Peripheralization and other Roman stories

CHAPTER 21 Peripheralization and Other Roman Stories Lorenzo Rinelli Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. On the one hand the orbis and the urbs, circular, with their extensions and implications (arch, vault); on the other hand the military camp with its strict grid and its two perpendicular axes, cardo and decumanus—a closed space, set apart and fortified. (Lefebvre, 1992, p. 245) The social and political questions posed by present-day European migration control policies and their repercussions lead my investigation into the European urban space. Historically, immigrants and migrants tend to be concentrated in the most important urban areas in a receiving country. As cities become home to a greater number of immigrants, urban and immigration policies necessarily overlap. The filtering effect of urban borders, which alternately deflect, tolerate, or promote dwelling, conditions every urban person’s existence. For instance, analysis of the architecture of the European Union’s border management reveals an interior design that features detention camps for immigrants as ordinary features on the landscapes of the most populated outskirts of European cities.1 Immigration policies that are adopted to manage international migrations—visa requirements, biometric filtering, militarization of the border—continuously produce anxiety and a population “in excess,” while feeding hostility and discrimination. No migrant enters a neutral ideological context when arriving in the EU. Depending on how external controls situate and catalogue migrants individually and collectively, they differently regulate how, and even whether, people are able to enter the EU’s urban centers and call them “home” (Balibar, 2003). Once migrants have crossed the frontier of the EU, they come to occupy a precarious place in the city that exists at the margins of integration. This chapter locates one of the new frontiers of Europe within a fundamental paradox of the city of Rome: an inexorable expansion of buildings together with a mounting rejection and marginalization of an emergent immigrant population that is vital to the city’s expansion. There are two reasons to study the city of Rome in relation to the contemporary European policies of migration control. First, the route that goes from East and Central Africa towards Libya via the Sahara Desert has been, at least until summer 2011, the most trafficked and policed in North Africa, and therefore the most dangerous. The main flow of migrants traveling from SubSaharan Africa to Europe sails from the Libyan coast and arrives at the southern coast of Italy. Several scholars have made the case for the significance of studying the topic of migration to Italy and its relation to questions of space, time, control, power, and visibility (Parati, 2005; Bullaro, 2010). Rome represents the place where immigrants in Italy can most quickly find points of reference and social coordinates to build new ways of life. Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. 300 Lorenzo Rinelli Just as it once was at the apex of its splendor, Rome’s vocation is linked to that of the Mediterranean, which leads to the second reason. The new urban plan for the city of Rome explicitly promotes the Mediterranean Sea as a harmonious center of different cultures with Rome as its epicenter, although the history of urban planning in Rome, and particularly fascist ideology, should problematize the Mediterranean as a mechanism that harmoniously regulates the residency of people in Rome’s urban space. Officially the plan aims at giving voice to different sounds of the immigrant communities living in the city; in reality, I maintain, it renders their rhythm unintelligible and their essence never a possibility. Questions to be explored in this chapter will be related to the official discourse of multiculturalism set in motion by Rome’s town hall and whether it pushes African migrants to the margins of the city, creating distinct places in the city’s peripheries. Once at the margins it is important to identify migrants’ tactics of resistance and placemaking that support individuals and their communities. It is important to focus on these tactics since they seem to lead to alternative social imaginations beyond marginalization. Rome—Peace Capital of the Mediterranean Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. To talk of the Mediterranean—of its past, present and future—is to move in this disquieting place. (Chambers, 2008, p. 5) On March 14, 2008, forty-five years after the last urban plan,2 the city council approved a new urban plan for the city of Rome. Several successive city administrations took on the difficult task of formulating a new urban plan for Rome. The result is a compromise among groups of private landowners, developers, and city hall to regulate the expansion of the city. Squeezed in the middle is a growing immigrant population which has been left out of the public debate. The introduction to the new plan is solemnly titled “Rome—Peace Capital of the Mediterranean: the new urban plan of Rome” (Morassut, 2003). The introductory document is intended to highlight Rome’s crucial