Passaparola It

Panorama

Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy

This book is about migrants’ lives in urban space, in particular Rome and Milan. At the core of the book is literature as written by migrants, members of a “second generation,” and a filmmaker who defines himself as native. It argues that the narrative authored by migrants, refugees, second generation women, and one “native Italian” perform a reparative reading of Italian spaces in order to engender reparative narratives. Eve Sedgwick wrote about our (now) traditional way of reading based on unveiling and on, mainly, negative affect. We are trained to tear the text apart, dig into it, and uncover the anxieties that define our age. Migrants writers seem to employ both positive and negative affects in defining the past, present, and future of the spaces they inhabit. Their recuperative acts of writing, constitute powerful models of changes in/on place. As they look at Italian exclusionary spaces, they also rewrite them into a present whose transitiveness allows to imagine a process of citizenship and belong constructed from below.

Southern European Challenger Parties against the Mainstream

This book focuses on the rise of new challenger parties and the magnitude of their impact on political systems and the existing political order in Southern Europe in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Examining Podemos (Spain), SYRIZA (Greece), and M5S (Italy), it highlights the differences and commonalities between them and their voters. The book reveals whether these parties were effectively able to change the status quo represented by mainstream parties and, secondly, whether they created novel organizational structures capable of “bring the people in”, that is, of re-mobilizing disenfranchised voters and of re-inventing the concept of participation within the political party. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of party politics, representation, leadership, political elites, public opinion, populism, and more broadly to comparative politics, European studies, and contemporary European history.