Specters of Eurafrica in an Italian Agroindustrial Enclave

Leandra D’Antone, Scienze e governo del territorio: Medici, ingegneri, agronomi, urbanisti nel Tavoliere di Puglia, 1865–1965 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990).

Stephanie Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). I would like to thank Pamela Ballinger for suggesting this reference. On the notion of “hydrocolonialism” see Isabel Hofmeyr, “Provisional Notes on Hydrocolonialism,” English Language Notes 57, no. 1 (2019): 11–20.

Elsewhere I have dealt with the (much spectacularized) conditions of labor and life of these sectors of the workforce, and on the infrastructures of governance, extraction, and resistance underlying them, in more detail. See: Irene Peano, “Emergenc(i)es in the fields: Affective composition and counter-camps against the exploitation of migrant farm labour in Italy,” in Impulse to Act: A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice, ed. Othon Alexandrakis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Irene Peano, “Global care-commodity chains: Labour re/production and agribusiness in the district of Foggia, southeastern Italy,” Sociologia del Lavoro 146 (2017): 24–39; Irene Peano, “Ways of making a human otherwise: After-ethnography with migrant labourers in Italian agro-industrial enclaves,” in Modos de Fazer/Ways of Making, ed. Vítor Oliveira Jorge (Porto: CITCEM, 2020); Irene Peano, “Turbulences in the encampment archipelago: Conflicting mobilities between migration, labour and logistics in Italian agri-food enclaves,” Mobilities (February 2021): 1–12; Francesca Esposito et al., “Fragmented Citizenship: Contemporary Infrastructures of Mobility Containment along Two Migratory Routes,” Citizenship Studies 24, no. 5 (2020): 625–641.

See l’Attacco TV, “Lamorgese: ‘Riteniamo che Foggia abbia bisogno di un'attenzione particolare del Governo,’” YouTube, December 23, 2019, ➝. For references to bonifica in relation to slums, camps, and city neighborhoods, see, for example, “Infiniti pericoli e degrado, l’inferno dell’ex pista non è più tollerabile: ‘Si apra il Cara agli stranieri regolari,’” FoggiaToday, June 1, 2020, ➝; “Gran Ghetto distrutto: testimonianze sull'incendio, la polizia indaga su cosa è accaduto prima del devastante rogo,” FoggiaToday, December 6, 2019, ➝.

Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, Paneuropa (Vienna, 1923).

Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). See, for example, many of the articles in the propaganda magazine Africa Italiana, published from 1938 to 1943.

See: Elizabeth Krause, “‘Empty Cradles’ and the Quiet Revolution: Demographic Discourse and Cultural Struggles of Gender, Race, and Class in Italy,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 4 (2001): 576–611; Milena Marchesi, “Reproducing Italians: Contested Biopolitics in the Age of ‘Replacement Anxiety,’” Anthropology & Medicine 19, no. 2 (2012): 171–188.

Mia Fuller, “Italy's Internal and External Colonies,” in A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change, eds. Marco Ferrari, Elisa Pasqual, and Andrea Bagnato (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). See also: Pamela Ballinger, The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundations of Postwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020); Carmine Conelli, “Razza, colonialità e nazione: Il progetto coloniale italiano tra Mezzogiorno e Africa,” in Quel che resta dell’impero: La cultura coloniale degli italiani, eds. Valeria Deplano and Alessandro Pes (Milan: Mimesis, 2014); Roberta Pergher, Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922–1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

The annexation of the last territories that were deemed “naturally” Italian would take place during the Great War, and the incomplete unification project (including a “mutilated victory” in World War I) was indeed one of the leitmotifs of what would become the fascist movement.

Antonio Ventura, I "Reali Siti" del Tavoliere: Dalle cinque colonie alla città sovracomunale dell'Unione, contributi documentari, librari, letterari (Foggia: Grenzi, 2013); Raffaele Ciasca, Storia delle bonifiche nel Regno di Napoli (Bari: Laterza, 1928), 76–83.

Nelson J. Moe, The view from Vesuvius: Italian culture and the southern question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

For examples of such attitudes in this period, see: Melchiorre Delfico (1788), cited in Ventura, I “Reali Siti,” 14; Giuseppe Palmieri (1789, 1792), cited in Ventura, I “Reali Siti,” 16, 126–27; Francesco Mercurio, “Agricolture senza casa: Il sistema del lavoro migrante nelle Maremme e nel Latifondo,” in Storia dell'agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, I: Spazi e paesaggi, ed. Piero Bevilacqua (Venice: Marsilio, 1989).