role in promoting intercultural and interreligious dialogue featuring social cohesion, as “the richness of contemporary metropolis is over all associated with their standards of social quality” (Morassut, 2003, p. 27). But how does the new plan supposedly promote social quality? First of all, it does so through environmental protection. It reserves 88,000 hectares of territory to green areas. Second, the protection and preservation of historical Rome is to be extended beyond the classic Roman ruins to include contemporary architecture that is located within the periphery. Third, and most important, the innovation that the urban plan envisions revolves around the concept of the polycentric city: there will be eighteen new urban nodes, or miniature cities, within the city, each with schools, hospitals, and administrative services (Figure 21.1). Lastly, Rome requires the so-called “iron cure,” which is the modernization and lengthening of the entire metropolitan rail system. In the initial document, Roberto Morassut, town-planning councilor in 2003, describes a utopian city that is accessible to its inhabitants, that is filled with social opportunities, and that is modern without forgetting its historical character. But Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. Peripheralization and Other Roman Stories 301 Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Figure 21.1 An example of a new urban node in the southern part of Rome. Despite the intentions of the planners, most of the newly constructed urban nodes lack vital services such as transportation, schools, hospitals, or even a well-designed sewage system. The result is the creation of isolated urban dwellings at the margin of the city. Photograph by Lorenzo Rinelli (2010). what exactly does this document entail? At first sight, the link between Rome and the Mediterranean recalls a distant past perhaps best encapsulated by the Roman imperial tag: mare nostrum (our sea). As a matter of fact, the definition of mare nostrum appears on the first page of Ceasar’s De bello gallico (On the War against Gauls), indicating confidence from having acquired full control over the Mediterranean—which led to a change in Rome’s foreign policy to be oriented to the North, towards the Atlantic. The idea of mare nostrum entailed a totality of control over a sea that ironically was considered by Roman emperors as a mere lake “already conceptualized as a homogenous space of confinement, possession, and colonization” (Pugliese, 2010, p. 11). However, the Mediterranean Sea was never a homogenous space either during the Roman occupation or today when European policies of migration control attempt to purge it of foreign bodies as they traverse the few miles that separate Europe from Africa entering Italian territory.3 Multicultural City Once the African migrant becomes visible in the urbanscape, once she has navigated the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, she comes to be incorporated, more often than not, as a multicultural ingredient that serves to promote the image of a tolerant and multiethnic city. The latter has to be contextualized within the strict relation between market and urban society. Multiculturalism has a major leverage for generating future growth and attracting investment capital and consumers. This phenomenon illustrates a growing relationship between neoliberalism and cosmopolitanism, whereby Rome competes with the other great capitals of Europe, like Paris and London, in their social makeup. It is worth noting here, although briefly, that Rome has only recently approached the discourse of multiculturalism and is doing so in a superficial way. The tardiness of government policies is not necessarily linked to the Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 302 Lorenzo Rinelli ethnic composition of its society, which does not share the postcolonial flows of Paris and London; instead it has to do more with the fact that Italian society has not yet come to terms with its colonial past and with its contemporary role as a country of immigration. Nowadays the immigrant, when visible, stands as a classic example of a fetish where multiculturalism and celebration/construction of difference is the natural outcome of a managerial approach to the city. As Deleuze and Guattari have noted “the dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective choices” (1987, p. 178). It implies a fulcrum, a homogenizing principle at its core, a white wall on which to design a rainbow cloth. The idea behind the document that introduces the urban plan is that Rome with its monuments and (imperial) history plays this role. In this sense, the slogan “Rome—Peace Capital of the Mediterranean” signifies a homogeneous space, without conflicts where, therefore, the city’s market can flourish and different voices can be distinctly heard. Peace, intended as absence of conflict, is then the necessary chamber to generate harmony. But where can harmony be found other than in an orchestra? In the following section I show how the documentary entitled L’Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (Ferrente, 2009) exemplifies Rome’s organized discourse of multiculturalism. A critical