Ancient versus Modern Others: Contemporary Racial Thought and Its Predecessors in Italy

Ann Morning, New York University (NYU)

The concept of race has often been linked to empire, and primarily to the European imperialism of the 15th through the 20th centuries. Beliefs about descent-based groups, however, did not originate with race, and their contemporary manifestations reveal strata of much older notions of difference. Contemporary Italy, which proudly traces its roots back to the Roman Empire and before, offers a kind of laboratory for the excavation of multiple historical layers of conceptualization of descent-based groups. At the deepest levels, we find what I call Italy’s “Ancient Others”: the figures of the Jew, the Muslim, and the “gypsy” (or Roma), whose stereotypes are infused with meanings that preceded the advent of race thinking. Since then, however, they have been complemented by the “Modern Others” that Gaia Giuliani calls “racial figures,” which in Italy include not just the Africans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans targeted by Italian colonial aggression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also the image of the backward Southern Italian, or meridionale Based on interviews with over 100 young Italians in Milan, Bologna, and Naples, I show how present-day beliefs about the nature of group difference are refracted through multiple eras of belief about alterity. I also explore how these figures of difference evolve jointly over time as elements of a shared ecology of descent-based difference, where particular forms of alterity are attributed to certain groups and not others. Italy’s long and well-recorded history makes it an ideal site for such an archaeology of racial thought and its antecedents, but its sedimentation of beliefs about descent-based difference also characterizes societies as young as the United States.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 72. Race and the Long Shadow of European Nationalism