourse by indifference, returns in a media form that serves the stronger interests of multinationals trying to sell products. Thus, Spinetta reaffirms the alleged ability of black men to satisfy women as no one else can, and inscribes herself into the global context of commodification while at the same time the actress playing the role operates against the ocular-centric obsession of modern theater by virtue of her drag performance.
Finally, in I ventidue infortuni Martinelli plays with an element that has become a signature style of the Albe’s shows: multilingualism. In this specific case, the presence of many languages on stage recalls the structure of commedia dell’arte in which each mask not only represented a mode of being, but also a regional origin of which he/she spoke the dialect. Once again, there is more to it. Multilingualism serves to resignify blackness in its multiplicity. Mor and Scapino at times address each other in Wolof. Using their native language, the actors break the fictional narrative and remind the audience that after all they really are immigrants in a foreign land. Mor Awa Niang used to be a vu’ cumprá before encountering Martinelli and his group, and decided to return to that activity after I ventidue infortuni because street vending was more profitable than theater. In the second act, Mor converses in French with Lelio, who has
120 Picarazzi, cited work, 25. 103 studied in Paris for a while. The colonial language enters in dialogue with the history of
exploitation of Senegal, a history that caused Mor Arlecchino / Mor Awa Niang’s immigration to
Italy. For the Italian audience, though, the mastery of another European language inscribes Mor
Arlecchino within a higher status in the social ladder, attributing to Western-style education the
privilege of real culture and knowledge. Unveiled under the rubric of comedy, the negative tropes of blackness can properly perform an inversion of perception. Spectators acquire awareness of their compliance with the ideological mapping of the Other as the enemy, the backward primitive or the minor, and can develop a personal counter-methodology to the silencing imposed by
“historic forgetfulness.” This possibility requires a closer look at Teatro delle Albe’s poetic, which I analyze in depth in the following chapter. 104
CHAPTER TWO - Teatro delle Albe: Mise en vie and the poetic of intra-culturalism
I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate my cycle of freedom (Frantz Fanon)
Three vu’ cumprá carry rugs on their shoulders and try to sell cheap lighters (1.000 liras each) to a crowd of baffled Italian buyers. Annoyed and uncomfortable, some people quietly complain to their peers, others are more bold and loudly voice their disconcert uttering the typical generalization “I wonder where we’ll all end up if things keep going like this,” while others take advantage of the cheap bargain and buy a lighter for half price. The set of this scene is not an
Italian street or a beach, but the floor of the Goldoni Theater in Bagnacavallo, where Ruh
Romagna piú Africa uguale debuted on February 25, 1988. 121 The three vu’ cumprá were actors
Iba Babou, Abibou N’Diaye, and Khadim Thiam, whose interpretation of street vendors tricked many Romagnole spectators into believing that real vu’ cumprá had somehow managed to break into the theater to do business while they were waiting for the show to start. Babou, N’Diaye and
Thiam delivered a realistic performance because up until a few months before February 25, they had worked as street vendors in Rimini and Bologna. They knew the behavioral codes of making minor business in informal settings, managed the audience’s reactions with expertise, and played with the impossibility for Italian spectators to imagine any other embodiment of their black bodies but that of street vendors.
121 Ruh. Romagna più Africa uguale . By Marco Martinelli. On stage: Iba Babou, Luigi Dadina, Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari, Abibou N’Diaye, Khadim Thiam, Giuseppe Tolo. Costume and set design: Cosetta Gardini, Ermanna Montanari. Director: Marco Martinelli. Production: Teatro delle Albe, Comune di Bagnacavallo. 105 In this chapter, I retrace the notion of blackness in the early work of Teatro delle Albe, and use the textual analysis to dig into the origin and development of the group’s core poetic. I will mainly focus on a reading of the script of Ruh , since no videos of the show circulate. The framing of blackness as a performative element constituted in 1988 a revelation for both the
Albe’s actors and the audience. Even though Ruh showcases all the limits inherent in being the first attempt to conjugate blackness into the texture of Teatro delle Albe’s theater, the show still provides valuable insights on the company’s history and on the construction of its Afro-
Romagnole trajectory. Martinelli and his companions realized that blackness on stage “does something” since the black body as an acting (and active) body supplements meaning by default for a white audience. Not reduced to a background image against the backdrop of violence and social conflict, blackness could lay claim to political participation, as the site in which the contradictions of ethnic frictions come to face one another and spark the need to produce a solution. Blackness was not merely limited to being a vehicle of self-criticism of the white people - as the original locus of political agency - but participated in a non-exploitative self- representation that empowered the Senegalese actors as doers, creators, forces that shaped and re- directed social reality and its perceptions.
Engaging the notions of politttttttical theater and the technique of mise en vie , I aim at individuating those elements that make the Albe a rather unique and successful experience of intra-culturalism not only in performance, but under the rubric of its overall social impact. At the same time, I argue that such successful outcome was initially built on textual and performative experiments that had the best of intentions, but did not necessarily read as effective counter- narratives to mainstream reductions of black people to ornamental objects. My discussion overall 106 aims to raise the level of critical awareness around intra-cultural theater: what makes it effective
and what challenges its laudable premises. How can we develop a theory of intra-culturalism in
performance that goes beyond the hit-or-miss chances of a show to succeed?
Ruh. Romagna piú Africa uguale - Blackness as the Agency of Nature
Once again the analysis of the show’s title offers some useful insights. Teatro delle Albe’s
website defines Ruh as “commedia nera .” The linguistic pun plays off the double meaning of nero as black - an immediate reference to the presence of Senegalese actors on stage and of
Africa as one of the show’s underlining topics - but also of nero as dark. Ruh inhabits the literary
genre of dark humor, exciting bitter smiles through an atmosphere that alludes to the degradation
of the Earth and the responsibilities people bears for it. Martinelli interweaves multiple narrative
strings that evokes a vague reference to science fiction’s apocalyptic tones: the place is an ironic
Happy Ravenna in a time that is not specified but only hinted at ..... piú in lá ! (farther along!)
In the show, a climate of inanity juxtaposes progress and nature. The former takes the
form of the character of Vincenzo Balsamo, self-proclaimed spokesperson for the Association
“Information on Christ.” Balsamo embodies a missionary belief in development. He repeatedly
asks the three actors from Senegal what do they know about Christ, and distributes pamphlets as symbolic repositories of messianic indoctrination. Catholicism, which constitutes a master framework deeply rooted in Italian society, becomes, through him, a pervasive cultural cage hidden under the promise of conversion and redemption. In this narrative, blackness has traditionally played a strictly secondary role, and Africans have been reduced to the role of children in need of education. Ruh debunks the Catholic Church compliance with the system of
exploitation and forced conversion. When Balsamo asks the vu’ cumprá how old they are, they 107 answer: twelve, nine, eight and a half. The paradox of tall Senegalese men claiming to be minors acknowledges unconscious forms of identification that do not assimilate the Other into a coherent sociability, but rather fragment and destabilize the subject inhabiting a post-colonial mind.
Progress in Ruh takes also the shape of a ghostly character, whose name is often invoked even though spectators never see him on stage: Raul. To a knowledgeable audience, to which
Ruh usually played since the show mostly toured in Emilia Romagna, it would have been immediately clear that the name referred to Raul Gardini. Gardini was an entrepreneur born in
Ravenna in 1933, who turned a provincial, family-owned agribusiness into Italy’s second-largest company - the chemical monopoly Montedison. He made himself into one of the country’s richest and most admired industrialists, and represented images of success and class at an international level. From the late nineteen seventies to the mid nineteen nineties, the Montedison group assured employment and wealth to most people in Ravenna. Directly or indirectly, virtually every family’s economy depended from employment at Montedison, and obviously
Gardini was highly regarded in the city. On the other hand, the development of Montedison drastically changed the nature of Ravenna’s economy - from agricultural to industrial - but also the city’s quality of life. The chemicals of the Montedison factory had a serious impact on
Ravenna’s air, soil, and sea, while the chimneys and loading docks transformed the landscape of the city’s seashore. Savior and mentor for the majority of the inhabitants, Raul Gardini also embodied the evil sign of lucrative development built on a disinterest for the environment and political corruption. In 1993, Gardini was caught up in the financial corruption scandal that rocked the Italian government, and he was reportedly about to be arrested for bribery when he 108 shot himself. With his death, and the demise of the debt-ridden company he owned, Ravenna’s economy went into a period of deep depression, but the damages to the city’s environment still stand as a memento to the rampant logics of progress and profit.
The inscription of Gardini in Ruh serves a double goal: to place the “cementification” of
Ravenna against African nature, and to develop a debate with spectators on the future of Ravenna
- a wedding between global and local worries. In the show, Africa and blackness symbolize the locus of nature. Ermanna Montanari plays a character simply called Madre - Mother. The use of madre , rather than the most common mamma , immediately evokes the image of the Earth as the nurturing mother - in Italian Madre Terra . Montanari’s Madre is not so much nurturing, but rather mournful and bitter. Babou, N’Diaye and Thiam accompany Madre in her entrances, visually reinforcing the link between Africa and a natural relationship with the energy of the
Earth. This element somehow constitutes an easy slippage into the connotation of Africa as the locus of primitivism, while the serious tone of Madre’s appearances do not re-frame the trope in an ironic light, rather the opposite. Ruh effectively spurs laughter through the absurd dialogues between the white characters: Balsamo’s obsession for Christ, and Fattorini’s description of his insanely rich, obese friend Raul, whom he aspires to resemble. When Martinelli works with the
African context, though, his need to communicate an agenda made up of environmentalism and tolerance becomes too obvious and predominant, and does not pay good service to the attempts of recasting blackness under a different rubric. The pedagogical intent shrinks the elements of lighthearted playfulness. Not even the fact that Madre utters long monologues in Romagnole helps distance blackness from the tropes of the primitive and the noble savage.
The following monologue gives an instance of such shortcomings. Madre delivers it 109 dressed in a flowered African garment. 122 While she speaks, Iba Babou massages Madre’s hands
and legs with dark soil.
Black is the birth of whiteness black are the nightmares preceding your arrivals black are the tears of the childish brain black are the waves of the childish brain black is Venus black is Venus! [...] Black is the birth of the blue, green, red of this sky, from which the powerful ones spy on us of this Mother that we devour of these clear gums that chew on words and wheat black is Venus black is Venus! 123
The monologue plays with the double connotation of black, at times utilizing the adjective to
connote metonymically the African genealogy of whiteness or Venus, at times working off the
negative, dark images associated with the color black. Madre conveys a direct accusation of the
audience’s “historic forgetfulness”, the disappearance of that ancestral memory able to reconnect
the collective self to the original space and time of human kind. The accusatory tone of the
monologue, plus the confusion between the interrelated shades of whiteness and blackness, work
against Madre’s intention to emphasize unity and sameness. The long list of “black is”
unwillingly reproduces the equation black Africa = negativity.
In bell hooks’ Killing Rage. Ending Racism , the feminist black scholar argues that the associations white - light, black - darkness are not only culturally imposed, but also subjectively perceived. In the black imagination, she argues that whiteness ceases to be the bearer of light and
122 The director’s notes describe the costume like this.
123 Martinelli, Marco. “Ruh. Romagna più Africa uguale.” Teatro Impuro . Ravenna: Danilo Montanari Editore, 1997, 110 goodness and assumes the role of a terrorizing, wounding, disrupting imposition linked to the
histories of slavery and racism. Turning the dominant discourse upside down, hooks offers a
fundamental contribution to the understanding of the operational mode of stereotypes. “White
people can ‘safely’ imagine that they are invisible to black people since the power they have
historically asserted over black people accorded them the right to control the black gaze.” 124 Only active human subjects could observe, and blackness, being the negation of subjectivity, implied the impossibility to return the gaze, hence: “black folks were compelled to assume the mantle of invisibility, to erase all traces of their subjectivity during slavery and the long years of apartheid, so that they could be better, less threatening servants.” 125 The introjections of such mode of self- erasure connects whiteness to terrorizing evocations in the black imagination.
Ruh reaffirms, rather than complicating, the color-coded alleged norms of light vs. darkness. I partially explain this continuity in line with the show’s main purpose to raise awareness around environmental issues. At this point of Teatro delle Albe’s own development, the connection with Africa was not fully in place. The encounter with the Senegalese community had happened only a few months earlier, but most importantly, the theorization of an Afro-
Romagnole identity still needed to be proved both as a mode of performance with aesthetic potential, and as a form of coexistence among the Romagnole and the Senegalese actors on and off stage. The initial connection between the previous works of Teatro delle Albe - the adaptation of science fiction novels by Philip Dick - and Africa happened somehow unintentionally. In
1987, Martinelli and Montanari attended a lecture at the University of Bologna where researchers
14-41, 26. 124 hooks, bell. Killing Rage. Ending Racism . New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995, 35.
125 Ibid., 35. 111 presented scientific evidence that the lower strata of Emilia Romagna’s soil shared the same geological composition with Northern Africa. The logical explanation of such anomaly was that thousands of years ago, when the continents of Africa and Europe were closer to one another, a mass of land detached itself from what would become Northern Africa, traversed the proto-
Mediterranean sea - probably a lake at the time - and collapsed into the future Italian peninsula to sediment under Emilia Romagna. In repeated interviews I had with them, Martinelli and
Montanari recalled the shocked reaction of the conference’s audience. Having a predominantly agricultural cultural background, Romagnole people perceive a deep sense of belonging to their land. Even though the region’s economy has developed towards industrialization and tourism, they cherish a direct connection with their rural past, considering the Pianura Padana - which is the most extended plain field in Italy enclosed between the Appennine mountains and the
Adriatic sea - as a site of identification and economic wealth. The idea that such land was not inherently Romagnole could not generate an enthusiastic reaction.
For Martinelli and Montanari, instead, the revelation came as a confirmation of what they had already sensed in the air: the connections between their homeland and Africa were much tighter than expected. By 1987, black street vendors constituted a common sight along the Emilia
Romagna seashore, and the main city of Bologna offered immigrants many job opportunities in the service and industrial sectors. If Emilia Romagna had African roots, this meant that African immigrants were returning to an ancestral site of belonging. They were not guests in a foreign land, but rather long-time relatives reconnecting with their soil. That African immigrants would feel at home in the middle of Emilia Romagna’s foggy plains, because geologists had proven the similarities of rock formations across the Mediterranean, seems more a romantic hypothesis than 112 an actual possibility. Nonetheless, the change in perception carried with it the potential of
“decolonizing” the minds of black immigrants and Italians alike. “Going” and “returning” are not
mere different verbal modes, because they inhabit different psychological approaches. “Going”
somewhere by acts of migration implies a jump towards the unknown. What immigrants know
about Europe is often the product of a triple distortion: the tales of those who migrated and
periodically return home with gifts for family and friends; the expectations of people waiting for
their chance to migrate who may have heard of what life in Europe is like by narrations passed on
from person to person; and in the best of the hypotheses, the master framework constructed by television and movies that show Western wealth and luxurious life-style. “Returning” to a place, instead, erases the cold diffidence of the new and unexpected, puts emphasis on the subject’s agency, and his physical or spiritual connection with a locality that calls upon him and requires his presence.
The idea of return substantiates in Ruh when Madre delivers a chant, while the three
African actors surround her, one hand pointing at their pelvis - the locus of generative male
power - and one hand pointing at the audience - signifying the genealogy of their generated self.
Each stanza of the chant opens with “Welcome back” repeated three times. Madre’s utterances
deliver the message of an origin located somewhere else, in an Africa that she never mentions
explicitly, while she blames on white spectators the deviation and disrespect of that origin.
Welcome back Welcome back Welcome back to these beaches crowded with tourists. Those who live in the North of the world smoke Camel cigarettes and stare at the camel on the package and look at you 113 selling cheap Lacoste and ask themselves why do they come here? Why don’t they stay in their countries? People always ask intelligent questions before going to sleep [...] and they steal all the fish from your sea steal from your land all its gold steal from your plate all the wheat and say it is not our fault if we invented the printing press before them it is not our fault if before they did we invented gun powder it is not our fault if before they did we invented the market even Athens had its slaves and perfect golden statues! 126
History’s misdoing is a product of human agency. In the monologue, Madre evokes common racist phrasings, mixing them with a subtle invitation for black immigrants to improve their level of self-awareness. The tension ensues from the contrast between white indifference to the suffering of the Other and black contemporary making-means-do: against the impoverishment of
Africa by the hands of white capitalism, black immigrants enter that same system to appropriate and manipulate symbols of consumerism - the Lacoste shirt. Unfortunately, the one missing piece of information in Madre’s monologue is the condition of exploitation that the black market economy of fake brands implements over the cheap-labor required to produce and sell these products. The real profit still lies in the hands of a few unscrupulous capitalists.
Black is the past, the origin of white Europe, but dark is its future. Based on these assumptions, Martinelli met with members of the Senegalese community in Rimini until
126 Ruh , 34. 114 eventually three immigrants expressed the desire to work with the director. The interest in experimenting with a new form of theatrical métissage pre-existed the show by Teatro delle Albe that required black and white actors. The Afro-Romagnole’s initial input was extra-theatrical, but necessarily took the form of an artistic exchange. Ruh did not precede the insertion of Babou,
N’Diaye and Thiam in Teatro delle Albe, but rather their presence and the shared desire to work together inspired Martinelli to write Ruh . Connecting with immigrants answered a personal need that went beyond performance. It simply meant an immediate approach to other people living within Ravenna’s territory, whose different approach to all that was extremely familiar to the
Albe probably offered something interesting to say. The model was very much Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s movie “Accattone” (Homeless), the story of Roman lower income people that Pasolini narrated not by casting famous actors but through the voices and bodies of people coming from that same social environment - long before reality TV, but rather in the genealogy of the cinematic tradition of Neorealism.
Even though I argue against the easy assumption that working with people taken from the streets donates a reassuring sense of truth to an artistic project, I also claim that the unpredictable dynamics of the Senegalese - Romagnole encounter had a fundamental effect on the Albe’s ability to speak socially about theater, and artistically about society. Truth can never be definitive; it is always declined with exclamation points, quotation marks, or parentheses.
Nothing absolute can be said about truth, but Freud professed in Totem and Taboo that a human being’s name is a core element of his essence, of his soul. The intra-cultural opening to African immigrants was a double attempt to listen to that soul and respectfully engage a conversation with it that could lead anywhere; an open ended dialogue not claiming the erasure of differences 115 but rather the opposite. To highlight bodies that speak, move, and dance according to their own intimate rhythms was an act against that politically correct cosmopolitanism that tends to oversimplify the convoluted circles of interpersonal relations.
Despite the show’s critical success, and the fact that many regional theaters requested it, the intra-cultural experiment of the Albe suffered at first. Martinelli, Montanari, Dadina, and
Nonni had created the group in 1983 as a community in which the two men and the two women had equal decision-making power regarding artistic and organizational matters. The insertion of three new actors posed a problem in terms of internal hierarchies. The belief in theater-as- community required that Babou, N’Diaye and Thiam would receive equal economic treatment and could also participate in the decision-making process. Not everyone from the original Albe’s ensemble seemed thrilled by the idea, because it meant reorganizing the inner group dynamics based on an experiment that no one could assure would lead to success. The ideal assumption that had led to the birth of the group confronted practical issues: how to share profits? Did the expertise in theater-making of the white actors matter more than the ideal of a participation of equals to the creative process? How to avoid an imposition of Western performance traditions over untrained African actors? Inevitably, the tensions had also an ethnic character.
Along the racial frictions, a gender issue was raised since the presence of Babou.
N’Diaye, and Thiam heavily shifted the gender balance of the group. Ermanna Montanari and
Marcella Nonni acted as peers with Martinelli and Dadina. Montanari closely worked with her husband Martinelli in the staging of the shows, creating set and costume designs, while Nonni planned the group’s tours and managed its economic aspect. The Senegalese actors joined the
Albe carrying with them a set of values according to which men embody power and decision- 116 making. While I was touring with the company in 2005-2006, I had many informal chats with
Montanari over breakfast. In one of those instances, she mentioned her frustration while rehearsing for Ruh because the African actors would not listen to her suggestions or directions.
Each time, she found herself in the position of having to ask Martinelli’s intervention. Her ideas acquired relevance to the Senegalese actors only when the white male director mediated them.
The empowerment of black actors went hand in hand with the apparent dis-empowerment of the white women. Montanari was aware of the fact that Ruh represented the first theatrical experience for Babou, N’Diaye and Thiam; and she decided to step back to avoid useless tensions. When I asked her how she managed to conquer their respect as a woman in a position of equality with her husband, Montanari answered that her on-stage performance was the key to the African actors’ acceptance of her off-stage position. Once the Senegalese men witnessed her commitment to theater, and admired her talent and powerful stage work, they also acknowledged
Montanari’s experience and it became somehow more acceptable to take directions from her.
Problems arose for the Senegalese actors as well. When they accepted to work with
Teatro delle Albe, they had never been in a Western theater before. They lacked the physical vocabulary to be “actors” in the traditional sense of the word. Martinelli was not worried, because he actually wanted to keep alive their raw and unrefined energy on stage. The director was suspicious of actors trained in academies, because they tend to develop a common technique after which they all share similar ways of speaking or gesturing. The real issue was that Babou and companions considered theater as their way to abandon street vending and land a real job in
Italy. They did not know how little theater pays. After a few months’ run, and still many more shows to perform, the African Albe confronted the Romagnole Albe and decided to return to 117 street vending because it was more profitable. The news was doubly shocking: it meant the failure of the intra-cultural experiment, and more practically it would force Teatro delle Albe to slow down its activity and cancel shows.
In a moment of honest self-criticism, Martinelli told me that only then, during that tense and sad meeting, he came to realize how little he had understood his black companions up to that point. The director confessed that for him and his long-time friends, it had become somehow normal to live a life of on-and-off performances, low pay, and sacrifice. The four young founders of Teatro delle Albe were committed to their theatrical passion as a life choice that no material impediments could put into question; theater-making was a vital need to them, before being a job or a career. Babou, N’Diaye and Thiam’s trajectories positioned them very differently. They had left Senegal to earn money for themselves and families. The pleasure of performing and the creative need to communicate through art were secondary to the pressures placed on them by the expectations of their relatives back in Senegal. To put it differently, freeing immigrants from a life of unstable economic conditions and lacking political rights had to pass through the fundamental precondition of assuring them financial independence in the form of a monthly stipend. If they continued earning so little, they would have not been able to remit part of the money to their families.
Martinelli processed the sense of betrayal into an understanding of his African friends’ different positionalities. No one in the Albe was eager to cancel Ruh ’s regional tour, while working also on the new show Siamo asini o pedanti , so Martinelli went back to Rimini where he remembered having met a young immigrant that had left quite an impression on him. Mandiaye
N’Diaye happily joined the group, and brought along Mor Awa Niang, who came from a griot 118 family, and El Hadji Niang, a drummer. Within a week the three learned the show by heart. The audience had enthusiastic reactions, whereas critics were divided. A certain leftist criticism acknowledged the ethic, social and aesthetic values of Ruh and Siamo asini o pedanti . Many others insisted on the evanescence of the project. It did not seem possible to them that the Afro-
Romagnole wedding would last long. Conservative critics cynically commented that the performance of the Senegalese actors acquired the status of art only because it was inscribed in a pre-existing white ensemble, while they also criticized Martinelli for exploiting immigrants to add extra-theatrical value to its Afro-Romagnole experiment.
Mandiaye N’Diaye likes to narrate his encounter with Martinelli as a desperate and clumsy attempt to leave street vending behind. When Martinelli visited the Rimini public housing complex where hundreds of Senegalese immigrants shared small, over-crowded apartments, N’Diaye had been in Italy for a few months. Since he is shorter than the average
Senegalese, he pushed his way through the crowd surrounding the white director and lied to him, claiming a long experience in performance. Martinelli did not select him then, but when he was faced with the need to replace his actors on such short notice, he remembered N’Diaye and went back to look for him. Martinelli and N’Diaye define their meeting as the reunion of common ancestors, in line with the idea that, after all, Romagna and Africa are not so far apart. They somehow recognized each other as twin souls thirsty for a deeper understanding of each other.
N’Diaye, who had grown up with twenty-two brothers in the small village of Diol Kadd, had a syncretic approach to spirituality. The mixing of Islam and animism is not uncommon in Senegal.
N’Diaye believes that Martinelli was the reincarnation of an ancestor, and Martinelli speaks of the fiery passionate light in N’Diaye’s eyes as a moment of self-recognition. 119 In Ruh , the scenic presence of African actors works very much within the logic of such
ancestral atmosphere. As I noted earlier, they continually accompany Madre on stage and are the
only characters who perform actions on her, hinting at the direct link between blackness and
nature. The detachment of their acting bodies from a framework of contemporaneity, once we
pass the opening of the show where they play the figures of vu’ cumprá , is reinforced by the fact
that spectators hardly ever get to hear their voices. The silence of the African actors, doubled
with physical movements that conveyed solemnity and ritualism, is somehow problematic
because it positions them outside of history, in that constructed space of exotic fascination in
which the white man has placed them for his own use. When they utter sentences, the actors
mainly speak or chant in Wolof adding one more layer of mystery and incomprehensibility to
their stage personas. Towards the end, they finally have a longer exchange of lines in Italian, but
even then the actors’ voices are pre-recorded, amplified and distorted. Iba, Khadim, and Abib
(the three retain their real names on stage) sit around the well, sipping shit-cola 127 and reading
Karen Blixen’s My Africa . When the recording starts, this is what we hear:
Iba: I’ll write a novel. Abib: What will you call it? Iba: My Europe! Khadim: Europe is beautiful. Abib: They have hospitals. Khadim: They have discos. Iba: I like discos. Abib: Tomorrow, this Europe will be ours. Khadim: Tomorrow.... when? Abib: Tomorrow. Iba: It will be our Europe. Khadim: You don’t have children anymore. Abib: Schools will close. Iba: Retirement homes will be full.
127 Called like this in the stage direction.
120 Khadim: You guys are old. Abib: Child birth rate zero. Iba: Child birth rate zero. Khadim: And there are many of us. Iba: Hunger in Africa is terrible. Khadim: Europe is beautiful. Abib: Europe is free. Iba: We don’t wanna be vu’ cumprá . Khadim: Europe is beautiful Abib: We are not animals. Iba: Vu’ cumprá terrible job, shitty job. Khadim: Europe is beautiful. Abib: We are not animals. Iba: Hunger in Africa is even more terrible. Khadim: Our Europe! Abib: We will give it ... to our ... children ... Iba: You won’t have any children then. Khadim: Child birth rate zero Abin: I pity white people ... you guys have no more sperm... 128
This exchange echos the white man’s nightmares, reinforcing for an Italian spectatorship the fear of an invasion of young, desperate, hungry individuals who will eventually annihilate national identity and culture. The broken Italian they speak, with missing verbs and short elementary sentences, casts immigrants in the category of limited mental ability: lack of linguistic proficiency equals lack of intelligence. Against this racist-charged trope, the discussion the three men entertain shows an understanding of both Italian society and the white man’s psychology.
Therefore, spectators see three immigrants who demonstrate that they have been observing whites. Such revelation entrusts immigrants with a subjectivity that is the bearer of agency and puts whiteness under blacks’ scrutinizing critical gaze.
Nonetheless, Ruh ’s structure lacks the consistent parodic framework which works as an
effective system of signifying difference in I ventidue infortuni di Mor Arlecchino and that has
become a signature of Martinelli’s writing, as I will argue in my discussion of I Polacchi in 121 chapter four. I attribute the shortcomings of Ruh in encompassing blackness, and staging it in
forms devoid of stereotyped tropes, to its nature as the first intra-cultural experiment of the Afro-
Romagnole Albe, rather than to a fallacy in the group’s ideological stance towards immigration.
As a matter of fact, notwithstanding the limits of the performance, Ruh constitutes a good
example of the multiple layers of meaning interwoven on the Albe’s stage that dialogically
embrace the tensions between local and global cultural traits, aesthetic beauty and sociopolitical
significance, pedagogy and entertainment, depth and leisure.
The Politttttttical Poetics of Teatro delle Albe
As a theater company, Teatro delle Albe’s work should be positioned first and foremost in terms of artistic measurement. Theater is the media the group chose to utilize, and Martinelli’s thinking theorizes performance as action. The director does not construct a show on the concept of mise en scéne , but rather of mise en vie . He does not put on stage a text or character, but puts them to life. As I already noted earlier, Mor Awa Niang, Iba Babou and Mandiaye N’Diaye had worked as vu’ cumprà before actually playing street vendors on stage. Mise en vie , though, means something different from performing oneself. Even when Awa Niang took on the role of
Arlecchino, he did not pretend to mimic the acting canons of commedia dell’arte . He brought into the plot images of his own personal history, as when Mor Arlecchino appears on stage with gifts for his entire extended family in Senegal. At once, spectators saw Arlecchino, whose character is saved in its quintessential witty energy, and enjoyed Mor Arlecchino’s own independence as an accomplished character in and of itself. Likewise, when Ermanna Montanari performed her individual, strong female characters - as the young patricide Beatrice Cenci in
Cenci (1993) or the spinster Alcina in L’isola di Alcina (2000) - she merged the female
128 Ruh , 38. 122 psychological repository of a dilapidated history of gendered biases with her own cultural
references as a woman raised in the rural town of Campiano.
Mise en vie is the encounter between a text’s essential meaning and the most intimate
level of signification that actors read into it. The characters’ tragic destiny meets the echo of truth
that actors hear in the written words, so that history, personal experiences and interpretation
collapse into one another. The life of the actors becomes the lens through which the essence of
the drama fully lives its social and artistic value. Actors “are” on stage, do not “play” a role. They
“are” because they participate in a teatro di carne (flesh theater), one in which acting assumes all its meanings of fanciful game and serious investments of physical and spiritual energies. The dialectical relation at play is a communion of history and memory - that linguistic pun condensed in the Italian word storia . Bodies in performance, whether Martinelli works off femininity, blackness or adolescence, constantly make the explicit decision to bear the consequences of the construction of a counter-narrative to a general, diluted cultural policy of theater-making.
Personal memories and tastes get reworked and reframed within the scope of the performance text, to the service of meaning and aesthetic harmony. For instance, when Romagnole teenagers rehearsing for I Polacchi in 1993 suggested that their army should move to techno music sounds,
because that is the kind of music that their peers enjoy in clubs on the Adriatic coast, they were
unconsciously embracing Martinelli’s mise en vie .
I understand this technique as the respect for those elements of life that shape a person’s
identity as consequences of his/her experiences, intellectual formation, emotional maturity, desire
to devote to one’s own continuous search for a center knowing that the closer one gets to it, the
more one has to invest in an unending commitment to research. Based on this theorization, I 123 argue that mise en vie allowed untrained immigrants to claim a creative, active role because it didn’t focus on technicalities such as diaphragmatic respiration, asides, etc... The implications were that the feeling of one’s own bodily movement in the theater space, energetic arch, sensibility towards the relation with the audience, would stem from the truth of the actors’ perception of themselves and their personal narratives. Nothing is left of the reassuring bourgeois theater. Through mise en vie , spectators perceive actions and texts as self-inflicted emotional wounds on their safe and allegedly passive positioning. They never witness an attempt to a form of “passing” of a black actor for a white character, or of a woman for a man, but rather see the blatant showcase of difference, which the performative context mirrors endlessly.
