Euroacademia Conferences
Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (9th Edition) April 24 - 25, 2020
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (9th Edition) June 12 - 13, 2020
8th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions Again January 24 - 25, 2020
Re-Inventing Eastern Europe (7th Edition) December 13 - 14, 2019
The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (8th Edition) October 25 - 26, 2019
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (8th Edition) June 28 - 29, 2019
The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (7th Edition) January 25 - 26, 2019
7th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions Again November 23 - 24, 2018
Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (8th Edition) September 28 - 30, 2018
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (7th Edition) June 14 - 15, 2018
Tor Pignattara as Rome’s Banglatown: The Suburb as a Feminine, Racialized Spacetime
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Presentation speakers
- Elisa Fiore, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Abstract:
Over the last thirty years, sizeable international immigration flows from Bangladesh have started to influence the physiognomy of Tor Pignattara, a neighbourhood located in South-East Rome, so much so that it has now been renamed Banglatown. The locale has come to be identified, over the years, with the racialized “Other”, and its representation revolves around common narrative tropes such as those of the Roman suburb/periphery as a collector of (im)migration, and its consequent association with exoticized difference and decay, which present the area as assumedly “run-down” and “destitute”. These ‘grand narratives’ inevitably inform and structure everyday experience and perception in the locale: (im)migration is blamed for all the locale’s evils – crime, decay, drug dealing, sexual harassment/violence – as well as for its state of cultural, social and infrastructural impoverishment. The perceived “invasiveness” and “aggressiveness” of Bangladeshi settlement has engendered over the years a process of gendered racialization that simultaneously racialized and feminized Tor Pignattara and the Bangladeshi community residing there, thus producing an alignment of Bangladeshi–ness with exoticized/exoticizing non-whiteness. This research investigates the spatiotemporal practices that structure the determining conditions of social life in Banglatown through a new materialist approach. By conceiving race and gender – and their entanglement – as not exclusively human businesses, but rather as more-than-human assemblages given by the intra-action of all different manner of (human and nonhuman) actants, this research shifts towards a posthumanist understanding of agency and reality, so as to look past identity politics issues and reveal the complexities of identity structurations within the locale. Through multi-sensory (auto)ethnography, the research engages with affective urban materialities – street art and food smells – to understand how bodies and meanings come to matter in Tor Pignattara/Banglatown, enable a historicization of boundaries and separations to see how they sediment, materialize, persist, and contradict each other, and finally produce accountable knowledge that places the relationship between knower and known, subject and object at the center of the knowledge produced, thus operating a reworking of the notion of ethics from human attribute to a politics of possibilities.
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