Hannah Martens

Honors 384
August 7th, 2017
The Stories They Tell
Examining Immigration Law, Narrative, and Identity in Italy

The evolution of migration laws in Italy is a history of both deliberate and involuntary
misinterpretations of what migration is and who the subjects in migration are. Graziella Parati

Introduction:
In my group research project, my reflective essay centered on the concepts of narrative and

relational identity in regards to migrants. I focused on outlining the ways in which the relational and

narrative approaches to understanding and building identity were undermined by my own perception of

immigrants by virtue of assuming their stories. I had found myself limiting the scope of their identity to

a narrative fitted narrowly within the legal definitions of refugee and asylum seeker provided by the

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In examining the restriction of identity by

disengaging the relational exchange between audience and narrator, I embarked on a project that led me

to examine my own, and the general, practice of enacting epistemic violence and minimizing the

identities of individuals in the marginalized position of other that comprises refugees and asylum

seekers. In this paper I hope to extend that project by further examining ways in which Italian

immigration laws characterize immigrants and how these institutional characterizations can be

understood in terms of epistemic violence as Kristie Dotson defines it. One thing that I have been

thinking about as I delved deeper into my research is how with my reflective essay the project was

limited to my own observations and reflections, so here I will also seek to expand beyond that limitation

by reporting on the practice of talking back to the law that is occurring in contemporary Italian

literature written by migrants, thereby allowing an examination of the relationship that migrants have

with the constraining dialogue of legal definitions and cultural understandings.

Epistemic Violence
 Kristie Dotson, in her paper Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,

outlines the importance of the audience in a successful transmission of testimony. For anyone can speak,

but for that speechthat narrativeto have meaning it has to be received. There is a special

relationship of reciprocity implicit in successful communication. That is to say that to communicate we

all need an audience willing and capable of hearing us1, a dependency that leaves the speaker

vulnerable, specifically to the problematic way in which entire populations of people can be denied this

kind of linguistic reciprocation as a matter of course institutes epistemic violence.2 This form of

violenceepistemic denial or oppression of the speakers testimonyis split by Dotson into two

categories, two means by which audiences can, intentionally or unintentionally, violently rob victims of

their capacity to narrate: first, testimonial quieting, which occurs when an audience fails to identify a

speaker as a knower. A speaker needs an audience to identify, or at least recognize, her as a knower in

order to offer testimony;3 the second, testimonial smothering, occurs because the speaker perceives

ones immediate audience as unwilling or unable to gain the appropriate uptake of proffered

testimony[it,] ultimately, is the truncating of ones own testimony in order to insure that the testimony

contains only content for which ones audience demonstrates testimonial competence.4 These two

forms of epistemic violence are characterized by Dotson as existing in testimonial exchanges that are

charged with complex social and epistemic concerns,5 and therefore are aptly applied to the instances

where law and culture interact with immigrants abilities to narrate their own stories and identities.

Italian Immigration Law and Policy, Cultural Norms, and the Depiction of Refugees:

In a number of critical ways Italian immigration laws and policies, and the political and social

climates which produce them, can be understood as assigning narrow narrative and relational identities

to the immigrants that they seek to regulate, since migration laws in Italy attempt to create rigid

1
Kristie Dotson, Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing, 238.
2
Dotson, 238.
3
Dotson, 242.
4
Dotson, 244.
5
Dotson, 244.
definitions of the identities to which the migrants can aspire6. The importance of examining the ways

law and policy create immigrant identities is in part from the bearing that they have on the whole of their

nations context, for

immigration and immigrant policies are pieces of a larger puzzle. They are embedded in the
institutional, economic and international contexts in which they are conceived and reconceived.
They can be part of economic strategies, they can be inserted into securities provisions and they
can be adopted with the aim of reinforcing national identity7

meaning that the narrative they prescribe often has ulterior motives and origins apart from the official

purpose of representing and regulating immigrants and immigration. A critical example of this is the

way in which the need for immigrant labor interacts with a nationalist sentiment and a fear of losing

Italy to foreigners has resulted in the Bossi-Fini Law which dictated entry visas connected to labour

contracts that, once expired, would automatically cause the visa to expire,8 a reality which results in a

perception of migrations as seasonal, that is, as temporary. This would place residency and citizenship

out of reach for the ideal migrant, and provides an identity to immigrants only

as a worker who should erase itself after the hours of production as it can only be accepted as
a what in order to be efficiently used The migrant exists to produce in a cultural and legal
context that restricts his/her right to integrate outside the workspace. Consequently, his or her
duty to produce is accompanied by a duty not to reproduce, have a family, and occupy a cultural
space that is [be], a non-person, a what.9

Temporary worker, a tool utility without threat or burden, this is one of the categories of identity

provided by the immigration laws of Italy to migrants.

