Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Abstract

What do we care? We worked so hardto affirm our italianitàand so now let's erect a monument to Dante!1—Achille Almerini, “La colonia di Dante”The streaming series Zero broke new ground for global media by featuring a predominately Black cast depicting children of immigrants living in urban Italy. The show takes place in a fictional Milan neighborhood named Barrio on the city's outskirts, inhabited primarily by migrant and other working-class Italian-born families. The socially conscious superhero program with a romantic storyline begins with a voice-over by the main protagonist, Omar (Randi 2021). The son of Senegalese parents, Omar narrates, as he bicycles through the streets as a pizza delivery man, that he feels he is an “invisible man” whom no one notices, suggesting rather obvious links to Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man and the predicaments of African Americans in the mid-twentieth century. But his sensation of being imperceptible and obscured is not a mere personal condition but one, as Omar states, that is experienced by others where he lives: “Sono uno come tanti, invisibile come i quartieri dove abitiamo” (I am like the others, invisible like the neighborhoods where we live). He concludes, observing that it is local monuments that create a unique sense of place: “L'unica cosa che li distingue sono solo i monumenti. Al Barrio abbiamo il Monumento del Migrante. Appropriato” (The only thing that distinguishes them are the monuments. In Barrio we have the Migrant Monument. Appropriate; Randi 2021).The viewer briefly sees the monument as the camera moves as if from Omar's bicycling point of view. Subsequent shots of the statue show it more clearly, a television prop made to look like cast bronze. The sculpture, situated in a piazzetta, portrays a standing mustachioed man with a somewhat forlorn expression; he wears a fedora and carries a suitcase in his right hand. The figure, poised on a rectangular pedestal surrounded by abstracted rock-like shapes, is in turn ensconced on a circular base. This crafted icon of transience is the hub around which the show's main characters congregate as it provides them with a communal anchor that symbolically grounds them to the neighborhood.The emigrant monument portrayed in Zero is reminiscent of the various monumenti degli emigranti (emigrant monuments) found in numerous towns but rarely in urban centers throughout Italy. These public tributes to those who left to seek their fortune are sponsored and commissioned by Italians abroad and/or towns’ pro loco (grassroots organizations; Baldassar 2006, 54–59). These material commentaries on global mobilities have mostly been erected in the decades following the increase of immigrants arriving in Italy, often from outside of (western) Europe. Like the statue seen in Zero, these emigrant monuments often depict a single man with a suitcase looking into the horizon, as found, for example, in Altino (Chieti province, Abruzzo) or Calitri (Avellino province, Campania), and are identified with textual inscriptions in the singular “L'emigrante.” In other commemorative spaces, as in Vasto (Chieti province, Abruzzo), a male and female couple with a child or two are the representations of the town's citizens abroad. Inscriptions may list the local and emigrant sponsors, a poem or dedication, and/or the cities and countries where migrants have gone. These spaces are on occasion affecting reference points for summer feste del emigrante for returning emigrants or those visiting their ancestors’ hometowns (Baldassar 2006, 55–56). All in all, these monuments are sites of recognition of a community of people who have, to varying degrees, achieved a level of economic stability to organize and contribute financially and culturally to their symbolic representation of home.3 The convergence of different migrant trajectories implicitly and explicitly alluded to by the television monument visually indicates the complicated history of transnational movement of the modern Italian state.Current events in various parts of the world concerning monuments also make themselves felt inadvertently in Zero. In the second episode, the migrant monument is decapitated, its head stolen by unknown assailants. The viewer soon learns that this and other acts of vandalism are part of a larger campaign tied to outside attempts to gentrify the working-class, immigrant area. The act also helps illustrate the quotidian discrimination the characters experience as Black Italians in a racist Italy, made especially clear when an undercover police officer reveals that he is happy the statue was damaged because “c’è sempre stato sul culo quell'immigrante di merda” (that shitty immigrant was always a pain in my ass), suggesting the synecdochal connection between the statue and the actual migrants living in Milan (Hossameldin 2021).But this dramatic turn echoes events in 2020, when in the aftermath of the police murder of African American George Floyd in Minneapolis, people in numerous countries vandalized and tore down statues as part of iconoclastic decolonization actions targeting public statuary and commemorative spaces deemed representative of racist and oppressive regimes. The beheading in Zero reminds us of the one that occurred in 2020 in Boston of a Christopher Columbus statue—donated in 1979 by Italian Americans to the city—on behalf of Indigenous Peoples. Similarly, in Milan, a statue of Indro Montanelli, a journalist who had volunteered for the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and admitted to having purchased a twelve-year-old Eritrean girl as his “wife” during the war, was doused in red paint and spray-painted with the words “razzista stupratore” (racist rapist). These collective acts of iconoclasm are part of a worldwide phenomenon questioning and challenging the role of public monuments to individuals and events once thought to be worthy of approbation and emulation.This