The SIE represents a kind of global Italian citizenship. It stems from a vexed position between the impossibility of return to Italy, and the quest for new solidarities based upon new forms of existence. Likewise, the identity of ?Italians abroad? is produced from this complex combination of cultural nationalism (locating an original fatherland and culture within the confines of the Italian state territory) and of diasporic awareness (rehabilitating the emigrant, multi-local mode of existence). The Simbolo is the emblem of the Scalabrinian project of creating a new Italian identity that transcends regional differences ? which are at the basis of the existing London-Italian organisational structure ? while it represents a distinct political and cultural constituency abroad, thus producing yet another ?region? within the Italian state apparatus, but one which spills beyond the Italian borders. The borders to the Italian state remain unscathed as the ‘original fatherland’ within the ‘global’ home of Italians Abroad, whose ‘home’ is ‘the rest of the world, outside Italy’, rather than the world itself.
The space of ?Italians abroad? arises as a kind of third space, beyond the confines of territorial boundaries ?here? (England/the UK) and ?there? (Italy). This is strikingly conjured up in a section of La Voce titled ?planet emigration? (Pianeta Emigrazione), which again resorts to the metaphor of the globe, the planet, as a space of interconnected belonging.
Planet Emigration signals a shift in the grounds of identity from exclusively Italian to a broader ?migranthood?, and parallels the displacement from ?ethnic church? to ??migr? church?, creating a terrain of belonging that both maintains and exceeds the boundaries of immediate locality. The move from local integration to global interconnectedness is marked by a shift in the ways in which Scalabrinians imagine their and the Italian immigrants’ relationship to the world. Combining modern discourses of Christian universalism, and postmodern discourses of globalisation, this ?church among migrants? may be viewed as a site of ?global localism? (McDowell 1996: 31), that is that it stands at the crossroads of different ranges of belonging located on different scales. This is a belonging that is at once local ? being Italian and Catholic in a non-Italian, non-Catholic world ? and global ? being part of the world ?community? of Catholic/Christian migrants.(4)
This shift in the spatial horizon within which the question of ?identity? is cast, is part of the Scalabrinian imagined community of ?Italians Abroad?, where migration constitutes the basis of a new global ?ethnoscape? of belonging. For the London Scalabrinians, this new identity is deeply connected to locally specific struggles for recognition and liberation from what Umberto Marin has coined the ?brand of foreigner? (1975: 154).
Migration as transcendence: estrangement, community, home
The essence of the Scalabrinian project is to emancipate emigrants from the forever-foreigner condition. In Marin’s words cited earlier, the church will hopefully constitute a place where Christians may ?find themselves, thus cancelling the notion of foreigner?. In line with their politics of identity, the Scalabrinians ground the identity of the church and the ?community? in what they call the ?drama of emigration? ? in a manner akin to Iain Chambers’s ?drama of the stranger?: ?[c]ut off from the homelands of tradition, experiencing a constantly challenged identity, the stranger is perpetually required to make herself at home in an interminable discussion between a scattered historical inheritance and a heterogeneous present.? (1994: 6) As I show below, the Scalabrinian project of recovery of a positive migrant identity speaks of the discomfort of not having a ?home? and of inhabiting a body that is out of place. The ghost of the stranger haunts their identity project, and becomes an emblematic figure of the human condition. Their view, I suggest, reifies the migrant-stranger as essence.
Emigration is the recurring theme running through the images displayed in the church. It is located at the junction of past and future in a project of continuity, change and liberation. ?People do not know where they are going, if they ignore where they are from?, writes father Umberto Marin (Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 7); and where they are from is emigration. However, the drama of emigration is not a site for indulging in nostalgic recollections, or for dreaming of mythical returns to a prior home, defined as stasis, fixity, comfort and familiarity; there is no going (to that) home. While the earlier ?ethnic church? arose from the necessity to provide a space of transition, for recently arrived immigrants, between two ?homes? (the one where one comes from, and the one where one lives), the present ??migr? church? has become a ?habitual space? where emigration is retrieved in images that shape a new kind of belonging and entrust individuals with the ?courage of the future? (Marin in Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 7).
