Dalla Vostra Parte: populist irony, illiberal ventriloquism, and the rise of the Non Buono refugee in contemporary Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Alongside the highly mediatized life of recent Italian politics, populism as a mode of social expression has permeated Italian public discourse since the mid-1990s. This trend has become even more apparent in the aftermath of the so-called Mediterranean refugee crisis in the 2010s. Since then, the Italian popular classes’ increasing engagement with online social media has contributed to the electoral success of anti-immigration leaders and Facebook celebrities like Lega Nord party secretary Matteo Salvini. Simultaneously, controversial black Italian YouTubers like the artist Bello FiGo have also found commercial success, due to their own populist and ironic engagement with Italian immigration policies. This article explores how ideologically divergent media operators such as Salvini and Bello FiGo co-participate in ironic, future-oriented media performances of anti-refugee discourses that make possible different modes of displaced alterity. As we will demonstrate ethnographically, these performances allow for forms of cultural intimacy between these media operators and their publics by means of populist irony, while engendering opposite (though structurally similar) dynamics of illiberal ventriloquism. In doing so, these controversial, future-oriented performances tend to subvert institutionalized liberal narratives of crisis and systemic displacement and put into question Italian immigration policies.