Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other

14. Mediterranean Seafarings: Pelagic Encounters of Otherness in Contemporary Italian Cinema

255 Chapter 14 Mediterranean Seafarings: Pelagic Encounters of Otherness in Contemporary Italian Cinema Elena Benelli The sea is History. —Derek Walcott 1986, 364 For the last thirty years, immigration in Italy has been viewed as a problem, handled as an emergency, and defined by the Italian mass media in very negative terms. In a recent study that analyzed how immigrants are defined in Italian newspapers, two sociologists from the University of Bologna, Giuseppe Sciortino and Asher Colombo, noticed that for the Italian press, the public discourse on and around immigration became of crucial importance for the entire social life of the country because “foreign residents in Italy have long been a key element in national self-definition” (Sciortino and Colombo 2004, 97). Their study spans a period of three decades, and it highlights the fact that the Italian media “led the way, preceding the experience and often even the awareness of the presence of immigrants” in the country (95).1 The construction of the immigrant other has been based solely on a binary opposition between Italians and immigrants, and the public discourse has clearly given in to “the progressive codification of a distinction among different types of foreigners, the gradual institutionalizing of a distinction between ‘foreigner’ and ‘immigrant,’ and the establishment of relations between these conceptual oppositions and the distinctions applicable to the Italian population” (97). According to Sciortino and Colombo, the negative shift in the perception of migrants spilled from the media into everyday language around 1989–1991, when migrants ceased to be defined by the terms “immigrants” or “foreign workers” employed to indicate someone who moved to Italy Chapter 14 256 either to live or to work, and instead were identified solely as extracomunitari ,2 a pejorative expression with a strong negative connotation used to indicate someone whose origin is outside the European community, and in the news is associated with criminality, as if being a migrant is synonymous with being a criminal.3 Two present-day surveys, one from the Italian Caritas dated October 2009, and one from Transatlantic Trends dated October 2010, clearly confirm and highlight this widespread belief in Italian public opinion: in the first study, six out of ten Italians were convinced immigration has a direct link with criminality, while in the second survey “there was a lack of distinction among Italians when asked about their perceptions of legal versus illegal immigrants; 56 per cent of Italians now believe that legal immigrants increase crime in society, the highest of all countries surveyed, and a 24 per cent increase from the 2009 survey” (Transatlantic Trends 2010). The statistics back up the generalized uneasiness Italians feel toward multiculturalism , to the point that the then-Italian Presidente del consiglio Mr. Silvio Berlusconi could irrationally affirm without consequences that Italy should not become, ever, a multi-ethnic society.4 Italian political discourse, fuelled by Mr. Berlusconi’s Party of Freedom and his good ally the Northern League, an overtly xenophobic and far-right political movement founded and directed by Umberto Bossi (the Minister of Reform at the time, whose name was stamped on the latest immigration law), has been propelled by a “a right-wing legislature that coldly moves forward, pressing for additional borders and frontiers, surveillances and controls” (Bouchard 2010, 116), making it extremely difficult even for regular migrants to work and live in Italy.5 The legal procedures of differentiation between regular immigrants and extracomunitari have been brilliantly defined by Yosefa Loshitzky as “screening strangers”: The idea of “screening” migrants, of differentiating between the “indigenous” population and desired and undesired migrants, is still influenced by popular and racist myths according to which immigrants bring disease and pollution to the body of the nation (and the continent) and therefore need to be screened and contained. The process of screening practiced by the “host” society (which very often is more hostile than hospitable) is to screen the “good immigrant” and expel the “bad” to the literal and metaphorical “dumping grounds” of “the rest” of the world. (2010, 2) Mediterranean Seafarings Elena Benelli 257 Italy has been engaged in this process on the political level; however, alternative discourses and narratives coming from literature, cinema, and the arts have started to challenge stereotypical images of migrants, removing them from the sensationalist press and resituating them in complex historical and cultural dimensions. Italian cinema, which has greatly contributed to the articulation of Italian national identity in the last century...