![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the representation of climate migration and climate colonialism in contemporary Italian eco-dystopias. After a theoretical introduction, I address the representation of migrants, and of Italians as climate migrants, in Paolo Zardi's XXI secolo (2015) and Bruno Arpaia's Qualcosa, là fuori (2016). Climate migration is a growing phenomenon that is intimately connected with Anthropocenic violence, and that will produce changes in society and demographics, challenging existing notions of nationality and culture. In the second part, I discuss two novels (Tommaso Pincio's Cinacittà, 2008, and Antonio Scurati's La seconda mezzanotte, 2011) that deal with what I call, following Stephen D. Arata, the anxiety of reverse colonisation. These two novels portray (and express) a fear of a takeover of Italy by the Chinese that is rooted in both long-standing anti-immigration prejudices and the new shapes of contemporary economic colonialism.
SOMMARIO
Questo articolo si occupa della rappresentazione delle migrazioni climatiche e del colonialismo climatico nelle eco-distopie italiane contemporanee. Dopo un'introduzione teorica, viene discussa la rappresentazione dei migranti, e degli italiani come migranti climatici, in XXI secolo di Paolo Zardi (2015) e in Qualcosa, là fuori di Bruno Arpaia (2016). Le migrazioni climatiche sono un fenomeno in crescita, intimamente connesso alla violenza dell'Antropocene, e che produrrà cambiamenti sociali e demografici, contribuendo a ridefinire tradizionali concettualizzazioni di nazionalità e cultura. Nella seconda parte, vengono presi in esame due romanzi (Cinacittà di Tommaso Pincio, 2008, e La seconda mezzanotte di Antonio Scurati, 2011) che hanno al centro quella che, secondo Stephen D. Arata, si definisce “ansia da colonizzazione inversa”. Questi due romanzi dipingono (ed esprimono) il timore per una conquista dell'Italia da parte dei cinesi che è radicata tanto in pregiudizi anti-migratori di lunga durata quanto nelle nuove forme del colonialismo economico contemporaneo.
Notes
1 R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
2 D. Haraway et al., ‘Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene’, Ethnos, 81.3 (2016), 535–64 (p. 540). Olwig reprises this concept from his ‘The Earth Is Not a Globe: Landscape versus the “Globalist” Agenda’, Landscape Research, 36.4 (2011), 401–15.
3 D. Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), p. 4.
4 Chakrabarty, p. 70.
5 B. Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. by C. Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), pp. 121–22.
6 On the ethical dimension of climate change, see S. M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and E. Cripps, Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
7 M. Jakob et al., ‘Governing the Commons to Promote Global Justice: Climate Change Mitigation and Rent Taxation’, in Climate Justice: Integrating Economics and Philosophy, ed. by R. Kanbur and H. Shue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 43–62 (p. 43).
8 C. Heyward and D. Roser, ‘Introduction’, in Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World, ed. by C. Heyward and D. Roser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–18 (p. 2).
9 H. Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 2. For discussions on political solutions, see also S. Caney, ‘Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 18 (2005), 747–75; and S. Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
10 N. Hassoun, ‘Climate Change and Inequity: How to Think about Inequities in Different Dimensions’, in Climate Justice, ed. by Kanbur and Shue, pp. 95–112 (p. 95).
11 On intergenerational responsibility, see E. A. Page, Climate Change, Justice and Future Generations (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006); P. Lawrence, Justice for Future Generations: Climate Change and International Law (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014); and S. Caney, ‘Climate Change, Intergenerational Equity, and the Social Discount Rate’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 13 (2014), 320–42.
12 D. Carrington, ‘“Climate Apartheid”: UN Expert Says Human Rights May Not Survive’, The Guardian, 25 June 2019, <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/25/climate-apartheid-united-nations-expert-says-human-rights-may-not-survive-crisis> [accessed 8 September 2022]. See also J. Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017), pp. 213–232. For further discussion on the effects of global warming on human rights, see Human Rights and Climate Change, ed. by S. Humphreys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
13 O. O. Táíwò, ‘Climate Colonialism and Large-Scale Land Acquisitions’, 26 September 2019, <https://www.c2g2.net/climate-colonialism-and-large-scale-land-acquisitions/> [accessed 8 September 2022].
