Theorising from the European South: Italy, Racial Evaporations, and the Black Mediterranean

Abstract

In March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic had just begun to ravage through Italy and would soon sink its already struggling economy, the spectre of past divisions and internal fragmentations in the European project resurfaced with glaring clarity. As finance ministers of EU countries commenced discussions about a series of coordinated measures to support the economic recovery of member states, Northern European ministers and economists voiced their unease at supporting a plan that, they claimed, would bail out countries that had been fiscally irresponsible¹ – in a telling echo of the accusations which, ten years earlier, had led to the imposition of austerity measures and structural adjustment programmes in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Once again, at a time of profound crisis, the presumed cohesion of Europe around a common horizon was faltering under the weight of long-standing internal cracks. After weeks of discussion – and when it became evident that the pandemic would have impacted economies beyond Southern Europe – a €750 billion recovery plan, wishfully called Next Generation EU, was approved. Nonetheless, this moment stands as a powerful reminder that, whenever the rhetoric of unity gets silenced by deep-rooted assumptions and stereotypes, the perceived or imposed divide between Europe's North and its multiple Souths abruptly re-emerges from the European unconscious.

Like the debt crisis of 2010 and the refugee crisis of 2015, the Covid-19 pandemic has been another (yet surely not the last) trigger of ‘a larger epistemic crisis’ at the heart of the European project.² This crisis permeates political institutions, cultural spaces, and the European mediascape – but it also determines, as Chloe Howe Haralambous lucidly shows in her essay in this special issue, who deserves to be rescued at sea. In Howe Haralambous's account, the ‘rescue plot’ of migrant crossings in the Mediterranean crystallises ‘contradictory political impulses’ at the heart of Europe's regimes of bordering and exclusion. In what follows, I set out to disentangle the historical and ideological foundations of those impulses. My central contention is that, even to begin to articulate what a place called ‘Europe’ might be, we need to look at its history, present, and future beyond paradigms of progress, security, or idealistic cohesion, and address instead its fissures, contradictions, and uneven histories. To do so, this essay calls for an epistemic reorientation towards Europe's South and the Mediterranean as liminal spaces that have become the epicentres of Europe's interconnected crises, having always sat uncomfortably within continental ideas of homogeneity. Such reorientation seems particularly important today because, first, theorising from these spaces requires ‘a persistent attention to the postcolonial dimension of the borders of “Europe” and the boundaries of “European”-ness’;³ and second, because this attention in turn demands that we address how ideas of cultural and political belonging have been and continue to be shaped by colonial histories and racial formations that Europe cannot ignore any longer.

By focusing on Italy and the Mediterranean, one of my goals is to show that this perspective can offer particularly effective tools for drawing into conversation some crucial questions that have often been compartmentalised into distinct disciplinary fields: the relation between the European South and the Global South, the invention of Europe through a dialectic of internal otherness, the intersections of modernity and coloniality in the Mediterranean, and the disavowal of race and Blackness as central categories for the definition of Europeanness. In this sense, rethinking Europe from one of its Souths does not mean substituting a northern-focused Eurocentrism with a supposedly more inclusive or more hybrid southern one. Rather, it is a project aimed at destabilising hegemonic paradigms through which Europe has been conceived while articulating, as Ian Chambers puts it, ‘the emergent grammar of another language’.⁴

Imagining another language means first of all acknowledging that the hegemonic grammars and discourses of Europe have been founded on the exclusion of its South, understood as the internal other that could never be fully assimilated into the ideological framework of capitalist modernity. In the conceptual formation of Eurocentrism – that is, during the process of universalisation and normalisation of Europe's provincial history – Europe's South was framed as the cultural, economic, and ontological antithesis of the North. As Roberto Dainotto has argued, the epistemological foundations of the colonial project of European modernity rested on a ‘new logic of identity and alterity’, whereby the South came to represent ‘the negative moment in the dialectical progress of the Spirit of Europe’.⁵ If the North thought itself as the bearer of modernity, progress, and reason, the South was its incommensurable antithesis, defined by primitivity, underdevelopment, and deviancy. What is crucial to stress here is that the South came to embody the dialectical other of the North not as a historical accident but as ‘the necessary condition’ for theories of imperial hegemony and mission civilisatrice even to be conceived.⁶ In this sense, the unity of Europe as an imperial hegemon rested on a founding distinction that shaped its very philosophical conception. Though Europe has been imagined as a whole, it has always been a deeply fractured one.

