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Silence
Silence. One day I visited a bookstore. It’s one of those clinging to survival in an increasingly post-book world. Aimed at a “discerning” audience it carries a rich diversity of titles – fiction and non-fiction on virtually every topic. It is particularly well stocked with historical works – Europe, America, Australia, Germany, Britain, France and others. Plenty to choose from. But that day I was looking for Italian history. I was looking for my history, for “Italy”. I found the Italian history section. It consisted of two books. One was a book on Simon Bolivar, the great liberator of South America, misclassified as “Italian”. The second was a book on the mafia. Here was all…
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Is ethnic nationalism a surrogate religion?
The notion of foreignness relies on a separation of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and today’s world, it is often ethnicity and nation—two terms that are related but not necessarily coterminous—that create that us-them dichotomy. It is crucial to realize, however, that the ideas of ethnicity and nation are hardly timeless. We tend to cherish our so-called ethnic or national identities as if they are embedded in our DNA, and while there is of course nothing necessarily wrong about doing so, it is also essential to bear in mind that far from being natural, ethnic or national identities are socially constructed—and, what’s more, only socially constructed very recently. In order to understand…
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Abolish Foreignness
Eight million children under the age of five die each year from largely preventable causes. One billion people live in abject poverty. Thousands die crossing international borders while fleeing poverty, war or persecution. Rich countries reinforce barriers, laws and measures to prevent people crossing their borders. Hundreds of thousands are held in migration prisons as if they were criminals. 67 million people live as refugees or are internally displaced as a result of persecution, war, poverty or other causes. Believing that human beings are “foreigners” makes such profound human rights violations possible.
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Identity Crisis
Some countries obsess about ‘who we are’. The obsession becomes more intense, the more people with different coloured skins, different accents, diffent cultures become part of day to day life. In an age of migration “we” can become very confusing. Who can “we” be, if quite obviously “us” includes “them”. This question is not just one of tribalism, although tribalism is at the roots of this anxiety. The world is constructed around the idea of “races”: every nation a state and every state a nation. Italians in Italy, Germans in Germany, Poles in Poland. The theory was simple: better simplistic – and it never worked well. At its worst it…