Mise en vie highlights the position of Teatro delle Albe within the larger trends of theatrical experimentation of the nineteen sixties and seventies that underscored a culture of the body, as opposed to a culture of the mind. The former corresponds to the image of an individual as a cohesive being in which all the parts act simultaneously, in no hierarchical sequence; the latter indicates the old-fashioned mantra that emphasizes the positive attributes of reason against the negative aspects of the physical body. Avant-garde artists aimed to escape from pre-acquired belief, and launched theater on a quest for the possible - the suspended space between what is known and what is not yet discovered. The culture of capitalist dominance, which lies at the core of the mind-body split, mapped the cognitive backdrop against which theater-makers politicized their bodies and denounced the discriminatory norms of class and gender. In Italy, this passage also designated for artists an emancipation from Catholicism and its teachings, which had mortified the body as a receptacle of deadly sins against the purity of a man’s soul. Instead, the avant-garde physical aptitude embraced the low elements of dirt, sin, tactile memory and pain to 124 delineate reality in all its performative twists and turns. Human beings stepped center stage and
became an interactive, co-agent protagonist of the performance. This was the moment in which
one witnessed the passage from art mimicking life, to a life that becomes an artistic process; from
mimesis and poiesis to kinesis. It was also the moment in which, paradoxically, the sense of
urgency that worked as a push factor for creativity ceased being a collective phenomenon and fell
into the hands of few selected individuals who took upon themselves the task of representing and communicating such urgency to spectators and bystanders.
Urgency pushed the Albe’s artists towards the theorization of mise en vie . “To be an actor
is to live at once, in a short time span, life and death. Extreme conditions. Yearning, burning.
Weaving the life of a an invisible being that will die soon. [...] To be an actor is to lack
something. It is frightful stuffed flesh playing with fear. The actor is terrified, he is an earthquake
survivor often unable to control his body and his voice. [...] To turn one’s own body into a cross.
Shattered body. Measured body. Obsessed by the measurement of life and time.” 129 In an
interview with Lea Melandri, Montanari describes her work, her teatro di carne as a self-
imposed harsh discipline, an existential suffering linked to the disconnection between the need to
be self and Other, the process of bringing to the surface that which does not visibly exist and the
intervention of the unexpected that spotlights the actor as a vulnerable human being. A tension
that the actress expresses when she says that “beyond the extreme lucidity of the actor (total
awareness of space, lights, or audience reactions) there is a warm and obscure bottom, a shadow
of passion, feelings, madness, that one can express only by means of a rational and cold artistic
129 Melandri, Lea. “Il linguaggio della Dea. Come liberarsi di un mito.” Lapis. Percorsi delle riflessioni femminili . Roma: La Tartaruga. N. 26, June 1995, 27.
125 technique.” 130
Critic Franco Cordelli writes that: “Experimental theater was born, in my opinion, out of
two fundamental facts: from frustration – which is an irrational, episodic, casual phenomenon -
and cultural marginality. The lack of a central positionality, not having an organically valuable
artistic reference, led to a form of research necessarily inner-produced and totally
autonomous.” 131 Much of the scholarship surrounding experimental theater in Italy tends to place these experiences within a leftist ideology. This same trend emphasizes the fact that artistic
creation of this kind comes out of a sense of frustration painstakingly felt by disenfranchised
individuals. Their minority status imposes on them a desire to bend the rules and bring about
meaningful social transformations in the larger community to which they claim to belong, or
from which they stress their distancing. This point of view renders only partial justice to the
phenomenon of experimentation in Italy in the twentieth century and to Teatro delle Albe.
Geographical dislocation placed the Albe away from the major circuits of theater-making.
Culturally, the background of the artists combined Catholicism and a certain leftist milieu which
had historically coexisted in Emilia Romagna side by side for many decades. Martinelli and his
companions were not outsiders; they lived their culture as a burden to be metabolized and a
richness that required critical intervention.
While the historical avant garde needed ideology in order to proceed to an analysis of the
world, from the early nineteen seventies experimentation grew more and more unfamiliar with
political commitment in the form of party alignment, following a trend that had caught
130 Interview with Maria Giovanna Maioli Loperfido for Il Nuovo Ravennate , November 15, 1991.
131 Cappelletti, Dante. La sperimentazione teatrale in Italia tra norma e devianza . Torino: ERI Edizioni Rai, 1981, 203. 126 momentum in the overall Italian society. The Albe’s vision refused the political structure to
embrace the politttttttical , a neologism that indicates, according to Martinelli, their urge to
engage all the possible bends and turns that life takes and, within life, art. Political theater treated
spectators in a populist fashion, with a pedantic pedagogical project. The Albe’s desire was to
discuss complexity, considering both theater makers and spectators as adults with a dreamy
consciousness.
Years ago we chose to define our work as politttttttical (with seven t’s) to signify a scene that does not provide answers, but rather opens questions, anxieties, disembodiment, containing as many t’s as there are twists in reality. The Albe constantly blends tradition and innovation. We know that Aristophanes is avant garde (if properly evoked) while Duchamp possesses the gaze of an old shaman. So how shall we define our theater? Maybe..... simply theater, an ancient art, an art still able to rant, to affect the spectator’s heart, an art still very ‘necessary’ in an era of emptiness and televised simulacra. 132
The claim to intimacy, evoked in Martinelli’s reference to the spectator’s heart, envisions a
theater in which the actors, the people who make it and receive it, are central. In the vision of
Teatro delle Albe the untamed actor is an ancient mask that, at the same time, possesses a face
which speaks of contemporaneity; creating worlds, not merely interpreting them; inspiring the
playwright-director, not simply listening to his suggestions. An athlete of the imagination, an
anti-psychological puppet, a “cruel” comedian, an artist immersed in his own era.
In the nineteen twenties and thirties, Futurism and Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Teatro degli
Indipendenti had the merit of giving a communal space and time to the urgency of early twentieth
century transformation. 133 By contrast, from the nineteen sixties, the avant-garde was never really
132 Personal email received from Marco Martinelli on May 26, 2004.
133 The example set by Teatro degli Indipendenti, founded by Anton Giulio Bragaglia in 1922 in Rome, demonstrates 127 willing and able to create a cohesive movement, having introjected the post-War ideology of
individualism. Experimental theater lived off separate groups, some more effective than others,
that shared an implicit poetic but only rarely gained momentum as a whole. Teatro delle Albe
broke this negative trend because it was able to maintain artistic and poetic independence, while
also cherishing exchanges with a web of other theater-makers that form the so-called
phenomenon of Romagna Felix - a flourishing of successful theater groups in dialogue with one
another, who were able to push the envelope of experimental research and gain international
visibility: Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Motus, Teatrino Clandestino, Fanny e Alexander, and of
course Teatro delle Albe, to name a few. The generosity with which Martinelli and his colleagues
operate in synergy with other artists derives from the director’s open vision of theater as a
community. Community here resonates with the sense that Jill Dolan attributes to Biddy Martin’s
and Chandra Mohanty’s interest in “the configuration of home, identity, and community” in the
tension between “being home,” “the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected
boundaries,” and “not being at home,” “a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of
coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the
repression of differences even within oneself.” 134 Community assumes also the larger meaning of
how avant garde and privileged social status could actually move hand in hand. The merit of Bragaglia’s activity was to offer for the first time ever to Italian audiences extremely innovative texts and mise en scénes that would soon become the epitomes of Western experimentation: Jarry, Apollinare, Lafourge, Strindeberg, O’Neill, along with Italian authors such as Pirandello, Marinetti, Svevo Rosso di San Secondo. The special evenings at Teatro degli Indipendenti, a nineteen twenties version of events that in the following decades would become known as “happenings”, mainly attracted an audience composed of elitist intelligentsia and bourgeoisies. Bragaglia often stressed that experimentation ought to remain a never ending research in order to function as a spectacular, shocking critique of contemporary social habits. In his words: “Experimentation has to constantly experiment, and can only do so for a specialized audience. One should not confuse popular theater with experimental theater.” Bragaglia’s elitism was justified by historical contingencies, since in the nineteen twenties 35% of the Italian population was illiterate and liberalism had a strong populist ideology.
134 Dolan, Jill. Geographies of Learning. Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance . Middleton: Wesleyan UP, 2001, 67. 128 theater as the shared moment of collective recognition, as in ancient Greece when sacred
ritualism and mundane entertainment coexisted in the performance framework, and acting was at
once an act of respect for the Gods and a social commentary on the ethical limits of the human
world. Teatro delle Albe’s contested home reproduces a fictive kinship and familiar relations that
create a welcoming environment for those who feel an elective liaison with its poetic. The way in
which Martinelli and N’Diaye speak of themselves as ancestors who re-found each other, or the
admiration with which the four young permanent actors of the group (Argo, Roby, Fagio, and
Renda) look at Marco and Ermanna, as everybody familiarly calls them, reinstates professional
relations under the rubric of intimacy. Romagna Felix has become the extended family of
election with which the Albe maintains an open and lively channel of communication.
The assumption of such communication is the resistance against art that separates texts
from bodies, language from action. Communication as an art form and communication as a social value merge into a unity of intents. Theater influences society as much as the inventiveness and energy of everyday life inspire artistic creation. “The intersection of art and politics is the crucial condition for the reconstruction of human agency as a multiplicity of acts of resistance to the limits imposed by social structures.” 135 Experimental performances focus on the value of actions
and analyze the essence of political activity; they measure the significance of direct involvement.
As Margaret Drewal theorizes “in the broadest sense, performance is the praxis of everyday
social life; indeed, it is the practical application of embodied skill and knowledge to the task of
135 Martin, Jay. The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 . Berkeley: U of California P, 1973, IX.
129 taking action.” 136
Similarly, Teatro delle Albe theorizes theater as a form of knowledge by means of physical work. An actor is able to recognize himself through physical actions and sensorial responses; the very possibility of generating actions constitutes the actor’s identity as a living being. Hence, each performer carries within him/herself a set of inscribed signifiers that get repeatedly eaten, digested and recreated when they are compared with those of all the other acting subjects. Consequently, nothing stays inscribed in a body forever: a Romagnole teenager acquires a movement from an African dance; a Senegalese actor learns the tones and rhythms of
Ravenna’s dialect. The claim is that bodies are universal and local at once. The Albe’s performers are not Italian or Senegalese actors, but rather actors from Italy and Senegal. Shifting the geographic perspective by repositioning adjectives of nationality, the linguistic trick helps locate a spatial/cultural origin, while freeing the acting body from those unwritten rules that tell people what they can and cannot do or be, based on alleged inscribed socio-cultural markers.
Mixed performance elements give way to mixed identities until it becomes impossible to discern where a specific gesture came from, or who initiated that song or joke, and eventually everyone recognizes everyone else as part of the same community. In the work of Teatro delle Albe, theory lives before and underneath practice and its aesthetic production. It is always a total work, unstable and unbalanced, in so far as performance lives in the moments and in the experience that spectators and actors have of it in the making. The cognitive act is at once logical and emotional, underlying the research of that intimate connection between the actor and his own timing.
On this basis, the audience of an Albe show inhabits the cognitive pleasure of capturing
136 Drewal, Margaret. “The State of Research in Africa.” African Studies Review . 34,3: 1-64. 130 the inferred meaning of language, but also the textural pleasure derived by the accuracy with which lights, sounds, set and costume design contribute to the creation of a consistent, and beautiful work of art. Visual languages play with the actors’ performances and multiply their enjoyment. In Martinelli’s writing, the savvy use of multi-lingualism projects Teatro delle Albe into a cosmopolitan circuit. Different national audiences can capture glimpses of meaning and work off a plethora of visual clues to fill in that which they cannot understand in the spoken parts. Put in this way, it may almost seem that multi-lingualism is a utilitarian tool to speak to a larger audience and sell shows all over the world. There is, instead, a strong component of genuineness in Martinelli’s interest in the intra-cultural. The shows he directs speak of our reality, but play with it in exaggerated and grotesque forms. The two new productions by Teatro delle Albe, for instance, take to extremes the feeling of hate: unconditional, state-of-the-art fear of the Other - pure hate. In Sterminio (2006) Montanari plays an intolerant, evil home owner who exterminates her tenants, a group composed of two families in which incest, deformity, racist slurs and avidity are the norm. In Liebe (2006) an authoritarian entrepreneur runs a factory that produces girls-in-a-suitcase, surrounded by cheering choruses and tap dancers. In both cases,
Martinelli has moved away from the more explicit intra-culturalism that confronts whiteness and blackness, and focused on theater as a propositional site of resistance against the logic of the market, the abundance of commodities that turn identities and values into a spectacle, and the reduction of humanity to its exchange value. The shows pertain to that line of thinking that looks for a space of intellectual freedom within the narrow logistics of capitalism. Martinelli deliberately chooses to plumb the depths of existence from no pre-set ideological stand. Against the lonely human condition, any attempt to regain a collective sense of belonging constitutes a 131 subversive action full of promises for the future
Teatro delle Albe offers an approach to theater that recuperates memory of a mystic rural world, one in which religion goes beyond the Church interpretation of the word of God, and builds a syncretic structure of the magic, the supernatural, ancestral beliefs, and irreverent parodies of institutionalized truths; a theater that privileges space, movement and bodies as sites of urgency and danger. Freed from void ideologies that had informed so much of the experimentation of the previous decades, contemporary theatrical research does not exclude the possibility of actively intervening in the cultural materialist debate, but it chooses to do so through a scene that causes anxieties and disembodiment. If, on the one hand, I personally believe that this idea fully represents the fragmented essence of our globalized world, at the same time, I question the real efficacy of this constantly destabilizing choice. In the reflection of
Maurizio Grande: “artistic experimentation is still victim of a prejudice that represents it as a constant movement of ‘diversity’ and existential pain, as the aberrant production of ‘events’ and
‘linguistic chaos’ that goes beyond any possible translation, interpretation or critical formulation.” 137 This prejudice lives on the edge of a form of conservative categorization, too close to the transformation (or self-transformation) of experimental performance into a canon.
Nonetheless, since the world has shrunk to the point that environmental catastrophes or economic and political turmoil happening thousands of miles away from our home affect the security and stability of our wealth, theater necessarily investigates that which is different and far away as if it was a part of our own self.
The locality of the Albe sells nostalgia to an audience of Romagnole people that can
137 Grande, Maurizio. La riscossa di Lucifero: ideologie e prassi del tetro di sperimentazione in Italia, 1976-1984 . Roma: Bulzoni, 1985, 15. 132 directly connect with the cultural signifiers of dialect and evocations of known places,
atmospheres and tastes. Even more interestingly, it is able to communicate nostalgia across racial
and generational barriers to people who have never actually experienced those situations. The
recollection of childhood memories effectively translate across cultures, because spectators
detach from the specific object of reference and imaginatively link them to what is familiar to
each one of them. When Madre, in Ruh , recalls her grandmother’s obsession with food because
“grandma feared hunger more than anything else in the world” 138 one does not need to have been
a young kid in Ravenna to share that feeling; nor does one need direct experiences of war to
painfully relate to the army of children-soldiers that fight in Ubu Buur (2007). Likewise, in the
show Griot-Fulêr (1993) 139 , the sensory pleasure of narration unites Luigi Dadina’s memory of
old voices around a fire at night in the foggy Romagnole winters, and Mandiaye N’Diaye’s
stories told at sunset under a baobab tree in Diol Kadd. Cross-border tales became the common
language of a performance that also summarized the actors’ different life trajectories. Mixing
narrations was a natural re-production on stage of that which the Albe actors experienced daily,
encountering each other and learning to discern their various cultural signifiers. Respect for one’s
own roots is also the possibility to reinvent them, because when one discovers the Other, one
reaffirms oneself. After all, the ancient Greek word metis , from which the Italian meticcio, the
French métissage , the Spanish mestizo , meant wisdom. Knowledge comes from confronting the
138 Ruh , 32.
139 The f ulêr was a professional narrator who lived off his story telling. In Emilia Romagna, he would move from farm to farm in the fall and winter nights, entertaining both men and women during their evenings spent sewing or repairing tools. The stories usually dealt with magic, and people appreciated the more skilled fulêr for the plot as much as for their narrating skills – voice tone, pauses, and gestures. The griot is a figure appearing throughout sub- Saharan Africa and receives respectful welcome everywhere. He is often the depository of a community’s genealogy and acts out an informational as well as an educative role. 133 unknown, the different, not closing oneself within what is already given. Griot-Fulêr
experimented with linguistic disequilibrium, built on the dusty ground of an African desert and
the watery flat land surrounding Ravenna. There is an implicit danger in being too grounded, too
local and that is the risk of becoming canonical and intolerant. The homeland is the screen
behind which feelings of hatred and closure find their pseudo-moral justifications. Teatro delle
Albe, instead, in its Afro-Romagnole constituency, conjugates its ultra-localism with critical
intelligence, well-rounded literary interests, and desire to embark constantly on new journeys.
The thoughts on modernity, as they appear in the poetics of Teatro delle Albe, invest the
relationship between materialistic production of objects and production of socialization, creation
of meaning and creation of memory, the unabridged technical and mechanical inventions of an
epoch and the related exhibition of aesthetic experiences. This site and time specific poetic
confronts the past within a respectful yet parodic frame, as repetition with a difference, that
opens a dynamic confrontation with the present and limits the possible pitfalls of extreme self-
reflexivity. Saying and doing do not necessarily represent an act or its image; they infer meaning or rather a density of signifiers that surrogate stability, certainty, and linear evolution. This approach recalls what Jean Paul Sartre considered an effective performative act: “There are no images in the theater but the image of the act, and if one seeks the definition of theater, one must ask what an act is, because the theater can represent nothing but the act.” 140
Reaching Beyond the Theater Walls
My analysis of Teatro delle Albe’s philosophical background requires me to explain the base from which Marco Martinelli launched his encounter with three Senegalese immigrants who
140 Sartre, Jean Paul. “Beyond Bourgeois Theater.” The Tulane Drama Review . 5:3; March 1963. 134 were living as street vendors in Rimini, of which Ruh was the first and imperfect stage expression. Though the search may appear to some critics as a post-colonial imposition of the white director’s desire upon black immigrants, the logic was actually very different and spoke of acknowledging the presence of the Other, by our side. It is the passion for the role of the actor and the creation of his own world, through physical involvement, that brought Martinelli and
Montanari towards immigrants who were aiming at assessing their identity and self-recognition in the host country. Immigration deals with a deep human necessity to envision that which is not there yet, but could develop in forms of accrued material and emotional well being. Immigrants and actors alike search for the invisible that triggers their most inner needs. No one can stop people from dreaming; but, as the English poet Yeats once said, dreams carry with them many responsibilities.
In the world, 10% of the population enjoys 80% of all the natural resources. Teatro delle
Albe raises serious concerns about millions of people who still live in uncodified forms of slavery and maltreatment. The monologue that concludes Ruh expresses this probelmatic. The character of Prologo, a stage device used in Greek tragedies to push forward the action by means of narrative summaries delivered directly to the audience, addresses Madre:
Madre, I’ll tell you, I don’t understand anything no more. I suck a candy and, without knowing it, I support a racist government a thousand miles from here. Each candy is a blow to an African man’s face. A candy.... a blow. A candy.... a blow. A candy.... a blow. I don’t know where my actions end; I can’t measure them; they are prolonged into a dark space; and others, others make of me and of my acts whatever they like. We have lost a sense of measure, I tell myself before falling asleep... any sense of measure. Madre, what can I do? What clothes should I wear in the morning and not be ashamed of myself in front of the mirror? 141
141 Ruh , 40.
135
Prologo vocalizes the loss of identity as an outcome of the impossibility for the individual to
control the consequences of his social actions, even those that may appear innocuous. Madre
concludes the show without any word of hope, but rather with a memento to the need for people
to analyze their complacency with the systems of aggressive exploitation that is condemning the
world, and humans themselves, to death. Madre’s natural tasks do not encompass solace or
salvation. She admits herself that “I am not omnipotent [...] I am neither good nor evil and I
watch all of you die...” and when Prologo begs her to say something that may sound as a hopeful
goodbye, Madre ends Ruh with a cryptic “I don’t like magniloquent statements. I don’t like
History. I like lemons!” 142 Identity crisis affects the personal level as much as the community level. People are displaced, forced to migrate and relocate due to major economic, demographic or political changes. Dislocated people naturally initiate a process of re-territorialization to reconstruct an ideal cultural identity by means of imagination. This process of restoration takes place within a framework complicated by the appropriation and commodification of cultural products within the capitalist logic of profit. Re-territorialization exemplifies that it is no longer easy to sort out the local from the global: transnational circulations of images get reworked on the ground and redeployed for local, tactical struggles. These local makeovers simultaneously encumber and energize global flows. 143 The only possible defense against the forces that commodify human interactions seems the pleasure derived from the simplest elements of nature
– the lemons that Madre advocates in the end, and that three black actors distribute among the
142 Ibid., 41.
143 Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 136 spectators who leave the theater as a physical reminder of nature’s goodness.
During my fieldwork I conducted extensive interviews with the participants of Teatro
delle Albe. Quite interestingly, many of them expressed the returning idea that the intra-cultural
phase of their work is over. Nowadays only Mandiaye N’Diaye remains in the group. Both Mor
Awa Niang and El Hadji Niang left a few years ago, once again because the economic conditions
did not seem profitable enough to assure a conspicuous income to be shared with their families in
Senegal. Admittedly, the financial success of Teatro delle Albe as a production company under
the administrative control of Ravenna Teatro has conspicuously improved from the mid-nineteen
nineties. Ravenna Teatro receives public founding from the FUS (equivalent to the National
Endowment for the Arts), and various sponsorship programs at the regional and city levels,
redistributing the resources between Teatro delle Albe and Compagnia Drammatico Vegetale.
Since public cuts to such programs always jeopardize their budget, Teatro delle Albe’s major
income derives from its extensive touring schedule, and the co-production collaboration with the most prestigious festivals in Italy and around Europe. While I was working at Teatro Rasi, the company had three shows on the road: I Polacchi and Salmagundi (2004), with a cast of about
twenty people each, and La canzone degli FP e degli IM (2005), a four-actors reading of Elsa
Morante’s text that can be performed in any space, theatrical or not. Each permanent member of
the company (fifteen people in total including actors, technicians, and administrative staff)
receives a monthly stipend, while the actors who get cast for a specific show are paid according
to the national contract for temporary work. Overall, despite the struggle that each year Italians
theaters fight against budget cuts at the FUS, Ravenna Teatro is able to pay for a permanent
structure at Teatro Rasi, and supports a relatively high number of people and production projects. 137 At first, I was surprised that everyone at Teatro Rasi tried to understate the intra-cultural aspect of the Albe’s work, since the company had received much of its critical and scholarly attention due to its Afro-Romagnole experiment. With time, I realized that the need to distance itself from intra-culturalism is not a rejection of the Albe’s own past, but rather an evolution of the experimental phase into its introjection as a constitutive element of the group’s identity. For a while, the success of the Afro-Romagnole performances risked categorizing Teatro delle Albe as a migrant theater, which the group is not and never aimed to be. To escape the paradox of a successful idea becoming a formula that critics and spectators want to see reproduced over and over again, Martinelli always reaches for projects that differ from the previous ones, although they always maintain a certain recognizable signature style. On the other hand, twenty years have passed since Ruh. Romagna più Africa uguale . The black and white Albe have so intimately metabolized their collaboration with each other, that ethnic and cultural differences have become a blurred mix of shared memories and practices. Skin color is an accessory, an eventuality, not the determining factor in N’Diaye’s history or in Montanari’s performance. This should not be called political theater, which is the kind of theater that wants to inform, convince, and convert to the detriment of art and its aesthetic presentation, but rather politicality of theater, the implicit and explicit meaning that a performance assumes in relation to the larger contingent and constantly shifting social context. By means of intra-cultural, bi-directional encounters, Teatro delle Albe has moved away from the company’s self-generation towards a movement of
(re)finding that which is different from the self. The teatro di carne debunks the pervasive theatrical culture whose language can be mutated in other spheres of human knowledge.
Suspending language, by which I mean here a pre-codified set of rules that morally impose what 138 is right and what is wrong, allows a re-connection between the Other and the self. Teatro delle
Albe’s dramaturgy focuses on human beings/actors whose artistry on stage derives from their own Hamletic ability to “be” - a strong sense of identity. Teatro delle Albe was from its beginning built on bodies, and each time new flesh entered into the group (teenagers from
Ravenna, Senegalese immigrants to Italy, Afro-Carribean and black students in Chicago) this contributed new dramaturgy to the ensemble. These are knots of life that can be resolved only through the subjects’ direct experience and never by means of ideology. To a certain extent, the long trajectory of on and off-stage intra-cultural exchanges, and the life-long friendship and professional work of N’Diaye and Martinelli, position Teatro delle Albe in a state of suspension of ethnic tropes. The company embodies in the present what Italian society overall could become if it welcomed immigrants with an open mind rather than fear. Intra-culturalism is “dead” because the Albe actors have learned to recognize each other beyond the funereal notion of cultures as incompatible sets of rules, but rather through their joyous perception as fluid enliven practices.
Teatro Rasi stands as a lively memento of the possibilities of communicating across alleged ethnic lines of separation. The city space surrounding the building follows a different logic made of segregation. Ravenna is a typical rich northern Italian city, with an austere yet appealing historic center that merges a certain middle-European atmosphere and the splendid mosaics of its Byzantine Churches, clean streets deserted after dinner time, chic boutiques and posh coffee houses, in which forms of spatial separation are quite visible. The vast majority of immigrants live in the Lido Adriano neighborhood, an area by the seashore, which requires a fifteen minutes drive from the city center on a street that cuts across rice fields. The area’s 139 destiny was born under the rubric of immigration. In the nineteen sixties, the Milanese Count
Chiricatti built the new neighborhood using money sent by Italian immigrants who wanted to
have a vacation house back in their homeland. Through the years, Lido Adriano has become a
city within the city, with officially 20.000 inhabitants living in tall ugly buildings that contrast
with the elegant architecture of Ravenna. There are twenty-seven different ethnicities in Lido
Adriano, in constant tension with the local inhabitants, who think of themselves as the proper
owners of the neighborhood: Italian immigrants coming from the South and mafiosi in exile.
There are not only Africans then, but lots of East Europeans and Rom families living side by side in a dormitory-like area that lacks public spaces for social activities. Lido Adriano architecturally embodies the tension between repulsion and fascination which appears as a trope in many accounts of encounters with the exoticized Other, and reflects the need to construe a stable subjectivity by maintaining minorities at the margins and individuating the geographic, cultural and psychological limits that the Other should never be allowed to cross. I saw this very much at place in the geographic dislocation of the immigrant away from the city, in an enclosed space trapped between the sea and the rice fields that denotes the fear of proximity and the need for
Italians to be able to monitor immigrants.
My visits to Lido Adriano and the Senegalese restaurant Ciwara, a cooperative owned by three immigrants including N’Diaye’s wife, is a perfect example of how monolithic representations of nationalities and immigrants constitute a false ideology on blackness. There, I met tall Wolof people in Senegalese attire and other black men wearing suits, or low cut jeans and t-shirts. Some would only speak African idioms, while others praised themselves for mastering not only Italian, but also a perfect Romagnole dialect. Cerno, an elegant man from 140 Dakar and one of the representatives of the Senegalese community in Ravenna’s City Council, showed the most affirmative way of expressing his opinions. He was able to crack jokes in perfect dialect, which he believed had given him access to the unmediated trust of the locals.
Cerno was very joyful when he described his first steps in the Italian societies, and the ways in which he had built his career as a salesman with hard work and wise strategic moves, such as learning Italian better than Italians to show them respect and love for their homeland.
In general, when we engaged in more serious talks, most of the men admitted to being frustrated by the lack of sociopoliticalal recognition towards their community after more than thirty years of migratory flux. They are long-time residents of Lido Adriano, and most of them live with their wives and children. Nonetheless, many of them have to undergo the humiliating renewal process of their working papers on a yearly basis. The visit to the local police station, where suspicious officers always question their real identities, frames legal workers as delinquents. They live suspended between the desire for stability, represented by housing and children’s education in local schools, and the hope that their children will not forget Wolof. It is not uncommon for children to spend vacations in Senegal, and sometimes, also a long period of preparation in Koranic schools. All the men I talked to expressed the dream of obtaining the right to vote, and proved to be very knowledgeable of both Italian and Senegalese politics. Their cognitive map places them in the double position of aspiring to be acknowledged as productive members of the Italian society, yet at the same time they wish to remember and be remembered by Senegal. According to regional laws, legal immigrants can choose representatives to sit in local and provincial governments, but national elections are still a taboo and both Cerno and
N’Diaye agree that, for now, Italians are not ready to accept such a step. Using my experience at 141 Lido Adriano as a springboard, in the next chapter I will analyze more closely the evolution of national immigration laws and the interplay between the political and media debate over immigration. 142 CHAPTER THREE – Constructing a National Emergency: Media and Politics on Migration
“Since as a tolerant country we cannot condone any increase in racial prejudice, and since an increase in the black population would surely result in more prejudice, than we must resist any pressure to admit more blacks.” (Charles Husband, White Media and Black Britain )
In November 2005, I visited Dakar for a cycle of conferences / shows on Teatro delle Albe. Each night, I sat on stage and dialogued with Marco Martinelli about the group’s innovative approach to intra-culturalism. Then I ran back stage to get dressed in a shiny red suit and turned into Lelio, the spoiled rich brat of I ventidue infortuni di Mor Arlecchino . With Mandiaye N’Diaye, who
played the leading role, and two teenagers from the Italian Department of the University of
Dakar, we performed a selection of crucial scenes from the show. During our last night in town,
Bruno Morbici, an Italian journalist from Rai Uno (Channel One of the public broadcasting
company) asked us if he could film I ventidue infortuni in order to include the footage in his
reportage on Senegal. Martinelli and I were to catch a late night plane to Milano that same
evening, but the journalist was welcomed to videotape N’Diaye, Aliou and Ndei.
The documentary aired on Rai Uno on December 11, 2005 with the title Regalo di Natale
(A Christmas Gift). The heading was problematic from the start, prompting a reflection on the importance of the “politics of naming.” Regalo di Natale set a paternalistic tone over Senegal and
its people, and left me wondering who’s gift was it, and for whom? Morbici alternated interviews
with Professors from the University of Dakar, N’Diaye performing as Arlecchino, and sights of
the country’s tourist attractions, constructing an analysis that reaffirmed the idea of Senegal - and
Africa overall - as a land with no future, a locus of scarcity and absence: the “dark continent.” It
was not at all the Senegal that I had experienced during my short stay in Dakar. The broadcast
reached its lowest point when Morbici played a joke on N’Diaye’s first name, since Mandiaye 143 sounds like the Italian past tense of the verb mangiare (to eat). Linking such linguistic pun to the journalistic pivotal inquiry, the documentary rhetorically asked: is it better to be poor as an immigrant to Italy or to stay poor in Senegal?
The question highlights the ways in which media address news on immigration through sensationalism and stereotyping: they take for granted that black African immigrants come from poverty, that they lack elements of formal education/training, and have no entrepreneurial ability fundamental for a successful migration to Europe. There is also the implication that the community-based support system at home reduces the impact of poverty on the individual, which subtly and dangerously suggests that migrants should think twice before abandoning that support, and that it is better to be poor than lonely and poor. Finally, the idea that by staying in Senegal people develop less needs, and can find comfort in the little that they have, works against projects of solidarity between the North and the South of the world. My discomfort with Regalo di Natale arose from two main considerations: first, the disconnection between my personal experience with the Senegalese community in Dakar and Ravenna, and the hopeless picture painted by Morbici; and second, the danger implicit in the perception of journalism as an objective, factual and non-fictional representation of reality.
In this chapter, I argue against the understanding that mainstream media embrace such paternalistic tones to represent immigrants as passive bearers of hunger, unemployment, and under-development. The press and television networks mediate between the central purpose of informing and the need to respect editorial lines imposed by politic-economic reasoning of profit- making. I also complement my critique by looking at the ways in which politics, and specifically immigration laws, play within the same limited discourse. Once more, I place my argument in 144 relation to an original production by Teatro delle Albe: Sogno di una notte di mezza estate . The
show is an inquiry on the relationship between power and the right to exist, live and occupy a
space. As such, Sogno intrinsically speaks to mainstream media and national immigration
policies because these latter forms of intervention start from a dangerous presupposition: to
question the immigrants’ human and civil right to be present within “our” homeland. By
deploying technical devices to create a permeable space of interaction between white actors
(Theseus’ Court) and black performers (the elves of the wood), Sogno denounces that political
and journalistic discourses use clear-cut ethnic separations in useless, ideologically-charged, and
populist forms. The show’s alternation and overlapping of day and night, dream and nightmare, truth and imagined visions is a metaphor for the essence of any migrant’s life project, and for all human exchanges that have always flourished beyond and against national, racial or cultural barriers.