special issue of the Italian American Review is concerned with the wide and complex history of monuments and memorials and their relationships to Italian mobilities broadly understood. We see this edited collection of essays as the first foray into a targeted engagement around Italian migration issues and monuments. This dedicated issue—and indeed our introduction to it—is not pushing toward a comprehensive review of examples but rather offering a wide-ranging reflection on how the consideration of these two topics jointly might suggest different questions, fresh approaches, and new understandings to commemorative spaces connected with migrating peoples. What do monuments and memorials reveal about Italian migration histories, cultural power, and inclusion/exclusion within any one dominant institution? What do they suggest about the role of assimilation and the constructions of identity? And what do the presences and absences of certain commemorated individuals and/or events imply about public proclamations of italianità (Italianness)? Italy's complex and diverse migration histories and the fundamental involvement of Italian and Italian diasporic craftspeople and communities in the creation of commemorative spaces on multiple continents offer an excellent opportunity to decenter monument studies from a national focus to a more transnational perspective.One of the underlying and recurring themes throughout the examination of Italian migrations and monuments is the simple fact that migrants of various stripes arrive at a place where others already reside. The emerging relationships between inhabitants and newcomers are invariably fraught. Such sites of encounter trigger, to one degree or another, confusion and fear, discrimination and othering, and acts of subtle and overt violence. These zones of relocation also offer opportunities for empathy, creativity, transformation, renewal, reinterpretation, and love. At times, commemorations in the physical forms of monuments and memorials are ways migrants negotiate their place in a new land, a land that is often troubled by their very presence. Said material culture allows us to mark fault lines and negotiated settlements of identity and belonging; as such these locales are, as Teresa Fiore might describe them, both “pre-occupied” (previously inhabited) and “preoccupied” (with concern) spaces (2017, 12–13). Expressive culture in the form of public statuary and markers “because of its simultaneous powers of documentation, evocation, and imagination at the crossroads of the local, the national, and the transnational” allows “for a remapping of Italian culture and identity which challenges fixed forms of belonging” (14).The heightened interest in these interconnected topics is evident in the overwhelming response we received to our 2020 call for papers. Forty abstracts were submitted proposing topics spanning Africa, Europe, North America, and South America, with the great majority involving the United States. We requested ten articles, which went through review first by the two of us as guest editors and then by two outside, anonymous peer reviewers. The final four articles chosen involve public statues and commemorative markers made from 1904 to 2007 in Argentina, Egypt, and the United States. They are in-depth inquiries into the negotiations around the political and aesthetic interpretations of historical figures and events, as well as the monuments themselves as cultural artifacts on the landscape. Collectively, the four articles reveal considerations about planning, creation, installation, performance, and the (re)imagination of public memorials and are ultimately interested in the ways in which Italian migrations, broadly defined, stake a claim to public consciousness through civic discourse and physical objects both big and small. The essays in this volume follow and expand on an approach already existing in Italian diaspora studies that uses, as Loretta Baldassar has described in her work on Italian Australian relations to monuments, “local history, resources and ideas of local leadership in an effort to understand the social and political flux that produced them” (2006, 45). The authors here are mindful of the global influences on what are sometimes multiple localized stories.In this introductory essay, we position our approach within larger academic currents as well as highlight arguments concerning commemorative spaces and transnational and transcultural Italian migrations. By mapping popular notions and scholarly trajectories on monuments and memorials, we discuss what an understanding of migration brings to such studies, especially with regard to Italian mobilities. We also consider a number of factors specifically within Italian diasporic and transnational contexts: the role of migrant communities in relation to monuments, the problematics of building and dismantling monuments, Fascism's legacy, the role of politics and aesthetics in interpreting commemorative objects, and the suggestive possibilities for reimagining Italian diasporic monuments moving forward. We intend our comments here to highlight and give further context to the specific case studies and research inquiries of our four contributors and the careful work with which they entrusted us.Discussing public monuments and memorials in Italian migration contexts raises many uncomfortable topics, topics that push us to discuss political affiliations, ideological practices, economic motivations, and aesthetic values. Humanities and social-science scholars tend to favor research-based, analytical discourse grounded in historical context and self-conscious positionality. They look for and highlight a multiplicity of voices and experiences illustrated through differing forms of cultural expressivity. Their scholarship unearths historical and cultural factors that lay the groundwork for curriculum development, opinion pieces, policy-building, creative projects, and activist work. And yet it cannot be ignored