For the Scalabrinians, ?home? is not only the remembrance of migration, but also its transcendence. Emigration is remembered in the church’s iconography, but it acquires a special significance as a result of its association with religious languages and beliefs. A distinctive feature of the Chiesa del Redentore, is the reprocessing of biblical narratives in terms of migration, thus creating a new migrant Christian universalism. In a remarkable twist of the ?patriarchal pioneer? narrative that has characterised historical renditions of immigrant populations up until recently, the drama of emigration is retold through episodes of the life of Jesus that feature in three of the four stained glass windows of the Chiesa del Redentore: the flight to Egypt, deemed the ?first drama of emigration? (Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 13); the disciples of Emma?s (when Jesus made himself ?migrant among the migrants?, the motto of the Scalabrinian order); and the Pentecostal family: ?[t]he experience of human migrations is a stimulus and a recall to the Pentecostal fraternity, where differences are harmonised by the Spirit and charity lives through welcoming the ?other?.? (Scalabrini Order vade-mecum in Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 13) The drama of emigration culminates in the Calvary, ?[t]he most dramatic story of migration? (5) which is most evocatively captured in the fresco that dominates the church altar.
To be sure, this is a narrative of origins: migration is not only the inaugural moment in the formation of a future (Italian) community, but of the history of (Christian) humanity. It constitutes a myth of origins, by virtue of which ?we? are descendants of the first migrants. More significantly, following Sara Ahmed, I want to suggest that the Scalabrinians are creating a common heritage on the basis of not being fully ?at home?, either in the location of residence or in the location of ?origins?. Contra the tendency, in theoretical discourses of exile and diaspora, to conceive of migration as a refusal of ?home?, here,
the sense of not being fully at home in a given place does not lead to a refusal of the very desire for home, and for a community or common heritage. The very experience of leaving home and ?becoming stranger? leads to the creation of a new ?community of strangers?, a common bond with those others who have ?shared? the experience of [migration]. . . The forming of a new community provides a sense of fixity through the language of heritage ? a sense of inheriting a collective past by sharing the lack of a home rather than sharing a home. (Ahmed 2000: 84-85).
Yet the transcendence of the ?foreigner? condition is not solely resolved by the constitution of a deterritorialised ?community? founded on new definitions of origins and heritage. Anxieties about estrangement, and the project of transcendence, are also mediated through the language of the body. This is most clearly captured in the fresco.
A male figure, young, white, muscular, arms stretched out in a cross, hovers against a sky-blue backdrop, the colour of God. His head is hanging sideways, eyes closed. His face expresses both pain and rest. He is naked except for a piece of cloth wrapped around his hips, covering his genitals. His feet are crossed and marked with blood stains. Above him, an opening echoing those of the church?s vaulted ceiling, is painted in trompe-l’oeil; light floods through it, seemingly drawing the floating body upwards.
The most striking feature of this painting is the truncated body: arms, legs, torso and head are sliced so that we see the blue backdrop in the spaces left by the missing parts. But despite its fragmented state, the body occupies the space as a whole, unified body.
This figure is remarkable for many reasons. Firstly, it emphasises the human, physical, bodily nature of Jesus by depicting a muscular body. Though such ?manly? representations of Christ are not new (Morgan 1996), this depiction nevertheless contrasts starkly with the suffering, slim, weak crucified body most often seen in Euro-American Catholic churches. Secondly, the fresco breaks away from the traditional crucifix by leaving out the cross, a gesture that enhances both the suffering and spiritual strength of Jesus. Hence the fresco further troubles traditional Catholic representations of the crucifixion by suggesting the strength of hope and redemption, rather than overemphasising the suffering and pain of an earthly life of sacrifice.
