Nationalism, trust, and activism among Italy's Eritrean diaspora

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the ways that Italian colonialism in Eritrea and contemporary migration shape the political reality of Eritrean activists in Italy. Italy’s relationship to its colonial past must be understood in dialectic with the experiences of descendants of the colonies currently living in Italy. Eritreans in Italy are dismissed as generic ‘migrants’, which contrasts with the connection they feel to Italy and the centrality of Italian colonialism to the sense of Eritrean national unity which developed from Eritrea’s War of Independence from Ethiopia. Through an examination of activism undertaken by individuals who oppose the Eritrean government, the thesis explores how narratives ascribed to the Eritrean government’s own nationalism are deployed in support of Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers – labelled as traitors by the state. Such activism formulates a language of humanitarianism that serves as an alternative to otherwise silenced political discontent, thus challenging the strict control of the Eritrean state over much of Italy’s Eritrean diaspora.

The displacement of colonialism in Italy constitutes a paraphasic shift that reveals a gap between two historicities – the dominant Italian and the marginalized Eritrean. The theory of paraphasia developed in this thesis, expanding on Ann Stoler’s colonial aphasia (2011, 2016), considers Italy’s ‘occluded histories’ related to colonialism from the perspective of the formerly colonised. Rather than focusing on what is absent from Italian narratives of colonialism, paraphasia brings the gap between parallel narratives to the analytical forefront. This perspective highlights the way the postcolonial encounter is experienced by Eritreans in Italy and reveals a tension between belonging and exclusion which is mirrored in the political division present within Italy’s Eritrean diaspora. The concept of paraphasia offers a novel theoretical tool to interrogate the ways in which colonisers and former colonised subjects engage with and articulate a shared past in Italy.

Date of Award	28 Jun 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Stavroula Pipyrou (Supervisor) & Daniel Martyn Knight (Supervisor)