This fundamental fissure at the heart of Europe's self-imagination has been historically formulated as a cultural, economic, and even climatological difference between the North and the South. Most significant for my argument, dynamic and evolving processes of racial fabrication have moulded the North–South divide along the axis of race.⁷ Particularly in Italy, because of its geographic position at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, these processes have resulted in remarkably fraught theorisations around the racial peculiarities and ambiguities of its populations. Consider for instance the canonical work of Antonio Gramsci on the questione meridionale (‘southern question’) – that is, the state of underdevelopment in which the industrialised North had kept the Italian South since the Unification of the country in 1861. In denouncing forms of semi-colonial oppression, Gramsci highlighted how the subalternity of the South depended on theorisations of the ‘biological inferiority’ of its populations, who were deemed intrinsically uncapable of economic and social emancipation.⁸ Gramsci's reflections were also a response to a long history of biological racism, which Italian scientists had imported from France. Today, this fervent yet understudied period of racial theorisation at the margins of Europe has come to light, revealing the plastic, unstable, and often contradictory ways in which Italians have been racially categorised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by positivist scientists and anthropologists such as Cesare Lombroso, Alfredo Niceforo, and Giuseppe Sergi, and later during the Fascist Era, by Aryanist scholars and intellectuals.⁹

It is not my intention here to recount this complex and thorny history. Instead, I want to highlight a few elements that show how race has been a crucial problematic for the construction of Italianness and, as a consequence, for establishing whether and to what extent the racially ambiguous South was compatible with the imagination of a white and Northern European identity. This is primarily a question of scale, whereby racial theories circulating across national, regional, and continental frameworks get readapted to serve localised political projects. In the late nineteenth century, concerns about whether Italians fully belonged to what Arthur de Gobineau had infamously called the white Aryan race prompted criminologist Cesare Lombroso to posit a direct connection between criminality and deviancy, and between southernness and Blackness – further claiming, as Angelica Pesarini reminds us, that bandits from southern Italy were ‘badly “whitened” Blacks’.¹⁰ Pesarini acutely points out how Lombroso's theories testify to long-standing ‘tensions and fears of being located in a liminal and ambiguous racial position’.¹¹ This in turn fuelled anxieties about racial contamination, due to the geographical and historical proximity between Italy – and particularly southern Italy – and Africa. From the late nineteenth century until the Fascist Era, discussions about race in Italy were thus saturated by what was perceived as a decisive predicament, the ‘racial equivocality’ of Italians.¹² Mussolini, with the promulgation of the Leggi Razziali (‘Racial Laws’) in 1938, attempted to solve this ‘problem’ by claiming Italians' unquestionable belonging to whiteness, and yet, this operation was possible only because the internal racial differentiations that had puzzled previous theorists were externalised and pushed further south. In this way, as the historical and cultural connections between Italy and Africa were silenced – and as Africa's absolute alterity was postulated – southern Italians were able to become, however suspiciously, part of the fabricated racial community of the nation.¹³

These variable dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and externalisation of difference mirror, at a smaller scale, the processes I have described on the continental scale, whereby Southern Europe – as Europe's internal other – was seen as functional to the invention of a continental homogeneity that remained nonetheless highly precarious. In this sense, regional processes of racialisation that seem to pertain only to the Italian context can cast light on broader practices of exclusion and differentiation, which continue to resonate today in discourses about Southern Europe's perennial lag and belated or incomplete modernity. This is not to say that these dynamics are homologous. Indeed, differential processes of racialisation depend on cultural histories, social repertoires, and modes of expression that vary across local spaces – what David Theo Goldberg has termed ‘racial regionalizations’.¹⁴ At the same time, because these processes often overlap with global tropes and discourses, they require an approach premised on the careful analysis of their transitivity across spatial and cultural scales.

The reorientation towards the European South I am calling for can be envisioned only if we attend to these transitions and permutations across scales – of definitional hierarchies, matrices of difference, and conceptual categories. This means also reassessing what it means to speak of a European South in relation to the more capacious and flexible category of the Global South. Once again, Italy's intermediate position within the Global North/Global South dyad offers a peculiarly fruitful lens for approaching this question. On the one hand, the country's brutal histories of colonial conquest and plunder – justified through an often erratic process of racial differentiation between coloniser and colonised populations – testify to Italy's political participation in and concrete gains from the European imperial project. On the other, the semi-colonial status of its own South, waves of mass emigration to Northern Europe and the Americas, and more recent processes of ‘Southification’ of its economy reveal particularly stark forms of uneven development, typical of spaces canonically understood as part of the Global South. To these considerations, it must be added that the category of the Global South is polyvalent, unstable, and constantly shifting – a relational orientation more than a geographical attribute. As Russell West-Pavlov aptly puts it, the Global South ‘works like a deictic marker, linking discourses, places, and speakers in such a way as to generate new subject positions, fields of agency, and possibilities of action’.¹⁵ It is precisely through this work of linking ideas, spaces, and opportunities for discursive and political action that the European South, and Italy in particular, can destabilise categories we often take as fixed or self-explanatory while opening up avenues for rethinking Europe as a whole.

