When
Title: “No Crisis is an Island: On Sicily as Both Italy/Europe and Not Italy/Europe”
The Sociology Brownbag will be held online via Zoom at the link below from 12:00-1:15PM:
Zoom link: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/87942716864
Zoom password: migration
Please find an abstract of Professor Carney's talk below:
In this talk, I will examine the significance of Sicily’s position on the front lines of migration to Europe. First, I briefly allude to the deeper history of the island, including centuries of colonization and occupation; extraction of labor and asymmetrical development compared to the rest of the Italian nation-state; and land dispossession, displacement, and emigration of siciliani. Second, I argue that these historical conditions and the more recent onset of intersecting crises such as economic austerity, migrant deaths at sea, and the Covid-19 pandemic, articulate with particular affective states—ways of feeling—that precede local acts of solidarity. I provide examples of repeated attempts to “responsibilize” siciliani to attend to social problems that have afflicted the island for decades, such as poverty and corruption in politics, as well as to respond to more recent migration and the pandemic. As modes of affective disciplining, these processes have ascribed a set of moral failings to siciliani—conceived as indebted, irresponsible subjects—that also operates to dehumanize and alienate them from Italy and the rest of Europe.