Mass Media and Blackness: Immigration Equals Illegality
Traditionally, on January 1 st , Italian newscasts track down the first baby born on New Year’s day.
Much to national surprise, in 2007 two babies were competing for the honor: the sons of two migrant couples from Algeria and Morocco. On January 17 th , 2007 the talk-show Primo Piano
featured an interview with Parliament member Roberto Castelli on the death of two Bengali
immigrants in the fire of their apartment in Piazza Vittorio - Roma’s most ethnically diverse
neighborhood. Addressing the issue of low income housing, Castelli declared his sorrow for what
had happened, but he stressed that the Italian Parliament had the moral duty to protect the rights
of Italian citizens first. He lightheartedly implyed that immigrants could never be equated to nor 145 considered as citizens. 144 On February 2 nd , 2007 former Parliament member now turned anchor
woman Irene Pivetti hosted a special edition of her show Tempi Moderni . In her introductory
statement, she emphasized the need to think about immigrants beyond stereotypes and the
reductive category of illegality. Nonetheless, for the remaining two hours I watched African drug
dealers in Padua, Moroccan pick pocketing on Roman buses, Rom enclaves in Milan as off-limits zones for national law enforcement, and the search for a job performed by an undercover journalist as a veiled woman. 145 So much for confuting stereotypes! Marginality, violence, and
Otherness hold the main stage in media representation. The immigrant is always outside: outside
the law, our culture, our reach, and our understanding.
Even when the media address the presence of second generation immigrants, it is rarely to
present stories of successful coexistence. For instance, the debate over the Islamic school in
Milano characterized the late summer of 2006. Conservatives singled out the elementary and
junior high school as attempts by the growing Islamic community to provide their children with
an education in contrast with the foundations of Italian civil society. 146 Yet, when children of
immigrant couples attend public schools, the media dwell into the unsustainable social costs of
an education system that should take into account religious, linguistic and cultural differences:
144 Official statements of this kind fall within the linguistic common trope of “Non sono razzista, per b...” (I am not racist, but...). The introductory remark places the speaker in a safe space that erases the openly racist comments that follow. The journalist Giovanni Maria Bellu, in his weekly column on immigration, created the ironic category of the nor Bppero to describe the uses and abuses of such linguistic scapegoat. See: “Le ondate migratorie e la crisi del Nor Bppero” in La Repubblica , May 13, 2007.
145 Primo Piano is a journalistic talk show, half an hour long, that confronts the positions of two politicians from opposing parties on relevant sociopoliticalal issues. Rai Tre, the most liberal, leftist, and culturally oriented network of the national public television broadcasts the program weekly. Tempi Moderni is also a weekly show on Rete 4, the most openly supportive network of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party Forza Italia .
146 The official position of the city council in Milan was that the building did not meet the local sanitary requirements. It is very common for public officials to deploy reasons of ‘public safety’ to justify urban interventions that often discriminate against minorities, or low-income workers. 146 from veiled students and religious symbols in the classrooms, to cafeterias serving pork entrees or vegetarian dishes. The bottom line is: immigrants create problems; immigrants are a problem.
The hot topic of immigration in the media provided both quantitative and qualitative working questions for my analysis: What is the main concern that Italian newspapers express about immigrants? What image do they build of them? How much space do immigrants have in the news? Do they ever speak directly, or are they being talked about? One introductory point has to be made. The formation of a consistent media sensibility around immigration took almost three decades to develop. In Great Britain, a critical thinking on the relationship between the press and ethnic minorities has existed since the nineteen fifties, as the work of Hartmann and
Husband demonstrates. The same happened in France. 147 In Italy, the appearance of immigrants in journalistic accounts dates back only to the second half of the nineteen eighties. 148 Scholars as well had a late awakening, with the most consistent publication of works concentrated around the time of the Martelli Law on immigration (law 39, 1990). 149 More recently, trends in migration
147 See: Tannenbaum, H. P. “The Effect of Headlines on the Interpretation of News Stories.” in Journalism Quarterly , N. 30, 1953, pp. 189-197; Warr, P. B. and B. Knapper. The Perception of People and Events . John Wiley and Sons, 1968; Guillamin, Collette. “The Popular Press and Ethnic Pluralism: the Situation in France” in International Social Science Journal , Vol. 23, N. 9, 1971; Hartmann, Paul and Charles Husband. Racism and the Mass Media; A Study of the Role of the Mass Media in the Formation of White Beliefs and Attitudes in Britain. London: Davis-Poynter, 1974; UNESCO. Race as News . Paris: UNESCO, 1974; Husband, Charkes, ed. White Media and Black Britain. A Critical Look at the Role of Media in Race Relations Today. London: Arrow, 1975; UNESCO. Ethnicity and the Media . Paris: UNESCO, 1977.
148 There are a number of publications on the relationship between media and immigration demonstrating the interest in the topic: Gennari, Mario. “I mass media” in L’educazione extracomunitaria. Problemi e prospettive . Edited by C. Scurati. Brescia: La Scuola, 1986; Mansoubi, M. Noi stranieri in Italia. Immigrazione e mass media . 1990; Marletti, Carlo. Extracomunitari. Dall’immaginario collettivo al vissuto quotidiano del razzismo . Roma: Nuova ERI, 1991; Grossi G., Belluati M., and Viglongo E. Mass media e societá multietnica . 1995; Lodigiani, Rosangela. “La rapprsentazione dei rapporti interetnici nella stampa locale” in Immigrazione e societá multietnica in Lombardia . Edited by Ambrosini M. 1996; Corte, Maurizio. Stranieri e mass media. Stampa, immigrazione, e pedagogia interculturale . Padova: CEDAM, 2002; Sibhatu, Ribka. Il cittadino che non c’é. L’immigrazione dei media italiani . Roma: EDUP, 2004.
149 Much of the literature on immigrants to Italy deals with the phenomenon from a sociological point of view, with 147 studies tend to focus on the connective elements of the phenomenon, as a total act involving
spatio-temporal continuities: immigration happens here and there, before and after. The sending
country and the receiving one, the cultural sphere of the family of origin and the (inter)ethnic
community in which immigrants rebuild their patterns of socialization, do not produce
dichotomy, but rather a circular space of interactions in which personal agency and neoliberal
structural impositions converge. 150 This circulation is at once a process of adaptation of the
migration patterns to existing sociopoliticalal conditions, and the proof of the natural
sedimentation of human activities in the making. Facing laws that restrict their freedom to leave
and re-enter a country at any given time, migrants tend to become sedentary. The desire to defend
the rights to reside and work in the receiving country tends to replace the idea of seasonal
migration, while the circulation of people, economic remittances, and goods multiplies in order
to compensate for the physical and psychological absence of the migrants’ bodies from their
an emphasis on analytical data, personal interviews / ethnographic accounts and a focus on specific regional or city- wide communities. Examples of such works are: Bernardotti, Maria Adriana. Con la valigia accanto al letto. Immigrati e casa a Bologna Milano, FrancoAngeli 2000; AECA,ed. Immigrazione, cittadinanza, lavoro.Indagine sull’immigrazione in Emilia Romagna e percorsi d’intervento per l’integrazione socio-lavorativa . Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2003; Sacchi, Paolo and Pier Paolo Viazzo. Pi j a sud. Studi antropologici sull’immigrazione a Torino . Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2003. Also, the majority of these researches analyze the condition of immigrants in the Norther regions of Italy, or the urban setting of Rome. Immigrants in the South attracted little scholarly attention, but paradoxically more media concern because of the illegal trafficking of human bodies between Libya. Algeria, Tunisia and the Southern Italian coasts. Some investigations on immigrants in Campania and Puglia appear in a few numbers of the journal Studi Emigrazione / Migration Studies .
150 Building on notions of circular diasporic identities as theorized by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic , and Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead , contemporary theory considers migration as an extended social relation, rather than an individual act. This approach merges considerations over neoliberal politics, push and pull factors, network analysis and psychological reasoning behind the migration choice. See for example: Favaro, Graziella and Mara Tognetti Bordogna. Politiche sociali ed immigrati stranieri . Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1989; De Angelis, Roberto. Ghetti etnici e tensioni di vita . Roma: La Meridiana, 1991; Somma, Paola. Spazio e razzismo. Strumenti urbanistici e segregazione etnica . Milano: Franco Angeli, 1991; Landuzzi, C., ed. Tra luoghi e generazioni. Migrazioni africane in Italia e Francia . Torino: l’Harmattan Italia, 1995; Zanfrini, Laura. La ricerca sull’immigrazione in Italia. Gli sviluppi pi j recenti . Milano: Fondazione Cariplo, 1996; Dal Lago, Alessandro. Non-persone. L’esclusione dei migranti in una societá globale . Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999; Sayad, Abdelmalek. La doppia assenza. Dalle illusioni dell’emigrato alle sofferenze dell’immigrato . Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2002. Also very important is the above mentioned journal Studi Emigrazione / Migration Studies that privileges a multi-national, comparative approach with publications both in English and Italian. 148 homeland. In conditions of migration, life goes on: families reunite, babies are born, teenagers go to school or enter the job market, cultural practices hybridize, and the praxis that immigrants believed temporary can become a lasting, intentional choice.
In my analysis, I dedicate special attention to the ways in which the press accounts for news on immigration. Television reaches a wider audience in less time, but it also consumes the event more quickly. Televised reports have to cater to the spectators’ short attention span with spectacular takes on news. Instead, the press reaches a smaller audience but its ability to define the specificity of a situation is much higher, and so is its pulse for local events for which the average reader seems to experience a keener interest and direct involvement. Newspapers can dedicate multiple articles to the same event with a continuity of coverage, and their written format has a permanence that contrasts with the disappearance of fast-paced moving images on television. As long as the topic appears to be relevant to the reader, newspapers act as an echo of daily events.
Nonetheless, events become news not so much based on their social relevance, but according to a business-oriented marketing strategy to sell copies. On this account, newspapers are not free from a process of spectacularization. Summarizing a rich field of scholarly writing, van Dijk claims that: “the news media do not passively describe or record news events in the world, but actively (re-) construct them, mostly on the basis of many types of source discourses” which include corporate interests, the professionalization of journalism, dominant values and of course patterns of production and reproduction of news events. “These factors” he continues
“favor preferential access of powerful persons, institutions and nations to the media, more stories about these powerful elites, special focus on negative, conflictual or dramatic events, and 149 generally a white, Western, male, and middle class perspective on news events.” 151 The
positionality of professional journalists expresses the ambivalence of the journalist-reader
relationship. On the one hand, the choice of readers as consumers seems to impose the kind of
news that live longer in the press; on the other hand, the sensationalistic or alarming tone of the
news shapes and forces the curiosity and voyeuristic desire of the reader, reproduced and
circulated in multiple media forms: newspapers (with morning, afternoon and evening editions),
televison, cell phones and the internet. Mixing entertainment and socially-aware journalism,
serious reportage and diversion, these media blur the lines between genres. More information is
available, but the dispersion of this quantity in many different media can create confusion and
complicate definitions.
In a study published in 1991 on the media representation of immigrants to Italy, Carlo
Marletti individuates three moments in the attention cycle of a news topic: the latency, the
emergency, and the self-referential phase. At the beginning of the nineteen nineties, the relevance
of immigration for media purposes was still very recent. This fact unveils the slowness with
which journalism felt the pulse of a changing society in the last thirty years of the twentieth
century. In fact, the ratio emigrants-immigrants in Italy had already reached a positive value in
1974. The latency phase, one in which the objective social relevance of an issue does not find
space in the mass media but only in restricted circles of researchers and opinion makers, had a
very long gestation. In the emergency phase, the media and politics discover the problem, which
151 van Dijk, T.A. “Mediating Racism. The Role of the Media and the Reproduction of Racism.” Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse . Ruth Wodak, ed. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J.Benjamins Pub, 1989, 203. van Dijk’s builds his work on: Gans, Herbert. Deciding What’s News . New York: Pantheon Books, 1979; Fishman, Mark. Manufacturing the News . Austin: U of Texas P, 1980; Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly . Boston: Beacon Press, 1983; Graber, Doris A. Processing the News. How People Tame the Information Tide. New York: Longman, 1984; Robinson, John P. and Mark R. Levy. The Main Source. Learning from Television News . Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986. 150 assumes prominence due to a series of relevant events that the public opinion perceives as such.
The media tend to turn the issue into a spectacle to meet the spectators’ interest and to keep it alive. In the third phase, the issue becomes autonomous from both the events from which it acquired visibility and from the public opinion’s interest. General audiences lose interest, and the topic reduces to public displays of preoccupation or support showed by politicians and opinion makers. 152
In 1991, Marletti still perceived Italian media as unable to abandon the latency phase. My argument updates his discussion. I argue that the real turning point for the coverage of immigration to Italy happened in 1989, when the murder of a young South African refugee, Jerry
Masslo, pushed the country out of the latency phase and into a state of emergency. The ghost that hunts my argumentation throughout the dissertation is that, since 1989, Italian media and the citizens’ social consciousness have been unable to metabolize this emergency trope, which actually developed into an increasing sense of social tension and fear of the Other. Masslo had escaped the apartheid regime of South Africa and found a seasonal job in the fields of Villa
Literno, not far from Napoli, collecting tomatoes. He was murdered on August 24 th , 1989. His death unveiled the horrible living conditions of immigrant seasonal workers - underpaid and forced to sleep in overcrowded, unsanitary apartments - and caused a wave of indignation. The accident awakened Italians from their naiveté to discover that they lived in a racist country.
Masslo’s case produced a heated political debate and national anti-racist manifestations. Rai Uno even broadcasted his funeral live - a treatment that tv networks reserved only to high ranking
152 See: Marletti, Carlo. Extracomunitari. Dall’immaginario collettivo al vissuto quotidiano del razzismo. Roma: Nuova ERI, 1991. Marletti’s study stems from a reading of Torino’s newspaper La Stampa , the only one to have an accessible online archive dating back to 1982. 151 public officials killed by the mafia, Lady Diana, and the Pope. Such awareness lasted for a few months, but a trip to Villa Literno today would show that the immigrants’ living conditions have not changed a bit. Likewise, and to the detriment of a useful collective self-critique on the limits of multi-culturalism Italian-style, since 1989 the national press itself has been unable to abandon the emergency phase. Rather the opposite; it has taken it to extreme limits with spectacular title evoking the invasion of the Italian peninsula by foreigners, the loss of national cultural traits, and violent crimes that have made our cities unlivable. In 2007, the press is still digesting the presence of immigrants in Italy at a slow pace. The emergency trope speaks of a general attitude towards immigration considered as a historic conjuncture, a moment in time that will eventually resolve itself, rather than as a structural phenomenon.
More tragically, emergency is a synonym for Africa itself. In her book Performing Africa ,
Paulla Ebron sets the stage by writing: “Africa often enters a global imagination through news accounts of ethnic wars, famine, and unstable political regimes. [...] The repetitive refrain - signaling a cycle of destruction and unrest - encircles sub-Saharan Africa like a swarm of bad omens that, more often than not, fails to distinguish national differences or historical moment.” 153 According to Ebron, the definition of what constitutes a media event, a newsworthy piece of journalism, is still nowadays irremediably racist. I agree with her, but this is not to say that newspapers overtly invite their readers to act violently against blacks. News’ racism is embedded in the silence surrounding blacks and Africa, which is often out of sight and mind. The world that counts is white and Western. Events are newsworthy if the general opinion can
153 Ebron, Paulla A. Performing Africa . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2002, 2. See also: Laitin, David D. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa . In Italian, see: Casti, Emanuela and Angelo Turco, eds. Cultura dell’alterit B. Il territorio africano e le sue rappresentazioni . Milano: Edizioni Unicopoli, 1998. 152 associate them with public interests, and in Europe and the USA the leadership that dictates such
interests is predominantly white. When Africa and Africans appear in the news, a plethora of
intentional misrepresentations accompany them. Immigrants embody a paradoxical colonial
history-less identity of primitive instincts and continent-wide tragedies. Africa is not a country,
but the media often treat her as such, because they are not keen on entering into the amazing variety of the continent’s cultural, and sociopolitical realities. Likewise, media short-cuts prefer to lump Africans together as repositories of exotic diseases, poverty, and lack of formal education or culture tout court .
However, in the last few years a number of journalistic broadcasts on national tv
(Nonsolonero , Un Mondo a Colori , Shukran ), and editorial initiatives such as the periodic
publication by La Repubblica of an insert completely dedicated to immigrants residing in Italy,
demonstrate that immigrants are not only a subject to be talked about, but consumers / readers /
spectators of information themselves. The most obvious limit of these products resides in the fact
that they perceive immigrants as targets, hardly ever as viable producers or commentators of their
own news. 154 They still revolve around a white gaze investigating the Other. Much of the content
of these shows has an educational intent: to inform foreigners on laws and bureaucratic deadlines
to apply for residency certificates or work permits. These editorial products also seem to suggest
154 According to a research conducted by the non-profit organization COSPE (Cooperazione per lo Sviluppo dei Paesi Emergenti) in Italy there is a network of about 59 radio programs and 63 newspapers/magazines managed by immigrants. Most of the radio programs are aired by local stations once a week, and cover both news and entertainment in national idioms such as Albanian, Tagalog, Arabic and Wolof. Local tv stations also broadcast weekly shows and news bulletin dedicated to immigrants, but their number is much smaller. Geographically, the production concentrates in Lazio and the North, whereas the South still lacks access to such programming. See the “Tuning in to Diversity” project under the “Media and Minorities” section of the COSPE website: www.cospe.it/italiano/documenti
153 the possibility to “normalize” the immigrants’ presence in Italy as part of the larger social framework. In my research, I assume as a methodological given that immigrants are a substantial, structural constituency of Italy’s social formation and collective identity. Based on this, I wish to investigate the validity of a “normalization” process. Does a Senegalese worker, recently arrived in Italy, have the same needs of any other Italian citizen? Where do we draw the line between a process of integration and the protection of the immigrants’ different religious, linguistic, alimentary customary habits? What is the most effective politics to overcome the emergency phase: “normalizing” the presence of immigrants or rather creating culturally specific solutions for each case? How do we erase the idea of immigrants as a homogeneous group, and start taking into account their ethnic, national, and gender diversity?
Newspaper articles on immigration usually deploy a paternalistic tone, utilizing one of two models to describe criminal or unlawful events - “too bad a black man did it” or “thank God, it was not a white man who did it.” 155 There is a certain level of cynicism in the ways in which headlines can set apart categories of people as “special,” deserving a different attitude and level of social awareness from the mainstream point of view. It is not unlikely to read of a “murder in the homosexual community,” which makes me wonder why no journalist ever feels compelled to comment upon a killing within the “heterosexual community.” What is it in the (homo)sexual choice of a victim that makes his death more morbid, setting it apart from other violent deaths?
Translating the sexually charged subject into a racial discourse, the same logic still holds true. To be black and Islamic in a predominantly white and Catholic country is in and of itself a sufficient element of noticeability, to which the media light-heartedly attach negative features. Racial
155 Marletti, cited work, 82. 154 tropes are not significant by nature as bodily marks, but become so by repetition and
performative practices that inscribe them as different. The relevance of racial diversity
necessitates this constant performative re-inscription in order to become a fixed identity,
translating in time and space to bodies in different cultural settings. 156 Media participate in addressing and reproducing the performance of Otherness, categorizing people in bulk groups - as the Moroccan street vendor, the Albanian drug dealer, the Rom beggar, or the Nigerian prostitute. 157
Immigration Laws and Blackness: The Lack of a Long-Term Planning
Politicians were as slow as journalists in reacting to global immigrations. Eventually, in 1987 the
Italian government promulgated Law 943, the first attempt to systematize the flow of immigrants since the fascist period. Both conservative and liberal governments in the post-World War II era have dealt with immigration as an emergency, managing it repeatedly by acts of sanatorie -
Parliamentary decisions meant to regularize illegal immigrants already present in the country,
requiring that they demonstrate that they are in good standing with the law and have proof of
employment. In 1987-88, Law 943 legalized the status of 118,700 immigrants; in 1990 the
number rose to 217,700, and even though in 1996 it was only 147,900, a mere two years later it
reached again a peak of 214,421.
The hypocritical reasoning behind a sanatoria is very disturbing. On the one hand,
156 Stuart Hall talks about performative repetition in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices . Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997. The necessity of citational, enunciative, repetitive cultural practices is also acknowledged by post-colonial thinker Homi Bhabha in “Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism” in The Politics of Theory , ed by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Magaret Iverson, and Diane Loxley. Colchester: U of Essex P, 1983. Likewise Judith Butler applies the citational power of identity construction to gender in Gender Trouble . New York: Routledge, 1989.
157 On this see also: Dal Lago, cited work. 155 politicians use bombastic tones to reassure voters that they are committed to cut down on illegal
immigration; on the other hand, a sanatoria implicitly admits that the phenomenon is unstoppable and uncontrollable. The sanatoria politics has had the effect of spotlighting the illegal portion of the immigration process. 158 Each sanatoria , bringing to the surface the black labor market, opens up the question of the nature of the immigrants’ work force: is it in addition to or in competition with local workers? The anxiety of the national work force rises every time thousands of immigrants obtain access to the job market, even though ethnographic researches conducted in highly dense industrial areas confirm that the migration labor force fills in the lacunae left in the local job market by demographic and educational patterns. 159 Media have jumped on the bandwagon to report on the interminable queues of immigrants outside post offices and police headquarters, lining up to mail their legal papers’ requests. The chaos increases due to the fixed number of permits that the government decides to bestow each year according to complex calculations of supply and demand for foreign workers. 160 It often happens that the legal predicament results in a smaller figure of legal papers issued by the State than the number of workers that factory owners require to fill their slots. If the request for foreign workers is
158 See: Barbagli, Maurizio, Asher Colombo e Giuseppe Sciortino. I sommersi e i sanati. Le regolarizzazioni degli immigrati in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004; Ambrosini, Maurizioand Meri Salati. Uscendo dall’ombra. Il processo di regolarizzazione e i suoi limiti. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2004; Zucchetti, E. La regolarizzazione degli stranieri. Nuovi attori sul mercato del lavoro italiano. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2004.
159 See for example: AECA, ed. Immigrazione, cittadinanza, lavoro. Indagine sull’immigrazione in Emilia Romagna e percorsi d’intervento per l’integrazione socio-lavorativa . Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2003.
160 The notion of fixed numbers of carta di soggiorno was introduced only with articles 3 and 21 of law 286, July 25, 1998 (application of the law Turco-Napolitano). The only cases exempted by such limit are family reunions and refugees. For the first few years though, the system did not seem to work properly. Due to a slow decision-making process, and the difficulty to consult all the actors (local administrators, union representatives, National Business Association’s spokesmen) the Parliament decided the number of immigrants to legalize not in terms of the job market’s supply-demand logic, but rather on projected data which had to been adjusted ad-hoc. This lack of organization complicates the interpretation of the parameters of inclusion for both immigrants and non-profit organizations assisting them. 156 generally higher than the State’s numbers, what is the source of the emergency trope?
The need for foreign workers derives from the flexibility and availability of low-end, low- skilled jobs, as much as from the disjunction between the Italian education system and the job market. The presence of a shadow labor force fills in the gaps created by the exclusive interest of
Italian students and workers for high end, intellectual, white collar positions. The official attitude towards this imported work force lives on a paradox. The fear of not being able to support the socio-economic costs of immigration pushes the government towards public display of strength to demonstrate that Italy does not plan to base her economic development on foreign workers.
Yet the shortage of native-born workers speaks to a different reality. Moreover, the tension between acceptance and rejection relates to Italy’s humanitarian tradition as a land of hope for those who were fleeing from war, famine, and persecution or for anyone who seeks a decent life in accordance to principles of honesty and decency. This ongoing contradiction leaves the immigrant in a non-space, a narrative of open arms and easy handcuffs, a live and let live ideology that avoids the central issue of acknowledging full socio-juridical status to foreigners.
Obtaining a work permit does not entitle an immigrant to citizenship. Restrictive rules on citizenship imply that immigrants desire to reside in a place, but also master a deep knowledge, understanding and sharing of the cultural, linguistic, religious, and social dynamics of the country. What makes Italy a specific case study is the fact that the country still bases citizenship on a logic of jus sanguinis rather than jus soli . One is born Italian because his blood ties him to the territory, descending from parents and grandparents who were themselves born there. One is citizen out of descent, not out of consent. This approach reveals a national social policy that equates the country to the family. Its nature differs from the flexible US policy that gives 157 everybody the possibility to become a full fledged citizen as long as one showcases hardworking
skills, and performs the oath in a public setting in front of a judge and the American flag. Instead,
Italy has inherited from the ancient Roman Empire a sense of “us” - the civilized ones - against
“them” - the barbarians. Jus sanguinis has tightened the boundaries of citizenship by marrying
the notion of exclusive civilization with the seventeenth century ideal of the nation-state. This
condition leads to a paradoxical situation in which it is easier for a third generation Argentinan-
born son of an Italian emigrant to apply for citizenship than it is for an African immigrant to
Italy, despite years of continuous residency. 161 The real question on the table is what degree of communal and shared value systems is required to be a nation and how much internal differentiation it can hold without breaking down. Even more importantly, who gets to decide the ethical standards upon which the community has to agree? As I have argued throughout the dissertation, and will explore even further in this chapter, the Afro-Romagnole Teatro delle Albe performatively intervenes in the identification of the limits of such definitions.
The first national law on immigration dates back to 1931. Throughout the post-War period, the economic boom of the sixties and beyond, this remained the only complete legal discourse on migration. The law subjugated foreigners to a constant, minute control by police forces of their residency, work, and private property. Many governments integrated the 1931 law with the adoption and implementation of various international treaties,162 but it wasn’t until
161 The left-wing Prodi government, elected in 2006, wants to reduce from 10 to 5 the years of residency required to apply for citizenship. The proposal has caused a fierce debate on be the requirements that migrants will have to fulfil in order to become citizens, the temporal span being only one of many. For Prodi’s opponents, migrants should also demonstrate language proficiency, and share the fundamental cultural values of the country. Does this mean that all immigrants should be Catholic and worshipers of the free market?
162 Law 772, July 24 1954, that ratified the Geneva Convention on refugees; law 848, August 4 1955, ratifying the Rome Convention on Human Rights; law 306, February 1 1962, acknowledging the status of stateless person mentioned in the New York Convention of 1954; law 654, October 13 1975, implementing the New York 158 1987, with Law 943, and then with Law 416, effected on December 30 1989, known as the
Martelli Law by the name of the Justice Minister of the period, that Italy finally abrogated the
Fascist legislation. The Martelli Law emancipated immigrants from the realm of national security to be managed by police forces, but it also enunciated for the first time the direct link between migration fluxes and the job market. The Government reiterated the Martelli Law for many years by acts of decree laws, a Parliamentary tool that in the presence of motives of necessity and urgency, and in the impossibility to fully legislate upon a matter, allows the legislative body to intervene without rewriting the law, but simply updating it. The Constitutional
Court, with sentence 360 on October 24, 1996, declared the illegitimate nature of such decree laws. In the meantime Parliament had passed the 1995 Dini Law.
With this legislation the Parliament returned to a “legality” precondition of exclusion of foreigners. Under this veiled form of discrimination lies the rhetoric that politicians often use as the primary discourse to appeal to a moderate electorate, afraid of immigrants but not willing to define itself racist. According to an article of the Dini Law, the immigrant suspected of jeopardizing public order or committing minor offences shall be exempted from the normal juridical procedure and expelled from the country without the possibility of an appeal. Besides the unconstitutional idea that suspicion is a proof valid enough to enact a procedure of expulsion, the Dini Law had a more nefarious consequence: to re-assign immigration to a police authority.
In 1998, the leftist government led by Romano Prodi not only reiterated the preventive expulsion rule, but also introduced the CPT (Center of Temporary Permanence): barbwire enclosed trailer parks that accommodate illegal immigrants at their first arrival, while the police check their
Convention of 1966 over the elimination of any form or racial discrimination; and law 943, December 30 1986, regarding various ILO Conventions . 159 background and identity. 163 Too often though, these Centers turn into a permanent residency,
becoming overcrowded prisons for clandestine immigrants awaiting a future of forced
expulsion. 164
The veiled discrimination continued with the third national immigration law of the
Republican era, known as the Turco-Napolitano Law (1998). Article 6 of the Turco-Napolitano
Law read: “The foreigner whom, summoned up by police officials, does not present a valid
passport or other forms of identification, that is to say a residency permit or green card, is subject
to arrest up to six months and to a fine up to eight thousand lira. [...] Public officials have also
the right to require proof of financial independence, deriving from a stable job or other legitimate
form, sufficient to support the subject and any family member residing within the national
territory.” Once again, the legalistic logic denied immigrants any form of protection of their
privacy. By then, the conservative return to the policing of immigration as an issue of social
unrest had been completed, and was going to be taken to the most restrictive levels by the Law
163 These Centers should also serve as temporary residency for those immigrants who are subjected to a ruling of expulsion which cannot be immediately enacted. In general, Law 189/2002 (Bossi-Fini) contemplates immediate expulsion for unlawful immigrants. A police escort should accompany the immigrant to the national border, upon his/her identification and the availability of a means of transportation. The first predicament though is very tricky, because the identification of illegal immigrants is per s P a difficult task, if not impossible. Of these Centers, twelve are located in the South and five in the North, which speaks quite clearly to the bias of illegal immigrants as accessing the country by sea, while the majority actually arrives by land. The Italian Red Cross manages most of the CPTs. These centers also demonstrate that, in contemporary Italy, both Left and Right Prime Minister, managed the migration issue under the rubric of fear and emergency.
164 On May 16, 2007 the Italian government launched a ‘transparency’ politics, inviting journalists to visit the CPT in Lampedusa and to publish pictures of it. A reading of these images would be very interesting. On the one side, the triumphant smiles of Italian politicians shine. By opening the CPT to the press, public officials attempt to debunk the critics of the Centers as modern lagers. On the other side, the pictures show inactive immigrants in bed or by the fence, waiting. Most of them try to avoid the camera covering their faces or turning their backs to the photographer. I am not denying that among the immigrants that illegally land in Italy there is a number of delinquents, people that are running away from a criminal record and hence do not wish to be recognized. But the pictures published by the major newspapers cannot avoid a feeling of intrusion that curious Italian viewers perform upon the immigrants’ modesty, and lack of agency. 160 189, July 30 2002, known as Bossi-Fini Law. 165 The most criticized predicament of the Bossi-
Fini Law is the following: to obtain the carta di soggiorno (equivalent to the US green card), which is by no means a declaration of citizenship, each immigrant has to prove his ability to find and maintain a stable job. If the employer fires an immigrant worker, the unemployment status jeopardizes his/her right to live in Italy. The direct connection between a stable job (the key is in this stability requirement) and the right to stay in the country forces many immigrants to actually return clandestinely sooner or later, especially if they are jobless when the yearly renewal time of the carta di soggiorno arrives. 166
The obsession with legality reinforces the Western bias for documentation and written papers as the only acceptable way to assess one’s identity. It pays homage to the positivist law that defines a person not in moral, humanistic terms, but as a set of norms, rights and duties that belong only to those who are active subjects of the national social system. Everyone is a person in the natural sense of the term, but not in terms of social constituency. Since citizenship is the exclusive privilege of a social personality, and not vice versa, the exclusion from such privilege equates to a sentence of non-person status for immigrants. For my discussion here, the most poignant question that arises is, what is the definition of foreigner, as used in article 6 of the
Turco-Napolitano law? How can a policeman identify a person walking in the street of Roma or
165 Umberto Bossi is the leader of Lega Nord , a right wing party that reached national popularity by invoking the complete secession of the North from the South and a declared racist ideology against immigrants; Gianfranco Fini is the party secretary that changed the MSI ( Movimento Sociale Italiano ), the direct political descendant of Fascism, into Alleanza Nazionale , a conservative party with a young, modern face.
