Precarious Landscapes: Space, Identity, and Community in Migrant
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PRECARIOUS LANDSCAPES: SPACE, IDENTITY, AND COMMUNITY IN MIGRANT ITALY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Elisabeth Astrid Fay February 2016 © 2016 Elisabeth Astrid Fay PRECARIOUS LANDSCAPES: SPACE, IDENTITY, AND COMMUNITY IN MIGRANT ITALY Elisabeth Astrid Fay, Ph. D. Cornell University 2016 In this dissertation, I map the ways that intersecting historical, literary, cinematic, and media narratives produce spaces commonly associated with Italy’s minority populations. My analysis of these spaces—squats, encampments, detention centers, urban peripheries, and coastal waters—uncovers the conflicting strategies of Italian identity production that have emerged in response to new migrations, and further examines the ways that migrants living in Italy articulate their own identities. I argue that popular narratives produce distinct migrant spaces by emphasizing alterity and framing precariousness as an essentially foreign phenomenon. Consequently, these spaces are seen as a threat to Italian national unity and continuity: zones of foreign precariousness encroaching on the stability of Italian communities. I look beyond mainstream constructions of migrant spaces, and examine narratives from Italy’s thriving minor literature and cinema. In these works, migrant authors and directors explore the potentiality of living precariously, constructing spaces hospitable to fragmented and overlapping identities. Ultimately, I argue that these works provide us with alternative ways of considering space, identity, and community, allowing diverse subjects to navigate the shifting landscape of a global age. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Elisabeth Fay was born in New Haven, Connecticut. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied modern and contemporary Italian literature. She completed her B.A. in 2005, having spent three semesters studying in Italy, at the Università degli studi di Firenze, and then at the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofie - Università di Catania. Before beginning her doctoral studies at Cornell, she worked for two years as a language teacher in Rome. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank the members of my special committee: Timothy Campbell, for his unfailing insight and enduring patience, Karen Pinkus, for helping me define the direction of this project, and Medina Lasansky, whose ability to make surprising connections across disciplines has, on more than one occasion, refined and reinvigorated this research. Further thanks are due to Rhiannon Welch, who read some of the earliest versions of these chapters. I am indebted to Flaminia Cervesi and Michela Baraldi, whose mentorship made me a better teacher and a better colleague. I am also truly grateful to Lorenzo Fabbri for his generosity and good humor, and to Andrea Righi, Tatiana Sverjensky, and Liron Mor, for their friendship and support. This project would not have been possible without research and travel funding from the Cornell University Graduate School, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation of the faculty and administrators in the Department of Romance Studies. In particular, Rebecca Davidson has been an essential resource and an invaluable friend. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and my siblings for their support, my mother for everything, and Josh for his forbearance and his indefatigable curiosity. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements iv List of Figures vi Introduction – Precarious Landscapes 1 Chapter I – Belonging and Identity at Sea: the Migrant Mediterranean 27 Chapter II – Detention and Forced Itinerancy: ‘Nomad’ Camps 82 Chapter III – Illegal Communities: Occupations and Encampments 123 Chapter IV – Re-mapping the City: Belonging and Community in Rome 173 Conclusion – Navigating Precariousness 209 Bibliography 227 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Pigneto Installation 11 Figure 2: Map of Detention Centers 20 Figure 3: Three Versions of Mare Nostrum 31 Figure 4: The Vlora 43 Figure 5: Stills from Amelio’s Lamerica 55 Figure 6: Bodies dissolving in water 63 Figure 7: Stills from Crialese’s Terraferma 71 Figure 8: Stills from Crialese’s Terraferma 71 Figure 9: Mediterranean Maps 75 Figure 10: Closing Casilino 900 105 Figure 11: Casilino 900 Home 111 Figure 12: Resettlement of Casilino 900 115 Figure 13: Aerial Views of Nomad Camps 115 Figure 14: Decaying Serviced Villages 118 Figure 15: Places of Abjection 128 Figure 16: Sgombero Act One 135 Figure 17: Sgombero Act Two 135 Figure 18: Sgombero Act Three 136 Figure 19: Sgombero Act Four 136 Figure 20: Sgombero Act Five 136 Figure 