(De)Racializing Italianness. a Visual Essay on the Conflict about the Reform of the Citizenship Law 91/1992

My paper discusses the role played by the images in the reproduction of racial hierarchy and in its criticism. Visuality is part of the history of european capitalist modernity (Mirzoeff 2011) and its visual oppositions between “us” and “them” still have dramatic material effects, in Italy too. Visuality classifies and divides social groups, then legitimates those divisions through an “aesthetics of status quo” (Fanon 1961). I will show the research example of the long campaign against and in favour of the reform of the Italian citizenship law 91/1992, focusing on the “right to look” (as a visual claim to a political subjectivity) of children of migrants (the so called “second generation”) and of young people self-defined as “Afro-Italians” and “Italians without Citizenship”.

A visual essay will be screened in order to facilitate a debate on the reproduction of white supremacy in the neo-fascist propaganda and on the celebration of Black Italianness in the alternative public sphere created by social media (Nakamura 2007).