166 For a discussion of the application of immigration laws see: Mangiardi, Roberto. Stranieri ed attivitB di polizia . Santarcangelo di Romagna: Maggioli Editore, 2004. The Berlusconi government elected in 2008 proposed a law for which the carta di soggiorno works as a “points collection.” Each immigrant can gain points if he behaves correctly, learns Italian, refrains from intermarriage, and so on. Obviously, it is easy to lose points in the case of a criminal record, absence of a stable job, or improper conduct – whose meaning the law does not specifiy.
161 Milano as a foreigner? Are skin color and other somatic differences legal signifiers that reframe
the separation between ethnic groups? What shall we make of teenagers with dark skin who
speak fluent Italian, who are children and grandchildren of African immigrants? The law doesn’t
seem to take into account the option of dark skin Italians, turning the symbolic difference
between “us” and “them” into an ontological truth, a revelation of naturally inscribed distancing.
Sogno di una notte di mezza estate – The Tension between Proper Social Places and Spaces of Independent Agency
The 2002 production of Teatro delle Albe’s Sogno di una notte di mezza estate dug into the
visibility/invisibility conundrum to interrogate the notion of legality. 167 The show is a “ riscrittura
verso il basso ” (“rewriting on down”) of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream . With this
definition, Marco Martinelli means that the performance aims at stripping away the flesh of our
time, and bringing to surface its essential contradictions by employing a plethora of literary tools:
humor, distancing, leaps, repetitions. The show is an explicit interrogation of the invisible,
exalting the experimental theater’s culture of the body whose intent does not reside in mere
entertainment but rather consists in the desire to distance oneself from the object of the spectacle.
Sogno directs the audience towards feelings of loss as metaphors of a world that tends to
exclude, not include, people within its borders. The alternation of two alleged contrasting worlds
- the white Court of Theseus and Oberon’s black elves of the woods - serves as the springboard
upon which Martinelli inserts his stylistic signature of parody and the grotesque, which
transforms the full daylight of Athens into a daytime nightmare, and represents the night figures
167 Sogno di una notte di mezza estate , Director: Marco Martinelli. With: Ermanna Montanari, Mandiaye N’Diaye, Luigi Dadina, Roberto Magnani, Maurizio Lupinelli, Francesco Antonelli, Alessandro Argnani, Luca Fagioli, Massimiliano Rassu, Alessandro Renda, Michele Bandini, Cinzia Dezi, Nicole Garbellini, Emiliano Pergolari, Antonio Dikele Distefano, Moussa N’Diaye, Samba N’Diaye, Serigne Mbacke Niane, Bathie Niane, Madiama Fall, Falé Sarr, Pape Amadou Sowe, Salif Sowe. Music: Luigi Ceccarelli. Lights: Vincent Longuemare. Scene and costumes: Ermanna Montanari, Cosetta Gardini. Production: La Biennale di Venezia, Ravenna Festival, 162 as producers, not merely products, of dreams, desires and hopes. Sogno performs a metaphorical
movement back and forth from what is real to what is imagined, where the boundaries of one and
the other cannot be clearly marked according to traditional notions of black and white, dark and
light, night and day. In the end, the play poses the central question: who has the right to occupy
the performance space that contains both Theseus’ Athenian palace and the woods inhabited by
Oberon and Titania?
Martinelli conceived Sogno as a board game - in Italian gioco di società . The term is also a linguistic pun meaning that society is “a game of make-believe.” Given their status as artificial constructions, rules and values acquire relevance only in so far as everyone accepts them unconditionally and with an honest heart. It is clear from the show’s opening scene that the
Athenians do not comply to social cohesion out of belief or ideological commitment, but rather as the superficial consequence of hypocritical reasoning. They spend their days lounging around, playing tennis, or exchanging empty acts of courtship, but never reflecting upon the motivation that drive their instincts. The weak bases of such a social contract cannot hold when foreigners invade the Court, unveiling it as a non-space, deformed and elastic, and denouncing its inhabitants as bored puppets of an old “theatrical” act that repeats itself over and over again.
Athens on the one hand and the woods and its elves on the other conflict and merge to eviscerate the bottom line question: who is really dreaming about whom? At alternating times during the show, groups of characters come to a halt, pausing the evolving story line, and evoke the performance’s intentions repeating in a mantra-like invocation “save us from this disgusting, sneering uselessly ornamental, repetitive, strutting, joke-cracking, arrogant, self-flattering Italiot community of the early millennium.” These are the only moments when a sense of self-criticism
Santarcangelo dei Teatri, Ravenna Teatro. Venezia, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, June 14, 2002. 163 surfaces, in a claim that aspires to salvation against a social game that wants to keep us all docile
in our own pre-scripted place.
The performance area is a rectangle with white lines on the floor delineating the paths
that actors can follow to move on stage. The Duke of Athens’ Court is an ensemble of lazy
teenagers in a country club attire whose love games resemble the high society atmosphere of a
nineteen fifties movie with Grace Kelly. It is pure superficial appearance, under which lies the
real nightmare. This Italiot community has become a divertimentifricio - a business-oriented
amusement park. The four lovers switch partners not because the night Spirits act to change their
fate, as in Shakespeare’s play, but because fake idols blind them. They crave immediate fame and
fortune, they desire the latest model of mobile phone or the fastest car in town, to live an extreme
sense of fun which can assure them the proper status in their circle of friends. The absolute
artificiality of their desires silences their humanity, numbs their feelings and does not make them
any more real than the elves of the wood. On stage, the plastic life-size reproduction of the statue
of the Venus symbolizes this very idolization of the simulacra and easy, virtual shortcuts towards
success and pre-constituted happiness.
The stage is surrounded on three sides by a curtain made of faceted black beads, because in the words of the director “an enclosure is ideal for rendering boundlessness and emptiness.”
The supreme blackness of the beads moves from a claustrophobic entrapment to an airy impalpable wave, depending on how the dreamy lights conceived by Vincent Longemare illuminate it. Not a wall, then, but a liquid membrane behind which move the elves - a little army of nine Senegalese kids - and the royal couple of Titania – a futuristic disco queen-like Ermanna
Montanari - and Oberon - Mandiaye N’Diaye wearing a black suite and tie. Since this is not a 164 wall, it becomes a permeable passage that connects the country club ambience and the backstage
darkness. The invisibles move behind the beads yet pass through them like dark water revealing a
fairy king who steals the black dress from Theseus’ dead body, and Titania dressed as a disco
queen in silver and gold. Is Oberon borrowing his suit from the Duke of Athens, or rather the
opposite? Is one doubling the other? Does Theseus’ death trigger Oberon’s desire to steal his
attire, or simply, once the daytime nightmare of the white Duke fades away, does Oberon
rightfully claim what belongs to him? Is Titania, dressed as a disco go-go dancer, affected by that
same thirst for senseless, outer-directed, artificial amusement that influences the Athenians?
Who’s real and who’s imagined? Who has the right to possess the performance space and who’s
invading it as the product of a dream, or rather a nightmare? Most importantly, how can
blackness be different from whiteness, if they both occupy the same space, overlapping in time,
separated by a membrane-like boundary through which one can spy on the Other, smell, look,
feel the Other in close proximity?
Sogno stages the same doubling technique that I analyzed in I ventidue infortuni di Mor
Arlecchino , but this time the movement from white to black performs a metaphorical act of parricide against the alleged origin embodied in Theseus’ court - against the white Duke as emblem of extreme intellectualization and depravation - and somehow frees the black characters from that destiny of servitude which accompanied them at the end of I ventidue infortuni . The
Albe’s poetic debunks the old-fashioned ideology of the nation-state, which is ineffective at
determining access to a social space and civil rights. Real consistent walls that separate people
exist only in the thoughts and choices of those who deliberately decide to live according to rules
that exclude, rather than include, Others. Mental constructions are as dangerous as physical 165 walls. Martinelli’s re-writing shines a light upon an Italian society – which he calls Italiot because Italy is following a path that will lead her to becoming absolutely idiot - too immersed in a rush towards the commodification of time and human relations which many attribute to a senseless globalization.
Teatro delle Albe’s Sogno complicates, by means of constant spatial invasions and temporal leaps, the separation among those whom the State considers proper citizens and those who do not rise to center stage, who do not leave visible traces behind, the nameless beings: animals, plants, women, immigrants. Although it is possible that one might rejoice in this anonymity, experiencing the freedom of those history-less beings that do not have the burden of paying homage to their past, it is also possible that one might find oneself hunted by the ferocious symbolic disorder derived by an interrupted tradition of unfinished, cut narratives. The media tend to represent immigrants as people without history, cut off from the white male dominated world, restrained within a colonial gaze. Instead, Teatro delle Albe's poetic acknowledges the symbolic central positionality of the white male line of descendants while subverting it with the notion of an alternative positionality, a black one, in coexistence with it.
This line of thought, which translates into a performative action, no longer accepts that the stranger is a temporary guest whose presence and company should be tolerated in the social space of white men. It posits that we need to acknowledge that this guest is a permanent resident in our public space, and that he/she could be capable of making us acquire other modalities of encountering the Other that have not yet been envisioned in our dominant world-views.
Ethnicity at War and Contested Spaces
How can we change such dominant views beyond the scope of a theatrical game? Sociologist 166 Guido Bolaffi argues that there are two fundamental tensions at stake in the politics of ethical management of the immigrant phenomenon: the need to avoid political exploitation of immigrants during electoral seasons by opposing parties; and the acknowledgment that the core problem goes beyond the clash among races, and lies in the inability of the ruling class to determine the terms of a new social pact between “us” and “them.” Quoting Thomas Schmid, he adds that the immigrant, “arrives both as a messenger and a result of globalization in a society that needs him but lacks the social cohesion that characterized nations during the industrial revolution,” 168 the first epoch in recent European history that saw a significant movement of people and goods. Since nomina sunt conseguentia rerum , the real scale of immigration matters only partially, while the central knot of the discourse connects to the perception citizens have of the effectiveness of its political management. I find this macro position quite convincing. At the same time, I believe that the people’s perception instills in their everyday life subtle seeds of intolerance that use ethnic or religious tensions as a litmus paper. In his series of lectures on war and racism, Foucault summarizes that, from the seventeenth century, ethnic differences underscored disparities in power, and constituted the thin red line of history and social evolution.
This differential was the source of the production and transmission of Truth. 169 War rhetoric had such powerful and permanent impact on the western relation with the Other that many of the news accounts on immigration today borrow their descriptive language to infuse society with a sense of danger and precariousness. One cannot look at the macro structure without delving into the micro seeds of multicultural misunderstandings.
168 Bolaffi, Guido. I confini del patto. Il governo dell’immigrazione in Italia . Einaudi: Torino, 2001, 64.
169 Foucault, Michael. Difendere la società. Dalla guerra delle razze al razzismo di Stato . Firenze: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990. 167 Unfortunately, Bolaffi speaks of the moral justification for open migratory policies as
explicitly residing in the possibility of matching the immigrant and the rules of the capitalistic
market always in need of cheap workforce.170 The homo economicus trope bears an uncanny
similarity with the discourse on model minorities that accompany much of the American
multicultural notion of development. Advocates of this paradigm praise ethnic groups whose
commitment towards economic achievement fulfills capitalistic values and a business-oriented
ideology. When these groups exit the pure realm of economy and battle for the acknowledgment
of their political and cultural identities, then the general discussion surrounding their presence in
the country changes tone quite drastically. Model minorities become a nuisance, a problem, a
boiling pot to be kept under surveillance. 171
I appreciate Bolaffi’s attempt to break down the equation immigrant = poor. Most
immigrants do not come from the poorest African countries but from fairly developed ones, and,
within these, they are not representatives of the most dispossessed class, but usually of the lower-
middle class. Nonetheless, I find his idea of a middle-class war troubling. Racist reactions derive
from the internal conflict of the Italian middle class that needs immigrants as house keepers and
caretakers, but yet feels discomfort about their increasing numbers in middle to high income
170 Bolaffi, work cited, 32. The dialogue between the neoliberal rules of the job market and the perception of the invasion by a foreign work force, actually plays a major role in shaping ethnic tensions in Europe today. There is a clear distinction between those who bear the costs and those who enjoy the profits of a racialized work force. Among the latter are business owners who can employ workers at lower costs, and local and national governments who earn more taxes from a population who is often cut off from the enjoyment of public services. The social costs seem to fall on less specialized workers who have to face the competition of foreigners, and on the local inhabitants of areas with a major concentration of immigrants that see the value of their properties diminish.
171 See: Inkelas, Karen Kurotsuchi. Racial Attitudes and Asian Pacific Americans: Demystifying the Model Minority . New York: Routledge, 2006; Kramer, Eric Mark, The Emerging Monoculture: Assimilation and the “Model Minority.” Westport: Praeger, 2003; Wu, Frank H. Yellow: Race in America beyond Black and White . New York: Basic Books, 2002; Lee, Stacey J. Unveiling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth . New York: Teachers College Press, 1996.
168 residential areas. Conflicts surely arise from co-presence and contiguity, but these tense relations
affect impoverished people more than any other social class. Some immigrants may well be
highly driven self-made people, but more often than not they are dispossessed beings pushed out
by famine, drought, and the reconfiguration of post-colonial structures of power within the
stringent logic of profit. 172 Their agency does not reside in the myth of the self-made person, which seems to me a projection of a Western philosophy onto them, but rather in a de Certeau- like “making means do” - the ability to carve out spaces of self-empowerment in competition with other poor people.
I find more convincing the multidimensional approach that sociologist Vittorio Cotesta theorizes to explain the construction of ethnic tensions, and the replication of a war rhetoric around multi-cultural encounters. The dimensions at stake are: spatial – the movement of people and the reasons that push them to migrate; historic - the idea that ethnic tensions are the consequence of a modern ideology coterminous with medical, geopolitical, and pseudoscientific racial evidence; socio-anthropological - as a result of identity politics that work both at the collective and personal level; psychological - motives of ethnic conflict can be embedded in elements of the structures of personality; and discursive and communicative - encompassing collective representations, the production and reproduction of images, visual and verbal stereotypes and prejudices. 173 I believe it is imperative to add a neo-Marxist approach that perceives ethnic tensions as a form of conflict of interests developing simultaneously at macro
172 This is true for Italy more than other countries, since the country’s industries and higher education institutions have not become centers of attraction for young, educated and motivated people, as is the case in France, Great Britain, and the USA.
173 Cotesta Vittorio. Sociologia dei conflitti etnici. Razzismo, immigrazione e società multiculturale . Roma - Bari: Editori Laterza, 1999. 169 and micro levels. The history of human exchange revolves around the relocation/dispersion of
different groups in separated social dimensions. Ethnicity works as the focus through which one
group purses its well-being in opposition to another; it is the means through which internal and international State interests overlap, interweave, or conflict. 174 I am not arguing in favor of ethnicity as a perfect substitute for ideology of class and the nation; rather the opposite. The exponential increase and complexity of identity markers augments the desire for individuals to be identified with smaller groups, more exclusive and tightly connected. Ethnicity would provide for such cohesion. 175 Against a global culture that nourishes anonymity and seems to be lacking contextual geographic and historical references, ethnicity appears almost as a natural linkage providing people with a sense of shared destiny, memories and generational continuity.
Migration jeopardizes all this, because it creates a breach in the psychological security of cohesion.
A reading of the 2001 Italian census will help clarify my position, if we keep in mind that issues of gender and cultural affinity versus distancing play a major role in the perception of different ethnic groups and migration patterns. I understand that the census embeds an official interpretation of a society, but I pursue my analysis aware of the limitations of data that is not put in comparison with other sources. Since I am deeply concerned with the public rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of migration, public data reflect a deliberate choice. Until the late
174 On this see: Glazer N. and D.P. Moynihan ed. Ethnicity, Theory and Experience . Harvard UP, Cambridge, 1975, 155. In Italy the debate about the pros and cons of multi-ethnic societies sees two opposing sides. Ferrarotti (Oltre il razzismo. Verso la societá multirazziale e multiculturale ; La tentazione dell’oblio ) and Maciotti (Per la societá multietnica ) defend the possibilities of multiple ethnicities coexisting in one nation, whereas the group of scholars that are critical or more skeptical encompasses Balbo and Manconi (I razzismi possibili ; I razzismi reali ), Melotti and Delle Donne (Relazioni etniche. Stereotipi e pregiudizi ), Zanotti (L’invenzione sociologica del pregiudizio ), and Signorelli (ang1033 L’ambiguo rispetto. Riflessioni antropologiche sugli incontri culturali).
175 See David Bell’s essay “Ethnicity and Social Change” in the cited anthology by Glazer and Moynihan. 170 nineteen nineties, demographic surveys were the most common tools to analyze immigration waves: to know how many immigrants lived in Italy was a way of understanding their needs, values, and projects. According to the 2001 census, 2,600,000 legal immigrants reside in Italy, representing 4.5% of the total population. This figure is much lower than the demographic index of other European countries: France, Germany, and Great Britain in the first place. Then, why is there so much discussion, and most of all so much worrying, about the Other? 176
In 2001, Italy had a projected population growth rate of 0.09%, among the lowest in
Europe. Such a low figure consistently affects many social areas, from the job market to the public health system and retirement policies. Young migrants from abroad become the possible solution for an internal problem. They do not simply provide cheap workforce, but they also create new families and, importing into Italy active reproductive habits, keep the growth rate at a positive level. Needless to say, conservative commentators consider the reproductive justification an abomination, a serious threat to the very essence of Italianness. Migrants have too many babies, and their birth rate will eventually overtake that of native Italians, and this will spread the
“evil” of Islamic culture and erase long lasting autochthonous traditions. On the other hand, those who sustain the structural need for babies born by foreign parents do so by emphasizing the possibility of coexistence, and for each culture to enrich and be enriched with elements drawn from the Other. Nonetheless, this liberal point of view about migration has a pitfall. Like the homo economicus discourse, it reduces human beings to one sole aspect of their full potential:
176 The historic conjuncture under which Italy became a primary target for immigrants assumes a relevant signification. In 1973, the first oil shock brought to an end two decades of national economic growth and shattered the post-War myths of progress and capitalistic profit. A whole life style seemed to be in jeopardy. In moments of crisis, it is a political imperative to individuate a common enemy that can help maintain social cohesion, and divert public attention from the core aspects of the problem. The alleged immigrants’ invasion served as the perfect scapegoat. 171 their reproductive capacity.
A Senator from the Lega Nord party once declared: “We believe that the actions of some
business owners and priests hide, underneath a humanitarian blanket, the will to dismantle our
beloved culture. These people propose and sustain the teaching of Arabic culture to kids that
should really attend Italian schools...... and they do so by emphasizing Islamic religious
elements. This is an attack on Italian culture. Demagogic inter-cultural politics are leading to the
dissolution of our values. Immigrants are nothing but low cost workforce.” 177 The Senator metonymically reduced migrants to the inputs that they may give to the national economy, but the contribution of immigrants to the well being of the country does not bestow upon them the right to be acknowledged as social personas. Migrants, especially dark skin Africans, still live in a liminal world that erases them and turns their bodies into sites of absence. All we require from them is to produce and work at minimal wages.
The 2001 census data show a series of figures that contradicts these stereotypes. Since the nineteen seventies, populations from the Maghreb region have constituted the core of African migration to Italy. Moroccans account for about 50% of the total migrants coming from the area.
They pose a series of problems, when we read their immigration pattern within the double rhetoric of homo economicus and reproductive machine. Young, single males with a basic level of formal education constitute the majority of their immigration cohort, working primarily as street vendors. 178
177 From the Lega Nord website: www.leagnordsen.it
178 The existence of a parallel black market for luxury goods has a very complex nature. In the past, Italy completely controlled its high-end profitable resources. But some ethnic groups with a strongly oriented business mind and capital, such as the Chinese communities of Prato, Roma, and Milano, are now able to employ fellow countrymen and manage every aspect of the commerce of the fake ‘made in Italy.’ Moroccans and Senegalese vendors have a less structured organization behind them, and tend to be stuck in the low-end street activities. They are the last and most 172
Table 1 shows the rates of male/female migrants for the ten largest communities of immigrants.
60% of the Moroccans living in Italy in 2001 were males. 179 The census only counts legal
resident, so we can imagine that the ratio male/female would be even more unbalanced when we
consider the number of illegal immigrants. 180 The Moroccan cohort is not an anomaly. Tunisian
men are more numerous than women, and so are the Senegalese whose 84.5% appears as the
most striking ratio. On the other hand, the Philippines, Peru and Germany have an opposite trend
with a female prevalence of 61.1%, 62.7% and 64.7% respectively. I will set aside Germany,
visible link with Italian buyers.
179 Table 1. Male-female ratio for the 10 largest migrant communities in Italy. The source is the fourteenth annual census, 2001. Available on line at www.istat.it. The 2001 was the last national census.
180 www.caritas.it suggests adding an extra 45% of migrants to the official national percentage. 173 because migration patterns within the European Union is out of the scope of my research. The case of the Philippines and Peru is fascinating since migrant women paradoxically play a marginal role within the reproductive machine rhetoric, and they encounter a very different reaction in the Italian public sphere. From this point of view, issues of gender and sexual roles come into place. Female migrants from these countries generally work as caretakers, babysitters and housekeepers. The private space they occupy does not expose them to the inquisitive racializing gaze reserved for black male street vendors. Also, the roles these women fulfill respect the traditional proper female behavior around the maternal/domestic, re-inscribing their bodies within the context of a family. Italians do not interpret the fact that these women have husbands and children waiting for them in the countries of origin as a disruption of the reproductive cycle within the host society, but rather as a proof of their real intentions to work hard for a limited number of years and then return to their homeland and families. Finally, the private space of the Italian household can easily keep female migrants under control, also due to an alleged natural ability of women to self-censure their behaviors, while single male migrants create serious tensions because they channel their frustrations in alcohol and drug abuse, or in improper sexual activities. 174
The impossibility to enclose Moroccans in the strict definition of reproductive agents becomes
clearer when one looks at table 2. 181 Here, taking into account the ten largest national
communities of migrants in Italy, the census organizes families (defined as couples of husband
and wife) in which at least one parent is a foreigner. The first column reports couples in which
the
husb
and
is
Italia
n
and
the wife is a foreigner; the second column switches the terms; column three contains couples in
181 Table 2. absolute numbers of families with at least one parent of foreign origin. Census 2001. From the Istat website. 175 which both parents are foreigners and from the same country; finally column four counts single
immigrant parents. As one can notice at a glance, Morocco does not appear at all in column one,
nor do Senegal or Tunisia. This information confirms the fact that only a minority of Moroccan immigrants are actually women. It also implicitly speaks of the freedom that women from Africa have within their diasporic communities: when they are present, they are either already married, or they exclusively entertain romantic/sexual relations with the opposite sex within the ethnic group of origin. On the other hand, Morocco occupies the third place in column two. More than three thousand Italian women were married in 2001 to a Moroccan man, but in relative numbers this figure only accounts for 1.7% of all Moroccan men. The couples in column three are the ones that can more effectively contribute to the population growth and to the discourse on the transformation of Italian identity and values. In 2001, 30,670 couples from Morocco lived in
Italy, with a ratio of married women of 42.8%., but only of 17% for men. If we add this figure to the one of Moroccan men married to Italian women we have a total figure of 18.7%. One can hypothesize that the Moroccan men falling in the married percentage tend to make life choices more inclined towards stability and continuity. They would probably prefer a job in one of the big industries in the North to street vending activity. Still, this figure leaves an 81.3% of
Moroccan single men whose migration project plays against the needs of Italian society for low- paid workers and babies. 176
Table 3 shows how much foreign couples, divided by nationality, played into the population growth in
2001. 182 Moroccan couples contributed massively, but then again they represented the first migrant community and hence that should come as no surprise. There is no necessary sequential movement between a migration pattern of single men, and the movement of whole families. One does not follow the other, but they overlap and intersect. Second generation children born in
Italy, or who have spent very little time in their native countries across the Mediterranean, are more common than what it is widely believed. The reality of dark-skinned Islamic Italians already consists of a pragmatic factuality that the media, politics and scholars tend to ignore. The migrant family socializes itself outside of pre-constituted structures, as a group whose members
182 Table 3. Absolute numbers of babies born from foreign parents. Census, 2001. From the Istat website. Table 3. Absolute numbers of babies born from foreign parents. Census, 2001. From the Istat website.
177 enjoy a differential of access to spatio-temporal experiences in the receiving country. As my
previous discussion of the customary jus sanguinis law highlights, citizenship is not inscribed in birth but requires that both parents posses the civil rights to reside in the country. Therefore, the number of foreign babies born in Italy does not equate the number of new citizens admitted to passive and active rights.
The narrative deriving from Moroccans’ immigration strategy does not operate to deconstruct racial stereotypes. Whether the hope of returning home becomes an actual reality or remains a dream in the immigrant’s imaginative construction of his diasporic identity, the act of resisting the national discourse on social reproduction endangers the very possibility for black men to embody, after three decades, a sense of active belonging to Italian society. This absence of communication requires an effective mediation that apparently politicians are unable or unwilling to provide, and media do not recognize as valuable because it lacks sensationalism.
The questions of who migrants are, why they are here, and what role they perform in the host country need necessarily to be shaped around the physical experiences of migrants themselves, their projected desires and migration projects. Statistical analyses are a window on the spectrum of possibilities that migration entails, its gendered biases, its projected truths and matter of fact attitudes. The mathematical basis of statistical data produces a deceptive picture of scientific objectivity. Nonetheless, data are simply numbers, while their interpretation and framing construct a sense of lived reality. Reading the census as a working predicament of what migration trends tend to be like is helpful. Female migration comes primarily from Catholic countries: women from the Philippines, Ethiopia or Peru generally migrate by themselves leaving families behind. Male migration instead has a strong Islamic component to it, and women belonging to 178 these national groups are usually in Italy by means of family reunion acts, hardly ever as lonely
workers. 183 Such distinctions, cutting across nationality, religious affiliation and gender,
highlight the impossibility of a national immigration policy that ignores these variables.
In general, public national interventions on migration oscillate between pure humanitarian
aid and social control. The former tend to cover primary needs such as health and shelter.
Conservatives often attack such policy, because they hold it responsible for the immigrants’ high
crime rate. A certain Catholic philosophy of assisting the dispossessed does not empower
immigrants, treating them as minors requiring the attention of a parental figure. This approach
descends from a collective sense of guilt for the crimes that our ancestors committed in the past
combined with a legitimacy crisis of Western democracies, all leading to an effect of extreme
tolerance. On the other hand, the social control approach enlarges its radius to help immigrants
obtain work permits and residency certificates. Neither one of these approaches takes into
consideration the notion of citizenship as an essential element of the relationship between native-
born Italians and immigrants. 184
Education for intra-culturalism should pass through a multi-dimensional planning: CTPs
183 On this, see also Favaro, Graziella and Mara Tognetti Bordogna. Politiche sociali ed immigrati stranieri . Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1989, 41. The reality of the gendered division of immigration is a double edge sword, recalling the Fascist description of African women as ‘usable objects’ for sexual pleasure or housework, and men as dangerous enemies whose bodies were under police scrutiny.
184 The difficulty of speaking of immigrants as one huge group arises from a sociological survey conducted at the shelter for poor people in Via Ferruccio, Rome, by a team of researchers led by Roberto De Angelis. The results show that Moroccans tend to catagorize Norther Africans as ‘sly’ - those who live off petty thefts and in complete illegality, ‘active’ - those who earn a living by means of street vending and other activities not stigmatized as negative, and ‘passive’ - those who rely exclusively on humanitarian help. The subdivision of immigrants by immigrants themselves tells a complex story of multiple narratives. African migrants carry with them suspicion and prejudices towards other African ethnicities, and these interweave with representations of the Other constructed for the use of Italian public opinion. In a war among dispossessed people, sentencing the Other to a negative stereotype can project one’s own ethnic group into a different, more positive category. See: De Angelis, Roberto. Ghetti etnici e tensioni di vita . Roma: La Meridiana, 1991. 179 should not be a repressive prison, but centers in which trained personnel can immediately provide the necessary information on Italy and her socio-cultural / political conditions. By training, I mean collaboration among Italian officials and resident migrants so that the latter can offer their linguistic and culturally sensitive aid to newly-arrived immigrants who will find a common ground on which to explain who they are and what brought them to Italy. CPTs, which the newly-elected Berlusconi government will evenly distribute throughout the territory of the peninsula, should also connect with employment centers to quickly and effectively match a person’s work background and the needs of local economies. An efficient migratory plan should also consider the possibility of implementing institutional programs with African countries that can reach a wide audience and explain the real terms of migration beyond myths and misconceptions. Obviously, intra-cultural education also implies a change in the national emergency climate by showcasing that the majority of migrants successfully find their place in the sun in Italy. There is a need for school programs that look beyond national boders and cultural traits, for visibility in the form of black professionals, intermarriage, and mixed children.
The blame for a lack of intra-cultrual understanding cannot be exclusively placed on Italians.
Migrant communities, especially those that are more rooted in the country, should try to break out of the ethnic ghettos where they often carry on a self-imposed seclusion in order to interact on a daily basis with their Other. In a word, the real solution is not assimilation, but hybridity, mixig, métissage , that which is born out of the “intra-.”
The Press and Blackness
The structure of a newspaper article about migration usually follows a specific pattern: the title and subtitle summarize the event, usually a negative one, by pointing out the migrant’s ethnic 180 affiliation so that readers can immediately lump together a group of people and generalize the criminal activity as part of a communal marker; the body of the article contains declarations by politicians and experts, and rarely any comments by immigrants themselves; statements by Italian public officials and eyewitnesses always appear in quotation marks to emphasize objectivity and officialdom, while journalists often reduce migrants’ interventions in scope and importance.185
The semantics deployed to comment upon the immigrants’ actions tends to implicitly pass positive judgments on the group to which the main audience and the journalist belong, and negative ones on minorities. Whether through negation (“I am not racist”), mitigation (reducing the relevance of an event), or flipping (to blame the victim of a crime), the verbal construction of the immigrant communicates guilt, both as an individual burden and as a participatory form of each member of the ethnic group. Italians are hardly ever to blame. After all, foreigners shouldn’t be here in the first place and they are responsible for whatever happens to them.
In a study on the relationship between British media and racist stereotyping, van Dijk thoroughly analyzes the role that symbolic elites, such as newspapers and television, have in the creation and reproduction of racial prejudices. A typical media discourse starts with the individuation of a topic, and continues with its consolidation through repetition. As a consequence, media intervene in the cognitive construction of immigration by relating immigration to notions of social distress, illegality, fraud, geographic and cultural menace; associating criminal behaviors to a natural inclination of specific ethnic groups; emphasizing ethnic minorities as the embodiment of primitiveness, backwardness and fundamentalism;
185 On the predominance of white, official declarations in the British media, see: Downing, John. The Media Machine . London: Pluto Press, 1980; Wilson, Clint C. and Féliz Gutiérrez. Minorities and Media . Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985; Fowler, Roger. “The Intervention of the Media in the Reproduction of Power.” in Approaches to Discourse, Poetics and Psychiatry . I Zavala, T. A. van-Dijk and M. Diaz-Diocaretz, eds. Amsterdam: Benjamons, 181 depicting intra-ethnic relations as tense and conflictive. 186
The naturalization of illegality is quite apparent in Italian media. Different ethnic minorities have come to be associated with specific acts of illegality: Rom and gypsies as natural born pickpockets; Nigerian and East European women work in the prostitution business;
Albanians control the drug markets; Moroccans and Senegalese monopolize street vending and the profitable business of fake brand name goods. As Roberto Morrione, director of the information channel Rai News 24, notes: “Information on such complex and meaningful themes has betrayed its most essential task; namely to guarantee the two central characteristics of communication: memory and understanding. [....] 78% of immigration related news is bad news,
56% concentrates on crimes and illegality.” Migrants appear on the news on a daily basis: as desperate refugees seeking to cross the Mediterranean sea on old, overcrowded and dangerous vessels; as evil agents that take advantage of female migrants forcing them into prostitution; as young, restless, unemployed men whose social behaviors pose a constant threat to the safety of proper citizens.