14 See, for instance, S. Heiba, ‘How the EU Green Deal Perpetuates Climate Colonialism’, 3 February 2021, <https://earth.org/eu-green-deal-perpetuates-climate-colonialism/> [accessed 8 September 2022]; and P. Schönhöfer, ‘Climate Colonialism as a New Power Structure’, October 2019, <https://www.goethe.de/ins/ke/en/kul/mag/21689473.html> [accessed 8 September 2022].
15 D. Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015), 159–165 (p. 162, n. 5). See also J. Davis et al., ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises’, Geography Compass, 13.5 (2019), 1–15.
16 G. White, Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 4.
17 J. McAdam, ‘Introduction’, in Climate Change and Displacement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. by J. McAdam (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 1–8 (p. 2).
18 J. McAdam, Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 16–17.
19 White, p. 5.
20 See J. Apap with C. du Perron de Revel, ‘The concept of “climate refugee”: Towards a possible definition’, 18 October 2021, <https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2021)698753> [accessed 8 September 2022]. The authors base their data on those available at the Global Internal Displacement Database, <https://www.internal-displacement.org/database/displacement-data> [accessed 8 September 2022]. Further information about the numbers of climate migrations and the problems that this concept poses can be found on the Migration Data Portal, at <https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/environmental_migration_and_statistics> [accessed 8 September 2022].
21 Nixon, p. 2.
22 Besides the texts that I directly quote here, see P. Murphy, ‘The Non-Alibi of Alien Scapes: SF and Ecocriticism’, in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. by K. Armbruster and K. R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), pp. 263–78; U. K. Heise, Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); U. K. Heise, ‘Reduced Ecologies’, European Journal of English Studies, 16.2 (2012), 99–112; the monographic issue of Critical Survey 25.2 (2013), edited by R. Hughes and P. Wheeler, on the topic of the eco-dystopia; the monographic issue of Science Fiction Studies on science fiction and climate crisis, edited by B. R. Bellamy and V. Hollinger, 45.3 (2018); and my own Raccontare la fine del mondo: Fantascienza e Antropocene (Milano: nottetempo, 2021).
23 This paragraph summarises the analysis of the eco-dystopia and its ambiguities that I conducted in ‘Theorizing Eco-Dystopia: Science Fiction, the Anthropocene, and the Limits of Catastrophic Imagery’, European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes, 5.1 (2022), 29–43.
24 For an overview of the Italian eco-dystopia and the distinction between genre and mainstream authors, see M. Malvestio, ‘Sognando la catastrofe: L’eco-distopia italiana del ventunesimo secolo’, Narrativa 43 (2021), 31–44. While that article makes passing references to the works of Scurati, Pincio, Zardi and Arpaia, here I am analysing them with different critical tools.
25 A. Saiber, ‘Flying Saucers Would Never Land in Lucca: The Fiction of Italian Science Fiction’, California Italian Studies, 2.1 (2011), 1–51 (p. 15).
26 S. Brioni and D. Comberiati, Italian Science Fiction: The Other in Literature and Film (London: Palgrave, 2019).
27 Brioni and Comberiati, pp. 163–82.
28 ‘Bilancio demografico nazionale’, 13 July 2020, <https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/245466> [accessed 8 September 2022].
29 M. Ambrosini, ‘Immigration in Italy: Between Economic Acceptance and Political Rejection’, International Migration and Integration, 14 (2013), 175–94 (p. 179).
30 International migration also creates ‘transit states’ – that is, countries that migrants have to cross in order to reach their final destination. Examples include Mexico, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Turkey. See White, p. 7.
31 É. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. by J. Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 1.