reading of the documentary will give me the opportunity to explore how films, documentaries, and media in general can contribute to reinforce configurations of multiethnic society from above within an ethics of social concern denying the the immigrant equal status with the filmmaker/citizen. Disillusioned with official discourses of multiculturalism, I then move my research toward the discursively external part of the city: the periphery. There, in the southeastern area of Rome, I ultimately recognize the interconnections between Europe’s emerging southern border and the urban space of Rome. Like a border, the urban structure does not change spontaneously. Nor does a single powerful agent, such as the state, determine it. The urbanscape changes in ways that are related to forms of inclusion/exclusion that occur through modalities of externalization, or in the case of cityscape, of peripheralization. For Whom Does the Orchestra Play? The documentary L’Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio (the Vittorio Square Orchestra) takes place in the district around Rome’s main train station. Today the area is largely populated by immigrants whose activities revolve around a square, Vittorio Emanuele II Square, that is a hub for various cultures, sounds, and odors from all corners of the world (Lakhous, 2006); even Chinese shops are colonizing the entire area (Figure 21.2). This Piazza, its essence, inspired musician Mario Tronco and filmmaker Agostino Ferrente to reunite some of the most extraordinary performers among immigrants, each one unique in origin, instrument, and musical experience, in an orchestra, that plays world music all over the world. In 2006 a documentary that tells the story of how the project took shape was released and since then screened in many festivals around the world, winning several awards. Watching the documentary, we walk into a sort of harmonious melting pot Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. Peripheralization and Other Roman Stories 303 Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Figure 21.2 The area around Vittorio Emanuele square is occupied almost entirely by Chinese shops that have increasingly ousted historical Roman stores. Note the two posters of the radical right wing group, Casa Pound, on the book presentation "La Presa di Roma" [The seizure of Rome] by Claudio Cerasa (2009). The group, headquartered in the area, is very active in promoting antiimmigrant actions. Photograph by Lorenzo Rinelli (2010). that fits perfectly with the official discourse of Rome as a multicultural place presented with the new urban plan. While the story revolves around the project to revitalize and save an old theatre, the Apollo Theatre, from being transformed into a bingo hall, we have the impression that immigrants exist simply to provide some color to this political mission; they never participate directly in the group’s meetings nor are they involved in conversations with the town hall representatives. They Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 304 Lorenzo Rinelli remained isolated from the political possibility of this endeavor. They are left aside to do what they are good at doing: playing music. The two central characters, both Italians and both quite established within the art community, seem to enjoy the practice of fishing for new artists in the area around the square. An attentive reading of these scenes reveals an instinctive hesitancy and incomprehension, if not directly hostile, towards the two Italians. At the beginning of the documentary when the two Italians enter different shops to look for artists, whether a singer or a player of tablas, they do it by intruding into others’ spaces with a sort of nosiness and naïveté, “only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air” (Pink Floyd, 1977). Even when the documentary offers glances of the real life of some of these musicians while they struggle to survive in the city of Rome, the Italian organizers are preoccupied with accomplishing their musical and political project. They panic, for example, because the date of the concert is approaching fast and the Indian player is sent back to India for visa issues; or after several requests for help made by Raul, the Argentinean drummer, because he is going to be evicted from the garage where he lives. The documentary does not rest enough upon the city’s urban policies and high rent costs and the consequent marginalization connected with these municipal issues. It seems as though immigrants exist outside of global capitalist social relations and their corollaries of nationalism and racism. Overall, the documentary does not engage in a dialogue with the immigrants who are part of the orchestra, and without whom the orchestra would not exist. This is possibly because creating a dialogue would highlight tensions that occur within the “organization of difference as a qualitatively homogeneous fetish” (Sharma, 2006). In the same way, the discourse of multiculturalism presented within the urban plan does not imply a reification of separation between immigrants. Instead, the celebration of difference, both within the orchestra as well as between the lines of the