Lost in translation? Displacement, displaced persons and the limits of Italian historiography

Abstract

This article examines the absence of ‘displacement’ and ‘displaced persons’ as stable analytical categories in Italian historiography. Although these terms have long structured international refugee governance and scholarship, their inadequate translation into Italian has produced a linguistic and epistemological bias that has shaped interpretations of postwar forced migration. Rather than being considered as a historically specific condition resulting from wartime violence and postwar administration, displacement has often been subsumed under broader notions that obscure its political and bureaucratic origins. The article argues that this untranslatability is not merely a technical problem, but a condition that determines its historiographical visibility, which situates the Italian case within a broader pattern of non-equivalence between analytical categories of mobility across national traditions. By reconstructing the emergence of displacement as a legal and administrative category, tracing its re-elaboration within refugee studies and analysing how Italian public discourse neutralised its specificity through newsreels, reports and cinema, the article redefines postwar Italy as a vital area of transit, assistance and negotiation. In doing so, it seeks to bridge two scholarly traditions: Italian and Francophone reflections on the construction of categories of citizenship and nationality, and Anglophone historiography of forced migration.