that such scholarship—ours included—can seem to shore up what Friedrich Nietzsche referred to as human knowledge's “monstrous heaped-up substructure,” even as we like to think our critical discourse dismantles or redirects those institutional structures that keep certain dominant systems intact ([1873] 2019, 12).We thus propose to be bold in our approach to this challenging and uneasy topic, a point we spend time on here because we want readers to join us in unsettling and being unsettled from the outset. This essay and this collection as a whole are part of a broader spectrum of activism that we support from within and beyond Italian migration studies and Italian diasporic communities. We are invested in how our work, a scholarship of praxis, can engage and activate social change in our contemporary moment and encourage similar actions in the future.We recognize that academic discourse such as this one may appear quite removed from the very real, everyday, often violent ways that racism and exploitative acts continue to support large social and political inequities. Nevertheless, our analytical tools are useful in rethinking, reimagining, and ultimately shifting the worlds around us. We propose what Eve Tuck and Patrick K. Yang have referred to as an “ethic of incommensurability” (2012, 28), which asks us to move beyond only recognizing our own subjectivity or favoring diversity and instead to accept and prioritize spaces where our centered voices (i.e., academic, European-rooted, privileged in so many ways) do not shape the discourse. For Tuck and Yang, such a “decolonizing” move is uncomfortable because it “unsettle[s] innocence,” or as Morgan Johnson, expanding on Tuck and Yang, has explained: “As settler audiences, perhaps we can work to hold space for distinct cultural differences, even (or especially) when it means decentering and excluding ourselves from certain spaces or conversations. . . . [A]s [Tuck and Yang] point out, decolonization is and should be unsettling. Stepping back in this case is distinct from inaction and apathy; it is first and foremost about actively listening and responding to the expressed needs of Indigenous communities” (2021). While this collection is not explicitly about Indigenous communities, the impetus behind this unsettling discourse intrigues us as it speaks to some of the complexities we have encountered in our collaborative work, especially around Columbus monuments in the United States.4 In the Italian migration contexts we study, “decentering and excluding” requires offering critical space for reimagining the histories scholars have become comfortable retelling. This critical space with respect to the position of Italian migrations and power centers around three interrelated concepts: global mobilities, settlement, and racialized differentiations.Global mobilities refers firstly to the fact that Italy has seen a staggering number of its citizens—thirty million from 1876 to 2010 (Fiore 2017, 4)—leave their hometowns and migrate elsewhere. This diaspora, among the largest ever, has reached most of northern Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Australia; it has developed from historical and ongoing models of Italian mobility that have made border crossings of different kinds a defining characteristic of the nation-state of Italy as well as its associated cultures (e.g., Gabaccia 2000; Choate 2008; Ruberto and Sciorra 2017a, 2017b; Ballinger 2020). The phrase global mobilities also refers to a larger network of movement related to the Italian peninsula and connected to colonization, Fascism, the development of the European Union, and modern globalization. This element includes those who have arrived on Italy's soil as refugees or other displaced peoples as well as those who are part of the Black Mediterranean (e.g., Diop and Romeo 2012; Ben-Ghiat and Hom 2016; Hom 2019; Fogu, Hom, and Ruberto 2019; Proglio et al. 2021).Settlement references the idea that Italians who migrated to the Americas and Australia are part of a settler colonial system, even as historically they were not a privileged group (e.g., Crowder-Taraborelli 2004; Ricatti 2018; Gaggio 2020). To put it differently, even though Italian migrants at the turn of the last century in places like the United States were discriminated against and exploited, their presence and their labor were intertwined with the United States’ Manifest Destiny and Jim Crow infrastructure, an infrastructure that supported white supremacy and aided in the overall assimilation of Italian Americans into the central paradigms and privileges of whiteness. The notion of settlement also points to the ways that earlier emigrants were perceived by Italian politicians promoting the new nation's colonial expansion into Africa. Given Italy's weak colonial project due to limited capital in comparison with other European powers, Italian advocates for colonization saw expansion into and rule in Africa as “colonies of direct domination,” while also characterizing emigrants as “spontaneous colonies” as part of an informal empire of mercantile, political, and cultural influence on North and South American countries in particular (Choate 2008, 22–23). This agenda was greatly expanded under the ventennio, the twenty-year reign of Mussolini's Fascist imperialism, in which Italians were steered away from emigrating to the Americas and elsewhere and toward settler colonies in Africa (Locatelli 2016, 133–151; Ballinger 2020). For those Italians, the privileged positions in segregated and racialized colonial life “allowed them to establish a hierarchical and exploitive relationship with local people” (Locatelli 2016, 135).Racialized differentiation is a recognition of the complex way place and historical circumstances define and shape identity: from the North/South divide in Italy to the exploitation and victimization at the turn of the nineteenth century of Italian migrants to the United States to Italians aiding in the blanqueamiento (whitening) of