Paper short abstract:

This article explores how ideologically divergent digital media operators such as Italian populist leaders and African-Italian YouTubers co-participate in ironic performances eliciting diverse forms of displaced alterity, ranging from xenophobic imaginaries to powerful modes of resistance to them.

Paper long abstract:

Alongside the highly mediatized life of recent Italian politics, anti-immigration populism as a mode of social expression has permeated Italian public discourse since the mid-1990s. This trend has become even more apparent in the aftermath of the so-called Mediterranean refugee crisis in the 2010s. Since then, the Italian popular classes’ increasing engagement with online social media has contributed to the electoral success of digitally active anti-immigration leaders and Facebook celebrities like Lega Nord party secretary Matteo Salvini. Simultaneously, controversial Black Italian YouTubers and former African migrants like the pop-music artist Bello FiGo have also found commercial success, due to their ironic (if not explicitly parodistic) engagement with Italian mainstream populist discourses and immigration policies. This article explores how ideologically divergent digital media operators such as Salvini and Bello FiGo end up co-participating in ironic media performances of anti-refugee discourses that make possible different modes of displaced alterity, ranging from the cultural reproduction of anti-immigration imaginaries up to the instantiation of powerful modalities of grassroots resistance to them. As we will demonstrate ethnographically, these performances allow for forms of cultural intimacy between these media operators and their publics by means of populist irony, while engendering opposite (though structurally similar) dynamics of illiberal ventriloquism. In doing so, these controversial, future-oriented performances tend to subvert institutionalized liberal narratives of crisis and systemic displacement by putting into question the various internal inconsistencies characterizing contemporary neoliberal Italian immigration policies.