To this end, practising comparative thinking can be quite fruitful. Discussing Latin America and modernity, Ignacio Sánchez Prado has argued that, to fully grasp the position of this region in relation to the Global South, it is crucial to understand, first, that its histories of capitalist accumulation, racial and colonial modernity, and combined and uneven development, are entangled with ‘an important tradition of humanist liberalism’ imported from the Global North; and second, that such explosive combination of determinants has shaped theorisations of Latin America as ‘the site of a properly distinctive universality’.¹⁶ In other words, Latin America is a unique cultural and geopolitical totality because it has historically been a space of crossings and intersections between Western and non-Western forms of knowledge, indigenous and violently imposed foreign traditions, colonial designs and decolonial formations. The European South and the Mediterranean, in different forms and at different times, have experienced the same concentration of world-historical forces and conflicting vectors – simultaneously cultural, political, and religious. And just as the tradition of latinoamericanismo has been crucial for theorising the centrality of the Americas for the imaginative construction and economic formation of modernity, turning our critical eye towards the South of Europe can be conducive to a similar project of epistemic reorientation.¹⁷ Again, this is not a way of flattening the peculiarities of ultimately incommensurable regions; rather, it is an invitation to explore what might happen when dominant narratives are rethought from the perspective of spaces that cannot be smoothly subsumed within homogeneous political and cultural formations.

To do so, we might begin by recentring race as a decisive analytical category for understanding contemporary Italy, Southern Europe, and – scaling up – Europe as a whole, starting from the premise that today ‘for Europeans, race is not, or really is no longer’.¹⁸ This evaporation of race from Europe's self-imagination, which began after the end of World War II and the collective tragedy of the Holocaust, has led to the progressive erasure and disavowal of race as the most productive sociopolitical category for the invention of European identity – imagined as avowedly raceless yet indisputably white. In other words, despite the specifically European racial histories that sustained the project of colonial modernity, Europe has obliterated race from public discourse, institutionally, and legally. And yet, because evaporation signifies disappearance but also persistence – in the media, in public spaces, in the collective unconscious – race continues to saturate, without ever being named, Europe's discourses and political imagination on belonging and identity.¹⁹ This contradiction became tragically patent in the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015, which Nicholas De Genova has described as a specifically racial crisis that naturalises global economic inequalities into racialised categories of cultural or religious difference. The more loudly race is disavowed, the more effectively Europeanness can continue to reproduce itself as a ‘a racial formation of postcolonial whiteness’.²⁰

To counter this racial and colonial amnesia, in recent years scholars and artists have forcefully reinscribed Blackness within Europe's history, present, and future. Historian Olivette Otele, for instance, has excavated the invisibilised genealogies of the African presence in Europe, from Roman times to the present, and argued that ‘these histories have shaped the social practices and identities of European communities and continue to do so today’.²¹ This has been particularly true in the Mediterranean, a space that, at the inception of colonial modernity, was the incubator of practices and epistemic coordinates that would lead to the transatlantic slave trade and to the racial geographies of the Black Atlantic.²² In this sense, we can view the emerging critical paradigm of the Black Mediterranean as a response to the evaporation of race not only from the imagination of a white, postcolonial Europe but also from the ideological and political frame of reference of its southern borders. Within these border spaces, racial evaporations are even more dangerous, given the transcultural histories of the Mediterranean and the tragic realities of contemporary migrations, where Black migrants ‘tread the same ancient slave-routes dating back to the Roman Empire’²³ from Sub-Saharan Africa to Lampedusa and the coasts of southern Italy. Adopting a longue durée and transcontinental perspective becomes particularly productive to the study of contemporary Italy, where the erasure of race and the consolidation of ‘whiteness as a category of racial identification’ have run parallel to the disavowal of the role of coloniality in the country's national formation.²⁴