The fresco constitutes a highly resonant motif for an ?migr? religious organisation that is juggling with the project of creating unity in dispersal. Chosen as a replacement for the wooden crucifix that hung behind the altar prior to the renovations, the fresco signals a turning point in the mandate that the London Scalabrinians are defining for themselves. Deemed ?postmodern? by Padre Gaetano Parolin, this fresco symbolically captures ?the present day search for unity in the face of increased fragmentation? (in Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 9). Indeed, this is a broken, fragmented body; its parts appear detachable, as if they could simply float away, in different directions. A disintegrating body, that hovers between presence and absence; the migrant subject, here, is at once embodied and disembodied.
The body of Jesus epitomises the ?migr? condition; it is ?the image that best represents that which animates the emigration event: sufferance and hope? (Marin in Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 6). It is interesting to read this in relation to the discomfort Scalabrinians repeatedly express in relation to foreignness, which they associate with the ?immigrant condition? (Bottignolo 1985). More specifically, the implications of the Scalabrinian project of migration-as-transcendence are twofold: emigration is freed from its negative connotations, and this operates through the disentanglement of ?immigrant? and ?black?.
First, viewed as a ?one of the most complex and dramatic events of history? (Pope John-Paul II in Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 12), or a ?social calamity? which has reached ?breathtaking proportions? (Marin in Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 6), emigration is not fossilised into a protracted re-enactment of collective mourning over the ruptures of separation and loss. Migration rather becomes the ground for a new liberating force, symbolically reprocessed in religious terms. ?From migrations themselves come the call for a concrete and symbolic mobility, which breaks all structures of rigidity and of absolutism: Exile always precedes the Ascension, which prepares for the Pentecost.? (Scalabrini Order vade-mecum in Centro Scalabrini di Londra 1993: 13). Following the teachings of Scalabrini at the turn of the twentieth century (6), the Scalabrinians construct migration as a vector for world unity ?thus cancelling the notion of foreigner?. As Father Graziano Tassello, a leading advocate of Italian ?migr? identity, wrote: ?typical emigration values [include] a precious concern for universality and a desire to surpass borders? (LV 897, October 1993: 1). Migration, exile, are metaphors for a new universalism: what migrants share is the refusal of boundaries, the transgression of structures, the refusal of ?identities? that fix, of ?homes? that confine. Such a treatment of migration deploys a discourse of migration as
a movement that already de-stabilises and transgresses forms of boundary making . . . Migration is defined against identity; it is that which already threatens the closures of identity thinking. However, the conflation of migration with the transgression of boundaries in the impossibility of arriving at an identity is problematic. It assumes that migration has an inherent meaning: it constructs an essence of migration in order to theorise that migration as a refusal of essence. (Ahmed 2000: 81-82)
The essentialisation of migration goes hand in hand with the universalisation of the migrant body as any body. Running through the discourse of emigration are allusions to amorphous men and women whose only defining character is to be migrant, sharing the typical emigration experience of silent suffering and coping. Emigration is represented as an active thing animated by its own inherent characteristics: suffering, loneliness, estrangement, alienation, discreteness, but also displacement, settlement, and the negotiation of roots and routes. Emigration is something that is ?undergone, not undertaken? (Jacobson 1995: 24): it appears as something that happens to people and puts them through the inescapable obstacles of its journey.