urban plan, celebrates sameness within a generic alterity. The fundamental separation exists within hierarchical differences that are aimed at “reducing complex and overlapping relations” (Hardt & Negri, 2001). It suggests the preservation of a firm core around which legal and economic status and place meaning revolve, as the planets do around their sun. As Fernandes brilliantly put it (2007, p. 99): The West is cosmopolitan only insofar it understands its culture as the final step in a historical movement. Hence Western cosmopolitanism does not celebrate globalization as flows that breed differences but seeks to discipline the proliferation of differences through colonial-inspired racial and spatial hierarchies. In the end, a well-liked project such as the L’Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, both despite and because of its politically correct multicultural language, not only fails to question the dominant political organization and creation of differences but also despatializes other ideas of communities and reinforces the homogenization of immigrants’ unique experiences of the urban. Instead, true relationships within the urban occur when they are disconnected from the planned idea of difference and are connected to space through practice. Home comes to be defined, then, through experience rather than imposed places and identities. At the margins of the city, it is possible Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. Peripheralization and Other Roman Stories to encounter processes of transculturation that instead of being transcendent, rely on continuous negotiation. Processes of transculturation are indeed linked to subjectification that happen through imaginative reconfigurations of the political in a perennial movement of subjectivity (Fernandes, 2007, p. 133). Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Anagnina In this section, I move into the southern part of Rome where the documentary Like a Man on Earth (Segre & Yimer, 2008) in part takes place. It is a work that certainly explores the experience of migration from Africa in Italy while it recovers lost stories of courage and oppression. The documentary produced an original and innovative encounter with the society and city of Rome, along the tradition of Italian Neorealist cinema that “arguably after architecture . . . was the art form most rigorous in confronting the ruinous landscape, charting its provinces, figuring its dimensions, its rifts” (Steimatsky, 2008, p. xii). For Pasolini, who has been a critical lover and attentive observer of the Roman society, the south of the city where city meets fields was the opposite of the northern part; exchanges between people in the north were conducted on the basis of reason, in contrast to life in the south that was fed by passion and life. Today this idea still holds some truth, as this marginal section of the city is again a vital center, for the entire city and for all south-living immigrants outside the municipality of Rome who arrive in the morning at the Anagnina bus station to find a job near the city limits. It is the desire to get into the urban dimension, to be part of the legitimized polis, that drives the newcomers here, much as that desire drove Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and her son together with an entire generation of Italian migrants fifty years ago.4 At the beginning of Like a Man on Earth, we sense that Dag and his companions have finally reached Europe and the city of Rome, after a long, agonizing odyssey. In the background, gray benches outline the Anagnina bus station, which is at the southeast limit of Rome and was until only a short time ago the unmistakable threshold of the Roman urbanscape (Figure 21.3). Today, the wide open space is a neuralgic yet crucial hub for trade and information sharing among migrant workers who come from the countryside to find work in the city. The Anagnina bus station is emblematic to the understanding of Rome’s peculiarities in relation to the new urban plan. First of all, immigrants live in this area because they cannot afford to pay the rent within Rome proper. The renting market operates together with immigration laws as an effective filter to keep immigrants disconnected from the city without turning away a cheap workforce. It is worth noting here that the station functions as the southeast door of the city as it welcomes the long distance bus routes that arrive from the small villages and towns along the coast south of Rome. These towns are being occupied by newly arrived immigrants who have revitalized the spaces abandoned by Italians and have boosted, if not basically created from scratch, a renting market otherwise sterile along the coastline during winter seasons. Basically, those who utilize these long routes as means of transportation are of foreign origins. When these buses arrive at the Anagnina Station to drop into the underground metropolitan network, immigrants sit at the margins, genuine Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. 