21: Burning Pantanella 147 vi Figure 22: Pantanella Mosque 151 Figure 23: Pantanella Greengrocer 151 Figure 24: Pantanella Maintenance 151 Figure 25: Raul Scebba’s Hideaway 187 Figure 26: Hidden Cornet in Cinema Apollo 187 Figure 27: Giulia Photographs Nurit 197 Figure 28: Marco and Giulia 197 vii INTRODUCTION PRECARIOUS LANDSCAPES A Prayer to San Precario San Precario first appeared in Milan in July of 2004, as part of a protest against low wages and job insecurity. Protestors working with the activist group Chainworkers staged a mock religious procession, intoning pseudo-Latin chants and carrying placards adorned with the saint’s image: a man in his twenties wearing a supermarket clerk’s uniform, kneeling in prayer. Since then, San Precario has appeared at hundreds of protests and popular celebrations throughout Italy. A website dedicated to tracking the saint’s various apparitions and crowd- sourcing his canonization calls him “the patron saint of the evicted, the poor, the under- employed, the exploited, the extorted, the contract-less and the short-term employee. He is invoked to ward off neoliberalism, exploitative hiring practices, costs related to workplace injury, cooperatives, and mobbing.” A number of miracles are attributed to San Precario, including “the attainment of a long-term contract for a young man from Barletta, and the granting of disability pay for a Padovan woman.”1 The central conceit of San Precario’s legend paints a bleak picture of life in contemporary Italy—a place where basic workplace protections, once taken for granted, are now as rare as miracles; where exploited workers have no recourse beyond prayer. For many in Italy 1 “Nelle leggende, santo patrono di sfrattati, poveri, sottooccupati, sfruttati, ricattati, Co.Co.Co, assunti non in regola e dipendenti a termine. Invocato contro liberismo, caporalato, infortunio senza copertura, cooperative e mobbing […]La sua fama crebbe e molti miracoli furono a lui attribuiti. Il più famoso è sicuramente quello dei prolungamento all’infinito del contratto di un giovane di Barletta e della concessione di infortunio ad una ragazza di Padova, dopo che questa si era ferita durante il lavoro in una cooperativa del nord est.” See “La vita di San Precario,” http://kit.sanprecario.info/, accessed May 25, 2015. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Italian are my own. 1 today, the legend doubtless rings true. Italians born in the last thirty-five years have struggled to find steady work in a perpetually lagging economy, and have been consistently unable to achieve the standard of living that their parents and grandparents enjoyed. Stable, long-term contracts are vanishingly rare, mortgages are granted only to those with long-term contracts, and salaries are increasingly unable to meet the basic cost of living.2 Growth in the private sector is stagnant, the welfare state is in tatters, and while higher education remains reasonably accessible, a university degree no longer guarantees employment.3 As a result, young educated Italians are moving abroad in droves, part of the so-called “brain drain” that has come to define 21st century Italian emigration.4 Those who remain are having fewer children, leaving Italy with a top-heavy, aging population.5 Recent immigration has bolstered a dwindling labor force increasingly dependent on contingent labor, but new migrant arrivals are inevitably accompanied by Italian concerns about the ways that minority populations will affect the dominant culture. Precariousness is the word of the day in contemporary Italy, and new derivatives have recently entered the lexicon. The adjective precario is now commonly used as a noun, meaning “precarious worker,” and discussions of class difference have abandoned the proletariat in favor 2 ISTAT, Annuario statistic italiano 2014 (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, 2014), 311-391. 3 Much has been made of the declining value of a college degree in Italy. Degree holders are increasingly finding themselves in a double bind: unable to secure white collar employment, and over- qualified for other, less prestigious positions. The unemployable graduate has become a trope in popular culture—as in the popular film Smetto Quando Voglio (2014) which documents the fruitless job searches of several recent graduates. In one scene, the owner of a moving company tells an applicant, “Look, I thought I made it clear that I don’t hire university graduates.” The applicant replies, “I know, but please understand that it was a youthful error that I have come to regret.” (“Guarda, sono stato chiaro: non assumo laureati.” “Ma guardi che è stato un errore di gioventù, del quale sono profondamente consapevole.”) 4 ISTAT, Annuario, 499-519. 5 See ADI Associazione Dottorandi e Dottori.