Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T20:21:45.170Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Community, Belonging and Intimate Ethnicity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Anne-Marie Fortier
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper analyses the role of the Centro Scalabrini in London in defining a sense of belonging and identification for Italians in Britain. The essay broadens the conventional focus on how community organizations contribute to constructing an ‘imagined community’ for minority or migrant populations by suggesting that organizations are used as cultural objects and collective props for enacting and experiencing collective affective belonging abroad. The paper examines the processes through which community spaces themselves are constructed as scenes of ethnicity, for example, in the visual and narrative accounts of events found in the community press. However, rather than arguing that ethnic organizations simply reproduce an identity and culture, it is argued that the community centre offers intimations of ethnicity, as well as ‘intimate ethnicity’, for those who use it and move through it. As a locale in which Italians and other migrants can find themselves again (ritrovarsi), what the centre offers is not the continuity or reproduction of the old world; it is the production of a portable Italianness through traces that are filled with sensuality, with the bodily experience of contact.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , February 2006 , pp. 63 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agamben, G. (1993) The Coming Community , trans. Hardt, M., University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.Google Scholar
Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Postcoloniality , Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Ahmed, S. & Fortier, A.-M. (2003) ‘Re-imagined communities’, International Journal of Cultural Studies , Vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 251–259.Google Scholar
Amin, A. (2002) ‘Ethnicity and the multicultural city: living with diversity’, Environment and Planning A , Vol. 34, pp. 959–980.Google Scholar
Berezin, M. (2002) ‘Secure states: towards a political sociology of emotions’, in Emotions and Sociology , ed. Barbalet, J., Blackwell, Oxford.Google Scholar
Berlant, L. (2000) ‘Intimacy: a special issue’, in Intimacy , ed. Berlant, L., University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Boym, S. (2000) ‘On diasporic intimacy: Ilya Kabakov's installations and immigrant homes’, in Intimacy , ed. Berlant, L., Chicago University Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities , Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Brown, M. E. (1996) The Scalabrinians in North America , Center for Migration Studies, New York.Google Scholar
Busia, A. P. A. (1998) ‘Re:locations—rethinking Britain from Accra, New York, and the map room of the British Museum’, in Multicultural States. Rethinking Difference and Identity , ed. Bennett, D., Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ , Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Centro Scalabrini Di Londra (1993) Centro Scalabrini di Londra. 25 anni di servizio. Inaugurazione della rinnovata Chiesa del Redentore , Centro Scalabrini, London.Google Scholar
Colpi, T. (1991) The Italian Factor: The Italian Community in Great Britain , Mainstream, London.Google Scholar
Connerton, P. (1992) How Societies Remember , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980) Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie , Minuit, Paris.Google Scholar
Falk, P. (1994) The Consuming Body , Sage, London.Google Scholar
Fortier, A.-M. (2000) Migrant Belongings. Memory, Space, Identity , Berg, Oxford.Google Scholar
Fortier, A.-M. (2003) ‘Global migranthood, whiteness and the anxieties of (in)visibility’, in The Social Construction of Diversity: Recasting the Master Narrative of Industrial Nations , eds Harzig, C. & Juteau, D., Berghan Books, London.Google Scholar
Hage, G. (1997) ‘At home in the entrails of the west: multiculturalism, ethnic food and migrant home-building’, in Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sidney's West , eds Grace, H., Hage, G., Johnson, L., Langsworth, J. & Symonds, M., Pluto Press, Sydney.Google Scholar
Hoffman, E. (1989) Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language , Minerva, London.Google Scholar
Kaplan, C. (1996) Questions of Travel. Postmodern Discourses of Displacements , Duke University Press, Durham, NC.Google Scholar
Livezey, L. W. (2000) ‘Communities and enclaves: where Jews, Christians, Hindus and Muslims share the neighborhoods’, in Public Religion and Urban Transformation , ed. Livezey, L. W., New York University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Macdonald, J. S. & Macdonald, L. D. (1972) The Invisible Immigrants , Runnymede Industrial Unit, London.Google Scholar
Marin, U. (1975) Italiani in Gran Bretagna , Centro di Studi Emigrazione, Rome.Google Scholar
Mellor, P. & Shilling, C. (1997) Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity , Sage, London.Google Scholar
Missionari di San Carlo Scalabrini (1987) Di Terra in Terra … verso la Patria, 1887–1987, Centenario della Congregazione , Congregazione dei Missionari di San Carlo, Rome.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, M. C. (1996) ‘Patriotism and cosmopolitanism’, in For Love of Country? Debating the Limits of Patriotism , ed. Nussbaum, M. C., Beacon Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Parolin, G. (1976) Foreign Catholics. The Religious Practice of the Emilian Community in London. Unpublished MA dissertation, Kent University in Canterbury.Google Scholar
Silver, N. (2001) ‘The politics of sacrifice’, in The Politics of Community , ed. Strysick, M., The Davies Group, Aurora, CO.Google Scholar
Tassello, G. & Favero, L. (1976) Rapporto di sintesi sulle caratteristiche, il sisteme religioso, il sisteme sociale personale della seconda generazione italiana in Gran Bretagna , Centro di Studi Emigrazione, Rome.Google Scholar
Urry, J. (2002) ‘Mobility and proximity’, Sociology , Vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 255–274.Google Scholar
Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature , Oxford University Press, London.Google Scholar