Notes and References
1.In an interview with the author of this paper, Buddhadeb Dasgupta reflected that
2.Ohmae, 1990, pp. 94, 96 as quoted in The Production of Culture: Cultures of Production (Ed.) Paul de Gay, Sage Publications, London, 1997, p. 49.
3.Marc Levinson, Its an MTV world, ibid, p-56
4.ibid, p. 57
5.ibid, p. 57
6.The Telegraph, Calcutta, 15 October 1998
7.Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger and Colin Sparks N?stor Garcia Canclini (eds.) Culture and Power: the state of research: Culture and Power ? a Media, Culture and Society reader, Sage Publications, London, 1992.
8.Gay (1990)
9.Mark Levinson in Gay (1990) pp. 63-64
10.In an interview with Richard Schchner with the author of this paper
Pattern is the soil of significance;
and it is surely one of the hazards
of emigration, and exile, and
extreme mobility, that one is
uprooted from that soil.
(Hoffman 1989: 278)
In December 1993, the Italian Centro Scalabrini, in South London, celebrated its 25th anniversary. The Centro Scalabrini, and Italian religious-cum-social club, is part of the Scalabrini congregation, an Italian missionary order founded in 1887 to minister mainly to Italian emigrants and their descendants around the world. Aside from the administration offices, the building houses the Italian Women’s Club, a club for retirees, a youth club, and the Church of the Redeemer (Chiesa del Redentore). The Scalabrinian fathers in London also edit the most widely read Italian newspaper in Britain: La Voce degli Italiani (LV hereafter).
The Centro’s anniversary was marked by a series of events spread out over a seven-day period. During this momentous week, the Centro re-assessed its role and re-asserted its ecumenical character. That year, the Chiesa del Redentore was also consecrated, and was completely renovated in view of the festivities in December. The inauguration of the new church coincided with an attempt to re-orient the meaning of the organisation as a whole, in order to adapt it to new social parameters that the ?fathers of emigrants? now have to contend with. This signalled a shift away from the idea of ?ethnic church? toward the ??migr? church?, in an attempt to solve the anxieties about the future of the Italian Catholic faith in London. As Padre Giandomenico Ziliotto stated on the final night of the celebrations, ?the future of the centro depends on its creative capacity to construct a community.?
In this particular context, the manufacturing of this new identity relates to the shaping of physical spaces into mirrors of who ?we? are. In light of the ongoing redefinition of the centre’s purpose, I shall explore the ways in which the Centro and, more specifically, the Church, embody the project of identity. What interests me here is how, in the process of turning physical buildings and spaces into cultural objects, ideas of collective identity are crystallised in particular images and narratives.
A former resident-priest of the Centro once dubbed it a ?habitual space?. But in order for a place to be recognised as a ?habitual space?, some kind of ?architecture of reassurance? (2) is required. That is that the material organisation of space is such that it will interpellate its users and call upon them to ?feel at home? in the setting. This, at least, was the objective of the Scalabrinian priests when they had their church renovated in view of the 25th anniversary. In the words of the architect in charge of the renovations, the church’s interiors were restored in the Italian classical style ?to bind a Church loved by many of our community, to our history, to our cultural tradition? (Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 9; my emphasis). For the church leaders, this represents ?the best of our culture, that the community, and particularly the younger generations, could proudly identify with in front of the English. It is an accomplishment worthy of the fantasy, enterprise and generosity of the Italians who live in South London? (Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 9; my emphasis). The church is a space where these leaders express and hope to transmit the purpose and pleasure of their selves as Italians in London. It is objectified as a distinct marker and expression of the Italian presence in South London, standing at the junction of identity/difference, at once locating and projecting Italians in relation to English culture and in relation to themselves. England emerges as the ?significant other? which is located outside, yet which surrounds, thus includes, the church and Centro. Consistently represented as a hostile environment ? ?the great cold of the anonymous city? ? where Catholics are but a ?small minority? who must proudly display their cultural heritage ?in front of the English?, Britain is also coveted as the necessary, indeed unavoidable site of integration. There is a narrow clearing for the establishment of a ?habitual space?, or comfort zone, where the projected identity can be at once different and integrated. For the Scalabrinians, the challenge is to provide such a space that draws individuals outside of the privacy of family life and fosters a communal sense of belonging in Britain. The inauguration of the new church, in December 1993, provided the opportunity to lay down the new grounds of Italian ?migr? belonging in present-day Britain: an idealised form of belonging born out of, and liberated from, migration.
