Monstrous Beauties: Bodies in Motion Between Colonial Archives and the Migrant and Refugee Crisis

Languages of Discrimination and Racism in Twentieth-Century Italy

“…In the context of an analysis of photography describing the pain of Others, Susan Sontag describes that pain as something the Western "we" does not want to acknowledge because "it is intolerable to have one's own sufferings twinned with anybody else 's" (2003, 113): similarly, goodwill and anti-racist Italians are far from achieving anything close to empathy, impeded by "a very complex dynamic of denial" of racism and colonial power relations. In Italy, this complex dynamic of denial is structured by a number of factors, the first of which is the naturalisation of the white norm that imposes a racial hierarchy, on the basis of which-as emerging from Giuliani's enquiry on the Italian news media's coverage of migrants and refugees for the already mentioned project (De)Othering (Giuliani 2022)-all non-whites are seen as either in need of emancipation or punishment in a public debate oscillating between two dominant narratives, humanitarianism and securitarianism. Italian white anxiety over postcolonial invasions, based on the "catastrophization" ("state of siege") of immigration (Maneri and Quassoli 2016, 71), can be considered another factor.…”

“…It is within this context that the anti-racist humanitarian discourse is building a "new moral stability pact" (Giuliani 2015), a politically correct semantic context in which, although the structural causes of border violence are not questioned, only Lega and other far-right formations are seen as guilty of structural racism (63). This "new moral stability pact" is evident in the humanitarian anti-racist slogan of summer 2019 which, contrasting Rackete with Salvini, states "The Captain (as Salvini was named by his supporters) vs The She-Capitan" (Rackete) (Il Capitano vs la Capitana).…”