The exclusion of the immigrants’ voices from news reports has a constitutive effect; it makes of the immigrant what Italian readers believe an immigrant is. The impossibility to use the media as an echo for their points of view often leads immigrants to enact forms of resistance and social unrest in order to attract attention on their cases. By doing so, they embrace the social stigmatization of the immigrant as violent, unable or unwilling to fit in, a nuisance and a problem. This upside down logic sets information on immigration into a vicious cycle.
Immigration itself becomes a problem, rather than the discrimination that immigrants face on a
1987. 182 daily basis. The lack of speaking voices within minorities has a complex nature. First and
foremost, ethnic minorities privilege a less structured internal organization and hence possess
little access to media sources. At times, members of these communities have to maintain a low
social profiling so not to incur the overbearing control of the police force. The scattered nature of
some of these ethnic groups makes it difficult for journalists to interview them, if the case arises.
Journalists nowadays tend to rely mostly on news agencies over the internet and the phone, and
publishers reduce to the minimum the number of correspondents on the field in order to reduce
costs. Since most of the people a journalist considers reliable sources (politicians, the police, or
professional experts) are white, the white point of view will necessarily prevail. Moreover, the
need for objectivity forces many journalists to avoid the voices of immigrants when their own
interests are at stake because, as interested party, they would probably be too biased. Finally, one
must take into account the diffidence with which many immigrants would welcome journalists,
regarding them as outsiders, intruders who more likely than not will represent them as victims
responsible of their own condition.
During my fieldwork with the Senegalese community in Ravenna I experienced a
different reality made of a strong sense of internal cohesion and awareness of their rights as
workers who greatly contribute to the national economic development and the production of new
forms of sociability. Cerno, N’Diaye, Awa Niang and the others do not hide from the gaze of white Italians and public officials but put their experiences out there in order to push a political agenda of sedimentation within the local social life. Therefore, the silence of the media on the positive experiments of intra-ethnic participation to the national community stands as a mark of guilt upon the media themselves. Communities of immigrants with a longer sedimentation in
186 van Dijk, cited work. 183 Italy are able to offset the silencing of diversity of mainstream media with the creation of their own communication means: radio, weekly and monthly publications. Most of these alternative forms are self-produced and therefore cannot rely on continuity or pervasive diffusion. Moreover, they are inherently locally grounded. Hence, migrants’ communities still very much count on informal communication means to disseminate relevant information.
To write ethically about migration is not an easy task even when it is well-intended. In
2006, the newspaper La Repubblica started a weekly publication called Metropolis that aims to provide immigrants with information on relevant laws and bureaucratic deadlines, but also help them to understand Italy culturally and socially. The newspaper also contains a weekly column entitled Gli altri noi (The other us), edited by Giovanni Maria Bellu. 187 The articles at times address general concerns about the misconceptions surrounding immigration tout court , at times focus on single immigrants’ stories and their paradoxical odysseys in the intricacies of Italian society. One example is the story of Maria, a girl from Moldavia, whose purse was stolen while she was strolling on the street. Maria went to the police station to tell of her loss and was arrested because she was the only member of her family without proper documentation. There was the story of Valerica, from Romania, who faced expulsion from the country after he was hit by a car while riding his bike. At the hospital, after the emergency therapy, the police were waiting for him. Narratives of this sort are very common and suggest that there exists a double standard. I
187 www.repubblica.it/rubriche/glialtrinoi Also the newspaper Corriere della Sera has an online column on migration. Magdi Allam manages the blog., in which readers leave their comments and ideas. Allam is an Egyptian-born writer. Educated in a Catholic school in Cairo, he then moved to Roma to purse a degree in Sociology. His positioning could place him as a spokesman of the voiceless immigrants. But Allam expresses a critical point of view against the spread of Islam in Europe, and publicly opposed the construction of new mosques in Italy. His supporters praise him as the example of the moderate Islam that is welcomed in the national territory; his opponents see in him a dangerous admirer of the West. Allam’s criticism of Islam holds more power than other commentators because he can claim an insider experience of the Arab culture, which appeals to the moderate racism of many Italians.
184 wonder, though, why Bellu, who works for a predominantly leftist newspaper, mostly focuses on single case studies of illegality and political asylum? Where are the voices of immigrants? The stories Bellu selects appeal to his audience because they bring about the absurdity of the stringent chains of the law. They are disturbing enough to raise an eyebrow, but amusing enough to trigger a smile. The narration of these absurdities shapes the victims into characters of a Ionesco-like play, more spectacular than the lives of thousand of immigrants who have a normal existence similar to that of any other Italian. The intent of Bellu’s writing is commendable - to disclose that immigrants face a number of complicated twists and turns when they try to assert their own rights
- but he does so by spotlighting once more the illegal aspects of migration.
Bellu’s writing is more convincing when he addresses general concerns. In his article of
February 7, 2007 “Stampe e xenophobia: istruzioni per l’uso” (Press and xenophobia: instructions) Bellu asks himself how one can distinguish between racist remarks in the press and less threatening stereotypical clichés. He suggests a simple yet effective tool: pick any migration- related title from a newspaper and substitute the ethnic categorization of the Other, with a regional adjective, such as Neapolitan, or Milanese. The result is hilarious and at the same time quite revealing of how the mental map of ethnic separations distinguish between internal categories of regional differentiation, and that which is external - immigrants from Africa or
Asia. No one would ever write: “New Year: Milanese woman gives birth and dumps her baby in the garbage”, but apparently addressing the guilty woman as Chinese is perfectly feasible. Bellu concludes that: “The image of the immigrant is far away from the real immigrant. It is believed that he arrives by sea, but he almost always arrives by land, it is believed that he is a Muslim, but the majority is Christian, and - fooled by the abuse of ‘assaults’, ‘invasions’, and ‘waves’ - 185 Italians believe that immigrants are much more numerous than they really are.”188 The self- reflexive nature of these newspaper articles is not enough to eradicate racist images from public opinion. They are resistant to any counter proof because they are socially true, and they are socially true because stereotypical categories of thought are tautological and instrumental to the formation of a reactive identity in those who use them. I agree with Umberto Eco that the accessibility of information activates an empowering opportunity. Easy and multiple accesses to world news locates readers in real time in the same spatial coordinate of the event, shrinking time and space and emphasizing the feeling of proximity even for that which is removed. This gargantuan achievement of modernity negatively affects the capability of historical distancing from contemporaneity, even though Eco says: “This loss of a historic sensibility is surely dangerous [but] knowing, as an Egyptian slave would have probably know with a ten year delay, that something has happened, does not help me modify the event; knowing instead that something is happening here and now helps me feel co-responsible for it.” 189
Despite its limits, the militant journalism of Bellu constitutes a counter-force against the general tone of newspaper headlines about migration, as exemplified in the Italian web portal libero , which on May 5, 2007 launched the alarm: “Lebbra a Milano. Diagnosticati due casi su immigrati. É come tornare indietro di centinaia di anni.” (Leprosy in Milan. Diagnosed two cases among immigrants. It feels like stepping back hundreds of years). 190 The title simply reiterates two dangerous stereotypes: immigrants as carriers of exotic, deadly diseases, as viruses
188 On this see also: Castles, Stephen. Here for Good. Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities . London: Pluto Press, 1984.
189 Eco, Umberto. Apocalittici e integrati . Milano: RCS, 1994, 317.
190 See: www.libero.it (liberoblog.libero.it/cronaca/bl6870) 186 themselves that attack the healthy social body of the host country; and immigrants as products of
primitiveness, as backwards expressions of poverty, dirt, lack of hygiene and education. Likewise
the Repubblica title of May 10, 2007 reads: “Un reato su tre compiuto da stranieri” (One out of three crimes carried out by foreigners), where the word foreigner simply stands for immigrant.
The article rhetorically asks how is it possible that immigrants constitute only 4% of the Italian population but account for 33,41% of the total number of reported offenders in 2005, and for
36,5% in the first six months of 2006. It is meaningful that Giuliano Amato, Minister of Internal
Affairs, talking to the Parliament in plenary session stated that: “The association immigrant- crime is still a very common stereotype in our country. And the media greatly contribute to this situation in the way they address the news. Ten years ago Italians were troubled by drug users, nowadays they look at immigrants, and mostly clandestine ones, as the source of every social problem.” 191 The Repubblica article deploys a narrative structure that celebrates the official
political commentary of Amato; a technique that, as I noted above, is very common against the
backdrop of the silence of the immigrants’ voices. The headline, though, as in the leprosy case,
emphasizes an alarmist take on immigration, a trait common of much journalism constantly on
the lookout for sensationalistic scoops. Unfortunately, neither reductionism nor alarmism do
justice to the migrant phenomenon.
Newspapers abound of examples of dramatization, when liberal journalists denounce the
miserable conditions in which immigrants live; decontextualization, so that the spotlight turns on
the single event and away from the larger implications, without paying attention to its
motivations and consequences; emphatization, as in situations in which official remarks act to
191 From La Repubblica , May 10, 2007. 187 highlight the exotic aspects of a problem; and thematization, which acknowledges the lack of agency of immigrants and invites Italians to wear their super-hero capes to defend them and build a future of pacific coexistence. According to Vittorio Cotesta, the definition “subordinate inclusion” best describes the Italian case of intra-ethnic relations: neither exclusion and expulsion, nor cooperation and citizenship, but rather a hybrid form in which forms of solidarity are not extensive, but overt conflicts are kept to a minimum. 192 “Subordinate inclusion” is instrumental to the governing elites, as much as to those immigrants that arrive in Italy with a short migration project and do not wish to be fully included in the sociopoliticalal life of the country.
The limits of immigration news reports depend on a chain of command tracing back to five major news agencies, all run in the Western World. Reuters is the biggest and most powerful of the news agencies. A visit to its website immediately sets the stage. The Agency’s
International Edition encompasses specific coverage for each of the following European countries: Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The whole continent of
Africa appears under one edition, and so does Latin America, with the exception of Argentina and Brazil. Within Africa, however, Reuters separates its Arabic section. More than a website, it is a study in geopolitics. ( www.reuters.com ) Likewise, France Press ( www.afp.com ) has a total of 26 bureaus in 48 European countries, 11 bureaus in North America, 21 in Latin America, but only 16 offices for the 50 African countries. Once again the Middle East is a separate case, with
10 dedicated local bureaus. The Associated Press website ( www.ap.org ) delivers news in Italian,
French, German, Spanish, and of course English. Most of the post-colonial world speaks one of
192 Cotesta, Vittorio. Sociologia dei conflitti etnici. Razzismo, immigrazione e società multiculturale . Roma - Bari: Editori Laterza, 1999, 325. 188 these languages, but the lack of non-European idioms is striking. ANSA (www.ansa.org ) and
ADN-Kronos (www.adnkronos.com ) are the two most important Italian news agencies.
This oligopoly controls the collection and diffusion of information worldwide. The press, radio stations, and television networks depend on the releases managed by these five agencies. If an event occurs but none of the agencies launches the news, the event basically does not exist. It has become very expensive for newspapers and networks to dispatch their own journalists in the field to hunt for news, and now that the scope of journalistic coverage is global it would be virtually impossible to be on the news if it weren’t for Reuters, Associated Press, and their associates. Journalists depend on news agencies’ reports, and we all depend on them for the formulation of the final news. Africa or Asia appear very rarely on the bulletins of these News
Agencies. When they do appear, it is either in relation to an issue of interest in Europe and the
USA, or to report a climatic catastrophe, a war, or an act of terrorism. In a study of the ANSA news on immigration between 1998 and 1999, Maurizio Corte detects the same problems that I have addressed so far: 92% of the overall news are about illegal immigrants, 72% focus on crimes or negative events; the news headlines tend to highlight the immigrant’s guilt; the press dedicates little space to in-depth commentary of each single event, or to direct interventions of immigrants themselves; there is also little interests in the immigrant’s cultural contribution to the transformation of the host country; the efforts to welcome and integrate these new subjects do not arouse particular attention; immigration becomes a hot topic when the news equates it with emergency. 193
One of the few critical voices in Italian from the immigrant perspective is the one of
193 Corte, Maurizio. Stranieri e mass media. Stampa, immigrazione, e pedagogia interculturale . Padova: CEDAM, 2002, 118-123. 189 Mohammed Mansoubi. The Egyptian-born journalist published a number of essays on the tense relations between the (self)representation of Italianness and Otherness. In his view, immigration in Italy is talked and written about in racist language but not in post-colonial terms. The country cannot manage the phenomenon because it suffers from a lack of historical sensibility and a geographic location that imposes immigration upon the national territory. Italians have not yet come to terms with their own migratory past, which affects their ability to comprehend the coordinates of the national economy dependant upon a consistent foreign work force. The official and collective acknowledgment of such change would involve the reformulation of the symbolic relation between self and Other, inside and outside, thus affecting the perception of immigration towards Italy. It would involve a dual process of suspending the cultural understanding of non-
European cultures and abandoning the rhetoric about the sudden, unexpected and massive nature of the migratory phenomenon. As Mansoubi argues: “Hence the tendency [...] to privilege the idea of an Italy forced to take in / accept the exodus of the so-called South of the World, of an
Italy exposed to the invasion of a hungry and persecuted army, of an Italy somehow victimized.” 194
Strict time constraints, network ideology and overarching economic interests crush the ethics of newspapers and television reports. Time management and internal editorial guidelines hinder a thorough explanation of the complexity of the migratory phenomenon, and tend to symbolically and ideologically simplify it. Most problematically, media suffer from an intellectual laziness that avoids analyzing migration in its historical perspective. The press cannot deploy an overtly racist approach, even though after 9/11 the tone of some mass media aligned
194 Mansoubi, Mohammed. Noi stranieri in Italia. Immigrazione e mass media . 1990, 116. 190 with governmental policies has become quite blatant. The most common practice employed to
hide xenophobic remarks is the doubling technique. News reports divide immigrants into good
ones and bad ones, those who believe in the Western values and give up their cultural specificity to embrace the host country, and those who fanatically want to remain attached to their identity and reject integration. By presenting the two contrasting sides of the same phenomenon, media can claim a formal anti-racist position, while the representation of the bad immigrants justifies restrictive politics and the ideological stigmatization of the Other. 195 This practice constitutes a
modern version of what Jean Amselle used to call “ethnological reasoning”: an intellectual
framework that totalitarian regimes and colonial empires used to scientifically categorize and
politically dominate the non- Western world. By means of a planned marriage between science
and politics, ethnicity has entered the collective imagery and has become the strongest symbolic
repository of inclusion versus exclusion, “as if” applied to an objective understanding of human
beings. The “as if” became “is” and the process of reification turned ethnic groups into
politically-charged natural essences. In contemporary press and media, ethnic adjectivization
works linguistically to add meaning to a noun and, consequently, to a whole group of people and
to the events that the group participates in.
Bonnie Honig argues that: “In classical political thought, foreignness is generally taken to
signify a threat of corruption that must be kept out or contained for the sake of the stability and
identity of the regime. This somewhat xenophobic way of thinking about foreignness endures in
the contemporary world, though other options - from assimilation to many varieties of multi-
culturalism - are now also considered viable. All of these options persist in treating foreignness
195 Grossi, Belluati and Viglongo express a very similar argument in their book Mass media e società multietnica . 1995. 191 as a problem in need of solution, however.” 196 Much of this perpetuation derives from a cultural lag - the gap existing between the media-imposed representation of current conditions of migration and the dominant value systems (Catholicism, neoliberal capitalism) that we use to frame the problem in the “real world” and consider its consequences. Representation and reality exist in a flux that requires a constant reformulation of the cultural lag both in its production and solutions. If the media are unable to effect this constant reformulation, they inevitably locate themselves within a conservative mind set. In contemporary discussions on migration, the predominant unresolved tensions depend upon a cultural model of integration, mostly mutated from the American ideology of the melting pot in which all differences will be dissolved by means of an undifferentiated mixing. Against the demonization of difference implicitly contained in the melting pot imagery, post-colonial thinking and advocates of intra-culturalism push towards the exaltation of difference as a positive attribute of global exchanges. Nonetheless, media representations of these encounters rarely take into account the multiple and flexible interactions that intra-culturalism presupposes. Instead, these representations move between a clear cut definition of good and evil, and a clash of ethnic identities that may share a territory, but have no common ground for communication. Perceived as such, difference is a threat.
Analyzing multi-racialism in Italian television, Carlo Marletti developed a theoretical grid that translates quite effectively to the press. He individuates three possible approaches to multi- ethnic relations in fictional representation. “Racial emergency” mostly pertains to news reports and political talk shows. This type of television hypocritically re-discovers every time, amidst great surprise of its spectators and participants, that Italians are racist, and consequently embarks in a civil crusade to equate racism with backwardness. Even though it is well-intentioned, these
196 Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner . Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001, 1. 192 programs privilege desperate human cases that may cause indignation, but do little to eradicate
racism. Even worse, the “racial emergency” approach distorts history, suggesting that Italians
became racist all of a sudden in the last few years. The second group encompasses entertainment
shows that emphasize the possibilities of “racial integration.” These shows still live off the
melting pot ideology, as represented in the Northern American sit-coms The Cosby and A
Different World in which blacks and whites share the same life styles and face the same daily
problems. Skin color loses significtion, because “they” are just like “us.” The “racial integration”
programming has very little to do with the black people that Italians encounter in the streets of
Roma or Milano. This television resolves the problems of racism by simply ignoring it and does
absolutely nothing to address the real conditions of black immigrants to Italy. Finally, there is a
“post-racial” television that equates blackness with beauty and success; it idolizes black
sportsmen and music superstars, transforming them into models of consumerism, fetishizing the
Other as new and exotic, and therefore simply refashioning a primitivist ideology under a
glamorous look.197
The Foucaldian paradox of a national narrative that has to include at once subjugated
knowledges and privileged positionalities seems to perfectly entrap the national discourse on
difference. The media cannot apprehend under the same rubric the complexity of a subjugated
knowledge that encompasses erudition, production of culture, historical perception and at the
same time local beliefs, common sense, and the popular traditions that have been often neglected
197 See: Marletti, Carlo. Extracomunitari. Dall’immaginario collettivo al vissuto quotidiano del razzismo. Roma: Nuova ERI, 1991. On the use of blackness as a trope of fetishized Other see: Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies . New York: Routledge, 1994. For a reading of media and blackness applied to Britain, similar to Marletti’s, see: Husband, Charles, ed. White Media and Black Britain. A Critical Look at the Role of Media in Race Relations Today . London: Arrow, 1975; and Rosemberg, David and Paul Gordon. Daily Racism, the Press and Black People in Britain. London: Runnymede Trust, 1989. 193 and marginalized. The immigrant body subsumes this very tension. Italians want to believe that
immigrants are les damnés de la Terre , people without agency and history - the latter being a
discursive circulation of ideologies of progress and modernity. Instead, many immigrants have
reached levels of higher education, and leave behind cultural territories that in the past have
immensely contributed to the formation of Western thought. 198 In Italy, there is a rich web of
training and orientation services for immigrants, sponsored by the public sector and by a number
of non-profit organizations. These sportelli per immigrati are mostly vocational training projects
addressed to unemployed workers. Help desks for professional re-training or guidance of adults
with previous job experience are nowhere to be seen. This distinction sends a clear message. 199
Once again, local and central instruments of integration show little or no attention to the real
professional/educational background of the people that these programs set out to help. Especially
immigrants in North-East Italy seem to expect that the training programs will impact their lives
with an immediate placement in the job market at a level appropriate to their qualification.
Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, due to the structural complexity of the Italian job market
devoted to the ideology of flexibility, and a general disconnection between the training programs,
198 Jacques Le Goff, in an interview appeared on Il Corriere della Sera on June 8, 2000 describes Italy as a métissage from her origin, and exalts the richness deriving from the cultural coexistence of Islam and Christianity. Italy is one of the many countries built on a foreign founding father – Aeneas, a trope of the migration literature and Western political thought for which “established regimes, people, or towns that fall prey to corruption are restored or refounded (not corrupted or transcended) by the agency of a foreigner or a stranger.” In Honig, Bonnie, work cited, 3. Aeneas escaped from he burning Troy and landed on the South-Western coast of the peninsula, not far away from where Rome would eventually be founded by the descendants born from the marriage of Aeneas with the princess of the Lavini people. Yet: “The foreign-fonder’s undecidability is inescapable and, indeed, necessary (even if also threatening) to his founding mission. [...] This undecidability sets in motion a politics of (re)founding, which involves the plural efforts by postfounding generation to (re)define their collective identity by retelling their origin stories or by inventing new ones. For those whose origin stories feature a f-f, the politics of refounding often involve a contest to erase that figure from memory or to position him as either foreign to or founder of the nation. Rarely is the f-f celebrated as such.” Honig, work cited, 32. The foreign-founder is an ambivalent symbol, at once a source of (re)nationalization and a threat to a society’s original act of constitution.
199 Colombo, Maddalena. “Measures to Promote the Labour of Immigrant in Italy and Spain” Studi Emigrazione / 194 the real needs of the market and the inclinations of the participants. The reality is that, “77% of
immigrant men and 66% of women with a middle to high level of professional and educational
credentials suffer from a process of de-qualification once they enter the Italian labor market.” 200
They have access to a labor market defined by Abella with the three d’s of “dirty, dangerous, and demanding.” 201
I see very much at play here a perfect example of the disconnection between the reality depicted by statistical data, and the general perception of Otherness that the average Italian embraces. The former is a useful tool for all those private social formations (NGOs, minorities’ pressure groups, Teatro delle Albe) that think of migration first and foremost in terms of richness and precious diversity. The latter is a politics and media sponsored ideology to foment a climate of suspicion and fear so that the national Italian economy can profit from the immigrants’ capabilities, but laws and police forces can intervene in policing any instance of independence that is considered too extreme. In sum, statistics are not neutral because their reading always answers to a concrete agenda of interpretation of the world around us.
In these terms, the encounter with the Other does not trigger the attempt to apprehend a different world view, but rather to accept that one’s dominant world, as it has been long depicted,
Migration Studies , XL, N. 151, 2003, p. 606. Also: AECA, ed., work cited.
200 Ambrosini, Maurizio. “Oltre l’integrazione subalterna. La questione della valorizzazione della risorsa - immigrati” Studi Emigrazione / Migration Studies , XXXVIII, N.141, 2001, p. 7. The de-qualification is often dependent upon the impossibility for Italians to accept a supervisor, or a boss, of foreign origins and with black skin, as shown in Bruni M, ed. Attratti, sospinti, respinti. I lavoratori immigrati nelle aziende bolognesi . Milano: Franco Angeli, 1994. In 2000, according to Censis, 3.66% of all the businesses in Central Italy (Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Umbria, Marche) was owned by a foreigner. This category though includes all non -EU nationalities, also Switzerland, the US and China, and does not break down the data to show the ratio of business owners across ethnic groups, some of which may be more business-oriented than others, from a neoliberal point of view. It is important to stop thinking of immigrants as a monolith them against an Italian monolith us.
201 Abella, Park, and Böhing. Adjustments to Labour Shortages and Foreign Workers in the Republic of Korea . Geneva: ILO, 1995. 195 may become something else only under the close management of the dominated. Multiple
identities, multiple possibilities and multiple scenarios all coexist within the fictional unity of the
State. The complexity of intra-ethnic relations within the spatio-temporal coordinates of
modernity become even more pronounced when it merges with a problem of resource access. The
perception of a lack of resources, which in Italy constitute a second trend of emergency rhetoric
since the late nineteen seventies, creates a logic fear of dispersion around their possible
allocations. If there aren’t enough jobs for Italians, why do we need immigrants? If the welfare
State is collapsing, why should the national health system take care of immigrants? If INPS (the
National Pension Institute) does not have enough funds to pay for the future pensions of young
Italian workers, how could it pay immigrants? These concerns tell only part of the story. If retired
workers receive their pensions today, it is partially thanks to the taxes that legal immigrants pay
to INPS, knowing that they themselves won’t probably be recipients of a pension. If national agriculture still produces supplies of tomatoes, oranges, and lemons, it is due to many African and South East Asian workers in our fields. The core question is elementary: how do we decide to represent immigrants, as a resource or a burden?
My discussion emphasizes the formation of the image of migrants as mutilated beings, individuals with no past and no background. 202 The immigrant “exists by deficiency in his
originating community, and by excess in the receiving society, originating periodically in both
recrimination and resentment.” 203 He triggers that which Abdelmalek Sayad calls the “mirror
202 D’Andrade R. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. On how this process works see: Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . Tans. Charles Mackmann. New York: Grove Press. 1967; Hauser, Stuart T. Black and White Identity Formation . John Wiley and Sons, 1971; Wilcox, R.G., ed. The Psychological Consequence of being a Black American. John Wiley and Sons, 1971.
203 Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant. “The Organic Ethnologist of Algerian Migration.” Ethnography , N. 1-2, 2000, pp 182-197 . 196 effect,” because his presence unveils the contradictions and hypocrisies of a society, with its
political structures and the relations that link it with other societies in the world system. 204 Very rarely does a society want to be addressed by its own ghosts, even though it is an unwanted role
that the immigrant embodies unconsciously until he accumulates sufficient experiences. The next
chapter will analyze further this conundrum as part of the globalization theory debate and within
Teatro delle Albe’s most reinvented show, I Polacchi .
204 Sayad, Abdelmalek. La doppia assenza. Dalle illusioni dell’emigrato alle sofferenze dell’immigrato. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2002. 197 CHAPTER FOUR – Grounding Performance in Time and Space: The Politttttttical Resistance of the Albe against Neoliberal Practices
“The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor, and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown, and black.” (W. E. B. Dubois)
I Polacchi premiered at Teatro Rasi, in Ravenna, in 1998. Here I will analyze three versions of the show: the Chicago production in 2005 entitled Mighty Mighty Ubu , the European reprise of I
Polacchi in 2006, and the Italo-Senegalese version called Ubu Buur of 2007. 205 I worked as assistant to the production in Chicago, and then followed the short European tour as observant participant, also substituting for actor Maurizio Lupinelli in the role of Bordour in Berlin. The rehearsal process of Ubu Buur developed in Senegal at the end of 2006, opening in Diol Kadd on
January 27, 2007. I did not participate in this phase of the show, but I was able to see two performances of Ubu Buur in Italy, as a special event at the First National Theater Festival
(Teatro Festival Italia) in Napoli on October 11, 2007 and then at Teatro delle Albe’s own theater in Ravenna on October 25, 2007 where the original I Polacchi had debuted ten years earlier.
Multiple locations traced the show’s circular movement, returning after a decade to its original space with a different cast and quite a different meaning; three teenagers’ choruses, three ways to narrate the same story, but most of all the transculturation of a performance that addresses the notion of power and artistic resistance at different latitudes. A personal journey as well, I shall add, since I only witnessed I Polacchi at its home base in Ravenna as the conclusion of a two- year period of fieldwork following the show on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and the
205 The edited collection Suburbia contains critical readings of the multiple versions of Ubu, along with a dvd in which Alessandro Renda visually narrates the experiences in Ravenna, Chicago, Scampia, and Diol Kadd. See: Martinelli, Marco, and Ermanna Montanari eds. Teatro delle Albe. Suburbia. Molti Ubu in giro per il mondo . Milano: Ubu Libri, 2008.
198 Mediterranean Sea.
Power is actually the key word in the contemporary myth of Ubu. The young French
author Alfred Jarry wrote the play when he was a teenage student in Rennes, mocking one of his professors with the puppet character of the avaricious aspirant King. Martinelli’s Ubu reframed the notions of power, obsessive control, petty greed and violence, creating a fun yet thought- provoking farce. Each recreation of I Polacchi targeted the trajectory of authoritative rule
embodied in forms of racial, generational, or gender supremacy. What happens to blackness in
these different performance and geographical contexts? Most of all, I argue that the show speaks
to neoliberal notions of time and space, capital, power, and poverty. My discussion below will
highlight the commonalities of the cultural references that the different teenage choruses evoked,
but also the spaces of freedom that each group was able to carve out in order to adapt, rework,
absorb and transform such elements. Financial and economic multinationals turned teenagers and
their lifestyle into a commodity, disseminating cultural symbols and signifiers through different
geographic locations to give birth to a global market. Against this backdrop, I Polacchi
effectively shows that the lives of migrant teenagers are much more complex than any easy
categorization of identities in space and time. Moreover, the young performers in different
localized conditions demonstrate an imaginative power that lightheartedly re-conquers that which
has been turned into a commercial commodity and creatively transforms the same cultural
signifiers that the market has appropriated, constantly giving birth to new ideas.
It is virtually impossible to discuss migration without dwelling upon the stringent logic of
neoliberal capitalism, by which I signify the collusion of political and financial centers of control
set on the privatization of public services, the amplification of the gap between the rich and the 199 already impoverished, the dismantling of welfare systems, the implementation of a politics of
off-shore production, and the increase in work force flexibility. Likewise, it would be impossible
to speak of neoliberalism without acknowledging the role that national governments and
multi/trans-national decision-making centers play in structuring integrated economies on a global
scale. To summarize the argument that I wish to develop in the following pages, both Saskia
Sassen and David Harvey argue that there is a network of financial centers that function as nodal
points of political and economic power. New York, London, or Tokyo work as magnets for
financial investments that seek either “to disburse and absorb the surpluses down productive
paths, more often than not in long-term projects across a variety of space (from Bangladesh to
Brazil or China), or to use speculative power to rid the system of overaccumulation by the
visitation of crisis of devaluation upon vulnerable territories.” 206 Then, Harvey concludes: “ It is, of course, the population of those vulnerable territories who then must pay the inevitable price, in terms of loss of assets, loss of jobs, and loss of economic security, to say nothing of the loss of dignity and hope.” 207
This policy of diversion, which aims to expose the structural limits of Western late- capitalism somewhere else, has a boomerang effect against the First World for producing a mass of dispossessed people that need to migrate in order to support themselves. The real problem stems from the fact that neoliberalism operates conjointly at the international level, through processes of outsourcing and flexibility, and by acts of institutional brutality at the national level through political decisions that cut expenses in health care, education, housing and other
206 Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo . Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001, 75.
207 Harvey, David. The New Imperialism . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003, 134.
200 fundamental state-sponsored services. It is a subtle and pervasive form of violence that
dismantles the communal social fabric. As a consequence, neoliberalism exacerbates social
tensions and foments a war among the poor. In the era of flexible accumulation, the job market is
based on fast turnover, unskilled labor, forms of visual and physical control over workers,
gendering of roles with a preference for a female workforce that is more malleable and
controllable 208 – a race to the bottom toward low-skilled, mechanized and under-paid jobs.
Increasing numbers of people live on the edge of poverty, and not only in the developing world.
This situation makes things more complex for migrants. In the words of Ben Kiernan: “European
workers might sympathize at odd moments with colonial workers, but more often they see them
as competitors, sweated labor whose products would force down living conditions elsewhere.
Fellow European workers might also be competitors, but can be accepted as reasonable ones,
with an interest in maintaining the European standard of living.” 209 Long embedded ethnic
conflicts merge with modern economic fear to turn any competitor into an enemy.
