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Diaspora 7:2 1998 The Politics of "Italians Abroad": Nation, Diaspora, and New Geographies of Identity1 Anne-Marie Fortier Lancaster University In diaspora, questions of identity have led intellectuals back to the nation. — María de los Angeles Torres For the Italian immigrants, only an Italian entity as an ideal point of reference could mobilise their commitment and offer them that "ubi consistam" by which they could escape their impotence. —Bruno Bottignolo Italian people's relationship to national identity is complicated by a history ofmass emigration that reached important proportions in the years following Italian Unification. There are approximately 4.5 million Italian emigrants living outside Italy,2 and an estimated 25 million emigrated between 1876 and 1965 (Vasta). When descendants of emigrants are included in the surveys, estimates reach up to 65 million people of "Italian origin" living around the world.3 In this essay, I examine how the creation of an Italian emigrant identity relies on some form of "return to the nation."4 The nation has been widely theorized as a system ofrepresentation whereby individuals come to view themselves as part of an imagined community ofpeople who do not come in direct contact with each other, yet share an image of their communion (Anderson 15). Their shared belonging is shaped around narratives of origins and destiny that represent the nation as primordial, timeless, and grounded in a mythic origin that is located within a delimited territory (Hall, "Question" 292-5). The national myth encloses and fixes identities by grounding them within a bounded time-space. Moreover, discourses of nationhood naturalize individuals' allegiance and identification to the nation, making it something that is "second nature." In this article, I look at how the politics of identity of Italian emigrant leaders in London "are caught up with and defined against ... the norms of [the] nation-state" (Clifford 307). By dwelling in a place where they do not "come from," migrants potentially disrupt the "natural" order of things in both their nations of 197 Diaspora 7:2 1998 origin and their nations of settlement (Clifford; Gray). In my examination of Italian emigrant identity politics, I will be discussing the power of the national myth in securing a consistent and coherent referent ofidentification (Bottignolo 139), on the one hand, and of migration as a new time-space of identification, or "ethnoscape " (Appadurai 296-7), on the other. I shall be looking at the Italian emigrant leaders' attempt to resolve the "dialectics of diasporic identification" (Gilroy, "It Ain't") in their political demands for identity preservation and self-determination. In other words, I analyze the ways in which they bridge the gap, as it were, between "where they're from" and "where they're at" in their efforts to construct a new kind of émigré citizenship. These politics of identity emerge from a position of "in-betweenness ," where the relations between "here" and "there" need to be negotiated and redefined. Italian emigrants' integration in different areas of Britain is being consolidated as the years go by. In turn, this integration is a source ofconcern insofar as one ofits perceived consequences is assimilation. The central issue in Italian émigré identity politics, then, is the preservation of an Italian identity, which emigrant leaders propose to rescue by consolidating political and cultural links with Italy. A striking feature of these politics of identity is that Italian politicians, not the British, are challenged for their lack ofpolitical will to protect Italian emigrants from assimilating in British (or any other) culture. What emigrant leaders of London want is to enter the public debate, in Italy, about the nature oftheir relationship with the Italian state. But the issue of securing institutional ties with Italy goes hand in hand with the affirmation of local particularism: the "return to the Italian state," as it were, is connected with the construction of a distinct Italian "community" in England. In short, the politics of Italian emigrant identity are about achieving greater control over the decisions shaping Italian emigrants ' lives and destinies. This was summarized by Lorenzo Losi, a leading figure in London's Italian political life, in a speech he gave in 1993: One demand is obvious and has become explosive in...

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