Papers by Pamela Ballinger
Italian Culture, 2024
This essay complicates pervasive claims of amnesia about Italy’s fascist and colonial pasts by ex... more This essay complicates pervasive claims of amnesia about Italy’s fascist and colonial pasts by examining the “migrated archives” produced by decolonization in tandem with emerging migrant archives designed to give voice to those experiences often excluded from state or other official archives. Archives, understood here in the broadest sense, thus serve as critical sites in which to investigate processes of multidimensional and multidirectional remembering, particularly those associated with Italy’s many, entangled migrations. The analysis asks: how might a notion of “multidirectional diasporas” inform imaginings by scholars and activists alike of new forms of solidarity and more inclusive forms of citizenship? While taking cues from Michael Rothberg’s writings on the multidirectionality of the Holocaust, transatlantic slavery, and colonialism as “singular yet relational histories,” the discussion also draws upon Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz’s productive concept of memory citizenship to describe a form of belonging that draws upon what they refer to as migrant archives of remembrance. Memory citizenship offers a critical tool for remapping Italy’s migrant (and migration) archives in ways that take account of a diversity of diasporic histories, most notably those being recuperated by scholars of the Black Mediterranean.
Care in a Time of Humanitarianism: Stories of Refuge, Aid and Repair in the Global South, 2024
This article takes as its starting point conceptual and definitional dilemmas over how to categor... more This article takes as its starting point conceptual and definitional dilemmas over how to categorize Italian nationals who migrated out of the diverse territories lost with fascism’s defeat. Tracking the experiences of several groups of migrants to Italy in the early postwar period, the
analysis contends that moving to Italy entailed an active process of patriation or home-making rather than simple repatriation or a simple “return” to the homeland. Although “Italian” migrants from former colonies experienced dislocation, their integration in the Italian peninsula became a
critical means to sharpen their difference from colonial subjects who were not welcomed “home.” This, in turn, sharpened distinctions between the Global North and South.
Contemporanea, 2024
This article explores both the histories of citizenship in Italy and scholarly understandings of ... more This article explores both the histories of citizenship in Italy and scholarly understandings of that regime. From almost the creation of a unified Italy, citizenship has worked to facilitate the maintenance of ties by Italians abroad while simultaneously making naturalization by individuals with no claim to Italian descent a slow and difficult process. Whereas initial analyses of Italian citizenship often focused on its protective and inclusionary aspects, the last two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in the exclusions entailed by Italy’s jus sanguinis regime. Indeed, studies of Italian citizenship have shifted from an emphasis on citizenship as a normative and legal category to its lived practice, particularly in the context of racialization and colonialism/post-colonialism. The analysis starts from the premise that citizenship has been not only «good to think with» but politically urgent to think with – for scholars, state officials seeking to forge an Italian nation-state, and contemporary activists challenging the exclusionary principle of jus sanguinis. The concluding section highlights productive new directions for citizenship studies, focusing on understandings of Italian citizenship as a diasporic practice that, through recognition of Italy’s multidirectional diasporas, open up the meanings and boundaries of Italianness.
Contemporary European History, 2024
This article explores the Homeless European Land Program, an experiment in resettling foreign ref... more This article explores the Homeless European Land Program, an experiment in resettling foreign refugees in post-Second World War Sardinia undertaken by two idealistic Americans with the support of the Brethren Service Committee and the fledgling UNHCR. Focusing on individuals rejected for immigration, the initiative aimed to integrate these ‘hard core’ refugees by rendering them agents of development of a ‘backwards’ region of the Italian South and to overcome Italian reluctance to serve as a country of permanent resettlement for the displaced. The history of this project reveals the contradictory impulses of early Cold War refugee relief and humanitarianism: the competition between intergovernmental and voluntary agencies, of secular and spiritual enterprises, and of images of refugees as dependent and difficult to settle and yet capable of self-sufficiency. Many of the ideas piloted in Sardinia, notably the linking of self-sufficiency and development, later became prominent in the UNHCR's work in the Global South.
Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2023
The rich set of articles collected here and edited by Emma Bond and Stavroula Pipyrou raise provo... more The rich set of articles collected here and edited by Emma Bond and Stavroula Pipyrou raise provocative questions about post-displacement generally and post-displacement futures in Italy specifically. In proposing the concept of post-displacement, Bond and Pipyrou highlight the deep and entangled histories of migration and colonialism that inform present day experiences of and contests over migration in Italy. At the same time, in their use of the prefix 'post', they shift attention to future oriented visions, hopes, potentialities, and anxieties. In particular, they focus on 'the gaps, intervals, pauses and delays between hope and disillusionment that characterize displacement, because it is in this gap that speculation resides'. This move underscores the contingencies of historical processes and disrupts easy linear narratives, despite the ways that the 'post' tag conventionally stands for what comes after in a chronological sequence. In a now distant 1992, Anne McClintock cautioned scholars about the 'almost ritualistic ubiquity of "post" words in current culture', noting how the 'term post-colonial. .. is haunted by the very figure of linear "development" that it sets out to dismantle' (McClintock 1995, 10). As the articles reveal, the editors and authors reference multiple meanings and registers of 'post' displacement. To be sure, in some instances post here does signal something that follows another state or period, as with Giuliana Sanò and Francesco Zanotelli's exploration of migrant experiences after their reception within the bureaucratic machinery of the Italian/E.U. mobility regimes. Yet Sanò and Zanotelli do not restrict their meaning to mere posteriority, exploring the multiple temporalities and spatialities (or im-mobilities, as opposed to mere immobilities) that characterize migrants' experiences beyond institutional reception centres. This conjoins notions of after and beyond, time and space, as well as North and South, to reread the experiences of migrants like the young Malian man Djon interviewed by Sanò. Whereas in the eyes of anti-immigrant populists Djon might appear to be 'doing nothing' to improve his living conditions and opportunities, Sanò and Zanotelli consider Djon's non-action as 'a tactic. .. .. . the capability of Djon to practice his future while standing still'. This reminds us that waiting does not
Austrian History Yearbook, 2023
This short piece comments on the articles presented in the forum on Adriatic tourism and their an... more This short piece comments on the articles presented in the forum on Adriatic tourism and their analyses of competing historical claims to "our Adriatic." The comment focuses on questions raised about ownership of the sea and the Adriatic's borders of belonging. While sovereignty over areas of the Adriatic has proven an enduring diplomatic issue in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the forum authors instead consider claims by different types of actors: tourists (particularly Czech tourists who claimed a special relationship between Czechs and their South Slav "brothers"); investors in hotels and related infrastructure; socialist Yugoslav tourism planners; and environmentalists concerned with issues of pollution. In tracing out tensions in the agendas of hosts and visitors, as well as planners and scientists, the forum's essays measure and map the socio-ecological metabolism of the modern eastern Adriatic.
Re-Imagining the Balkans: How to Think and Teach a Region, 2023
No Neighbors’ Land in Postwar Europe: Vanishing Others, 2023
Part of "WHY EUROPE, WHICH EUROPE?
A Debate on Contemporary European History as a Field of Resea... more Part of "WHY EUROPE, WHICH EUROPE?
A Debate on Contemporary European History as a Field of Research"
The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination, 2020
Scholars have typically characterized Italy’s decolonization as abrupt and leaving relatively lit... more Scholars have typically characterized Italy’s decolonization as abrupt and leaving relatively little trace in the peninsula either at the time or subsequently. This chapter challenges such interpretations by demonstrating the deeply felt impacts of repatriation by Italian settlers to the metropole at the time of events and the continued, if selective, visibility of these experiences in public debates during subsequent decades. In particular, the analysis examines films and novels, arenas for which most scholars posit an explicit silence about imperial defeat and repatriation that instead become displaced onto other themes. Re-reading such cultural artefacts raises the possibility of what Michael Rothberg has deemed the work of multidirectional and cross-referencing memories. At the same time, however, the analysis acknowledges the limited success of repatriated settlers in producing collective narratives of their experience, with separate circuits of memory and commemoration that continue to remain set apart from broader popular culture accounts of decolonization.
Published in Social Anthropology (2016), pages 1-25.
Full list of contributors to forum: Sarah Green, Chris Gregory, Madeleine Reeves, Jane K. Cowan, ... more Full list of contributors to forum: Sarah Green, Chris Gregory, Madeleine Reeves, Jane K. Cowan, Olga Demetriou, Insa Koch, Michael Carrithers, Ruben Andersson, Andre Gingrich, Sharon Macdonald, Salih Can Açiksöz, Umut Yildirim, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Cris Shore, Douglas R. Holmes, Michael Herzfeld, Marilyn Strathern, Casper Bruun Jensen, Keir Martin, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgos Poulimenakos, Stef Jansen, Čarna Brkovič, Thomas M. Wilson, Niko Besnier, Daniel Guinness, Mark Hann, Pamela Ballinger and Dace Dzenovska
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Papers by Pamela Ballinger
analysis contends that moving to Italy entailed an active process of patriation or home-making rather than simple repatriation or a simple “return” to the homeland. Although “Italian” migrants from former colonies experienced dislocation, their integration in the Italian peninsula became a
critical means to sharpen their difference from colonial subjects who were not welcomed “home.” This, in turn, sharpened distinctions between the Global North and South.
A Debate on Contemporary European History as a Field of Research"
analysis contends that moving to Italy entailed an active process of patriation or home-making rather than simple repatriation or a simple “return” to the homeland. Although “Italian” migrants from former colonies experienced dislocation, their integration in the Italian peninsula became a
critical means to sharpen their difference from colonial subjects who were not welcomed “home.” This, in turn, sharpened distinctions between the Global North and South.
A Debate on Contemporary European History as a Field of Research"