Exclusionary intimacies: Racialized language in Veneto, Northern Italy

Abstract

While Italy has been a country of emigrants, since the 1970s, it has become a receiver of migrants. These recent, reverse direction migratory flows have triggered strong reactions, such as nativist discourses about national culture and identity and the aggressive anti-immigration politics of the Lega Nord (‘Northern League’). This article examines how racialized language in the Northern Italian region of Veneto is at times performed in ways that totally or partially exclude certain migrant groups, while at the same time creating intimate spaces of inclusion for Italians. By codeswitching from Standard Italian to Venetan, speech participants address audiences who are presumed to “share” this code, but when the topics of their conversations are migrants, such shifts can also enact exclusionary stances vis-a-vis the latter. This article demonstrates that familiar analytic dichotomies such as exclusion/inclusion and insider/outsider are inadequate, and it proposes more processual and gradient approaches to participation.