See: Le bonifiche in Italia dal '700 a oggi, eds. Piero Bevilacqua and Manlio Rossi-Doria (Rome: Laterza, 1984). See also the short film released by the regime’s Istituto Nazionale Luce, La bonifica del Tavoliere, 1940, ➝. For the overseas equivalents of these discourses in colonized Libya, see Hom, Empire's Mobius Strip.

In the same period, the coastal lake adjacent to the marshes was the object of another project of reclamation through drainage, one of the most ambitious for the period. The salinari and smugglers were the object of debate among the reformers of the time. See, for example, Saverio Russo, “La bonifica del lago Salpi, in Capitanata,” L’ambiente storico 8–9 (1985–1986): 119–135.

See: Rosario Labadessa, Il Tavoliere di Puglia dalla pastorizia all’agricoltura: Esperimenti borbonici di colonizzazione (Rome: Casa Editrice Pinciana, 1933); Savino Defacendis, Nuovi contributi alla storia di San Ferdinando di Puglia (San Ferdinando di Puglia: Archeoclub d'Italia, 2011).

Marta Petrusewicz, "Before the Southern Question: ‘Native’ Ideas on Backwardness and Remedies in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, 1815–1849,” in Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country, ed. Jane Schneider (New York: Berg, 1998). See also the well-known essay: Antonio Gramsci, “Notes on the Southern Problem and on the Attitudes Toward It of Communists, Socialists and Democrats,” 1926.

Frank Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy: Apulia, 1900–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

See: Mary Gibson, “Biology or Environment? Race and Southern ‘Deviancy’ in the Writing of Italian Criminologists, 1880–1920,” in Schneider, ed., Italy’s Southern Question, 99–115; Nicoletta Poidimani, Difendere la “razza”: Identità razziale e politiche sessuali nel progetto imperiale di Mussolini (Rome: Sensibili alle Foglie, 2009); Vito Teti, La razza maledetta: Origini del pregiudizio antimeridionale (Rome: manifestolibri, 2011).

Conelli, “Razza, colonialità e nazione.”

Conelli, “Razza, colonialità e nazione.”

See: Le bonifiche in Italia dal '700 a oggi; Poidimani, Difendere la “razza”; Maria Rosa Protasi and Eugenio Sonnino, “Politiche di popolamento: Colonizzazione interna e colonizzazione demografica nell’Italia liberale e fascista,” Popolazione e Storia 1 (2003): 91–138.

The propaganda of the time, up until the end of the fascist period, is full of such claims. For an overview, see, for example, Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian imperialism (London: Routledge, 2006).

At its root, the concept of Eurafrica “was derived from anthropology and ethnology, especially the works of Italian anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi. Basing his theory on physical anthropology, Sergi rejected the idea that the peoples of Europe were of Aryan or Caucasian descent, but argued that Europe’s population originated in Africa. There was thus one single ‘Eurafrican species.’” Hansen and Jonsson, Eurafrica, 32, footnote 30.

“Il fascismo e i problemi della razza,” Il Giornale d'Italia, July 14, 1938, republished as “Il Manifesto della razza,” La difesa della razza 1, no. 1 (1938): 2.

Poidimani, Difendere la “razza.”

See: Anton Blok, “South Italian Agro-Towns,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11, no. 2 (1969): 121–135; Snowden, Violence and Great Estates.

Giuseppe Barone, Mezzogiorno e modernizzazione: Elettricità, irrigazione e bonifica nell'Italia contemporanea (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 283.

Enrico Pantanelli, L’azienda irrigua di S. Chiara (Florence: Tipografia Classica, 1929).

Gianfranco Piemontese, Urbanistica ed Architettura nel Tavoliere delle Puglie: L'esperienza dei Centri rurali 1929–1942 (Foggia: Grenzi, 2010), 42, 65–66.

See, for example, Duilio Paiano, Quando a scuola andavo in bicicletta (Foggia: Parnaso, 2014), 48–49, 67. See also a short documentary film, Angelo Casto, Strani Migranti (Aranciafilm/RegionePuglia, 2007), ➝.

Personal communication from a descendant of the original settlers, Foggia, July 2021.

Lucia D’Ippolito, “L’ente di colonizzazione Puglia d’Etiopia,” in Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana, vol. II (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1996), 488–518.

See, for example, Federico Caprotti, “Scipio Africanus: Film, internal colonization and empire”, cultural geographies 16 (2009): 381–401.

At the same time, a massive population transfer took place towards Libya (including 235 people from Foggia) in the same years (1938–1939). See “1800 famiglie nei nuovi villaggi libici: Una flotta di diciassette piroscafi trasporterà il 29 ottobre i ventimila coloni,” Corriere della Sera, 1938.

See: Ballinger, The World Refugees Made; Riccardo Mariani, Fascismo e “città nuove” (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).

D’Antone, Scienze e governo del territorio, 193–194, footnote 50.