Futures in post-displacement Italy

Abstract

Italy holds multiple histories of displacement in both its past and present times. These might be said to begin with the ‘many diasporas’ of Italians sketched by Donna Gabaccia in her 2000 book of the same name, which charts the emigration of around 27 million people away from Italy from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Such outward displacements were not always permanent and gave rise to multiple webs of transnational identifications within narratives of Italianness. The vast majority occurred directly after the national process of Unification (1861–70), and just before the start of Italy’s first forays into establishing overseas colonies in the Horn of Africa (1882–90), thus displacing the concept of the nation at the very point of its foundation. There was a further, acute convergence of mobility that took place in the second half of the twentieth century, where Italian emigration shrank just as inward migration to the peninsula from the Global South and Eastern Europe increased. This occurred alongside a gradual acknowledgment of Italy’s (post-)colonial past and the ways in which its after-effects still persist within a multitude of structures and practices in contemporary society. As Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo state: ‘the temporal and spatial axes that link colonization, emigration, and immigration set Italy apart from other European contexts’. Our sense as editors is that something might have gotten stuck in the neat convergence of these accounts of temporal and spatial displacements, of pasts of outward emigration and presents of post-colonial migration. They connect ‘all at one point’ in the eloquent sketch of what Teresa Fiore calls Italy’s ‘pre-occupied spaces’, spaces that encapsulate past and present stories within new transnational and postcolonial networks. But the temporal arc involved is limited to looking around, and then back – so where within it can we locate discourses that attend to the future? What would happen to our understandings of Italy’s displacements if we were to shift our temporal gaze forward? Could we start to put together a toolkit that would allow us to map, chart, plan for and make space for Italy’s post-displacement futures? How might past and present displacements potentially haunt and unsettle such futures? At the same time, multiple Italian displacements have passed unacknowledged, and have often been hidden in layers of shame. Internal movement JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 2023, VOL. 28, NO. 4, 403–414 https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2023.2198838