What is crucial to highlight at this point is that the two opposing paths I have been delineating represent two diverging visions of Europe's future. Silencing race in public discourse will continue to bolster practices of casual and everyday racism, as well as validating forms of politically inert, performative anti-racism.²⁵ Conversely, only by emphasising the sociopolitical productivity of race, its plasticity, and its deep-rooted histories will it be possible to encourage a shift in individual attitudes and collective practices. It is with this goal in mind that we need to turn our gaze to the South, where race continues to be, in particularly stark ways, one of the central axes for determining political belonging, forms of differential economic inclusion, the right to mobility, and even the right to live – as the shockingly ongoing and shamefully ignored shipwrecks of migrant boats in the Mediterranean demonstrate, despite proclamations that the ‘migration crisis’ has ended.

This work needs to be carried out at the juncture of academic research, political activism, and discursive practices across different forms and media. That the framework of the Black Mediterranean has gained critical traction in recent years is a testament to the slow but steady shift – spatial, analytical, and cultural – I have outlined in this essay. Since its early theorisation in the work of Alessandra Di Maio, who established a parallel between the Black Atlantic and the racialised migrations of the Mediterraneo nero, the Black Mediterranean has become a powerful framework for countering Southern Europe's raceless racism, but most importantly for providing an alternative to seemingly progressive narratives about Mediterranean multiculturalism and happy mixing of cultures and peoples – a problematic assumption that has often informed theorisations of mediterraneità (‘Mediterraneanness’) and pensiero meridiano (‘Southern thought’).²⁶ Scholars have therefore challenged ‘the romanticization of the Mediterranean as a space of convivial exchange and unfettered hybridity’ by stressing instead the risks of erasing its histories of colonial oppression and their legacies in the present.²⁷ A space where ‘the wretched of the sea’ continue to see their humanity negated,²⁸ the Mediterranean represents but has not been able to come to terms with a crucial ambivalence. As Camilla Hawthorne has written, the Mediterranean ‘is preserved either as a source of racial contamination or as a site of innocent mixing, rather than a contentious object of knowledge production’.²⁹ Recentring the Mediterranean as a contested site for the production of cultural, political, and artistic knowledge – yet without erasing its racialised fabrication – can thus become a model for rethinking political practices of anti-racism on a broader scale. Precisely because the history and present of this region demonstrate that performatively claiming a Mediterranean and hybrid identity can end up bolstering forms of self-absolving and vacuous inclusivity, Europe as a whole should look at its South to find the discursive tools that could counter widespread practices of post-racial racism.

Scholars, activists, and artists variously related to Italy have been at the forefront of this cultural and political project. They have practised different media and forms – from fiction to filmmaking and podcasting; they have established solid connections with grassroots struggles for citizenship and political participation; and they have forcefully foregrounded Blackness as Italianness.³⁰ Within this emerging and vibrant formation, I want now to pause on a recent novel that can illuminate, from a discursive perspective, the conceptual and spatial shift via the recentring of race and of Europe's South that I am calling for in this essay. Sabrina Efionayi's Addio, a domani (Goodbye, Till Tomorrow) was published in 2022 by Einaudi, a prestigious Italian publisher, under the imprint Stile libero (‘Free Style’), which has often been attentive to emerging cultural and literary trends. The novel recounts, from an autobiographical perspective, the story of a young woman, Sabrina, who grows up in Naples with two mothers: Gladys, her biological mother, who migrates from Nigeria to Italy after being lured into sex work by human traffickers, and Antonietta, a Neapolitan woman who lives next to the house where Gladys works and decides to adopt Sabrina when Gladys abandons her for fear of retaliation by her procurer.

The novel is primarily set in Naples and Lagos, and links Italy's South to Nigeria and the Global South through the histories of migration and uneven development that connect these spaces. This peculiarly southern perspective reorients the reader's look towards Southern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, and at the same time localises global processes of labour exploitation, gender oppression, and modern slavery by detailing the Bildung of the characters across the spaces that have shaped their identity. Indeed, in the prologue, Efionayi defines Sabrina, the protagonist of the novel, as ‘a Neapolitan, Afrodescendant young woman’ – an expression that captures the scalar variability necessary to grasp localised (‘Neapolitan’) and global diasporic (‘Afrodescendant’) attachments, as well as the complex politics of geocultural identification the novel explores.³¹ Significantly, at the inception of the narrative, Sabrina values her cultural belonging to the city of Naples more than a nation-based identification with Italianness (a localising move), but she also deems her diasporic connection to Africa and Blackness more important than her attachment to Nigeria (a transnational thrust). Nonetheless, this does not prevent her from identifying, later in the novel, also as Italian and Nigerian.