the Argentinean population (as Heather Sottong discusses in her essay here), to Fascism's racial policies at home and in its African colonies, to racism against Black Italians in contemporary Italy (e.g., Guglielmo and Salerno 2003; Giuliani and Lombardi-Diop 2013; Welch 2016; Jackson 2020). Awareness of the historical and contemporary ways Italians, broadly defined, have been positioned within various countries’ racialized hierarchies of oppression are particularly relevant in our times given the rise of virulent xenophobia, increased nationalism, border restrictions, and racist violence all emerging as part of public rhetoric, individual acts, and government policies.These three concepts—global migrations, settlement, and racialized differentiation—form a foundation for our study of the specific connections between Italy, migrations, and monuments. In placing migration at the core, if not the boundaries of the scholarship on monuments, we here consider multiple points of intersection through which one might approach the Italy-migration-monument trifecta, toggling between them in our effort to understand better the cultural and political power expressed by the seeming permanence of bronze and marble.During the nineteenth century and for the better part of the twentieth century, monuments, stemming from neoclassical and older European examples, were understood to be the embodiment of uncontested ideals of bourgeois society. Large-scale war memorials to those who died in battle sought not only to commemorate the dead in the name of sacrifice and honor but also to reconfigure and reanimate symbols of national identity and fidelity. The gargantuan and raised figurative statues of nationally sanctioned heroes—invariably male, white, and elite—were regarded as paragons of civic virtue worthy of adulation and emulation. In Europe and the Americas, in particular, the models for these commemorative structures borrowed from the aesthetic languages of antiquity that were predicated on notions of artistry, the body, the heroic, and ultimately the state. The human form—men in uniform, women as allegory—were based on and expanded classic models (Savage 2018, 8–9), material perceptions of antiquity that sought to link the capitalist nation-state with the grandeur and longevity of a democratic Greece and an imperial Rome.We define monuments and memorials in this issue broadly, relying on Sabine Marschall's perspective when she defines them as “a wide range of material artefacts set up in public places” that include everything from “small plaques attached to buildings” to “architectural structures built as public monuments” where in each case the “intention of their creation and purpose of their existence is purely commemorative” (2020, 4). We extend her definition with our interest in a large range of commemorative landscapes involving signage, statuary, public art, memorials, and monuments as well as temporary and performative models of public commemoration.Importantly, monuments can be ephemeral, singular in moment, performative, or even quite intangible: Consider, for instance, the daily memorializing practices of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires or the annual chalking of victims’ names of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City. Both instances are visual, performative, and site-specific memorials, living monuments in a sense, which support a continual remembering as well as political embodiments for change. Memorials and monuments can also be quite small as with the Stolpersteine to Europe's Jewish victims of deportation to the Nazi concentration camps or the ceramic baldosas to the disappeared of the Argentinean dictatorship. All of the cases noted here suggest variable ways constructed and lived memorializations change landscapes, affect individuals, and have the power to reach far beyond any one recognizable moment or place.Contemporary exegesis of a monument's origins all too often becomes an exercise in mythologizing about history, intentions, and personalized sentiments. Regardless of the figures or events commemorated, said objects are also historical artifacts imbued with their own layering and resonance that contribute differing interpretations and treatment. Monuments materially embody the sensory experiences of those who formulated the impetus for their existence as well as those who funded, designed, built, and/or otherwise supported or contested them. Over the course of time, a monument's affecting presence is in constant flux as new generations pass before it with differing and shifting emotions and perspectives about the subject, its artistry, and its place on the landscape. A monument's materiality, with its sense of durability, prompts the viewer to contend with its looming existence and projected symbolism.Although a sense of intentionality unites various monuments, the ideological practices framing commemoration also are of profound interest. Monuments are interpreted sites not only of history but also memory and, as such, play a role in the lives of individuals and communities. One of the ways such memory work functions, as Andreas Huyssen has illustrated, is with respect to the “commodification and spectacularization” (2000, 29) that come about from public displays of commemoration. In addition, monuments and memorials are designed to mark a historical moment for the future, created ostensibly to fix time and “to defeat history,” as W. J. T. Mitchell describes (2014). They are generally understood to be permanent markers of irrevocable truths. These ubiquitous sites manifest a deeply mythologized past as well as the imagination as uncontested signs and purveyors of consensus. Once erected, these enormous structures commandeer public landscapes, shaping the very physicality of towns and cities.Interpretations of monuments and memorials have undergone a recognizably dramatic shift in the last half-century as the honored individuals and events, and the underlying