305 306 Lorenzo Rinelli Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Figure 21.3 A profile of Dagmawi Yimer against a background of gray benches of Anagnina bus station. Source: Segre & Yimer (2008). strangers to the city, looking for a good bargain or some useful information, before scattering along the ring road that surrounds the Eternal City. Every day, the space of the bus station blooms with vendors selling every kind of object. These vendors mostly come from the former Soviet block but also from Africa and South Asia. It is a self-sustaining, spontaneous market, still at the beginning of its existence, and does not have the official endorsement of the municipal authority. In fact, the authorities have cyclically challenged their presence, but immigrants have always come back to set up their stands. This is a transient space, for and by nomads who nonetheless are increasingly involved in organizing a series of social, economic, and cultural activities. They dwell in this space that belongs to them as they intervene in the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière, 2006) of the political space that otherwise has been sterilized and evacuated. These are border figures that exist in between citizenship and exile, in a space beyond the dichotomy of legitimization and illegitimization, between multiculturalism and complete integration. Instead of representing a pathological syndrome that can be removed, the nomads, I claim, personify an indication/warning regarding the central paradox of a new urban policy for Rome that permits no alternative to neoliberal multicultural hegemony. There is a widespread consensus among Italians that the urban condition needs to be taken seriously, that a managerially illuminated multicultural approach from above should be implemented to avoid the otherwise inevitable social calamity (see the riots in Paris banlieus in 2005 and 2007). As Rancière puts it (1998), consensus, far from representing the absence of conflict or peace, indicates a subterranean permanent violence intrinsic to any form of social purification and political evacuation. The mechanism of externalization related to migration control is indeed Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. Peripheralization and Other Roman Stories an example of consensus wherever it may occur, far from the government geographical location or within the metropolitan areas of Europe. However, it would be erroneous to configure the idea of consensus as a hegemonic and homogenous space, a plaque, where political life occurs separate from personal life. In this space of purity, our lives will be dominated by an overwhelming power and, as Rancière put it, “entrapped in the complementarity of bare life and exception” (2010, p. 11). Instead, proper politics are all about perforating this space, to produce breaks of elocution, which before were only heard as mere noise. As a matter of fact, the urban border appears only in the moment it is crossed, “for the border is not a thing but, rather, the materialization of authority” that has been contested and subverted (Chambers, 2008, p. 6). The spontaneous meeting point at the station engages the distribution of roles in the community as it contends with exclusion and exists as a transcultural space where practice prevails. In comparison, the well-intended project of the Vittorio Square Orchestra provides us with a pre-assembled, legitimized world and a romantic view of its immigrant subjects. Multiculturalist projects confuse communal distribution of bodies and social concerns with the political as Rancière intended it. He writes (2010, p. 39): Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Political argumentation is at one and the same time, the demonstration of a possible world, in which, the argument could count as an argument, one that is addressed by a subject qualified to argue over an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that he “normally” has no reason either to see or to hear. It is the construction of a paradoxical world that puts together two separate worlds. Following the documentary we come across a separate world a few miles from the Anagnina bus station, where the second University of Rome campus, Tor Vergata, is scattered over a vast and desolate industrial area. The neighborhood quarters a huge mall complex and the comforting blue profile of IKEA, plus many clothing factories and home furniture outlets that everyday attract thousands of distracted consumers. One of the university buildings, the former Faculty of Humanities, is a 12-story blue glass building. Here, with neither electricity nor a heating system, lives a community of 250 refugees from the Horn of Africa, including almost 30 children (Figure 21.4). Some of them were born during the exodus through the Sahara Desert and across the Mediterranean Sea. These are people who survived the strenuous journey, crossed many borders, became refugees at the port of Lampedusa, and inexorably crashed against the indifference of the post-political contemporary Europe. After being transferred to identification centers in Sicily, they were set free and, like many others before them, caught the first train to Rome, without any help or directions. This is the last frontier of Europe: its most internal one and probably the most difficult to decipher. In December 2005, with the support of Action, the building was occupied; however, in 2006, the refugees were cleared out. After that, the city hall signed a rent contract with the society that owns the building and in the meantime tried to find solutions for accommodating the refugees. The solutions adopted were always temporary and, according to the refugees, simply inadequate. They complain of the Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. 