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Accepted Paper:
Decolonising 'legality' in southern Italy
Margaret Neil
(University of Oxford)
This paper argues against longstanding calls for 'more legality' in Sicily. Instead, I argue that 'legality' is a racialised term, which needs to be decolonised also to show the ways in which it is now affecting (anti)immigration policy and praxis.
Paper long abstract:
The presumed absence or dearth of legality (legalità) in Sicily - in favour of informal and illegal work and customs - has long been viewed as one of the island's central problems by scholars and citizens alike. This is because, first, it is often considered the reason behind the island's so-called 'underdevelopment' (La Spina 2005). Second, as I observed during a year of ethnographic field work, the lack of legality is often tied to the idea of a 'mafia mentality' - a way of thinking that is in some way considered to be sick, deviant, deficient or criminal (cf. Schneider 1998). If Sicilians and Italians also attribute it casually, and biologically, to a Mediterranean or Arab 'essence' of Sicilians (the lingering effects of Lombroso's 'scientific studies' of the 1880s), other times it is considered to be a 'culture' that needs to be eradicated. Today, longstanding and engrained stereotypic notions of legality are being transposed onto migrants, providing discursive fodder to racist policies and praxis. In this article, I critique the above points of view, arguing rather that 'legality' is a racialised notion that originates in a historic attempt to 'other' southern Italians. 'Healing' in this case involves not more legality, but a decolonisation of the term - deconstructing it to reveal its racialised underpinnings and the uneven ways in which it is applied.