In the process of creating a new ?migr? identity, a slippage occurs from migration as experience, to migration as metaphor, which operates through the denial of the ?immigrant? in favour of the fetishised exile; a denial that is mediated through the negation of the materiality of migration. The ?migr?, here, is emphatically abstracted from any material context, indeed from any material body. Forms of displacement such as labour migration are superseded by the more romantic an more valued spiritual suffering of the exile. Likewise, transnational, cosmopolitan subjectivities are valued as superior to the negotiation of local conventions and imperatives of nation, citizenship, race and gender, that immigrants negotiate in their efforts to integrate and be recognised as full fledged members of British society. To put it simply, the imperatives of British citizenship operate differently on different bodies. Hence the shift from ?ethnic church? to ??migr? church? works through the obliteration of material conditions that a number of migrants share, but which are not lived equally by all. In short, the claim that ?we are all migrants? obscures the fact that ?we? are not ?migrants? in the same way. Although the aim is ostensibly to declare that differences should not matter, representations of collective belonging are deployed within a pseudo-universalist rhetoric of Christian fraternity that denies and represses the social relations of power that construct categories of identity/difference. By symbolically representing the transcendence of absolutism through the erasure of the male body in the fresco, Scalabrinians are gesturing towards a politics that simultaneously erases bodily differences that do matter, such as skin colour and gender, whilst re-instating a masculinist discourse of transcendence.(7) This ties in with the second implication of the project of migration-as-transcendence, whereby the recovery of migration as empowering implies a disentanglement of ?immigrant? and ?black?.
Whiteness and the anxieties of (in)visibility
Scalabrinians are fully aware of the racial politics constitutive of the social and political context of Italian immigration to Britain. As Umberto Marin wrote in his monograph on Italians in Great Britain (sic),
The very terms immigrant and immigration are attributed almost exclusively to those originating from former colonies such as India, Pakistan, West Indies and some African countries. Only recently, following Great Britain’s entrance to the European Community, politicians, economists and sociologists have turned their attention towards immigrants coming from European countries, symptomatically labelled Invisible Immigrants. (8) (1975: 5; italics original).
In Britain, Italians constitute an immigrant, multi-generational population, a linguistic and religious minority, which is also absorbed within the white European majority. The indeterminacy of their social and political status is thus seized in the figure of ?invisible immigrants?. (9) The phrase was subsequently used by Father Graziano Tassello, in a speech he gave in 1983, which was reprinted in La Voce degli Italiani in 1990. Under the headline ?The Future of “Invisible Immigrants”?, Father Tassello explained that in the context of recent migration of ?people of colour? (sic) and of the ensuing re-configuration of a British ?multi-ethnic? society, Italian immigrants have become invisible.
?Invisibility?, in the British context, is a notion caught up with ?race struggles? that makes its appropriation by Italians both arrogant and challenging. The meaning of invisibility stems from the very radicalisation of immigration and ?multicultural? politics, and its adoption by Italians may be read as a gratuitous claim for equality by a population whose invisibility is the product of its integration and acceptance within British society, rather than from conditions of marginalisation and imposed silence which configure the ?invisibility? of blacks in Britain and in Europe (Mercer 1994: 7; Back and Nayak 1993). This invisibility contrasts strongly with the practices of differentiation and segregation that Italians experienced during the nineteenth century. In his discerning historical account of Italians in nineteenth-century London, Lucio Sponza (1988) reveals how public debates about hygiene, poverty and street noise were ethnicised by using the figures of Italian itinerant traders (such as organ-grinders) as emblems of urban degeneracy. Although not all negative ? Italy and Italian culture was also much idealised by the British upper-classes of the time ? images of Italian immigrants circulated in political, intellectual and ?popular? circles, thus rendering them highly visible in the public space. Likewise, the intense Italophobia pervading public discourse during the 1939-45 war, in Britain, compelled many to seek to hide their visible and audible Italianness: avoiding speaking Italian in public, anglicising their names, or their trade (the fa?ade of Italian delis in Soho, Central London, bearing signs stating ?This firm is entirely British?; in Colpi 1991: 111). For some Italians, the past is inhabited by memories of hiding the body marks of ethnicity by way of passing as non-Italian. In this respect, the fresco may be read as a metaphor for the erasure of identity/difference by way of avoiding violent marginalisation. The erasure of the body may symbolically represents the ?sufferance? of migration as a bodily experience (Ahmed 2000), suggesting the discomfort of inhabiting a migrant body, a body which feels out of place.