The Power of the Bowels: A Visceral Afro-Pentecostal Critique of Italian Afrophobia

Abstract

This chapter examines the gut politics of African Pentecostal migrants in Italy. By engaging metaphors of incorporation as (in)digestion and by taking seriously bodily matters, the chapter particularly focuses on African Pentecostals’ visceral critique of Italian Afrophobia. From racial slurs to brutal assaults and assassinations, the incorporation of Africans in Italian society has been more like a violent ingurgitation of surplus population meant to satisfy the neoliberal hunger for racialized and forcibly domesticated bodies. This study shows how African Pentecostals’ gut and bowels become critical sites of ethical judgment and rejection of such incorporation. Through their prayer African Pentecostals collapse the biological, the social, and the religious order they inhabit and materialize into bodily intensities and enteric reactions their rejection of violence and racism.