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.