As I will show below, migration is conceived, by the Scalabrinians, as the basis of the distinct identity of ?Italians abroad?, and has been at the forefront of their own attempt to create a new identity for Italians, at a time where ?ethnicity? alone could no longer play that definitional role. In this respect, the Scalabrinians are very much living in their time, dialoguing with the increased currency of what John Urry calls ?mobile sociologies? (2000). As Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson write, ?[p]art and parcel of this conceptual shift [in definitions of identity] is a recognition that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home? (1998: 27). And indeed, the project of being ?at home in migranthood? that the Scalabrinians have put forward is a good example of this shift in definitions of identity. Uprootings, mobility, are widely conceived, in contemporary cultural and social theory, as the basis of new forms of identity formations (Rapport and Dawson 1998; Chambers 1994; Robertson et al. 1994; Urry 2000). Mobility has become the emblematic concept of life within the globalised world, understood in terms of flow, fluidity, and liquidity (Appadurai 1996; Castells 1996, 1998; Urry 2000; Bauman 2000). Movement, travel, are viewed as the ?reality? of the experience of daily life in the contemporary world, whilst fixity and rootedness are marginalised as experiences from which we withdraw from the world and take a look at it as it passes (us) by. Within this theoretical context, ?the migrant? and ?the exile? have become paradigmatic figures of postmodern life, whose ethnoscapes are increasingly documented. Yet, as I argue elsewhere, the privileging of mobility over attachment obscures the complex processes of ?regrounding? that are also constitutive of new forms of belonging (Fortier 2000). This chapter is premised on the assumption that, against the assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture, on the one hand, and the reification of uprootedness as the paradigmatic figure of postmodern life, on the other, cultural identity, in migration, is produced through both movement and attachment, at once deterritorialised and reterritorialised. The ensuing question, then, is: how is the regrounding secured, held into place? What kind of ?patterns? constitute the new ?soils of significance?? How does migranthood constitute the grounds for a new ?we?? What are the effects of positing migranthood as the shared terrain of belonging, on definitions of home, origins, identity and difference? What are the issues at stake in the project of creating a new identity for Italians in London (and more broadly, in England and Britain)?
First, the new migranthood proposed by the Scalabrinians is deeply connected to their mapping of Italian migranthood onto a global horizon. What interests me here is the ways in which the globe circulates within the Scalabrinian imagery as a figure that might stabilise the multi-local and dispersed Italian population. Informed by Franklin, Stacey and Lury (2000), I consider the globe as something which is put to work, which is mobilised to produce desires, identities, and so on. One of the questions at the basis of this chapter is to uncover how a global consciousness manifests itself and is articulated through ideas of difference and unity. I will do this by scrutinising the construction of the Centro Scalabrini as a space of localised global belonging. What kind of work do images of the globe do in identity narratives? What kind of social landscape does it map out? What kinds of ideas, desires, and anxieties are projected onto the global horizon?
One such anxiety is the transcendence of the status of foreigner. In the second section, I scrutinise the implications of elevating migration as a source of empowerment and of collective belonging against the threat of estrangement. More specifically, I discuss the reprocessing of biblical narratives in terms of migration, and the ensuing construction of a ?migrant ontology?, which essentialises and universalises migration as a feature of being (Christian) human. I contemplate the implications of this construction on definitions of migrant subjects. In the third section, I relocate this new ?migrant ontology? in the British context, where the Scalabrinians defines themselves as ?invisible immigrants?. What does invisibility mean, for Italians? How do the tropes of visibility and invisibility relate to the racialised structure of contemporary Britain? How do the anxieties of (in)visibility and the project of transcendence articulate and relate to the bodily experience of migration, of inhabiting a body out of place?
A global ethnoscape of belonging
In the Chiesa del Redentore, at the Centro Scalabrini of London, a stained glass window neatly captures the raison d’?tre of the religious order that runs this Italian Catholic mission based in Brixton, an area in South London. The image in the window depicts the founder of the congregation, John Baptist Scalabrini, encountering emigrants at the Milan train station in 1887. This incident is said to be at the origin of the foundation of this missionary order, which caters to Italian (and other) emigrants world-wide. The railway tracks trace a central line in the scene, drawing our gaze towards a globe that covers the opening of a tunnel. The tracks and the globe meet at the centre of the image, symbolically linking Italy with the world, and the present with the unknown future. In the foreground, stands Scalabrini, and, slightly behind him, two ?pioneers? (sic) (3) of the London Mission ? P. Walter Sacchetti, founder of the Centro, and P. Silvano Bartapelle. In the background, on the platform, stand two figures, a man and a woman, their luggage on the floor, looking towards the globe, their back turned against us.
In this pictorial rendition of the foundational myth of the London mission, temporal and geographical differences are fused within a gesture that marks an initiating moment that extends into the present. The anachronism of joining Father Scalabrini with two ?founding fathers? of the Brixton Centro (established in 1968) breaks down the temporal distance and emphasises the continuity of the congregation’s ?mission?. At the same time, the location of this event in the past is effectively interrupted by the central figure of the railway track.