208 The myth of women as better suited for clerical work in the service industry is only one example of how multinationals use local cultural values to the advantage of capital. In her study of Bajan women, Carla Freeman accuses that, “women are being employed in low-skilled, low-paid jobs, which, despite the comfort of their air- conditioned environments and the status and appearance of being well-off as signified by their dress, entail monotonous and frequently stress inducing work that presents little in the way of transferable skills or opportunity for advancement. Some of these women acknowledge these constrains in clear and direct terms, […] others, however, seem essentially content with their data-processing jobs.” Freeman, Carla. “Designing Women: Corporate Discipline and Barbados’s Off-Shore Pink-Collar Sector.” Cultural Anthropology , Vol. 8 N. 2, may 1993, 169-186. Neoliberal exploitation in late capitalism assumes various masks, from the slave-like condition of sweatshops around the globe to clean, efficient offices that encapsulate women in panoptical cages and socio-cultural constraints. Defining female migration by means of women’s childbearing, Micaela di Leonardo critically discusses the “assumptions of female nurturance and cooperativeness” within the phenomenon of “women’s culture” as a false set of statements built on a tension between sameness and difference among men and women, the natural combination of “home, children, community,” and the essence of motherhood. di Leonardo, Micaela. Exotic at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998, 98-105. Katha Pollitt, quoted in di Leonardo’s book, denounces the functionalism of “women’s culture” in so far as “it asks that women be admitted into public life and public discourse not because they have a right to be there but because they will improve things.” Ibid., 104. This is exactly what I see in place in the discourse over migration in Italy.
209 Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur . New Haven: Yale UP, 2007, 162. 201 The set of neoliberal practices that Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky define as “the mode
of governance through which the ideologies of ‘globalization’ are operationalized”210 hence hide under a homogenizing blanket, a substratum of poverty, inequality, racialized and gendered categorizations, gentrification processes, and social injustice. Globalization entered the media representation in the mid nineteen nineties, substituting terms that had been theorized in previous years. In reality, theories regarding the constitutive elements of a changing modern society had already started to develop, with a particular reference to the Western developed world, in the nineteen sixties. We could think of Daniel Bell’s study of the passage from industrial society to the post-industrial one, carried out by the increasing relevance of scientific research and technological applications, as the affirmation of professionals against the traditional blue-collar workers, and the prevailing force of the service sector compared to industry and agriculture.
Technocrats controlled post-industrial society, not only analyzing but also directing progress towards the exclusive goal of profitability. 211 This is a mirror of what Niklas Luhmann calls a complex society, a mechanism with increasing differentiation among its constitutive components, and difficult communication between its fields of specialization. 212 In such a state, societies moved away from their modern components towards a post-modern condition in which historic linear development and the nexus between meaning and context receded and left space for the
210 Goode, Judith and Jeff Maskovsky eds. New Poverty Studies: The Etnography of Power, Politic, and Impoverished People in the United States . New York: New York UP, 2001, 107.
211 Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting . New York: Basic Book, 1973.
212 Luhmann, Niklas. Potere e complessità sociale . Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1975.
202 insurgence of doubts about the ability for scientific reasoning to explain everything. 213
The end of the Cold War changed the perception of the world system. The constitution of networks that operated globally through communicative instruments of information allowed for actors to invest, in real time, in economic systems on a planetary scale, intervening within the crisis of old legislative systems and across national boundaries. 214 This political view connects with a more explicit economic reading of neoliberalism as the turn of the century mantra of world economy, with the emphasis on the flow of capitals, the ability of transnational enterprises to allocate investments through the re-distribution of sites of production, and the generalization of consumption of global goods against local products. Moreover, the actual hard production of goods gets doubled in the financial speculation on stock markets inexorably linked to one another. 215
From a different point of view, the homogenizing forces of cultural trends, with a
Western and mostly American bias, are pervading the different creations and articulation of culture. Speaking from the cultural realm of globalization, another point accentuates the feeling of dispossession that many perceive. The political philosophy of the nineteen hundreds elaborated a conceptual drift that translated the abstract notion of liberty into concrete historic and material forms. Collective action – social conflict as the sublimation of violence – re- instituted the subject and his individuality against dangerous processes of massification. The
213 Lyotard, J. F. La condition post-modern . Paris: Led Editions de Minuit, 1979; Rosenau, P.M. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
214 Castells, M. The Information Age. Economy, Society, and Culture. The Rise of the Network Society . Vol. I. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
215 Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money . New York: The New Press, 1998. Also: Das, Dilip K. The Economic Dimensions of Globalization . New York: Plagrdave, 2004.
203 subject came back as the decision-maker par excellence . Neoliberalism, inheriting the self- contradictory soul of modernity and classic liberalism, swept away this reacquisition because it de-terriotrialized the centers of political and financial management, producing a philosophy of subcontractors that are never at the head of the decision-making process. The issue at stake, in terms of social conflict, has become: who’s to blame? The idea of who can be individuated as the target of social conflict has become a lot more problematic. Neoliberalism has turned the revolutionary logic of the subject upside down. In its traditional take, the fracture with the status- quo and the seizure of power led to the creation of a new world and a new man. Instead, the global dislocation of power requires the pre-figuration in the practice of everyday life of a different sociality, and of new modes of interaction between self and Other. As a consequence of this re-birth, it becomes necessary to defend post-modern subjectivity against vertically-imposed and outer-directed political and economic powers.
In such a context, one cannot but agree with Eric Wolf that: “it is an error to envisage the migrant as the bearer and protagonist of a homogeneously integrated culture that he either retains or yields up as a whole.” 216 On this same note, Ben Kiernan contextualizes shifting ideologies of power and powerlessness, and demonstrates that homogeneity had always been a construction, even in Europe itself. During the colonial expansion, the advantages of the empire did not create a cohesive society. Upper classes enjoyed the cosmopolitan flavor of colonialism, while the working class had little to celebrate. The colonial experience informed a global upper class of colonizers that, “whatever their national quarrels, they had more in common with one another: they were in a way the first ‘Europeans.’ They shared the same technology and faced the same
216 Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People without History . Berkeley: U of California P, 1982, 361.
204 problems; most obviously, they were men of the same color.” 217
Displacement consolidates the belief in one’s own cultural identity around elements that are constructed through personal memory, as much as through fictions mediated by the commodification of ethnic and gender signifiers. Imagination plays a central role in migration to re-define and re-construct cultural traits and identities. Generally speaking, though, people choose to assimilate themselves in the host society or reject it in accordance to the interplay between desires and their concrete experiences in migration across borders. On the one hand, neoliberal capitalism aims to create consciousness through an accretion of meaning portrayed in cultural commodities. On the other hand, Teatro delle Albe bases its “surrogate family” on respect, dignity, and direct democracy. The ideal of community performatively confronts the principle of capitalist commodity. It recuperates the notion of responsibility as a relation to the
Other, one that assumes belonging to a community in which direct participation is a creative process of discovery, not a presupposition. Consumers disappear as citizens reacquire a place in policy-making.
Teatro delle Albe uses performance in action and performance as action. Direct involvement pertains to the realm of alternatives because it frees social resources that would be otherwise silent or wasted. It transforms passivity into a kinetic, concrete motivation. Teatro delle Albe works within the same cosmopolitan nodal points individuated by Sassen and Harvey, but also in areas of the world relegated to the margins, or at best used as pockets of cheap labor and resources. By means of performative interventions, where by performance I mean both acts limited to a theatrical space and campaigns of outreach for sociopolitical needs, the Albe
217 See: Kiernan, work cited, 156-157.
205 connects the two worlds and hybridizes them. Trips to Senegal or Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods do not consist in the imposition of pre-scripted formulas but in the guided short- circuit derived by the encounter with the Other: the white Albe as Others for the black performers, and the latter Others for the former. The intersection of art and politics is the crucial condition for the reconstruction of human agency as a multiplicity of resistances to the limits imposed by neoliberal structures. Performance centers our attention on the value of action, and as such it analyzes the essence of political activity; it measures the significance of direct involvement. 218 Immigrants who are part of the Albe’s theatrical network bring forward their need of self-representation. They want to move out of the storyteller realm to become political agents, reach cultural acknowledgment and achieve full active and passive citizenship.
The democratic setting of the turn of the century is witnessing the combination of re- allocation of wealth and power within a system of world-cities that from the US to Asia constitute a network of exchange, while, at the same time, we witness the proliferation of NGOs and non-state actors who claim their share in the making of a more humanitarian globalization.
Against the backdrop of the paradoxical nature of democracy - its nation-state bounded logic vs. its universal conceptual value – Arjun Appadurai suggests the institution of a “democracy without borders” that goes beyond the attempt to recognize universal principles within national jurisdictions. Semantically, the author defines it “deep democracy” because it is made of “roots, anchors, intimacy, proximity, and locality” along with groups who engage in “efforts to build international networks and coalitions of some durability with their counterparts across national
218 The literature on the relationship between art and politics is very rich. See for example: Schlossman, David. Actors and Activists. Politics, Performance, and Exchange among Social Worlds . New York: Routledge, 2002; Auslander, Philip. Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture . New York: Routledge, 1999; Kershaw, Baz. The Politics of Performance: Radical Theater as Cultural Intervention . New York: Routledge, 1992; Boal, Augusto. 206 borders.” 219 The horizontal line of development, when successful, enables actors to engage with
institutional agencies at various local and national levels from a more stable platform. Appadurai
calls the phenomenon deterritorialization. I use the term in the way Jane L. Collins does, not as “
an inevitable part of economic globalization” but as “one way that firms can construct their
relationships in the places where they do business.” 220 The ambiguity lies in the fact that
deterritorialization can be at the same time a strategy enacted by centers of power to gain more
profit from their investments, and a tactic through which workers carve out forms of autonomy.
Dislocated people naturally initiate a process of reterritorialization to reconstruct a cultural
identity. The restoration process takes place within the appropriation and commodification of
cultural products from the capitalistic logic of profit. Reterritorialization exemplifies that it is no
longer easy to sort out the local from the global: transnational circulations of images get
reworked on the ground and redeployed for local, tactical struggles. These local makeovers
simultaneously encumber and energize global flows. The reconfiguration of democratic
principles resonates with Marco Martinelli’s theorization of the politttttttical . In analyzing Teatro
delle Albe’s tension between local forms of identity and attention to the shapes of global power,
my intent is to move from a mere ethnography of location to one of circulation. In order to reach
this goal, I will consider the intricate physical and ideological movement of the Albe’s
performers in the production and perception of the show I Polacchi .
I Polacchi - Global Performance in Local Contexts
Legislative Theater: Using Performance to Make Politics . New York: Routledge, 1998.
219 Appadurai, work cited, 45.
220 Collins, Jane L. Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003, 152.
207 Have you ever heard of an international traveling Museum? I do not refer here to a
cultural institution borrowing unique artworks from another to organize special exhibits. I mean a
whole Museum, with its walls, custodians, and art masterpieces packed and shipped to different countries for a short term residency. I visited a Museum like this: the Museum Historiae
Ubuniversalis - the theatrical non-space in which the show I Polacchi takes place. The scenic
invention by Martinelli opened its doors for the first time in Ravenna in 1998, and since then has
moved to Teheran, Berlin, Zurich, Chicago, and Dakar to name only a few cities. Some faces
have changed: someone has been fired, someone else hired. Each time the artistic director
adapted the “expositions” to the specific places hosting the show: that time in Chicago the statue
of a winged Madonna substituted for Father Ubu’s horse, or that other time in Berlin the theater
could not contain the wooden cross projecting from the stage into the audience area. Martinelli
created a sui generis Museum, miles away from the dusty mold generally associated with the art
exhibits. The artists of Teatro delle Albe have the rather unique talent of dusting off the boredom
of the too often mummified theatrical creative act. The Museum Historiae Ubuniversalis was a museum - circus, with flaming dishes, techno music, acrobats and clowns; a freak show, like those that used to be very popular in the late eighteen hundreds, with the bearded woman, the midget and the contortionist. I Polacchi does not perform physical deformity, but ethical
depravation, the moral emptiness of those who embody greed for power. There’s a small
spineless man - Father Ubu - who lets his ambitious spinster-like wife convince him to kill the
king of Poland and steal his throne. There’s another man - Bordour - taller but nonetheless small,
who’s a traitor by nature. But most of all, there is a chorus of adolescents, the palotini : bored
teenagers who play a game of make-believe. They imagine a bloody narration inspired by 208 Macbeth that becomes a grotesque Polish farce inhabited by the Ubuesque puppets, in which they themselves cover the roles of guardians of the Museum and violent army in disarray serving
Father Ubu.
I saw I Polacchi for the first time in Chicago, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where
Martinelli re-thought it in the version that he titled Mighty Mighty Ubu . The paradox of a real
Museum hosting on its stage a parodic interpretation finds proper place within the “pataphysic” world of Alfred Jarry, Ubu’s author. If Poland were nowhere, it logically goes that it can be anywhere: a twelfth century church turned into a theater in Ravenna, a museum in the heart of downtown Chicago, or the semi-desert plains surrounding Dakar. Jarry’s Ubu Roi tore down the separation between high and low culture at its debut, destabilizing the dominant bourgeois ethic.
Chronicles of the time reported that Ubu Roi caused an uproar at its opening night, when the first word spoken on stage was merdre (with an extra ‘r’). The audience gathered at the theater for a night of entertainment was offended and caused the suspension of the show for many minutes.
The story is probably not historically grounded, but entered the mythic atmosphere surrounding
Jarry’s text, which speaks of Ubu’s relevance for European culture.
In I Polacchi, Father Ubu, played by Mandiaje N’Diaje, wears a dark green military overcoat, with a protruding belly and heavy green make up covering his eyebrows, and introduces himself to the audience with a neologism that since then has become the good luck mantra of Teatro delle Albe – “ merdraza .” The word is a combination of the French merdre with the word raza , that in Romagnole dialect means race. Hence, Ubu claims either a “shitty race” or that “race is shit” to welcome the audience into his reign. One has to understand the overall parodic intent, and in a way subversively freeing mechanism of the show for both performers and 209 spectators, not to shut down in front of the possible racist meaning of Ubu’s first word. After all,
N’Diaye is a black actor pretending to be the king of Poland, a marionette born out of the fantasy of a Breton writer, of a teenager in a French private educative institution, and re-inscribed in the adaptation of the original work by the hand of an Italian director whose show has since then lived multiple lives with casts coming from many countries, including the United States, Nigeria,
Senegal, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and more. The cross-cultural complexity of this description demonstrates in itself how race (and with it ethnicity, nationality, citizenship) cannot be reduced to the simplistic duality of black and white. Mighty Mighty Ubu moves beyond this binary logic to globalize its core message: greediness dehumanizes men and reduces them to puppets in the hands of their own thirst for power.
Marco Martinelli’s rewriting of Jarry’s masterpiece recuperated the illogical innocence of a group of teenagers that make the adult world’s contradictions explode, yet participating to its horrors as consenting accomplices. Father and Mother Ubu are two marionettes, acting out the fears, dreams and games of a group of teenagers, while at the same time they manipulate each other to obtain personal wealth and power, and use their creators as puppets themselves, forcing them into bloody intrigues, murders, and war. The palotini , which Martinelli renamed palcontents in the English version of the show, die innumerable times on stage, only to simply get up and show the theatricality of their death when the scene is over, and they move into the next playful moment. Violence repeats itself yet loses its unchangeable dynamic.
In Chicago, Martinelli, Montanari and N’Diaye did not simply restage their internationally renowned show. They reinvented it from scratch adding to the three Albe’s actors a group of black teenagers who had recently immigrated to the US from various African and 210 Carribean countries. Feeding off the precious pedagogical experience accumulated through the
years, the project’s precondition consisted in substituting the original chorus of ten Italian
palotini with ten African and Afro-American palcontents, and then let the linguistic and cultural short circuit break into the theatrical mechanism of the show. Operating on the show’s linguistic, physical and visual elements, the experience had two main correlated outcomes. The teenagers’ desire to express their creative energy demonstrated an ideal continuity between Italian and
African adolescents, to the extent that the generational ties seemed at times much more important than any distinction based on culture or nationality. They all expressed a universal need to communicate and leave a permanent sign of their presence. Moreover, the transnational life of the young migrants contested the notion of a cohesive racial mode of being black. In order to represent a character on stage, they learned to activate an array of symbolic knowledge, a collage of their previous experiences in the native countries - mother tongues, local songs - and their perception of what being a black American teenager meant - hip hop, street gangs. A true kaleidoscope of multiple interpretations.
The experiment of dissembling and reassembling the show had such a gratifying result that the Afro-Romagnole Albe then transported the technique to Italy and Senegal. The Chicago experience inspired Martinelli and his group to rethink I Polacchi through multiple
reincarnations. The first took place within the three-year project Arrevuoto , a collaboration
between Teatro delle Albe, Teatro Mercadante in Napoli, middle and high schools of the city,
and a group of gypsy teenagers from the suburb of Scampia. I did not have a chance to participate
in any stage of the project since I was back in the United States by then. From the information I
was able to gather from email conversations with Martinelli, the Neapolitan version of I Polacchi 211 - entitled Ubu sotto tiro - would fall outside of the proper scope of the dissertation since
blackness was not a coordinate in the work, even though it would be interesting to explore the
resignification of Ubu in relation to a different minority group - the gypsies and teenagers of a
troubled Southern city. Yet, the experiment itself demonstrates the vitality of Jarry’s text and
Albe’s poetics, the possibility to adapt it to different contexts, performers and audiences, always
keeping alive its dramatic texture.
The second rethinking of I Polacchi took place in 2007 under the title Ubu Buur - Wolof
for King Ubu. Mandiaye N’Diaye led the rehearsals in Diol Kadd, his native village not far from
Dakar, where the actor is also trying to build a theater that would function both as a training
space for African performers and visiting European artists, and as a performance space. N’Diaye
asked young teenagers from the village, most of whom are his direct family members, to commit
to the Ubu Buur project, which premiered in Diol Kadd in January 2007, and then traveled to
France, for the Festival des Francophonies en Limousin in Limoges (4-7 October, 2007), and to
Italy, where the show played in Napoli (11 October), Modena (18 October) and finally closed
with a successful run in Ravenna (25-27 October).
Ubu Buur holds a triple significance within the larger argument of my dissertation: first and foremost the show illustrates the formation of N’Diaye into a complete performer, independent from the mother source of Teatro delle Albe. When he first moved to Italy, he landed in Europe with no formal training and without specific career expectations. His circular trajectory between Ravenna and Dakar exemplifies a successful story of finding his own voice as a fulfilled performer who is able to use his migratory history to give something back to his homeland. Second, the re-staging of I Polacchi with a chorus of twelve Senegalese teenagers 212 brought a newly consistent notion of blackness into the performance, once again working off the teenagers’ imagination and familiar rhythms, sounds, and languages. Finally, the show traveled to different locations and performed in front of diverse ethnic and national groups. I will try to analyze the reception of the show both from its aesthetic point of view and its specific staging choices. In particular, what interests me is analyzing the interstice points in which each performance takes a turning from the original show and hence transforms the perception of both
Jarry’s message and the Albe’s intentions. I was not able to participate in any of the rehearsals in
Senegal, so my reading will mostly focus on the two shows I saw in Italy, and on written accounts of the French audience’s reaction to Ubu Buur .
The re-inscription of ten black students on the MCA stage, and the European tour of the show with a chorus of twelve Senegalese teenagers, were ambiguous acts. On one hand, they were made possible by the ideation of an Italian theater company, reaffirming the need of white supervision over the representation of blackness, or at least of black bodies. I believe that in
Chicago the spectators embraced the performance without extreme tension because they focused on its Italianness. Martinelli, Montanari and N’Diaye were exotic in their own way, being artists from Italy. Spectators and critics did not expect them to know the cultural codes of the American multiracial society and allowed them to “play” with Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American teenagers in ways which would have not been allowed to a US-based theater group. Nonetheless, the eruption of hip hop sounds at the MCA, and the freedom with which young actors expressed their world views, actuated a representation of blackness contingent to the generational element of the palcontents, confuting monolithic approaches to ethnic communities, sociocultural conditions, interracial relations, and most of all the desire to self-representation. 213 Likewise, Ubu Buur was never meant to be primarily a performance about blackness. Its
focus was, and still is, the generational energy brought on stage by teenagers, and the collapse of
the violent adult world in the dreams of these adolescents. The ethnic element though has
necessarily become a lens through which the audience reads the performance of violence, played
out in its childish game-like reality. And that is because difference informs the relation between
spectators and actors: the Albe attempts to annihilate the traditional theatrical distancing between
passive viewers and active doers, but superimposes on this a difference made of skin colors,
languages and rhythms. The intentionality of such agency, to create a short- circuit in the
audience’s preconceptions by means of displays of difference, reads blackness and whiteness not
as monolithic entities, but as a multiplicity of identities, at times conflating within the logic of
ethnicity, at times diverging from it and from each other. Still at times, the feeling of witnessing
a showcase of blackness as exotic for an almost all white audience resurfaces.
Both the Albe and the young immigrants in Chicago, or the teenagers from Senegal
embraced an artistic hazard. According to post-colonial thinker Rustom Bharucha, many scholars
and theater-makers still approach the Other within a colonial mind set. What concerns him most
is that they often speak of marginal communities as cut off from modes of representation, only to
reveal a cultural bias that grants value to specific, literary-based forms of encoding. What if
marginal communities are not interested in gaining access to these forms of representation, at
least not in the fashion that we require them to? The fact that the Zulus should produce a Tolstoy in order to be accepted as valuable counterparts of a conversation on culture, which they might not have asked for in the first place, presents a Eurocentric positioning. According to Charles
Taylor, not having a Tolstoy might be a cultural choice. However, this possibility is not taken 214 into consideration because culture is supposed to have a certain look. Nonetheless, both Jarry’s
text and the poetic filiation that the Albe derived from it contain the possibility of the encounter
between people of different walks of life.
Martinelli’s rewriting was born with a dynamic modality. In Jarry 2000 the director
remembers that, while he was conceiving I Polacchi , the theater company debuted with another production inspired by Jarry: Perhindérion – a Breton word for pilgrimage. 221 The religious faith
that prompts devotees to initiate a repenting pilgrimage shares common traits with the artistic
fervor with which visitors enter a museum searching for that painting which they have always
hoped to admire, or with the thirst of spectators immersing themselves in the darkness of a
theater to enjoy a performance. Religion and theater were intrinsically linked in origin, when the
ritual of the pilgrimage found resolution within the actors’ jokes. Martinelli conceived
Perhindérion to be performed specifically in and around Teatro Rasi in Ravenna. The show
evokes movement but is paradoxically linked to a space and, hence, non-exportable. By contrast,
I Polacchi constituted an ideal bridge between Jarry’s kinesthetic force and the Albe’s poetic: a
mix of sacred and profane, of “pataphysical” contemplation and earthy carnality, a textile of
linguistic games. Martinelli’s work as metteur en scene exalted Ubu’s essence, both in 1998 when he started working with teenagers from Ravenna and in 2005 when he chose a group of
African immigrants coming from Nigeria, Cameroon, Haiti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Saudi
Arabia. Bharucha’s criticism of a neoliberal and ethnocentric inter-culturalism, and of much postmodern theory that emphasizes hybridity and diaspora assuming “that the formerly colonized peoples will seek other futures in former colonies where they will be in a position to challenge
221 Martinelli, Marco. Jarry 2000. Da Perhindérion a I Polacchi . Milano: Ubulibri, 2000. 215 the civilizational premises of their erstwhile rulers” 222 speaks to the cosmopolitan lives of the young actors in Chicago. The scholar attacks an approach that assumes freedom of movement and the desire to experience a cosmopolitan life while ignoring the neoliberal policies that force many to migrate and emphasizing a unidirectional movement, from the ex colony to the former empire. “That such migrants should ever aspire to returning to their homelands would seem to be a regressive, if not nostalgic maneuver.” 223
Kinship and family connections showed that they played a central role in both the decision to migrate and the desire to return for the teenagers’ families. Socio-economic conditions of poverty, illegality and marginality intervened to transform these projected migratory plans, often impeding their final actualization. Yet, most of the ten Chicago actors had a more articulate transnational history than a simple straight line between a former colony and the
US. The most intimate value of the Albe’s project lies in its extra-theatrical milieu. Activating the teenagers’ imagination required opening up a space within Jarry’s text in which their multinational life experience could find proper location. Billy was a Nigerian kid who grew up in
Italy before moving to Chicago in 2002; Betty was born in Saudi Arabia, though her family originated in Eritrea and had just arrived in the windy city; Ojouti had just obtained his refugee status, having escaped from the war in Sudan. Martinelli treasured this incredible richness. He did not exploit the kids’ cultures, but stimulated the creation of an imaginary world to which multiple migrations contributed to a very large extent. This life experience entered in dialogue with the archetypes of Jarry and his masks - Father Ubu’s bloody dictatorship and obtuse
222 Bharucha. Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practices. Thinking Through Theater in an Age of Globalization . Hanover and London: Wesleyan UP, 2000. 6.
223 Ibid., 6. 216 ambition, Mother Ubu’s femininity suspended between religious icon and witch, Bordour’s cowardice hidden under the need to please he who holds the power. In such cases, theater conceived as life trajectory comes to the surface for its own generosity; it does not abandon spectators to the cathodic observation of everyday life, but pushes everyone towards critical understanding.
Intra-cultural experimentation is necessarily site specific. Too often intra-cultural has meant the encounter between the West and the rest. My personal doubt, reacting to such statement, would be, what West? As I hope I demonstrated in my historic reconstruction of blackness in Italy, the West itself is a multiplicity of identities, exchanges, consecutive layers of cultural mixing, the discharge of forgotten traditions in place of new trends. Moreover, to say that appropriations of Western styles, in performance as much as in other fields, does not account for intercultural work because the West is the dominant, is to reproduce implicitly the hierarchical system of post-colonial dominance. I am not denying, and it would be far from the main argument of my dissertation, dominance itself. I just wish to place it in a proper relativist context.
After all, diversity is not subversive by nature. Like the superficial multi-culturalism of Disney
World’s Epcot Center, diversity can represent the Other while not necessarily confronting the hegemony of the dominant culture or even trying to criticize it. Even worse, evocations of diversity and pluralism often conceal a conservative ideology that pretends that racism does not exist anymore, clearing white people’s consciousness and the arbitrary imposition of negative stigma over the Other, whether he/she is black, gay, woman, Islamic or immigrant.
Intra-culturalism as a Western thing seems to imply that culture is a term specifically located in the Euro-American context, and that every act of negotiation with the Other is imposed from the West to the rest. It may just as well be that the philosophical definition of culture is 217 rooted in a European tradition, and it is also plausible to sustain that some cultures are less
obsessed than others with the individuation of the boundaries delimiting “us” and “them.” Yet I
think it would be more useful, when it comes to discussing theater and art, to think of artists as
individuals not necessarily bound to a nation, but as spirits who breathe a cosmopolitan
atmosphere. I do not want to sound naive, because I am perfectly aware of all the instances in
which art has been co-opted for ideologically politicized misuse, and I am conscious as well that
sub-cultural minorities have an implicitly unbalanced access to cosmopolitan exchanges. My
focus here is on forms of intra-cultural contact that share a collaborative approach rather than a
neo-imperialist imposition. I privilege those experiments that do not distinguish between a source
and a target culture, but rather open up the possibility for multiple, reciprocal hybridizations.
From the pages of The Drama Review , Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert argue that:
“cross-cultural negotiation is more visible in migrant theater where there is an emerging exploration of cultural hybridity reflected in aesthetic forms as well as narrative content. While one cultural group is usually responsible for the production and staging of migrant theater, it frequently plays not only to that group but also to wider audiences, albeit to a lesser extent; hence cross-cultural negotiations may also occur at the level of reception.” 224 My discussion of the
three reincarnations of I Polacchi aims to highlight the very cultural roots of its local
embodiment. I will focus on three specific moments in the show: the war scene between Ubu’s
comrades and the Russian army that invades Poland to vindicate Venceslao’s regicide; the
moment in which soon-to-be King Ubu asks his teenage army to come up with an original
method to kill King Venceslao; and the sound score accompanying the play.
224 Lo, Jacqueline and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theater Praxis.” The Drama Review , 46,3. Fall 2002, 34. 218 Modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism are concepts whose meanings and procedures largely overlap and coincide at the level of procedures and operational modes. The issue that continues to defy analysis is how to elaborate an explanation of both the process of globalization and the multiplicity of individual temporalities and local rationalities that are inserted into it. Teatro delle Albe’s ultra-local poetic builds a mode of production that catches on the debris of history, and exploits the process of globalization to lend new strength to local idioms, imposing on stage not a translation nor an adaptation, but the re-enlivened version of an original show. The lingering question is: is the artistic métissage always successful? Dealing with different modalities of acquisition of performance skills also means to interact with alternative modernities, worlds that are not necessarily capital-oriented but that operate within the neoliberal model to act out local modalities of acquisition of wealth.
When Marco Martinelli showed me his 1998 rehearsals notes, I found comments surprisingly similar to the ones I wrote in Chicago during the work with the Afro-Carribean palcontents from Senn High School. The Ubuesque teenage energy seemed truly universal: the actors were explosive and restless, having serious trouble keeping their aliveness under control when they were asked to stay still on stage. Some of them had spent only few months in the US.
They had to mediate among the goofiness of a teenage body undergoing hormonal transformations, the need to become familiar with a new cultural atmosphere and the duty to learn a theatrical physical code that requires self-control, scenic timing, and relations with space and other actors. They seldom stood up straight when Martinelli asked them to create a tight army-like formation, and even more they resisted the idea of throwing themselves on the floor to play death. And when they did it, stillness would only last for a few seconds. Their bodies carried 219 an energetic surplus, their minds lacked at times the ability to concentrate, and rehearsals were
often tough to organize. Yet, the final outcome was a fluid composition alternating chaos and
commedia dell’arte-like improvisation with precise geometric figurations drawn on stage by the teenagers’ bodies. Martinelli was truly able to harmonize the liberation from all the inhibitions
that mortify the body and mind of an adolescent in the adult’s world.
In I Polacchi the most obvious multi-cultural encounter takes the shape and the color of
Mother Ubu - a head to toe white Ermanna Montanari - and Father Ubu - played by Senegalese
actor Mandiaye N’Diaye. In Chicago, the short rehearsal time posed immediately the problem of
finding the right access to the performance, taking into consideration that almost everyone there
was working in a foreign language and that the teenagers lacked awareness of stage presence.
How to find the key that would capture the students’ attention so that they could conceive
rehearsals as a moment of freedom that required serious commitment? Martinelli did not pretend
to teach them what theater is, neither did he want to impress them with theories on the avant
garde and the relevance of Jarry’s text. He told the adolescents that the text had been written by
students their same age to poke fun at a professor, back in Rennes, France. When you are fifteen,
school authority can be the most obvious embodiment of an asphyxiating lack of freedom. I
believe that having to step through metal detectors each time we entered Senn High School had a
deep impact on us, projecting the violence of the outside world into the educative setting and the
rehearsal space. In France, as much as in Italy and the United States, school systems have
increasingly assumed a role of censorship for teenage trends and behaviors, but also a
concentration of frustration and tensions. The theatrical game worked as the perfect space to
sublimate the students’ desire to rebel. The Albe welcomed those trends and behaviors in their 220 poetic, bridging the truth of their teenagers with Jarry’s a-temporal essence.
The first day, Martinelli asked the young actors a straight question: what are your passions? What turns you on? Almost unanimously the kids declared their love for rap music and hip-hop. The construction of the show then naturally started from a hip-hop rhythm. Everyone was invited to improvise his or her own ideas on a looping drum base. The task was to create a hymn that exalted the strengths of the palcontents, their street gang fearlessness, the dangers and visions of urban fighters. Ossey advised the audience not to rest safely in their nice houses because the palcontents would take away everything from them; Widney called her allies to embrace a no-frontier war against all the enemies of Father Ubu and his army; Chris, the youngest and one of the most receptive of the group, sang his untamed love for shining diamonds and cool guns, inspired by many well-known rappers. The absurdity of the theatrical game and the irony of toy guns proudly exhibited yet unable to hurt balanced the seriousness of these statements. The palcontents never gave way to their violence; they sublimated it by means of parody. Music was not an aesthetic accessory, but rather a generative element of their energy.
