A Scene of Lynching. or of the Coloniality of Italian Present.

In Italy, both high culture and "low," "popular," and "mass" culture retain enduring “figures of race” used to identify and define an alleged Italian 'difference' and superiority, establishing hierarchies of race and whiteness that severely impact people's lives. These figures are made of symbolic materials resurface today that give body to narratives that are more or less openly racist which are stored in Italian "colonial archive" (Ann Laura Stoler) and the "national archive of race" (Gloria Wekker). These archives have been constructed over centuries through what Del Boca calls “internal colonialism” and the Italian colonial enterprise, alongside colonial and racist meanings circulating in Europe through flows of ideas, images, and practices established at the four corners of empires. These materials, although discursive, possess the power, through institutional and social practices, to render vulnerable and expose to violence and death those who are identified as not belonging to the imagined national community.

To better illustrate how colonial and racial archives are reactivated today in a post-colonial context, my essay focuses on a critical reading of the latest tragic event in this long (and certainly partial) list: the murder of Alika Ogorchukwu, a 39-year-old Nigerian street vendor, in Civitanova Marche on July 29, 2022. This act was perpetrated by Filippo Ferlazzo, a thirty-year-old worker of Salernitan origin. In the following pages, I will attempt to offer a nuanced reading of this event, on one hand through an analysis of the Italian media landscape concerning migrants and migrations, and on the other hand through an examination of the similarities—and substantial differences—between this event and the scene of lynching, a specific historical mode of racist reprisal. This "scene" is evoked by the specifics of the event as it unfolded and how it was immediately sensationalized in the media.