In Italian immigrant historicity, the railway is a symbol that bridges distinct but overlapping timespaces constitutive of an Italian ??migr? identity: here/there; now/then; present/future; Italy/elsewhere. In his account of Calabrian immigrants living in Bedford, Renato Cavallaro suggests that the railway between the home and the workplace acts as a hyphen that symbolically links Italy (home) and Bedford (workplace), the space of origins and the industrial space, tradition and modernity (Cavallaro 1981: 93). The railway-as-hyphen runs on the border zone of sameness and difference, of identity and change. Moreover, in spite of its absence, the expected train speaks volumes of movement across and within space. In this representation of the Scalabrini mission, the train station symbolically represents a zone between Italy and abroad, a borderzone, the poles of which are linked by the tracks. It follows that the identity of the travellers standing on the platform is already shaped by movement and difference, which are located in the ?elsewhere? awaiting them somewhere on the globe. Even before they have left the platform, they are already ?emigrati?.
Scalabrini’s epiphanic experience at the Milan train station is the subject of numerous written and pictorial renditions that circulate within the Scalabrini order. One such rendition is found in a stained glass window of the Chapel of the congregation’s see in Rome. Like in the window from the London church, this one also portrays travellers waiting for a train, and the railway tracks figure prominently in the image. Yet a distinctive feature of this representation, is the presence of the Holy Family among the passengers, in a re-construction of the biblical narrative of the flight to Egypt as a form of migration (see below).
But the point I want to consider at this stage is the use of the globe in the window in London. As one of the most recent versions of the congregation’s founding myth ? if not the most recent ? the inclusion of the globe suggests a shift in the way that the London Scalabrinians position themselves and the ?community? in relation to the world. The use of the icon of the globe is suggestive of the transnational project of identity that London-based Scalabrinians promoted, especially in the years 1992-1996 (Fortier 2000: chapter 3). The image of the globe carries universalist claims of a borderless world which is, here, literally at the travellers’ footsteps. At the same time, this image unequivocally places Italy as the centre from which the world is contemplated.
In the commemorative booklet produced for the new church’s inauguration, Scalabrinian priest Umberto Marin revisits the fa?ade of the building and gives it a new ‘global’ meaning:
Residing in a nation where Catholics are a small minority, and with ecumenical sensibility, we thought to dedicate [the church] to the Redeemer under whom all, at least all Christians, may and must find themselves, thus cancelling the notion of foreigner. On the fa?ade, alas rather modest, is a mosaic of Jesus-Christ Pantokrator who holds the globe in one hand, symbolising Christian universalism which is a fundamental instance of the migrant people. (Umberto Marin in Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 6; italics original)
The Christian symbol of universalism, the globe, is explicitly picked out as a space where undifferentiated Christian ?migrant people? meet. This move ostensibly de-ethnicises the church’s identity, by suggesting the relativity of religious beliefs and insinuating a model in which particular forms of belief are less significant than the acknowledgement that ?we? belong to the same Christian family. In other words, claims to accept religious relativity are based firmly within highly universalised and globalised frameworks. Cancelling the foreigner condition, here, operates through the creation of a common grounds for Christians in Britain. Marin is stating that Catholics are not a minority, not foreigners, and do have equal status to Britons by virtue of their shared Christianity. At the same time, he is asserting a specific migrant identity that is distinct to that of non-migrants. This move ostensibly de-ethnicises the church’s identity, yet as I argue below, Scalabrinians are at once de-ethnicising and re-ethnicising the church’s identity (and the community they seek to create) within a wider global, rather than local, context. What strikes me here, is not so much the shift about the grounds of identity (which I address later), but the shift in the spatial horizon within which this question of ?identity? is cast.
Scalabrinians have used the globe in other instances as well. In the context of a debate over new voting rights for ?Italians abroad? in 1993 (Fortier 1998; 2000), the London Scalabrinians introduced the Simbolo degli Italiani all’Estero (SIE) in the pages of their newspaper, La Voce degli Italiani. According to Gaetano Parolin (former editor of La Voce), the SIE was the first stage in a longer term project which would consist of creating a more united movement of Italians living in Europe.
The logo represents a globe that is crossed lengthways by a pole, planted in the American continent, bearing the Italian flag, the three panels of which are parted, revealing parts of the globe between them. Insofar as the flag symbolises the nation state, this image suggests both unity and parting as a result of the dispersal of Italians around the world. The SIE is the symbolic representation of what is also coined the ?Other Italy? (l’Altra Italia), ?who lives far away? (LV 896, October 1993: 3). Both these labels suggest the preservation of the original fatherland, Italy, as a fixed geopolitical entity: its borders are preserved by locating the Italian diaspora all’estero or within another Italy.