307 Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 308 Lorenzo Rinelli Figure 21.4 Second university of Rome, Tor Vergata. The glass building used to house the Department of Humanities. Today it is home to 250 refugees from the Horn of Africa who have lived there in precarious conditions since they occupied the vacant building in 2005. Photograph by Lorenzo Rinelli (2010). size of the rooms where people had to live with five or six others and of the night curfew. Many of those who dwell here would like Italian authorities to clear their biometric data from the Eurodac database that enables countries to help identify asylum applicants and persons who have been apprehended in connection with an irregular crossing of an external border of the EU and therefore facilitates the application of the Dublin Regulation. According to the Dublin Regulation (2003/343/CE), the state responsible for examining asylum applications is the one through which the asylum seeker first entered the EU. Once officially recognized, that person cannot apply to another state where he/she may have better chances of success and living conditions. The aim of this regulation, which replaces the original Dublin Convention (1990), is to prevent multiple applications and hordes of moving asylum shoppers around the EU and to reinforce the role of the border on those states that geographically confine “problematic” countries. It is beyond the scope of this analysis to present the consequences of this policy reorganization on the lives of asylum seekers who, more and more, are subject to externalizing practices of interception, forced rejection, and peripheralization. Here it is important to note that the process of externalization operates through the combination of legislation of migration and refugee control together with the new urban plan for the city and its renting market. Muse, one of the residents, recalls that “to find an affordable rent in Rome is a massive challenge considering the current rates. And more, when they [the landlords] hear that you are a foreigner they say Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. Peripheralization and Other Roman Stories that they do not rent anymore” (“Fortress Europe,” n.d.). Unfortunately, as I noted above, once inside, asylum seekers cannot freely move within Europe to find the best opportunities for living and working. In the face of the pattern of exclusion and peripheralization, is there anything conceivable beyond tactics of survival? Is there anything that can be theorized as an innovative form of placemaking? Can a cinematic expression constitute a spatial practice by and for immigrants that not only facilitates mutual understanding but also leaves a mark in the city while engaging the distribution of the sensible? Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. I Am A Man I met Dagmawi Yimer, aka Dag, in December 2009, one year after the release of Like a Man on Earth. Dag was a student at the Faculty of Law of Addis Ababa University when instances of political oppression and electoral corruption following the general elections of May 2005 (“Ethiopian protesters ‘massacred,’” 2006) made him leave his community behind and embark on a long and perilous journey to Rome, where, eventually, he has been granted refugee status. After having survived the violence of the multiple borders all the way through the arid Sahara Desert and the deep Mediterranean Sea, he arrived in Rome. Next, Dag joined the school of Italian language organized by the Asinitas cultural association. The school is a meeting space in itself for many African migrants in Rome. Within the safe place of the school, Dag not only learned to speak Italian, but also became literate in the language of videodocumentation. He soon decided to gather the memories of others who, like him, had journeyed in exile from Ethiopia to Rome. Memories, gestures, and silences of the people who are represented recall actual difficult challenges that these contemporary migrants had to face along their journey. The kitchen where the interviews take place between Dag and his friends becomes a sort of sanctuary where in Aramaic they can share excruciating memories, knowing that those memories will not be lost. In doing this they become present. They leave a mark in the space and time of the host society that cannot turn its back to its responsibilities in the construction of their memories. It stands for a true placemaking that builds upon a dialectical process of recognition. It reminds us that, “it is in the interrelationship between the individual and society that questions of power and hierarchy, ideology and politics stand most forcefully revealed” (Nichols, 2010, p. 249). To further underline the political importance of Dag’s