A second prevalent way in which immigration law understands the migrants is in a narrative of

fear and responses that are brought on by stereotyping and alarmist propaganda, such that in

contemporary Italy, native Italians fear of immigrations and of migrants has escalated in direct

proportion with the increase in Italys need for an immigrant labour forcemigrants witness the

6 Graziella Parati, The Laws of Migration, 179.

7
Giovanna Zincone, The case of Italy, 279
8
Parati, 149.
9
Parati, 144, 149.
strengthening of an obsession to regulate their lives and bodies through laws10. One such regulation is a

security measure, Law no. 94/2009, which was adopted in July of 2009,11 which is explicitly devoted to

security issues (in fact, it was labelled by the government and the press as pacchetto sicurezza, that is, a

set of security measures), and it is intended to affect immigrants especially irregular immigrants12.

The law is specifically aimed at the very crime of being an immigrant outside the narrow confines of a

labor contract, and does this by detailing

a new criminal offence which goes under the name of reato dingresso e soggiorno irregolare
(entrance and irregular residence crime) [and] sets a fine of between 5,000 and 10,000 to be
paid by the person convicted. In order to ensure effective expulsions, immigrants can be
detained in temporary reception centres for up to 180 days (previously just a maximum of 60
days detention was allowed). If, however, at the end of this period expulsion cannot be executed,
the police may issue an expulsion decree. Those who do not comply can be punished with
imprisonment for up to a maximum of five years13.

This law which understands and treats migrant individuals in a narrative of criminality, furthers a larger

picture of what an immigrant is and how threatening their behavior will be, essentially an understanding

wherein irregular immigrants are regarded as potential criminals, meaning that those who do not have a

residence permit are more dangerous by definition.14 This is not true simply in this security mandate,

but in the entire institutional structure of Italian immigration, which remains in Italy either a military or

a police issue, rather than an administrative one, to such a degree that even the most routine renewal of

procedures of a documented migrants papers are handled at a police station,15 creating for migrants

implicitly a criminal identity that is limiting and problematic to those trying to start a new life, subsist,

or even survive in a new country.

10
Graziella Parati, Strategies of Talking Back, 25.
11
Tiziana Caponio and Paolo R. Graziano, Towards a security-oriented migration policy model?
Evidence from the Italian case, 113.
12
Caponio and Graziano, 113.
13
Caponio and Graziano, 113.
14 Caponio and Graziano, 113.
15 Parati, 154-5
Seen but not Heard:

Immigrant communities are often seen, since they are lacking meeting places, besides the

religious spaces, migrants have carved out of already existing locations[and] occupied specific public

areas, often squares, that make their communities visible,16 and yet this existence in the public eye does

not necessarily result in what Kristie Dotson would classify as a reciprocal, epistemically non-violent

relationship with the native community when it comes to the testimony of their identity. They are seen,

but not truly heard. Both the prescribed identitiestemporary worker and criminalcan function

according to Dotsons categories of epistemic violence. Migrants can have their own testimonies

oppressed in terms of testimonial quieting in that neither rootless worker nor criminal are broad

categories of knowers, and so testimony relating to ones broader identity is snuffed out by these laws,

the complete person becomes limited to the knowledge in their prescribed identity; the law functions by

employing the language of the what; that is, it functions by ignoring that uniqueness at the centre of

whoness,17 quieting immigrants as knowers of their own narrative identity. As for testimonial

silencing, the minimization of ones testimonyin this case narrative identitybased on the perception

that ones audience will be unwilling or unable to receive it is potentiated in the way that the

institutionally given identities of temporary worker and criminal to migrants. These individuals are

products of a language of the law [that] identifies a straniero (a foreigner) as an invader who, unable

to vote, remains outside of the political arena,18 and possess the ability of to interpret the legal

narratives about new laws in order to modify his or her own irregular identity within Italy,19 a

combination that results in a minimization of ones own narrative and a compliance with the existing

perception. A clear example of the testimonial smothering that migrants is even documented in Salah

Methnanis book Immigrato, where he

16 Parati, 147
17
Parati, 142.
18
Parati, 161.
19
Parati, 168.
 talks of the need to shape an identity connected to the new cultural context of immigration. He
describes his discovery that his ability to express himself correctly in Italian makes him
suspicious in the eyes of the Italians, who prefer to see him as part of the inarticulate crowd of
immigrants. He hides his university education in foreign languages and searches for another
acceptable self. Paradoxically, he finds it by turning himself into a stereotype, a Tunisian junkie,
who feeds his habit by pushing drugs, criminalizing his otherness that had already been
criminalized in the eyes of the natives.20

This suspicion is a part of the dominant identity politics that assign to the migrant the ability to speak in

broken Italian,21 which Methnani internalized in order to simplify his daily struggle for survival and

spoke in broken Italian,22 minimizing and even changing his testimonial narrative, his identity in both

content and style to align with that of his audiences perception.

