Uneven Whiteness: Images of Blackness and Whiteness in Contemporary (Postcolonial) Italy (2010–2012)

Gaia Giuliani

In 2009, the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi stated that Italy is 'multiracial, but not multicultural'. Focusing on a series of recent events and figures, the main aim of this chapter is to reveal the role that colour assignment plays within public discourse, re-creating racial stereotypes and white, heteronormative privilege in 'multiracial' Italy. These events and figures, in my opinion, point to a number of revealing signs pertaining to the European postcolonial framework in which Italy can be significantly included and understood. In particular, it takes into account the hetero-referential construction of Otherness and Whiteness that Italy shares with many European and largely Western national contexts. With hetero-referential construction of a racialized Other I mean – following French sociologist Colette Guillaumin's theorization of hetero- and self-referential matrices of racism (1972) and US sociologist Ruth Frankenberg's idea of unmarked whiteness (2001) – the process of racial construction that marks that which is not white, silently and invisibly builds hegemonic whiteness thereby naturalizing it. The events of 2010, I discuss here, unveil a significant set of similarities between Italy and a wider postcolonial European context in the ways they construct their Others. In the first instance, a 'hyper-signification' of black male bodies, which in my chapter is thematized by two cases: migrant workers employed in fields in southern Italy and the offences directed at the famous soccer player, Mario Balotelli. In the second instance, the vested orientalization and sexualization of the internal (the Southerner) and non-European brown Mediterranean women, in line with the European colonial tradition – as in the case of Berlusconi's go-go girls. Finally, the typical association of brown heterosexual men with public danger and sexual assaults, especially after 9/11, which is exemplified here by the repeated targeting of brown men in the police investigations around the kidnapping of Yara Gambirasio.

While Italy's racializing dynamics is better understood within the European shared colonial and postcolonial hegemonic culture, as I will argue, the racialized and racializing constructions of Self and Other in Italy are specifically related to the symbolic construction of both its cultural and historical past. Constructions of the Self and its Others in Italy derive from an idea of national, cultural, historical and biological heritage that manufactures italianità (Italianness) as both white and Mediterranean, as essentially heterosexual, and virile. This self-representation, as I have argued elsewhere, is the result of a slow process of discursive construction that finds its own fundaments in the Fascist idea of uomo nuovo (new man). According to this idea, Italians are animated by two complementary and apparently opposite/ polar features inherited by the Romans' fine and military/governing arts, Reinassance's arts and sciences, Catholic moral and patriarchal social rules: passion and rationality. The peninsula's passion derives from Italy's geographical position: belonging to the Mediterranean basin, Italians participate in its 'blackness'. This 'vice' becomes a virtue insofar as it is mastered by rationality. In my view, the long-lasting Fascist narrative of the uomo nuovo makes Italians neither completely white nor completely black. Their racial liminality positions them in a very complicated space, in which they cannot neatly distinguish themselves from 'African backwardness and blackness'. This self-representation grounds the many shifts of Italy's internal colour lines that sometimes include, and sometimes exclude, those subjects traditionally positioned at the 'racial margins' of Italianness – like southerners. Berlusconi's 'multiracial but not multicultural' recalls, as he has made clear on a number of occasions, the Fascist idea elaborated by the endocrinologist Nicola Pende (1933), in line with the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi, that Italians are the 'result of fruitful interbreeding' that occurred at the time of the Roman Empire and which is framed within the same (Roman that is supposedly white, Western and at once Mediterranean) culture. At the same time, Berlusconi's 'multiracial but not multicultural' refers to 'multicultural Italy' as an impossible outcome: many racial backgrounds can be merged with Italian stamina, but Italian culture needs to be crystallized in an ahistorical figure that includes whiteness and Mediterraneanness. In contrast to the 'surgical' idea of the nation in Nazi Germany, the idea of nation Italians have inherited from Fascism is, in my opinion, built on 'racial anthropophagy'. According to a 'surgical idea of a nation', as the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito highlights (2004), Nazism conceived Germany as a body from which corrupted cells and organs needed to be extirpated. In the case of Fascist Italy 'anthropophagism', domestic differences are swallowed and digested. I borrow the image of anthropophagism from decolonial studies in Latin America and Indigenous studies in the Pacific and Australia, where it refers to the 'cannibalistic approach', respectively, of Spanish and British settler colonialisms (see, for instance, Banivanua-Mar 2007, for the case of the...