Popular Racism, Modernity and Europe - an ethnography on Turin (Italy)

Maritano, Laura. (2000) Popular Racism, Modernity and Europe - an ethnography on Turin (Italy). In: UNSPECIFIED, Corfu, Greece.

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Abstract

[Introduction]. In this paper I am going to explore how ideas of Europe and European identity are used to articulate popular discourses on immigration and immigrants. In contrast with the literature on European identity and immigration which has mostly looked at institutions, adopting a top-down approach, I will look at popular discourses, adopting an approach from the bottom-up. I will base my analysis on ethnographic research carried out between 1997 and 1999 in a quarter of Turin, San Salvario, where there have been strong protests against the presence of immigrants. I will focus in particular on the interviews with some members of a grass-roots Committee created "to fight criminality brought in the quarter by the presence of immigrants". As a first step, I will focus on those studies which have analysed how issues of European identity and immigration have been constructed at an institutional level. Then, I will consider how Europe and immigration have become important grounds on which Italian identities are negotiated following the global and national changes of the 1980’s and the 1990’s and I will analyse how they are perceived among my interviewees. My argument is that ideas of Europe have been elaborated at institutional level in exclusionary terms in relation to immigrants and presented in terms of "modernity"; and that these ideas have had an influence on popular discourses on immigration and contribute to the production of racialised representations of immigrants. In other words, I will argue that ideas of Europe and modernity can be used to articulate popular racialised discourses of immigration.

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