documentary, it is important to mention that Like a Man on Earth is part of a larger project, the Migrants’ Memories Archive, which, since 2006, has intended to recuperate both the memory and the dignity of the migratory path of many out of the Horn of Africa. The project aims to invert the usual process by which the “us” (migration experts, academics, and journalists) speak on the “other’s” behalf. It is important to note how the project seems to challenge the very limits of the concept of archive, intended as a “closed” system of storage for memories. In this sense, the active and continuous participation of migrants in building the archive renders the project a “political act” (Segre, 2009, p. 19). The project is the outcome of conversations between social workers of the Asinitas Association, academic scholars specializing in colonial and postcolonial Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. 309 Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 310 Lorenzo Rinelli history of the region of the Horn of Africa, and a group of refugees from the same area. It explores the possibility of filling the lacuna between migrants and the host community. With regard to this social condition, Abdelmalek Sayad (2004) elaborates the idea of la double absence, which is the alienation of the emigrant/ immigrant. She is condemned to be absent twice, with respect to both her origins and her new society. Marco Carsetti recalls that the idea of building an archive of memories was born after his experience listening to migrants around Vittorio Square. In one of those recordings, Aziz screams his agony out when he says that “we are nothing that exists here, they do not want see us” (Segre, 2009, p. 26). Through the migrants’ active participation in narrating and setting the conditions for the narration, this concept of archive facilitates the spatial and temporal dispersion of the double absence. It succeeds in doing this at the first level by innerving the official discourse around the theme of migration from Africa to Europe. In fact, Like a Man on Earth rips open the veil that makes the implementation of the contemporary European policies of migration control in Africa within the urban dimension of Europe invisible and inaudible. Thus far, conventional academic analyses of migration remain bound to a hierarchy of high over low: the subjects/agents, policies, and data that are associated with states, politicians, and public figures take priority over the lives and experiences of migrants and their interlocutors. Although there are several academic attempts to examine the dynamics of migration from Africa to Europe (Gebrewold-Tochalo, 2007; Pastore, 2007; Huysmans, 2006), scholars tend to either focus on policy analysis and inter-state relations and pay no attention to the human dimension; or they attempt to map the route of the flow, like tracking a herd along geographical lines. Each approach is confined within its proper academic locus. These hierarchies then commonly filter what can be heard and what can be viewed. We hear politicians arguing for the construction of new walls. We hear the media venting citizens’ frustrations about supposed effects of “illegal” migration, such as increasing unemployment, urban insecurity, and cultural contamination. We see boats loaded with desperate people rescued by police authorities. The same is true for what cannot be heard and what must remain invisible. We cannot see a migrant reclaiming her political subjectivity within her new host society and city. In the documentary, Dag himself engages in a conversation with Mr. Franco Frattini, the former EU commissioner in charge of European policies of migration control. Outside the comfort of state media, Mr. Frattini is clearly bothered by Dag’s attempt to challenge and reorganize the terms of the discussion simply by presenting his refugee experience as tragic and clamorous as it is banal. Like a Man on Earth succeeds in more than revealing what has been kept concealed regarding the recent transformations of policies of migration control in Europe and Africa. It addresses the authority of an immigrant to speak within the political realm of the nation-state. It also, perhaps more importantly, questions the multicultural homogenization of a place, that of Europe, that is maintained at the center of a globalized world. But Europe and especially European metropolitan areas are spaces constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space “constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 474). This is, at the end, the essence of transculturalism: a process of performances Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. Peripheralization and Other Roman Stories between two or more communities and individuals within a dialectical zone of tension. I read Dag’s documentary as an effort to reappropriate the capacity to voice his and his companions’ experiences in a universal (visual) language that breaks the above-mentioned hierarchy and traverses the space of the city. As Benjamin put it, “the characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of his apparatus, man can represent his environment” (1969, p. 235). The author’s capacity for