assumptions about these public works, are reassessed and challenged in light of contemporary interpretative frameworks. Today, the monument from the past is understood as being situated in systems of power whereby a select few elites with access to political connections, financial resources, and cultural capital historically distilled and promoted hegemonic ideas as universal, be they notions of colonial settlement, militaristic patriotism, patriarchal inequities, and/or white supremacy (Marschall 2020, 4; Upton 2015, 15, 93; Savage 2018, ix–x). The monument's artistic economy of easily discernible imagery and text, so often involving a white male of violent, militaristic power (e.g., the equestrian general), helps to efface other depictions, narratives, and histories into “the silences of the memorial landscape” (Savage 2018, xiii). Monuments have become contested spaces, “representational battlegrounds” (Marschall 2020, 4) whereby ideas of memory, history, power, class, race, and gender are inspected and critiqued by scholars, artists, activists, and everyday people in unprecedented and novel ways. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, this scrutiny has involved a wide range of activities including town meetings, scholarly publications, foundation grants,5 public protests, forceful topplings, and state-sanctioned removals.The current global challenges around public memorializing and civic identity have emerged from several historical developments involving civil rights and anticolonial movements of Black and brown people, the monuments’ destruction and expulsion from public plazas in post-Communist countries (András 2010, 39–50), and the dominance of a cultural studies approach to history and culture with their critical investigations of the public sphere (e.g., Habermas, Lefebvre). This movement escalated in 2020 with Floyd's murder, which was, in turn, followed by an increased intensity of global Black Lives Matter protests, which took as one of its targets public statues and monuments to colonizers, slavers, Confederate traitors, and others involved in racist and genocidal practices. The very recent acts of defiance toward and resistance against public statuary are part of a larger historical narrative of resistance around commemoration. Yet various interrelated developments over the past half-century (e.g., Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC) have helped usher in a “democratization of monument building” (Upton 2015, 15) in which a new wave of public commemorations has emerged, expanding to include a diverse group of individuals, several understood historically as victims, and events (e.g., slavery, the Shoah), and doing so by relying less on classical stylistic elements.In keeping with this amplified scholarship, Marschall has suggested that juxtaposing monuments and migrations helps shift attention away from the former's decidedly bounded narratives of nationalism while amplifying transnational and diasporic memories and histories otherwise ignored in discussion of monuments. Such a realignment allows for “the recognition of hybridity, permeability of cultural boundaries, fluidity and border-crossing dynamics” (2020, 5). Italy provides a noteworthy cultural space from which to think about monuments and migration given, on the one hand, the historical and contemporary migration to and from the country from its inception in 1861 (and before) to the present day and, on the other hand, the significant movement outward of raw materials, completed sculptural works, renowned sculptors and skilled artisans, and an appreciated aesthetic concerning public art. In addition, Italian Fascism's predilection for classicism and monumentality adds a unique transnational component to commemorative spaces because of its global outreach to diasporic communities and its imperial enterprises in Africa and elsewhere (e.g., Cannistraro 1999; Fuller 2007; Aliano 2012; Savarino and Bertonha 2013). Building on the growing literature about and interest in the interconnected topics, we situate this special issue at the intersection of monument studies, memory studies, and Italian migration studies.The histories of public monuments reveal complex global networks of funding, materials, artisans, and other kinds of border crossings. Calling attention to these movements and interactions connected to such sites that first appear very place-specific is one of the goals of this special issue. Unpacking the role of Italian global migrations, settlement, and racialized differentiations within monument contexts helps reveal the instability of power and identity as well as the fluctuating political and cultural meanings of public memorializations.In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, countless Italian artisans, sculptors, and other skilled craftspeople (overwhelmingly men) contributed to a plethora of decorative, architectural, sepulchral, and monumental projects in various parts of the world, but especially in the Americas. These trained artists and artisans—casting in plaster and bronze and sculpting in granite and marble—worked in Italy on transnational commissions and abroad as migrant laborers. As the inheritors and maintainers of European sculptural traditions, they propagated ideals of the heroic, the triumphant, and the majestic rooted in antiquity and the classics while they supported the modern nation-building of their adopted countries. Understanding better their histories and the work they completed also helps illustrate the sometimes-invisible ways Italian labor was part of larger colonial settlement processes. These sculptors were collectively at the forefront of promoting a globally recognized cosmopolitan principle of a civiltà italiana, an elite cultural concept first developed in the Renaissance that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries new and developing nations found culturally valuable and were interested in importing and acquiring (Gabaccia 2000, 22).The i