Italian Decolonization: Multidirectional Migrations, Multidirectional Memories

Postcolonial racial surveillance through forensic genetics

“…By modern we mean the socio-historical organization and classification of the world founded on a macro-narrative and on a specific concept and principles of knowledge" (2006,205). It is this cut-off line of social, epistemic, cultural and ontological hierarchisation (Tlostanova, 2015), and, no less secondary, that of racial differentiation, a passenger accompanying the return of both the coloniser and the colonised at the terminus of historical colonial and imperial experiences (Ribeiro, 2004;Stoller, 2011;Tlostanova, 2014;Khan, 2015;Buettner, 2020;Ballinger, 2020). The question that stands out is therefore this: How does the logic of the coloniality, so integral to Western modernity, remain active and dynamic in European postcoloniality?…”

“…Studies on the life and identity narratives of populations arriving from former Portuguese, Dutch, French, Italian (Ballinger, 2017(Ballinger, , 2020 and British colonies (Burrell et al, 2019;Da Costa and Da Costa, 2019;De Noronha, 2019) demonstrate the absence of cultural empathy, complicity and homogeneity between the social groups that the colonial and imperial experience has created and which, ironically, does not recognise it as being part of a larger and more inclusive history because of its geopolitical and temporal scale and geographical framework. As Buettner observed in her analysis of the persistence of colonial imagery after the various processes of decolonisation, on the one hand, and of immigration and postcolonial movements, on the other, the matrix of Western modernity and its logic of coloniality have endured far beyond the collapse of empires, sustaining, in the postimperial European space, both the survival of the old provisions of colonial vocabulary and the complicity with the old grammar of racialisation, racial surveillance and of the continuous production of the "Other," as well as the rearranging (Santos, 2007) of the abyssal and border lines between postcolonial and postcolonialised populations.…”