Adriatic Brethren or Black Sheep?

Abstract

This article considers the shifting image and reception of the over 40,000 Albanians who fled their land for Italian shores during the dramatic events of March and August 1991 (an exodus which, in small numbers, continues even today). The analysis considers a striking rhetorical shift in Italian discourses;if, initially, the Albanians were depicted in this crisis as 'Adriatic brothers' and 'noble savages' who vafidated the ideal of western democracy against Communism, over the course of the crisis they became increasingly represented as merely savage and 'non-European'. This shift was paralleled in the problem of defining the Albanians as 'political refugees' or 'economic migrants', the latter designation aligning them with immigrants from developing countries whose presence has increasingly been a site of tension in Italy, as in many other western European countries. Additionally, the article considers the self reflection stimulated in Italy in the wake of the Albanian Crisis, which in many respects problematized ltaly's own rightful position alongside other European nations. The research is based on Italian mass-media discourses and anthropological fieldwork conducted in southern Italy, in an area which housed most of the arrivals.