While in the Italian version of the show the teenage army chanted its wild and aggressive nature using choruses inspired by soccer fanaticism, the palcontents in colored t-shirts supported King
Ubu rapping their anger. The chorus repeated its hymn several times in the show, yet the hip hop sound reached its apex in the war scene. The audience faced an army whose gun did not consist in rifles or cannons but microphones, a clash of talents among free-stylers showing off their ability to improvise on a beat. Young poets voiced their anger in urban poems: a scene that one could probably see in an Eminen video. I remember feeling real anguish when I realized the sonorous proximity between the repetitive sound of a drum and the noise of an automatic shot 221 gun. The words, emphasizing rebellion, hit me with the strength of a bullet. The mix of voices rapping in English, Yoruba and Wolof added to the surreal atmosphere and the complexity of an international army in disarray.
The war between the palcontents and the Russian army to the rescue of the legitimate
Polish heir is a moment of the show that perfectly exemplifies both the possibility to rethink the structure of the performance without de-legitimating its deeper meaning, while visually and contextually inserting the locale into the adaptations of I Polacchi for different young performers and audiences. As I mentioned already, the Italian chorus of palotini used stadium hymns to express their courage at war, yet the music and loud voices visually contrasted with the shirtless teens that, with their bare chests, could not hide their young age and evoked feelings of powerlessness and disorientation. Ubu’s army pretended to be strong and frightening but really turned out to be a group of harmless high school students. The scene revolved around an imposing horse, an opera prop on which Father Ubu sat motionless, while all around him his teen soldiers lay on the ground trying to grasp for air with their upper bodies. They yelled and cried melodramatically engaging a battle with a loud techno music which nullified all of their efforts: no one could fully understand them and hence no one would come to their rescue. Despite these elements evoking suffering, the war scenes played out in I Polacchi always kept alive the parodic, almost game-like atmosphere. As an audience member I never felt I was watching an army being massacred by the enemies, but kids playing at war.
In Chicago, Martinelli played initially with the idea of reproducing the scene’s structure and asked the Senn students to think of cheerleading choruses as possible hymns to accompany their war. The teenagers’ puzzled faces were a clear sign that cheerleading did not make them 222 very comfortable, and when Martinelli left them free to decide what music would work best, no
one showed any doubt: hip hop. Most of the male participants were real eager to steal each
other’s microphones to show off their rapping skills. The musical element of the revised scene
stayed predominant, but nonetheless the agonistic tension between the actors kept very much
alive the evocation of a contest, a war, or a challenge thrown at each other and against
hypothetical enemies. The resignification of blackness in such context could not escape the
stereotype of young black teens in inner city neighborhoods, while hip hop claimed its tropes of
borderline criminal activities, East Coast - West Coast fractures, and hyper-masculinity. It is not
incidental that of all the girls on stage, only Whidney felt the desire to improvise her lyrics in the
show. Yet, it is also not incidental that black teenage immigrants from a variety of African
countries unquestionably identified with hip hop culture - the clothing style, reference figures,
and jargon of black teenagers throughout Chicago mirrors rap music videos and vice versa.
The war scene changed quite drastically in Ubu Buur acquiring a value that, I believe, is
probably the most troublesome of the three shows in relation to blackness and ethnic interactions
on the Albe’s stage. Twelve soldiers taking off their military jackets to embrace kalashnikovs preceded Ubu’s entrance on horseback. They formed a semi circle while two of them started a fight alternating capoeira and a series of very grounded positions, embodying quite poignantly a controlled energy ready to explode. Compared to the shirtless Italian teenagers, the chiseled bodies of the Senegalese actors embracing short guns drastically evoked images of kid soldiers from the many forgotten wars of Central Africa. The overall atmosphere of the performance, that both in Chicago and in its European version always maintained a sense of absurdity and playfulness, in Ubu Buur turned into a serious and menacing event. On top of this, the black 223 actors dusted their faces and upper bodies with white flour, transforming themselves into a sort
of white face minstrels that carry along violence and death. Whitening themselves could be
actually read as an act of defiance, as if to say that war may be enacted by black bodies, but that
its real source exists in whiteness. After all, the white men sitting in the meeting rooms where
neoliberal economic and political decisions are taken are as responsible as any black dictator for
the blood spread in the African continent. Yet the resignification of blackness through whiteness
cannot escape the complexity of a long history of blackface performance, along with the
indisputable oppressive strength of colonial power over the colonized. Erasing the Senegalese
actors’ facial features and ethnic background, even though part of their bodies remained visibly
black, felt like a lack of acknowledgment of their work throughout the performance, especially
because the war scene flowed into the finale so that the actors thanked the audience while still
wearing a white mask on their face.
Moving to the analysis of the conspiracy scene, the comedic moment in which Ubu
orders his army to give him suggestions on the best way to kill King Venceslao never really
changed in its staging. Martinelli and N’Diaye always worked so as to give the young actors the
opportunity to let their imagination run free, searching for the most truculent modalities to
commit regicide. It wouldn’t have made any sense to ask new choruses to learn the lines as they had been conceived by the original Italian cast in 1998. The horror imaginary of Afro-American adolescents, or teens from a village in Senegal, had its own specifics and had to come to term with the eruption of world terrorism in our collective and individual conscience. Thus, it seemed only natural that TJ would make an hypothesis such as this: to hijack two planes, crush them against the royal palace and allow Father Ubu to become king in alliance with his best friend Bin
Laden. Notwithstanding some perplexities that we all had due to TJ’s very graphic description of 224 bodies falling from windows and clouds of dust, we all agreed that he was giving a perfect
representation of what nowadays one considers Evil. A blow to the face of that politically correct
attitude so common in much Western contemporary theater. This raw description was balanced
by Marshall’s thin voice suggesting that they could kill the king by playing a clarinet and boring
him to death, or by Fatima declaring her inability to kill the king because she fancied him.
Truculent images alternated with more light-hearted ones reaching the apotheosis when each
soldier started screaming and moving his/her body in grotesque ways mimicking asphyxia,
decapitation, hysteria and foolishness.
The actors’ modes of expression followed the same patterns both in the European tour of
2006 and in the African-based version of late 2007. What changed was the fantastic world each
actor evoked, being inspired by the images that were most common to his teenage fantasy. So, for
example, Roberto Magnani, the palotino who lasted the longest playing the role from the original show in 1998 until 2006, developed an articulate torture sequence that included slicing the
King’s leg to play guitar with his tendons, burning his scrotum and body hair, and cutting his nipples to blow so much air into his chest so that he would look like Pamela Anderson. This last reference effectively worked in obtaining people’s laughter every night. In Ubu Buur the political
element entered just like it had happened with TJ’s evocation of 9/11. One of the actors
suggested asking for assistance by calling one of the many other dictators of Africa. These claims
were always placed in opposition to more straightforward and simply funny interventions, such
as the idea launched by a soldier of killing the King by shutting himself into a room with him. To
his comrades asking him “and so what?” the Senegalese man answered in good Italian “finito”
(that’s it), at which point everybody pretended to beat him. The movement from serious to
comedic registers debunked the absurdity of Ubu’s embodiment of evil, which was even more 225 trivialized by the final decision: a simple rifle shot killed the King - an actor dressed in a skeleton
suit with a little silver crown made of foil paper who died silently, but saluted the audience with
his wavy hands and gave everybody the finger. What stands out in the triple re-thinking of the
conspiracy scene is the ability to incorporate both the imagery most true to the local teenagers
and references to historic or political conditions known to most, if not to everyone. In this case,
blackness and whiteness mattered less than the possibility for spectators across ethnic and
national borders to recognize themselves in the horror imagery brought to life by the
palotini /palcontents. The scene contains an affirmation of sameness more powerful than any
other blatant anti-racist claim.
Based on my previous discussion, it should be clear by now that the musical score was
not a mere sonorous carpet to transition from one scene to the other, but a core element of the
whole performance. First and foremost, the teenagers were active agents in proposing the type of
music to be used, enthusiastically submerging Martinelli with tapes of their favorite artists. I do
not possess the necessary knowledge to conduct a critical analysis of sound; I leave that to the
prosperous field of ethnomusicology. My reading of music is solely based on my reactions as an
informed audience member, who had the possibility to follow the evolution of the various stage
choices throughout the rehearsal period. The centrality of music in I Polacchi also constitutes a
poignant example of the insertion of the local into the structure of the show. In 1998, during
Teatro delle Abe’s initial conception, the ten original palotini brought in the music that was truest to their age and geographical location. Ravenna is only a few miles away from the
Romagnole coast, a long stretch of small sleepy towns (Rimini, Riccione, Cattolica) that during the summer turns into a crowded vacation spot for many German tourists and Italian youngsters 226 attracted by cheap prices and crazy nightlife. Romagna is the home of the biggest, most famous
disco clubs, but also homeland of the balera culture - leftist cultural centers where more mature crowds dance their nights away ballroom dancing. The mixture of techno music, tango and waltz that fills the air in Rimini and Riccione’s summer nights became the soundtrack of I Polacchi ,
bringing a piece of Romagnole coastline all around the world.
When Martinelli started working with the Senn High School students in Chicago, it was obvious to him that the Polish mazurka used during the party scene could not trigger the teenagers’ fantasy. He wanted the music to inspire them, and help improvise dance movements and games. That is when the young actors proposed to use hip hop and rap, which eventually substituted almost completely the original sound score. Some may accuse the Albe of complicity with a commodification politics of black music that has moved from marginal sub-culture to commercial success and exploitation. The truth is that hip hop crosses ethnic boundaries, since its audience is not limited to blacks, and national ones, as the unanimous choice made by the international cast of Mighty Mighty Ubu demonstrates. Whether one likes it or not, the insertion
of hip hop into mainstream production, with its accompanying debates over the loss of purity
both as an aesthetic form and as an ideological counterculture to white music, places it in a space
of consumption that justifies its use in the Albe’s performance. I personally believe that, given
the paradoxical nature of I Polacchi , a musical form not so immediately associable with black
culture and urban setting would have probably worked as one more element towards the creation
of that sense of nightmarish dream in the performance’s framework. Yet, keeping in mind the
Albe’s poetic of mise en vie , whose main point is to facilitate the short circuit between a
theatrical text and the life of the actors on stage, and also given the very short rehearsal process 227 that forced Martinelli to gain immediate access to the Senn teenagers’ attention, commitment and
trust, through music the young actors perceived themselves as empowered co-authors of the
show.
The same logic holds true in the Ubu Buur project. Once again, imposing on a group of
twelve Senegalese adolescents musical forms that had little significance to them did not seem the
appropriate directing choice to be made. During my research in Dakar in November 2006, I was
actually surprised by the fact that groups of young men would hang out for hours in front of the
two floor houses or on rooftops talking and listening to recording artists from many different
countries: Italy, France and the United States. Hip hop and popular romantic ballads by Eros
Ramazzotti or Laura Pausini were not unknown territory for them. Yet, when N’Diaye asked the local actors to pick songs on which to improvise dance movements and choruses, they chose traditional drumming and Youssou N’Dour. In Ubu Buur only one song remains from the
original 1998 production: the Bach piece accompanying Mother Ubu’s first entrance. In many
moments of the show, the Senegalese palcontents get into a tight formation, waving flags and
singing out loud their Wolof choruses. Even more often, they break into dances that mark
moments of collective celebration, as when Ubu distributes checks to everyone who has helped
him kill Venceslao, or serve as tension-building frames for the war scene and the finale. Half
naked bodies, lyrics sung in an inaccessible language (to most spectators, including myself),
drumming, stomping, and deeply grounded choreographed bodily movements interject images of
Africa into Ubu’s imagined Poland, but at the same time seem unable to detach the young actors
from a certain evocation of primitiveness and exotic rituals. The palcontents’ musical
performances within the show’s framework operate quite consciously on an introjected idea of 228 Africa, as white European audiences would stereotypically perceive it. This is where the show falls short, I believe, pushing mise en vie towards its very own inner limitation. 225 Empowering actors to weave a certain self-representation of their own world with the show’s original text and context should come to terms with the fact that this self-representation may be biased by an introjected vision of the self, constructed by images and tropes imposed from the outside. As bell hooks claims in her critique of race in American media, the definition of blackness as servitude and invisibility not only reassures whites of their privileged position, but also becomes a belief for black people themselves. Likewise, the Senegalese chorus in Ubu Buur seems to deliver a performance that responds to what the actors believe a white audience would expect from them. I am not denying here the relevance of dance and music in the Senegalese culture. Nonetheless, the importance of circles of men and women performing joy or sorrow through collective dances reinforces the notion of blacks as naturally born musical performers, which the show’s framework embraces and implements a-critically.
Along with music, another sound element has become a trademark of the Albe’s reinventing process of I Polacchi . In a Chicago neighborhood with a very high immigrant population, the afternoon rehearsals at Senn High School were always colored by a multiplicity of linguistic sonorities, a Tower of Babel on the verge of collapsing yet functional to the essential need of communicating. The Albe’s performances usually mix languages: Italian, Romagnole dialect, Wolof and French. Likewise, at Senn, English was not the common language, but it necessarily encountered other idioms. Martinelli would often give directions in Italian, counting
225 One of the reasons why Ubu Buur seems to me less convincing than Mighy Mighty Ubu is that I saw the former in a hybrid version. N’Diaye conceived the original to be performed in the open space of Diol Kadd, in front of the whole village. When the show traveled to Europe, host of two important international festivals, it had to come to terms with traditional theaters which, I believe, flattened its energy and tightened the Senegalese teenagers into a 229 on me or Tom Simpson for a quick translation. At times he would simply follow the impetus born out of a very well-done scene, and start speaking broken English, which he complemented with gestures and energy. The true problem was how to communicate with Gashu, a tall Eritrean boy who spoke almost no English, or Marshall who was a lot more comfortable in his native
French. Mandjaye N’Djaye often stepped in to favor all the French speaking actors of the group, a post-colonial linguistic heritage that puts together Senegal, Cameroun and Haiti. Other times we counted on the Arabic skills of Betty and Ojouti. Not to forget the various American English declination: TJ’s mixture of a thick Nigerian accent and ghetto slang, or Chris and Ossy, both willing to affirm their supremacy in the group by displaying a grammatically correct use of the language. Since their debut on the Italian scene, the Albe have been advocates of variety as a precious gift: the bridging of diversity creates a theatrical community which radiates its power beyond the limits of the theater and into society. They learned the lesson from the ancient
Greeks, and gave it a modern twist exporting it wherever they took their Museum Historiae
Ubuniversalis .
Multilingualism reappeared also in the case of Ubu Buur , presenting a more complex internal dynamic between the group of Senegalese actors and Martinelli. As I mentioned earlier,
Mandiaye N’Diaye conducted most of the rehearsals in Senegal, working with his amateur actors outside theatrical venues or Western-style rehearsal spaces. Often the scenes took shape in the open air, in front of an audience of curious young people and fellow villagers. The Senegalese leg of the Ubu Buur tour performed for the same audience that had followed the rehearsal process daily, in Diol Kadd, representing more a moment of collective festivity and enjoyment than a professional theatrical piece. When Ubu Buur moved to Europe, Martinelli stepped in more
space very unfamiliar to them. 230 actively in shaping the show for Western audiences and spaces. Even though this alternation may be read under the rubric of dominant vs. subordinate roles between the white director and the black actor, I believe it represents a proper choice in as much as the 2007 reinvention of Ubu
Buur celebrated a decade of life of I Polacchi , a show that Martinelli had conceived and nurtured from the start. The white director often used French to communicate his stage directions to the crowd on stage, and the re-connotation of the colonial language always had the effect of censoring the unmanageable energy of the young actors into the limits of the performance needs.
Using French, Martinelli embodied authority which was unquestionably recognized by the chorus of Senegalese palotini . Often N’Diaye vehemently translated Martinelli’s directions in Wolof, I believe because not everyone on stage mastered French to the point of understanding all that was being said. N’Diaye embodied a linguistic possibility: he could give the final word on stage directions, not being understood by Martinelli or anyone else of the Italian crew, and this positioned him not in the role of the marginal black actor, but rather of co-director. After all,
Martinelli and N’Diaye have developed a reciprocal blind trust, built on twenty years of shared work and ten years of international tours.
Mighty Mighty Ubu ran for two nights at the MCA, for an audience of tourists-spectators who could not rest peacefully on their seats. They were asked to decode a mix of languages, collecting signs that went from the truculent and trivial to the sophisticated and the inter-textual.
They had to defend themselves from toy guns. They had to show a green ticket to rude guardians who threatened them to kick them out of the theater in case they didn’t have it. They had to keep their senses receptive to a rhythm which alternated pure comedy, the grotesque and the tragic.
Martinelli imagined the performance as an assault on the audience in which the interaction 231 among actors and spectators would constantly turn inside out. Those on stage created an
energetic apex that all of a sudden would come to an halt within pictorial stasis. On the contrary,
spectators needed to be active in order to follow the actions happening both on and off stage, or
to protect themselves from the provocations that Ubu’s army projected onto them. Such a
paradigm characterized every performance of the show that I was able to see or be part of around
the world: Chicago, Zurich, Berlin, Napoli, and Ravenna. The Albe always played with the
performance space, whether a proscenium, an auditorium or an arena, in order to create a sense
of seizing the audience.
Season subscribers and college students, the majority decisively white, composed the
majority of the crowd at the MCA. Most of the black spectators were relatives of the young
actors from Senn. The absence of black spectators kept me wondering to what extent a museum is still very much perceived as a white space, in which other cultures are put on display but not admitted as active subjects of observation. Also in Zurich and Berlin, during the 2006 tour with the Ravenna ensemble, exclusively white spectators composed the audience, once again virtually erasing in the theater space the diversity of ethnic groups living in both European capitals. Ubu
Buur repeated the same pattern in 2007. The performance in Napoli, being part of a festival,
actually drew an audience mostly made of journalists, donors, and theater organizers. The
number of tickets available to the general public, and the fact that Ubu Buur played only once for
an afternoon show, did not facilitate the presence of average spectators. Yet, I hardly believe that
even at different times of the day or with multiple shows a significant black crowd would have
showed up, notwithstanding the huge number of Senegalese immigrants living in Napoli and the
surrounding areas. African migrants work, mostly as street vendors, from early in the morning till 232 very late at night, which doesn’t leave time or even allow developing desire for performance. The
audience that gathered in Ravenna, where Ubu Buur played for five sold out shows, once again was almost exclusively white. A few black spectators sat in the theater, but once again were
related to two of the young actors on stage, second generation immigrants to Italy. What I found
very fascinating, is the behavior of the Senegalese cohort of actors during the show. In those
moments that required active interaction with the audience by means of singing and dancing, they
were more keen to tease the few black spectators rather than the white majority, and truly
enjoyed doing it. I believe that some of them thought that, especially in the musical numbers built
on typical Senegalese drumming, an African spectator would participate with more emotional
commitment in the scene (and generally speaking, Italian audiences tend to restrain themselves
from too much physical participation, limited by a bourgeois tradition that has imprinted
spectators with a passive role). Also, the need to connect with someone similar to oneself - the
need for “home” - speaks of a natural desire to be acknowledge, to recognize and be recognized; after all most of the Senegalese teenagers were visiting Europe for the first time and by the time they performed in Ravenna, they had spent a few weeks in an unusual winter climate, eating
strange food, and surrounded by foreignness.
Many Stories through Many Blacknesses
Modernity tends to transform all rationality into an instrumental rationality - organizing life in a
practical fashion - by eliminating values from the discourse. The paradox, that transferred from
modernity into globalization, is first of all that they both are a cultural/value system, and that they
both confuse values with processes. The processes of modernity, with its scientific look of reality
and idolatry for the notions of growth and progress, have become the inevitable lens through 233 which the value of a culture can be judged. As Charles Taylor rightly points out, the perception
of modernity as built on the ashes of traditional religious and metaphysical beliefs “seems to
imply that the paths of different civilizations are bound to converge” toward the rationally
grounded Western outlook. 226 Despite the undeniable strength and world wide diffusion of
Western goods, the production of its entertainment industry, and the consequent image-building
construction of the consumer’s needs, we have come a long way from believing that cultural
differences would disappear. Local specificities do not passively assume the imposition of outer-
directed products, but rather adapt them by subsuming their use value, social relevance or
marketing strategies. Utterances and bodies respond to an imagery and background knowledge
that are culturally inscripted, and these cultures are not only the product of a global neoliberal
logic, but also stem from acts of voluntary resistance, counter-hegemonic creations, community’s
self-empowerment, and decision-making from below. “The notion is that our explicit beliefs
about our world and ourselves are held against a background of unformulated (and perhaps
unformulable) understanding, in relation to which these beliefs make the sense they do.” 227 The major concern of my discussion is that if financial capitals and cultural factors in the global world have acquired a strongly intertwined connection independent from politics, if financially and culturally-driven needs fashion our world view, if the nation-state has lost its ability to theorize the values according to which people shall live as a community, then where does political activism come from? Where does the politttttttical find its drive, strength and desire?
Appadurai states it very poignantly when he claims that “the central paradox of ethnic
226 Taylor, Charles. “Two Theories of Modernity.” Alternative Modernities . Dilip Gaonkar ed. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2001, 172-196, 181.
227 Ibid., 186. 234 politics in today’s world is that [...] sentiments, whose greatest force is in their ability to ignite intimacy into a political state and turn locality into a staging ground for identity, have become spread over vast and irregular spaces as groups move yet stay linked to one another through sophisticated media capabilities.” 228 Hence, citizens of the global world move away from a cultural identification by means of a habitus a-la-Bordieu, and into a decoding process of images and artifacts that are at once outer and inner-produced, in the tension between that which is perceived as real and authentic and the possibility to commercialize and manipulate such perception.
Capitalism entered a phase of spatial conquest with its alliance with imperialism, and in a second moment initiated the conquest of time in unison with neoliberalism and the sedimentation of technologies of the virtual. Capitalist imperialism is “a contradictory form of ‘the politics of state and empire’ (imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends) and ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ (imperialism as a diffuse political-economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy).” 229 The tension between territorial (need to consider a collective will and good that is bound to a specific land) and capitalist (individualistic logic of profit) logic of power interweaves with geopolitical games, interlocked virtual stock exchange markets, and the consequent asymmetries of spatial exchange.
David Harvey does an excellent job in individuating the dynamics of this war of conquest,
228 Appadurai, work cited, 41.
229 Harvey, David. The New Imperialism . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003, 26. 235 highlighting the continuities that mark globalization as a continuation of pre-existing
organizational structures of control. In the nineteen sixties, one of the revolutionary slogans was
already “think globally, act locally.” 230 On one point my reading of globalization and the
techniques to critique it differs from Harvey’s theory. According to Harvey, the possibility of
political action left to social movements shrinks their opportunities to the management of place
rather than space. I believe that my discussion of Teatro delle Albe demonstrates how theater-
makers acquired the ability to communicate and act by re-addressing the same technologies that
were often invented and managed by governments to control and influence us. Therefore, the
Albe are in the space as much as in the place of political activism and decision-making.
As Logan and Molotch argue in Urban Fortunes , the market works as social phenomena
in the sense that commodities acquire an accretion of meaning by means of “social contexts
through which they are used and exchanged.” 231 Logan and Molotch essentially limit the use and
exchange value of commodities to the real estate market, as function of the cultures that create
such market. My aim here has been to widen the researchers’ study to the larger framework of
commodity-creation in so far as all markets “are bound up with human interests in wealth, power,
and affection.” 232 Humans, as well, turn into a commodity, as gears of a market of representation
that involves policy-making, non profit organization, public funding, the media circus, and police
control. In the case of immigrants, the institutional goals of making immigration visible is either
230 Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change . Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989.
231 Logan, John and Harvey Molotch, eds. Urban Fortunes. The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987, 1.
232 Ibid., 9.
236 to legitimate a charitable response to the problem, or worse to surreptitiously offer material to the national emergency trope discourse and move the general interest away from more pressing social problems. Hence, the problem does not lie in the immigrants’ invisibility, but rather in the terms on which they become visible in the public discourse. 233 This is not to deny the danger of the smuggling network, under the control of the Italian mafia and local criminal organizations in
Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, that forces male immigrants to work for years to pay off transportation debts, and induces female immigrants into prostitution. Equally serious problems are the fictional constructions of liberal pluralism and multiculturalism which free inter-ethnic relations from their race and power tensions and scale them down to pure aesthetic, superficial enjoyment. Last but not least, the codification of deserving and undeserving immigrants - that runs across gender, racial, and religious division lines - embodies a typical obsession of the neoliberal ideology.
Italy and the United States historically differ in their approach towards the welfare state.
Whereas the proto-capitalistic American mind inspired by a Lutheran ideology emphasized the work ethic, whose symbol is the self-made man, post-war Italians heavily relied upon public- owned services, education, pensions, and health care. Since the late nineteen eighties, a wave of privatization and the increasing debts of the public sectors created a sense of scarcity and emergency. On this premise, Italians look at immigrants as undeserving consumers of services that are less and less available to citizens themselves. In addition, a certain rightist political ideology is pushing towards the individuation of immigrants (and the distinction of ethnic
233 A similar argument is present in New Poverty Studies , a deep analysis of the stigmatization of poverty in the United States. See: Goode, Judith and Jeff Maskovsky, eds.. New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States . New York: New York UP, 2001, 2. 237 backgrounds here loses its relevance) as a self-isolated underclass that wants to avoid any responsibility or social constructive action. The underclass, as pointed out by Michael Katz,
“always has reinforced images of social pathology because it has focused on bad behavior: long- term welfare dependence, drugs, crime, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, low educational achievement, unwillingness to work.” 234 Neoliberal market ideology has reformulated the historical division between the deserving and undeserving immigrant around the category of productivity, which hides a complex discourse of ethnic/racial hang ups. Teatro delle Albe performs a counter- discourse to this, reaching distinct audiences by means of acts that are at once confrontational, pedagogical and entertaining.
234 Katz, Michael, ed. The Underclass Debate. Views from History . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993, 21.
238 CONCLUSION – Effective Migratory Practices through Multiple Routes
“Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.” (Antonio Gramsci)
As I am writing these final pages, the newly elected government led by Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi is discussing a “homeland security” law in Parliament. Both left and right political alliances built the 2008 electoral campaign on the promise of safer cities for Italian citizens. The
“homeland security” packet is Berlusconi’s answer to the pre-election discussion, now that his right-wing party PDL ( Popolo delle Libertà ) has won the electoral race. The most dubious
element of such packet is the proposal to criminalize illegal immigration, equating it to crimes
such as murder or theft. If the proposal should pass, illegal immigrants caught in the act of
entering in Italy will be put in jail and tried as criminals. Besides the procedural problem of
engulfing the already slow juridical system, with hundreds of new trials that would require a
burdensome extra amount of work from lawyers, judges and the police force, the law has a clear
anti-humanitarian profile. The picture of a democratic country jailing women, young children, or
men whose only guilt is to strive for better living conditions, as if they were attempting to the
security of our country, is a sad one indeed. In fact, from the European Union to the United
Nations, from the PDI ( Partito Democratico Italiano ) – the opposition party led by Walter
Veltroni – to the national association of judges, many political and social operators are openly
critical of such proposal.
Now more than ever, I believe in the need to individuate the true terms of migration to
Italy, beyond stereotypes, media frenzy, constructed fear and alleged emergency. My claim does
not aim to a self-celebrating justification of the validity of my project; it is rather an answer to a
political debate that evolves faster than any printed text. I shall add here that the latest trend of 239 the emergency trope, which media have fully embraced throughout the electoral campaign, does
not place the blame on black migrants, but rather focuses on gypsies and immigrants from the
former Communist block. 235 The latter would be responsible for a vertiginous increase in the crime rate in most of the major Italian cities, from murder and rape to drug smuggling and prostitution. Blackness has somehow recessed from newspapers’ headlines. On the one side, this may be a sign of a certain level of normalization for African immigrants to Italy. Media have lost interest in blackness because it does not represent news to an Italian reader. On the other side, as
I have noted in my historic reconstruction of inter-ethnic relations between Italians and Africans, there is a certain pendulum movement that follows the lifespan of a news article. As I am writing, the media focus is on gypsies, but nothing assures that it will not eventually return on black
Africans. 236 Either way, the criminalization of illegal immigration reproduces once again that
235 The problem arose when, within a few days, three murder cases involved a Romanian illegal immigrant and an Italian victim - all women and elders. On January 1st , 2007 Romania entered the EU, hence Romanians are European citizens with all the rights to move freely within the countries of the Union, including the right to freely choose one’s own city of residency. The media and public opinions always confuse Romanians and gypsies lumping them together under the stereotypes of lazy thieves who live a nomadic life dedicated to all sorts of illegal activities. I do not wish to enter here into this heated debate. However one thing is to ask for justice, another is to foster a war of the worlds, representing major Italian cities as unsafe places invaded by waves of nomads who kill, steal, rape and then access national welfare services available to all other European citizens. For instance, with the city law n. 258 dated November 16, 2007, the major of Cittadella, a small town near Padua, placed limitations on the possibility to request residency in the town based on two central requisites: a minimum wage of 5.061,68 Euros per year, and the possession of a home that could match minimum hygienic standards. The law reads that the need for such requisites derive from the enlargement of the EU to East European countries with the consequent increase in the number of immigrants and the possibility that in a near future this condition may cause a real local emergency in the public health and social security sectors. Many other mayors from the northeast region, that is geographical a bridge from Romania and Bulgaria into Italy, are adopting a similar law. The full text of resolution 258 can be downloaded as a pdf file from the internet.
236 In fact, at the end of September 2008 a killing in the streets of Castel Volturno left six immigrants from various African countries dead. Castel Volturno, not far from Napoli, is within the territory under the control of a very aggressive criminal clan – the Casalesi. The clan uses migrants for different purposes: as petty drug dealers, under- paid daily workers in the promising business of luxury goods’ shadow market, or unlicensed contractors. The shooting was most likely ordered to set an example of the Casalesi’s power to punish those who try to rebel. On the wake of this clamorous and tragic event, Italians naively pretend to discover once again a reality in which hundreds of black migrants are forced into illegality, unhealthy living conditions, desperate survival choices, and uneventful life trajectories.
240 legalistic climate which has constantly accompanied the presence of migrants in our national
territory, and pushes it beyond any acceptable limit of humanitarian intervention.
When I embarked in the dissertation’s project almost two years before writing these
pages, I did not have a clear idea of how pervasively the fear of the Other had entered into the
Italian collective consciousness. 237 Neither was I fully aware of the collusion between media and
politics in creating a state of constant emergency that builds upon and endlessly reproduces the
notion of an attack against an imagined monolithic national entity. My dissertation has evolved
into an attempt to debunk the emergency trope, based on archival research and direct fieldwork.
The unreasonable nature of mainstream media and political discourse over migration, especially
black migration, is threefold. First, migration is not an emergent phenomenon, neither has it
exclusively covered the last three decades of the twentieth century. I previously discussed
innumerable traces of constant contacts and exchanges between Italians and Africans – this
relation has never been unidirectional, as many wish to believe. There have been times in history
when many Italians looked at Northern Africa as a land of opportunity, a place to settle down and
build a future for themselves and their offspring; there have been other times when military force
intervened in pushing the colonial penetration deep into the heart of the “black continent.”
Contingent socio-historic factors always contributed in creating the general climate of acceptance
or rejection under which whiteness and blackness have come to confront each other. I argue that
the historic perspective puts a definitive end to speculations around the alleged natural
backwardness of the South and the consequential unbalanced equation of Italians as citizens,
237 In an interview broadcasted on Rai Uno on October 1 st 2008, the journalist Gad Lerner spoke of the business of fear construction – meaning the intersection of economic and political interests in creating a climate of fear to move public and private funding away from other voices of national expenses (public housing, health, education and culture) and invest them into the army, the police system, and so on. I believe that Lerner is off to a meaningful 241 Africans and outsiders.
