Abstract

Through references to four anecdotes, this article approaches the complex and often neglected topic of the relationship between Sicilian migrants in Australia and Aborigines. It does so not in search of clear evidences that may structure a well-defined historical narrative, but rather looking for moments of truth that may open up new dialogues, narratives, research. Within embodied otherness, it is the uncanny feeling towards the racialised other that most effectively make us understand the complex relationship Italian migrants have had with the (un)familiar. The concept of the uncanny helps us understand that the racism of many Italian migrants towards Aboriginal people in Australia has not been resulting from a frightening encounter with the other, with the unfamiliar, with the difference. It has rather been the result of the return of what has been repressed from historical memory, namely the colonial character of Italian unification, Italians’ own racist and colonial history, the colonial nature of many Italian migrants’ settlement abroad, and the identification of southern Italians as the colonised, racialised others, in Italy and abroad. Through positive examples of emotional, intimate and political engagement between Sicilians and Aborigines, this article also consider people’s agency in moving within and challenging the constraining, intricate pervasiveness of the racial and colonial dictate in contemporary Australian society.

Highlights

  • Napoleone Colajanni, Per la razza maledetta[1 ] The violence of a racialised society falls most enduringly on the details of life: where you can sit, or not; how you can live, or not; what you can learn, or not; who you can love, or not

  • After reading more than seven hundred letters written by Italian migrants in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, I was struck by the limited number of references to Aboriginal people.[5]

  • I have suggested elsewhere that the silence about relationships between Aborigines and Italian migrants should not be read as evidence of a sort of ethnic or racial vacuum in which Italian migrants settled separate from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

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Summary

Introduction

Napoleone Colajanni, Per la razza maledetta[1 ] The violence of a racialised society falls most enduringly on the details of life: where you can sit, or not; how you can live, or not; what you can learn, or not; who you can love, or not.

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Conclusion

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