The scalar suppleness that characterises the novel's politics of cultural affiliation is mirrored on the formal level, as the narrative alternates between chapters narrated in third person and more intimist chapters written from a first-person perspective and addressed to a ‘you’ – Sabrina's biological mother Gladys. Efionayi explains in the prologue that she chose the third-person narrative to avoid being overwhelmed by the pain of what she and her mother had lived. And indeed, the novel details the intersectional processes of dehumanisation experienced by Gladys as a Black migrant woman. In this sense, the Bildung of the protagonist operates on different levels, which are reflected in the alternation of narrative perspectives. Sabrina embarks on a process of interpersonal and affective discovery that allows her to explore why she has felt alienated from Gladys while helping her to come to terms with conflicting feelings of sympathy and resentment. At the same time, the distanced perspective of the narrator allows the reader to grasp Sabrina's process of racial and cultural self-discovery, which entangles personal attachments, forms of systemic oppression, and everyday racism. When Sabrina is 7, she is for the first time addressed with the N-word – a word whose meaning, the narrator explains, ‘a seven-year-old kid does not know, and perceives only its violence’.³² Later, while driving through the streets of Naples with her adoptive family, she exchanges embarrassed looks with Black migrants and is reminded by her white uncle: ‘you are not like them, it's different’.³³ And finally, she notices that, if in her elementary school she was treated as an exotic curiosity, when she starts middle school, the racism she experiences is of the vicious and violent kind. Efionayi writes: ‘it is here that [Sabrina] discovers she is Black, Black for real’.³⁴

The novel therefore recounts the gradual and painful discovery of the social reality of race through the progressive emergence of Sabrina's racial self-awareness. This process is particularly destabilising because Sabrina grows up between two worlds: on the one hand, her mother's universe – where being ‘Black for real’ implies facing the intersections of gender oppression and racial capitalism; and on the other, her adoptive family's wishful obliviousness to the reality of race. When Sabrina voices her worries that the potential editors of her book might change their mind if they see that, behind her white-sounding name, there is a Black woman, Antonietta replies in utter surprise: ‘Why do you think so? What's wrong with your face?’³⁵ In highlighting her adoptive mother's well-meaning yet hurtful colour blindness, Efionayi narrativises the links between broader processes of racial evaporation and their very concrete emotional consequences. Most significantly for my discussion, she does so from a spatially grounded perspective, for Sabrina's Bildung in the city of Naples moves across its municipalities and neighbourhoods, from Castelvolturno to Secondigliano and Scampia – places whose presence in the Italian mediascape hinges primarily upon their connections to organised crime. Addio, a domani instead portrays these urban geographies as socially complex and racially layered spaces, and articulates a vision that is distinctly southern. This is significant because such a perspective continues to be marginal in the Italian literary and cultural fields. Indeed, the invisibility of political and discursive practices that look at questions of race and belonging from a place-based, southern outlook runs parallel to the discursive marginalisation of Italy's South, as works originating from the urban spaces of the industrialised North (particularly Milan) enter the literary field with more cultural and symbolic capital. In this sense, Addio, a domani not only contributes to a reorientation in the politics of visibility, but it also calls for a spatial, discursive, and political shift in the reception of literature from the South.

The novel ends with the acknowledgement that Sabrina is not yet ready to reconciliate with her mother Gladys and, from this intimist dimension, the epilogue moves to the political struggles of Black Italians after the murder of George Floyd. This is an indicative parallel, whereby Efionayi highlights that neither personal nor collective wounds will be healed if race continues to be disavowed in Italy's public discourse and political imagination. Within the broader framework I have proposed in this article, and along with other fictional and non-fictional works that have appeared in recent years, Addio, a domani thus demonstrates how postraciality ‘actively erases not only the relevance of race, […] but the very possibility of naming facts, organizational logics, official discourses and circumstances as racist’.³⁶ By forcefully drawing attention to the reality and social productivity of race, these discursive practices show that challenging dominant paradigms of postraciality is a very urgent project, yet one that continues to be dismissed in the name of wishful ideas of raceless unity and homogeneity, both in Italy and in Europe. Only if we analyse and work towards redressing Europe's racial amnesias and evaporations will it be possible to articulate alternative and more just visions of social collectivities. To do so, we will need to turn our gaze to the South and find vocabularies and epistemic perspectives that build upon, rather than repressing, the fissures and contradictions of the European project.