32 Balibar, p. 1.
33 Ambrosini, pp. 191–192.
34 G. Parati, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 6.
35 P. Zardi, XXI secolo (Castel di Sangro: Neo Edizioni, 2015), Kindle edition.
36 Zardi.
37 Ibid.
38 On the perceived relationship between crime and immigration, see S. Cecchi, ‘The Criminalization of Immigration in Italy: Extent of the Phenomenon and Possible Interpretations’, Italian Sociological Review, 1.1 (2011), 34–42.
39 On Italian citizenship policies, see E. Codini, La cittadinanza: Uno studio sulla disciplina italiana nel contesto dell’immigrazione (Torino: G. Giappichelli Editore, 2017).
40 Zardi.
41 Ibid.
42 ‘European City Air Quality Viewer’, 17 June 2021, <https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/air/urban-air-quality/european-city-air-quality-viewer> [accessed 8 September 2022].
43 ‘Emergenza idrica: La dispersione d’acqua’, date unkown, <https://fondoambiente.it/il-fai/il-fai-che-vigila/salva-l-acqua/emergenza-idrica-la-dispersione/> [accessed 8 September 2022].
44 Zardi.
45 B. Arpaia, Qualcosa, là fuori (Parma: Guanda, 2016), p. 219.
46 S. Caserini and E. Palazzi, ‘Il romanzo sugli impatti e la scienza del clima’, Climalterati, 6 June 2016, <https://www.climalteranti.it/2016/06/06/il-romanzo-sugli-impatti-e-la-scienza-del-clima/> [accessed 8 September 2022]. The first half of this paragraph reprises and condenses my argument from ‘Sognando la catastrofe’, p. 13.
47 Arpaia, p. 13.
48 Ivi, p. 12.
49 Ivi, p. 20.
50 Ivi, p. 28.
51 Ivi, p. 191.
52 Ivi, p. 173.
53 M. Colombo, ‘Discourse and Politics of Immigration in Italy: The Production and Reproduction of Ethnic Dominance and Exclusion’, Journal of Language and Politics, 12.2 (2013), 157–79 (p. 168).
54 See for instance M. Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigration and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. by J. Guglielmo and S. Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003).
55 S. D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33.4 (1990), 621–45.
56 On Scurati’s novel, see also A. Chiafele, ‘Climate Change: Eco-Dystopia in Antonio Scurati’s La seconda mezzanotte’, Quaderni d’italianistica, 42.1 (2021), 5–30.
57 T. Pincio, Cinacittà (Torino: Einaudi, 2008), Kindle edition.
58 Pincio.
59 Ibid.
60 Brioni and Comberiati, pp. 175–76.
61 Pincio.
62 Ibid.
63 R. Polese, ‘Pincio, un’Italia senza domani’, Corriere della Sera, 21 November 2008.
64 G. Zhang, ‘Contemporary Italian novels on Chinese immigration to Italy’, California Italian Studies, 4.2 (2013), 1–39 (p. 26).
65 A. Scurati, La seconda mezzanotte (Milano: Bompiani, 2011), Kindle edition.
66 A. Scurati, ‘Non voglio morire cinese’, La Stampa, 6 October 2011, <https://www.lastampa.it/opinioni/editoriali/2011/10/06/news/non-voglio-morire-cinese-1.36923475/> [accessed 8 September 2022].
67 Scurati, La seconda mezzanotte.
68 Ibid.
69 M. Chu, ‘“Non voglio morire cinese”: crisi e conflitto in La seconda mezzanotte di Antonio Scurati’, Narrativa, 35–36 (2014), 129–41 (p. 129).
70 G. Zhang, Migration and the Media: Debating Chinese Migration to Italy, 1992–2012 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), p. 4.
71 Chu, p. 131.
72 Arata, p. 623.
73 S. Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), p. 4. The myth of the ‘italiani brava gente’ also plays a role in this process, especially in relation to the War of Ethiopia, which took place right before the Second World War; see G. Bartolini, The Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (London: Palgrave, 2021), pp. 51–101.
74 D. Comberiati, ‘La colonia cinese: le rappresentazioni culturali e letterarie della Concessione italiana di Tientsin nella letteratura e nella cultura del Novecento’, Forum Italicum, 48.3 (2014), 398–410.