Second, I praise the historic outlook as an evidence-based tool to be used against a certain biased discourse over globalization. The world is not facing an unexpected or unprecedented phenomenon. Multi-directional economic and financial exchanges, cultural borrowings, and political pressuring have always influenced the nation-building process led by the West, determining shifts in the socio-cultural identity of the Italian people. The increasing complexity of the nation’s needs, consisting in the general participation of its population in the enjoyment of public wealth and democratic rights, combined with the implementation of a capitalist ideology that first turned citizens into consumers, and then consumers of goods into consumers of virtual desires, eventually reinforcing the dependency of each nation from “trades” of people, resources and artifacts. Citizens of highly developed countries are more and more immersed in the search for the satisfaction of complexly constructed desires of consumption and progress. The need to defend acquired wealth, notwithstanding the fact that much of this wealth is based on the abuse of the Other, produced a paranoid anxiety towards incoming individuals who claimed their share of the modern dream. The neoliberal world view was not necessarily the only natural outcome of capitalism, but rather its more profitable rendition as a consequence of: the imperial wars of conquest led by European countries; the ascending discrepancy in the global distribution of resources, both internationally and at the national level, that causes a war among poor people and the shrinking middle class; the extreme mobility and instability of the post-Fordist mode of production; the decrease in public investments and a wave of privatization processes; a change in ideology and value systems.
Third, the emergency trope does not make any critical sense when one considers that
target, which speaks to the general neoliberal frenzy to dismantle the welfare state and privatize all primary services. 242 blackness is not the product of linear genetic filiations, but rather a contingent expression
encompassing a variety of shades of colors: paradoxically blacks are not always as black as they
appear. To an Italian-born viewer, for example, black Africans are always darker than American
ones, because Italians attach to them a different set of constructed stereotypes. Mandiaye
N’Diaye is not black in the eye of those who cannot believe that an immigrant from Senegal is
able to master the Romagnole dialect as a native speaker. Neither would the average Italian ever
think of addressing Magdi Allam, vice-director of the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera , with the
epitome of marocchino , since the latter individuates a black street vendor (even with a light olive skin) or a black illegal immigrant, but cannot appeal to an intellectual educated in European schools who writes and speaks against Islam.
Recognition is at the heart of the matter, “for how do we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the midst of revolutionizing metamorphoses? How might we make sense of our changing practices, to ourselves and to others? And how could we ever hope to attain certainty about something so multifarious and evanescent as a self?” 238 I argued throughout the previous chapters that the real problematic of the encounter with the black Other lies in the conundrum between constructed cultural certainties and inevitable shifting processes at the individual and collective level. The genetic discourse, which according to Roger Lancaster transforms homosexuality into a scientifically determined human practice, finds in race the same affirmative usage. The public display of culture-insensitive ideology embodied by Nobel Prize winner James Watson, who declared that proofs in scientific testing demonstrate that black people are less intelligent than
238 Lancaster, Roger. The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Popular Science and Mass Culture . Ewing: U of California P, 2003, 4. 243 whites, 239 is only one example, the last and most scandalous one, of a certain obsession for that
genetic panacea that is the mapping of the human genome. Genetic reasoning is a paradoxical
tool also used by those who oppose racism, as in the case of scientists who sustain the exotic
hypothesis that white skin consists of a gene modified from blackness, 240 and that all humanity
traces its roots back to Africa. The real difference would be in degree rather than kind. If I can
appreciate this approach for trying to turn the canon upside down, at the same time I find
discomfort in its genetic reasoning.
Against methodological sociobiology, which I would also call “political-biology” due to
its immense outcome on policy making, or “market-biology” considering its dangerous
appropriation by economic multinationals, my work fosters the most perceptive attention towards
the implementation of culturally specific points of view to critique all forms of institutional
creation, control and reproduction of stereotypes. Culture is not nature. As Lancaster highlights at
the end of his book’s introductory pages: “Questions about the meanings of nature and the
‘nature’ of desire [...] get directly at the crux of institutional arrangements: who’s in and who’s
out of legitimate family kinship, and other systems of affinity and social support. They also get at
political-economic power in the modern world, where material values no less than ideal
valuations are distributed according to sex [and I would add race] and one’s proper and improper
performance of it.” 241 Family as the locus of affective sociability but also family as a metaphor for the state, translate in racial and gender terms the unattainable desire to erase that which is abnormal, disruptive, or simply different.
239 From The Times , October 17, 2007.
240 From The Washington Post , December 16, 2005.
244 The construction of the Other as the enemy within, or pushing from without, deals
directly with Antonio Gramsci’s study on hegemony. The Italian intellectual thought of
hegemony as a praxis, a historic tool to organize consent around a political project, to use the
people’s will and agency to drive their own path into the future. Cementing hegemony requires
stable institutions, cultural reproductive habits, and the securing of real and imagined territorial
mastery. I believe that the second point of Gramsci’s definition has acquired primacy over the
more overtly political aspects of hegemonic power in the neoliberal globalizing whirlwind. If
Harvey could write that, “Money, productive power, and military might are the three legs upon
which hegemony stands under capitalism,” 242 I would argue that he who controls the
communication system of a country possesses the real hegemony, given that the core articulation
of hegemony appears in the interstices between the realm of coercion and punishment in the
hands of the State and the private sector overall. Italy is a case in point because, notwithstanding
her historically short-lived governments and unstable political organization, the media monopoly
expressed by Silvio Berlusconi - founder of the three major private TV networks, editor of a
number of influential newspapers and magazines and, during his four terms as Prime Minister,
also able to dictate the guidelines of the three public TV channels - had a consistent ability to
construe the average Italian consumer’s identity. The proliferation of communicative media,
especially the internet, is an effective way of escaping from forms of imposed image-building.
Yet, the internet is not an immaculate space either. First of all, the majority of net surfing
happens through major portals that have a large share in stock holding and business-oriented
241 Lancaster, cited work, 32.
242 Harvey, David. The New Imperialism , Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003, 42.
245 markets: I think here of Google, Hotmail, etc... Most importantly, the use of the internet as a source of alternative information is still very limited to a restricted percentage of population, both in terms of average culture and generational trend. In Italy, a lot more people surf the net to access YouTube than to read world news on IndiMedia, the New Global independent portal.
Paradoxically, theater becomes the real space of dissent for it is the least profitable means of communication. There are a lot less commercial interests surrounding theater than television, movie-making, the music industry and the press. The lack of commercial attention for the medium allows a deeper level of freedom. I am not thinking here of the national system of public-sponsored theaters, the so called Teatri Stabili , that for obvious reasons tend to be very conservative in terms of productions and also attract an older clientele. I would rather focus on theater companies that combine limited public funding with other independent, private, or international sources of income. Teatro delle Albe is exactly this second type of artistic group, whose poetic recalls the ancestral myth of Ulysses - wandering in a world made exclusively of
Past and Future, juxtaposing one another, and where the Present is suspended, absent. It is not clear whether the stage narration tells of something that has already happened or still has to happen. The Albe performs a contemporary epic poem in which the hero does not exist, because the hero is pure consciousness itself, exalted in a web of images constantly decomposed and re- composed; a never-ending movement of the creative mind climbing towards higher visual and speculative paths, yet always grounded in a keen observation of the truths surrounding us all.
Theater makers such as Martinelli, Montanari and N’Diaye embody the Gramscian role of organic intellectuals, those who have the duty to debunk the hegemonic structures by disclosing the vertical and horizontal connections existing in and around power. Organic intellectuals 246 assemble the fragments and make them evident to everyone else because they are able to analyze deeply the hidden traces of power in civil society. Obviously the under-the-radar nature of theater also means that its communicative power reaches fewer people and its dissemination requires a face-to-face involvement, but freedom has to pay its price.
Mandiaye N’Diaye’s Pluto: Rethinking One’s Own Migratory Project
The parabolic movement of my writing necessarily leads me back to Senegal. I will metaphorically follow Mandiaye N’Diaye’s homecoming process to build a theater in his native village, in order to highlight an element of migration that is often passed over in silence: the connections that immigrants maintain with their homeland and the enriching opportunity to return home with hybridized culture to be narrated.
N’Diaye arrived in Italy in 1988. He moved to Rimini where “brothers” belonging to the same Muridic group had already migrated years before. Within a few days, he found a place to stay shared with other countrymen, and a job as street vendor. N’Diaye recalls those days with embarrassment, because he felt uncomfortable approaching white strangers to sell them cheap goods. After a few months, Martinelli showed up at N’Diaye’s tenement and their collaboration started. In twenty years, the Albe has toured extensively, visiting Senegal with a certain regularity. When the white Albe showed interest in knowing more of the country from which the black colleagues were coming, N’Diaye also had the opportunity to return home and look at it through the eyes of his stranger friends. Each trip was a double understanding into each other’s perceptions. In this final chapter, I will focus on a recent trip that N’Diaye did by himself and that led to the creation of a show inspired by Aristophane’s Pluto (2002).
At that time, N’Diaye was playing Oberon in Sogno . He would come on stage at Thesus’ 247 death, undress the Count and wear his clothes, acting a metaphorical disembowelment of the
father figure’s power and status. Soon after the debut of Sogno , though, N’Diaye’s real father
died and the actor returned home to pay homage to the man who had had the greatest influence
on his life and had prompted his migration to Italy. During the visit, which coincided with the
June rainy season, N’Diaye lived in his native Diol Kadd. The two sides of the family composing
the whole village descended from two common ancestors. At that time they were fighting over
the proper moment to plant the seeds, which provide the village with food for the whole year.
The modernists, called Kër Pate (the House of Pate), wanted to plant corn as soon as possible since the rain season had already begun; the traditionalists, Kër Kokki (the House of Kokki), insisted on waiting for the signs of nature that for centuries had directed the rhythm of fieldwork.
In the end, no one obtained a good harvest because those who had waited did not receive sufficient rain to grow the seeds, but those who had planted too soon saw their young plants drown under the second round of heavy rain. 243
The eventful clash between the family’s two factions triggered N’Diaye’s memory of the story of Cresilus, the leading character of Pluto , which he had discovered while working at
All’inferno! Affresco da Aristofane (1996). 244 The actor caught the opportunity to channel the village’s most sensitive event – the life cycle based on harvesting – into the creation of a pedagogical theatrical piece staged in and for the entire village. N’Diaye wanted to use his performance background to stop the hemorrhage of young males who left Diol Kadd for Dakar or
Europe, therefore restoring life to the village. Since his extended family thought of him as a
243 N’Diaye narrates the event in: “Le tre T” Teatro delle Albe. Suburbia. Molti Ubu in giro per il pianeta, 1998- 2008 . Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari eds. Milano: Ubu Libri 2008, 83-93.
244 This was Martinelli’s intra-cultural rewriting of the Greek comedy. 248 successful migrant, by returning home and managing projects in his native village N’Diaye
wanted to send a message: rather than have you come my way, I’ll come back to yours; we can
create something good together, and our collectivity will regain hope.
In Pluto multiple narratives coexist in time and space. The performance constituted a
“happening” that saw the whole village participating in the double role of actors and spectators.
Actually, one could not speak of an audience in standard theatrical terms, because everyone was involved in the making of Pluto . Neither would staging be an appropriate definition, because the
performance merged the traditional theater plot with a festive atmosphere, or rather the
unscripted energy of a street action. The performance entered into each household, collected
followers along the way - villagers playing the role of the chorus, and dozens of characters trying
to talk Cresilus out of his plan to restore sight to Pluto – until the parade ended under the sacred
baobab where a sort of collective finale was performed, an explication of the show’s moral
intentionality.
N’Diaye reframed the social, political and religious experience of theater going in ancient
Greace as a communal act that displayed the participation of the individual to the collective
good. N’Diaye adapted the sense of belonging that Greeks felt when they recognized, in
Aristophane’s witty jokes, public personalities stigmatized for their corruption or laziness,
bringing the play’s participatory element to its full fledged outcome: theater intended as a
visionary, radical exchange with the polis - a space in which the actors, the people who make it,
are central. Pluto, the God of wealth, unevenly distributes richness due to his blindness. At Diol
Kadd rain embodied wealth, therefore Pluto became the God of rain and Cresilus launched his
quest to solve the village’s drought. N’Diaye strategically cast his family members: two cousins, 249 known for their oral ability, played the narrators; the oldest man in the village bestowed his
wisdom as the judge; Cresilus and Pluto came from the two opposing factions of the family. The
performance transported the village’s everyday interactions and disputes into the fictional plot of
Pluto , and the two overlapped to become one cohesive moment of collective expiation. People
did not only see characters enacting a script, but family figures who embodied a role within the
economy of the village itself.
The hybrid performance form in which multiple narratives of fiction and familiarity
merge and intersect was possible because N’Diaye applied the mise en vie technique, which
highlighted the embodiment of his own personal trajectories across cultures, desires, religions,
countries, and jobs. Unconsciously, N’Diaye brought to Diol Kadd a performance that connected
his village to the Western experimentation of the nineteen sixties and seventies. That cultural
milieu subverted the hierarchical prvileging of the written text over the physical vocabulary of
performance. The author’s tyranny vanished into the opportunity for everyone to become authors
of their own interpretation. Meaning was diffused, and the reading of a performance required an
activation of the spectators’ ability to analyze not only spoken words, but movement, lights,
sounds and colors. The culture of capitalist dominance, which according to Randy Martin lies at
the core of the mind-body split, mapped the cognitive backdrop against which theater-makers
politicized their bodies and denounced the discriminatory norms of class and gender. 245 With
Pluto , N’Diaye placed a spotlight on those who never rise to center stage, that majority of humanity whose history clashes against the dictatorship implemented by white, male and heterosexual norms.
245 Randy, Martin. Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self . New York: Bergin & Garvey Publications, 1990. 250 Performance implies a way of knowing along with a project to reach that knowledge; it is
epistemological as much as methodological. N’Diaye’s work acknowledges that desire plays a
role in unconscious forms of identification to emphasize that these do not assimilate the Other
into a coherent sociability, but rather they fragment and destabilize the subject. On this note, it
closely reflect José Mu ňoz’s notion of disidentification which he defines as the “recycling and rethinking [of] encoded meaning” that can only imagine new worlds on the basis of old ones.
Hence disidentificatory practices are necessarily rooted in codes of heteronormativity, whiteness
and male dominance. 246 Suspicious of the post-structuralist absolutism of relativism, N’Diaye
recuperates hybrid pluralism as a contribution to the notion of resistance in performance, as long
as it is grounded in local and historical understanding. N’Diaye invokes a solution to the “historic
forgetfulness” affecting his villagers, but also the world of the ultra-modern West. He recuperates
memory of an animistic world that syncretically encompasses his Islamic upbringing but also the
Catholic atmosphere of his Italian home.
By Means of Conclusion: Italy and Her Blackness
With N’Diaye’s increasing involvement in projects that keep him in Senegal for many months
each year (first Pluto , then Ubu Buur , but also the management of a non-profit association called
Takkuligey that sponsors culturally and environmentally-conscious vacations in Diol Kadd and
its surrounding areas) the militant intra-cultural momentum of the Albe has slowed down.
Martinelli and Montanari are investing their creative energy in new productions and pedagogical
246 Mu ňoz , José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Colors and the Performance of Politics . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 31.
251 assignments with teenagers from Ravenna and Napoli. 247 The theatrical pedagogy naturally
stems from the Non-School work inaugurated almost two decades ago, the long gestation of I
Polacchi , but most of all the encounter with Africa and N’Diaye. Intra-culturalism functioned as
a self-pedagogical training for both the white and black actors of the company: from there they
both felt enriched and mature enough to initiate independent yet correlated works. This
independence also speaks of the normalization of intra-culturalism and inter-ethnic contacts
between N’Diaye and Martinelli. Unfortunately, the in-group dynamic of the Albe does not
mirror the overall social atmosphere, for which genuine theatrical and extra-theatrical
interventions are still very much needed to fill in the gap in comprehending the migratory
phenomenon.
The insertion of blackness in sociopolitical and artistic discourses was Teatro delle Albe’s
fundamental contribution against the universalizing attempts to reproduce and foster a white
(male) -dominated, Western-based notion of history. The philosophy of modernity required that
one could speak of History with a capital H, meaning the progressive, univocal development of
Power - a white, masculine, scientific, and capitalistic reasoning. Feminism, anti-colonialism,
anti-racism, queerness, and migration were all successful processes to step out of the biased
modern ideology and enter a world made of multiple possibilities. As Walter Benjamin once
wrote, history was for a long time a representation of the past written in the pages of the
dominant groups. 248 Subalterns did not find space in history books. Post-modernity revealed the white European model of progress for what it was: one ideology, not inherently worst or best
247 The three-year long experiment of Arrevuoto , with disadvantaged teenagers in Scampia, gave birth to a permanent performance school, called Punta Corsara , that allows adolescents to engage in conversation with professional actors and theater-makers.
252 than others, that through the link between armed interventions and financial investments was able
to impose itself as the alleged inescapable destiny of humankind, imprinting it with physical
oppression, subliminal violence, and the construction of fixed identities. The increased visibility
in the public sphere of racial and gender subjectivities 249 has contributed greatly to the initiation
of a process of multiplication of visible identities.
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo includes the ramifications of the communication
society in the list of transformations that have opened up the strictly linear ideology of modernity.
Actually, the major consequence of the spread of the mass media was to characterize post-
modern society not as more accessible and transparent, but rather more complex and chaotic. Yet
in this very chaos the seeds of human emancipation could grow and flourish. Media have become
elements of a general explosion and multiplication of Weltanschauungen , notwithstanding the
attempts to concentrate their control in the hands of capitalistic monopolies. 250 My analysis
confronts the role of the media as creators of visions of the world, images of our reality and
ourselves, but I critically engage Vattimo’s idea, and aimed to stress the market-like mind behind
the communication society. Information functions as oil or a crop in producing business around
it. Since information requires a market functioning in terms of supply and demand, and operates
in a climate of speculative activities, life itself has become object of communication and
spectacle. The power of the mass media is paradoxically the closest our contemporary world
could get to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, the atemporal force aiming to the perfect human
consciousness as the consequence of the identification between contingent events, historic trends,
248 Benjamin, Walter. “These on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations . New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
249 The word here is actually wrong since women are objectively more numerous than men, and non-whites than whites; but I refer to a power relation rather than quantitative data. 253 and collective awareness. It is a distorted, inverted realization of Hegel’s vision.
The multiplication of Weltanschauungen brings with it the negative outcome of a neo- traditionalist reaction in which the emergency trope finds fertile soil to sediment and grow. The irrational belief in the end of History creates anxieties that echo in the media individuation of the
Other as the enemy within and searches for refuge in archaism - the return to an imagined Golden
Age and the recuperation of myths of primitive purity. To look back at the origins means to recuperate that idea of unity which post-modernism has inexorably challenged. In Puritan
America, women suffered from witch-hunting, as scapegoats of an irrational fear for the dispersion of male power against the backdrop of shifting relations between genders. In our own time, the cathode tube substituted the Catholic pulpit, and immigrants represent today’s new witches. In order to gain emancipation, subaltern groups had to erode the very principles of modernity and reality as it had been built in the European context since the fifteenth century, to base their own vision of the world on oscillation and plurality. Nonetheless, financial and political strongholds are still very much in the hands of direct heirs of that white, colonial, masculine European milieu and hence minorities have to face a constant backlash from their adversaries. No one is willing to give up formal power, and in times of shrinking resources not even to share it with others. The positive element of the post-modern turn, though, is the creation of awareness around the contingency of world views. In the global village no one can claim his/her own belief system - political, religious or aesthetic - without acknowledging its positioning within a given space and time, its limitedness, and historicity. Increasing actions of fundamentalism are a proof of the uncomfortable truths disclosed by historic contingency.
The communication society that construes immigrants as the danger coming from across
250 Vattimo, Gianni. La società trasparente. Nuova edizione accresciuta . Milano: Garzanti, 2007. 254 the sea does not consist merely in a set of technical devices. Media contain, express and reinforce
its very own inner Weltanschauung - not only a belief or value system, nor subjective points of
view, but a consistent reasoning that frames imagined identities and searches for their scientific
proof in genetics, anthropology, evolutionism and technology. On the contrary, theater’s liveness
rejoices from the lack of a linear direction because it is able to absorb faster than other sectors of
society that which Walter Benjamin argues for in his famous short treaty “The Work of Art in the
Era of its Mechanical Reproduction.” 251 The new conditions of the production and consumption of Art in the time of mass media substantially modify the essence of Art itself, by which I believe
Benjamin meant not the immutable, eternal nature of Art, but the way it offers itself to consumption in the contemporary epoch. Through the essence of live performance - the impossibility to exactly reproduce a show night after night, confronting the changing elements of a performance (the audience, the venue, the performers’ emotional state) - theater-makers rejected the notion of mechanical fixity and embraced a mental and affective opening towards diversity and change. Therefore, theater became the most stable space for experimenting the dissolution of immutable identities, mixing sounds, smells, and bodies coming from multiple latitudes.
The construction of an effective intra-cultural approach to migration in politics should consider theater beyond its performance elements, as a metaphor of human interactions. I already discussed the limitations of Italian immigration laws, based on legalistic turns that try to criminalize migrants, or reduce them to the homo economicus tropes. Generally speaking, national politics aiming to the management of migration fall within one of the two categories:
251 Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Era of its Mechanical Reproduction.” Studies on the Left 1.2 (Winter 1960). 255 they either push towards assimilation, or they put in place legislative organisms to limit the impact of immigrants on the national compound. Governmental decision-makers often implement integration policies by means of guidelines that distort the very notion of their essence. In Italy, they usually intend integration as a coercive form of imposition of codes of behavior over the migrant communities. The implicit philosophy preaches: you either live by our rules and abandon your way of thinking and your belief, or you cannot be integrated in our country. The formal bias in such thinking does not understand integration as a meeting point between cultures, the possibility to give up something of who we are in order to accept the Other.
Meaningful respect of diversity passes through the ability to put into jeopardy one’s own world view. Fear is a political feeling, and so is the perception of social danger, which gets manipulated for ideological reasoning. Italians confuse street vending for criminal behavior, but they hardly ever judge their irrational fear as a form of increasing racism. This unconscious fear has to deal with the objective fact that many productive sectors of Italian society - industry and agriculture in the first place - need immigrants to maintain their ability to be competitive in the world market.
The Veneto region, the same area where city officers are developing “ingenious” local laws to reduce the presence of immigrants, acknowledges paradoxically that every year its productive system, made mostly of small and medium size factories, requires 20,000 new immigrants to properly function.
The second kind of political intervention, which directly feeds off from the climate of fear and emergency, believes in the ideology of repression, policing migrants by means of shrinking areas of personal, religious, and cultural freedom, by means of restrictions on their liberty to move, own a business, produce forms of sociability, intermarry and so on. It is becoming 256 somehow a daily cliché to hear Italians voicing their fear to walk out at night, discomfort with too many beggars and street vendors, or apprehension for their safety at home. Nonetheless, irrational misunderstandings of that which is not known foment this fear, while objective data depict a different reality. To give numeric examples, homicides have been at their lowest figures in 2005 and 2006. It is true, on the other hand, that petty small theft is eight times higher than in
France and Germany. The question is, how can this be exclusively related to the migrants’ presence, considering that in absolute terms France and Germany have more immigrants than
Italy? I believe that the data show the fallacy of the Italian apparatus for welcoming and integrating migrants, which pushes too many of them into the black market and at the margins of proper forms of sociability. Whether numeric data are reliable or not, what matters the most in the economy of my discussion is the perception of the danger, as it is implemented and internalized. Hence, the substance of the issue doesn’t change. If Italians believe they are facing a crisis, the crisis exists until a shift in perception happens. If this conclusion holds true, then repressive legislation is obviously inadequate both in managing migratory flux and in reassuring
Italians about the safety of the daily environment in which they operate. Uncertainty increases due to the fact that immigration laws have become an organizational tool, a last-minute solution to impelling questions, rather than the venue in which to envision ideals, intervene with long- term perspective and produce real transformation. Ideally, cultural intervention at different levels could step into the void left by militant politics to perform these tasks more effectively, by instituting intercultural teaching in the classrooms from elementary school on; television and radio programs on national networks independently managed by migrant communities; the presence of qualified Italian citizens born abroad in jobs of a certain public relevance; live 257 performances of the likes of Teatro delle Albe, only to name few options.
I opened these concluding pages by quoting Gramsci. The Italian intellectual was one of the first to address without mercy the question of the South in Italy, drawing international attention to the hierarchical economic configuration that cast southern Italians as inferior to those in the North. Gramsci’s thinking is poignant since it complicates the task that I tried to accomplish in regard to immigrants throughout my dissertation. The Marxist thinker rightly disregarded genetic or scientific reasoning in terms of ethnicity to focus on the economic structural interests beyond the identification of people from the South as lesser human beings.
The bloody wedding between political power’s need to endlessly reproduce itself and the mantra of development and progress required a sacrificial scapegoat. In the late twentieth century, the biological identification of southern Italians as Other became unsustainable, thanks to an increasing disappearance of regional differentiations, the diffusion of the national educational system, and public television that taught standard Italian to everyone. At this point, the first substantial communities of African immigrants appeared with perfect timing to subsume the unwanted role of subalterns. This sudden shift in target, which took less than twenty years to consolidate, demonstrates that nations do not possess a natural ethnic base, but “as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicized that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing an identity of origins, culture and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions.” 252 The dissolution of nationalism - or better yet the vanishing of the sense of national belonging built around a mere territorial compound - and the
252 Balibat, Etienne. Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities . London: Verso, 1991, 96. 258 dissatisfaction for traditional forms of political participation left a wide open space for the media
to embody the role of censor. In the original Latin meaning of the word, the censor held a public
moralizing role finalized at the individuation of that which was proper for citizens by juxtaposing
it to the nefarious pollution brought by Barbarians. Media nowadays work by means of a
dissemination of images that mix fiction and reality, documentary accounts of other continents
and news reports about migrant people. Conflating truth and fiction, and using the power of the
visual, the communication society transforms the emergency of a single moment or situation into
a general feeling of anxiety perpetuating in time and space.
The duality of media representations complicates even more the ability for the Italian
audience to conceptualize ethnicity. Generally speaking, Italians combine blackness and
Africanness into one, but when it comes to visual representations of blackness in television and
the movies the situation is hardly ever clear-cut. Whereas documentaries tend to speak of
blackness in the context of Africa, focusing on the continent’s wildlife or unique forms of
religious devotion and cultural traditions, fictional representations – especially movies - more
often than not speak of blacks in an American context. On the one side, there are ethnic human
beings, exotic life styles, or borderline poverty; on the other, the audience enjoys blacks as
Hollywood stars. In the latter form, blackness is much more appreciated and acceptable, since the
US does not evoke the same sense of social backwardness and geographical proximity that Africa
embodies. 253 Black Americans are not a threat, Africans are. This stereotypical separation opens
253 Then of course, for Italian viewers Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans suddenly revealed blackness in the US context in its real terms, as a continuation of segregated communities with different degrees of social visibility and relevance. The question that lingers on is: how do we discern the images of a real natural disaster from those of a multi-million dollar Hollywood production? To what extent television viewers maintain their critical ability to read into images and information, when they are submerged by a hoard of contrasting signifying inputs?
259 up a methodological problematic. Black theory developed in the American academia does not necessarily help understand the way blackness holds true in the Italian context, and cannot fill in the gaps of the Italian academic debate. In such a void, performance theory and the study of the emotional resources involved in the theatrical representation of migration, such as N’Diaye’s homecoming, seem the most valuable tools to debunk ethnic stereotyping. Teatro delle Albe’s productions create a space for black and white actors to display the very essence of emotions, both metaphysical and physical, by hearing each other’s vocal texture, smells, bodily contacts, or sharing their work ethic. This exchange allows to gain pleasure from one’s own body interaction with other unknown bodies, even though pleasure hardly ever comes without pain. Most of all,
Teatro delle Albe’s task has the advantage of showing a condition that is very often erased in movies and other media representations of blackness: black labor. The exoticizing discourse that emphasizes the talent of blacks as naturally born dancers and singers, while stage acting falls into a Western tradition reserved to whites, completely writes off from history the work that black performers put into action to acquire their level of proficiency. Too often, black labor in literature, fiction and so on exclusively consists in slave labor. On the Albe’s stage, spectators can actually witness the strenuous work actors undergo in order to create the make-belief trick of acting. Black actors are not naturally born performers; their acting, singing and dancing skills do not derive from genetics or skin color but from serious training. Moreover, the Albe’s commitment to inter-ethnic work demonstrates that theorizing blackness in Italy is possible without necessarily positioning it in opposition to whiteness. It reclaims the possibility to inhabit multiple identities, implicitly criticizing both essentialism and absolute constructivism.
To paraphrase the sad yet compelling words of Jim, the first black lead character in a 260 literary masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, “there is a river to
cross.” Jim obtained liberty by making it to the other side; still, many more metaphorical rivers
have to be crossed. The running waters of ignorance, stereotyping, political and financial
interests create a strong current in opposition to those migrants that, by crossing the
Mediterranean waters, look at Europe as their promised land. Too often that same water turns
into a tomb; not everyone is as lucky as Jim in making it to the other side. There is nonetheless a
duty of acceptance, that is at once moral, utilitarian, and deeply needed, by the hands of those
who believe in free exchanges among humans. Theater as an alchemic creation of languages, as a
radical, visionary confrontation with the here and now of our existence, stands against the logic
of the virtual nullification of all spatio-temporal coordinates, erases a lot of what has been said
on the relationship between performance and life, between mono-culture and inter-culture,
between self and Other. I think I understand where the overcoming of that impasse lies. It may
not be a final answer, but I know that this intuition opens up new perspectives in my work, and
hopefully in the making of a serious discourse around migration to and in Italy. Intra-cultural
performance overcomes those deadlocks because it goes to the heart of the question: not the
possibility to translate a written text into music, acting, or a scenery, but rather the individuation
of that point that exists an instant before the word. The text may be sacred but is never
untouchable, because it is in itself the translation of the " aleph ", the lament (of the body or the soul) that precedes it. A text’s appeal, its real appeal, does not lie in the ability with which the author conceived it, but in the "before", the breath that transpires through it. More than the translation, what matters is the cultural, artistic act to adhere to the fire that had belonged to someone else (the author) and start it all over again (the actors) towards other directions (the 261 audience). It does not matter whether the input comes from ourselves or someone else (it always
comes from the Other that is within ourselves): art comes to life based on the way in which we
take care of that input, it depends on the "before." Each scenic tangle, each performance element,
each embodiment of feelings and bodily expressions come from questioning. It is not about
choosing a form, but wondering about something and asking why. The essence is the cognitive
impulse of researching. The question generates the form. Martinelli’s "question" resembles more
a spiral-like, feverish line of questions, one connected to the other. They revolve around our
presence here, today, in this world infected by violence. The Albe have a hard time sticking to a
single note, because they perceive and live that feverish spiral in their veins: they trace a journey
through styles - comedy, satire and tragedy; presences - sometimes choral, sometimes solitary;
generations – teenagers and middle-age; languages and ethnicities. Their experiments have not
been always successful, because they tackle the conflicting, dangerous fields of a tense world:
Africa should not be exclusively the force of childhood expressed by the little elves chorus of
Sogno , nor the white-face warriors of Ubu Buur . The less provoking ideas get balanced by the
group’s full commitment to debunk banality, as in the transnational triple recreation of I
Polacchi , which really expressed the contingent multitude of blackness in the bodies of adolescents that were not talked down to as a lost generation, but rather exalted as the emerging ancient. It's a complex and winding itinerary, while neoliberal capitalism flourishes on the certainty that spectators, actors and critics are little brains tuned in to a single note. The work of the Albe proceeds through "rubbing": "rubbing together, not without efforts, these realities - names, definitions, visions, sensations - one with the other, testing them in peaceful confrontations and discussions without envy, so that sudden shines the knowledge of each reality 262 and the intellectual intuition, for those who perform the most strenuous effort in human capacity." 254 These are rare outcomes, fortunate ones; these are the fruits of courageous undertakings, not rushed, or commercial or full of pride. Necessary works, that talk about us, investigate who we are or we are not, but never with nostalgia. This is how one finally comes back or feels at home.
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