expression reclaims a temporal and spatial mobility both from the society of origin along certain routes and at certain speeds, and also within the city he inhabits. That’s why that if we conceive that city as a striated space traversed by memories, sounds, images, and experience, a sort of living and pulsing archive, then Like a Man on Earth succeeds to mark a further line on this archive, interacting, translating, and ultimately modifying the surrounding social environment. Notes 1 2 3 Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 4 www.migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/carte-en.pdf Rome, as capital of the Italian state, has had five other urban plans: 1873, 1883, 1909, 1931, 1962; but only one, that of 1909, has been adopted by the city council. The urban history of Rome confirms its peculiarity in terms of transparency of planning mechanisms (Insolera, 1993). Recently “Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said migrants who have landed on the island of Lampedusa threaten the institutional and social structures of Europe” (“Italy warns Europe over migrants,” 2011). In 1962, Pier Paolo Pasolini realized Mamma Roma, as a complex critique of the urban development of Rome (Rhodes, 2007). Its central character, played by a superb Anna Magnani, is a prostitute who dreams all her life to leave behind her life on the streets and bring her son with her to have their home coi signori (with gentlemen) in one of the new buildings of the expanding southeast periphery of Rome. References Balibar, E. (2003). We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, W. (1969). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1st ed.). New York: Schocken. Bullaro, G. R. (2010). From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Shifting demographics and changing images in a multi-cultural globalized society. Leicester: Troubador Publishing. Cerasa, C. (2009). La Presa di Roma. BUR Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli. Chambers, I. (2008). Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham. NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans. and Foreword). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fernandes, J. L. A. (2007). Challenging Euro-America’s Politics of Identity: The Return of the Native (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Ferrente, A. (dir.) (2009). L’ Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio. Documentary. Magnolia Home Entertainment. Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10. 311 Copyright © 2013. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 312 Lorenzo Rinelli Fortress Europe: In fuga dall’Eritrea: il deserto, il mare e i ghetti di Roma. (n.d.). Retrieved from: http://fortresseurope.blogspot.com/2005/12/in-fuga-da-tripoliverso-i-ghetti-della.html Gebrewold-Tochalo, B. (2007). Africa and Fortress Europe: Threats and Opportunities. Aldergate: Ashgate. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huysmans, J. (2006). The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Insolera, I. (1993). Roma moderna: Un secolo di storia urbanistica, 1870–1970 (Piccola biblioteca Einaudi) (Nuova ed.). Piccola biblioteca Einaudi. Italy warns Europe over migrants. (2011, February 15).BBC. Retrieved from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12461866 Lakhous, A. (2006). Scontro DI Civilta’ Per UN Ascensore A Piazza Vittorio. Imprint unknown. Lefebvre, H. (1992). The Production of Space. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Morassut, R. (2003). Roma Capitale di Pace del Mediterraneo. Online, available: http://static.repubblica.it/roma/piano_regolatore/presentazione.pdf (accessed February 16, 2011). Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Parati, G. (2005). Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (1st ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pastore, F. (2007). Recent Developments and Critical Issues. Rome: CeSPI. Pink Floyd (1977). Sheep (lyrics by Roger Waters). Animals. Columbia Records. Pugliese, J. (2010). Transmediterranean: Diaspora, Histories, Geopolitical Spaces. New York: Peter Lang. Rancière, J. (1998). Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (2006). The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum. Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. (S. Corcoran, Trans.) London: Continuum. Rhodes, J. D. (2007). Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (1st ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sayad, A. (2004). The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity. Segre, A. (2009). Come un uomo sulla terra. Castel Gandolfo (Roma): Infinito edizioni. Segre, A. & Yimer, D. (2008). Like a Man on Earth. Documentary. Retrieved from: http://likeamanonearth.blogspot.com/ Sharma, N. (2006). Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant Workers” in Canada (1st ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Steimatsky, N. (2008). Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Transcultural Cities : Border-Crossing and Placemaking, edited by Jeffrey Hou, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1125173. Created from templeuniv-ebooks on 2020-08-11 06:47:10.