Talking Back:

Graziella Parati coined the term talking back in her discussions of Italian immigration. It refers

to the ways in which those who have become the objects of the law can take back the power of

narration, of being the subject, the protagonist, the speaker, and respond to those laws that are

epistemically violent in oppressing their testimonies and narrowing the confines of their lives in a new

country. Parati sees immigrants writing as an act of talking back [that] accomplishes the goal of

narrating selves that decriminalize migration In literature, migrants object to being an object in legal

discourses23. Authors like Pap Khouma, Saidou Moussa Ba, and Salah Methnani are

constructing narrative transgressions and creating representations that challenge the text of the
law and its finality in shaping the limiting roles that the immigrants can embody. The literature
that migrants write is, therefore, in dialogue with the cultural constructions they find in place in
Italy and questions the future of a culture that legally attempts to exclude or dramatically contain
difference24.
The process of talking back, of telling the narrative of ones life and experience in fictionalized

autobiography allows a response, a voice that places the migrant writer in a position where they remain

20
Graziella Parati, The Legal Side of Culture: Notes on Immigration, Laws, and Literature in
Contemporary Italy, 303.
21
Parati, 175.
22
Parati, 175.
23
Parati, 175.
24
Parati, 176.
an agent in the construction of his own whoness that talks back to that whatness: prisoner, criminal,

prostitute, other, which is only a part of who he or she is,25 thereby rejecting the narrow identity

dictated by the law. Examples of this include author Komla-Ebris response to the criminalization of the

migrant present in the Bossi-Fini Law of 2002:

I havent had a job for almost two months because the firm I worked for went bankrupt. A man
who cannot feed his family isnt a man. Every day I get up and my feet wander tirelessly through
streets and gates without finding any solution. If weve thought of going back it is because this
law doesnt give us any way out. I should go home and wait to be called to come back to Italy. I
know that this is an absurd law, just as no one would buy a knife if it were hidden in its sheathe.
But this is their country and they make the law. We have no choice26.

A narrative response that contextualizes and criticizes the law from the mouth of the body it seeks to

control and invisibilize. The realities of migrant life and the individual characteristics of each person

who immigrates is reinforced in the autobiographical novel Pap Khouma, Io, venditore di elefanti. In an

episode of this the Senegalese writer tells of an instance where Pap, the protagonist of Khoumas

autobiographical text, experienced the homogenizing potential of racial stereotyping when policemen

told him to start break dancing as all black people can,27 a laughable and poignant point of narrative

that helps tear down the monolith of immigrant built up by the laws regulating the bodies of these

individuals. Author Mohamed Bouchanes book Chiamatemi Al, in which he remembers the pressure

exercised by some priests who offered assistance in exchange for conversion,28 and his experience

when as a bricklayer, Mohamed is renamed Mario, but rejects this christening by claiming for himself

the name Al, easier for Italians to pronounce as it appears in the orientalist versions of Middle Eastern

tales.29 Bouchanes story is yet another instance of immigrants talking back to institutional structures

that want to restrict their identities. The list goes on: Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo, Yousef Wakkas, Hassan

25
Parati, 177.
26
Parati, 152.
27
Parati, 45.
28
Parati,158-9.
29
Parati, 175.
Itab, Nassera Chohraeach of these authors use their autobiographical texts to talk back to the laws that

attempt to define them.

Conclusion:

In this paper I have tried to build out the reflections made on my own interactions with

immigrants in Rome, and across Italy. I found myself returning again and again to the relationship

between telling your story and identity. The connection is crucial in feeling autonomy and individuality

in the self. Here I tried to substantiate the idea that the ways that laws frame the individuals migrating

impact the perceptions of the speaker by those who would be the audience to their testimony of the self.

The research accomplished in this paper has allowed me to broaden and substantiate the points I

reflected on earlier, clarifying the connection between narrative, law, identity, and immigration. In this

paper I also found a means of answeringin partthe question I left open at the end of my essay, the

what to do question, which is to pay attention, give uptake to, and validate the narratives of migrants

which talk back to the Italian immigration laws and their effects on their lives and identities.

Bibliography:

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from the Italian case. Migration and welfare in the new Europe: Social protection and the
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Press at the University of Bristol.
Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing. Hypatia vol. 26, no. 2
(Spring).

Parati, G. (2006). The Laws of Migration. Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination
Culture. (pp. 142-190). University of Toronto Press.

Parati, G. (2006). Strategies of Talking Back. Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a
Destination Culture. (pp. 142-190). University of Toronto Press.

Parati, G. (1998). The Legal Side of Culture: Notes on Immigration, Laws, and Literature in
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