The Migrant Metaphor Within Radical Italian Thought

Bibliographic Data

ID2641913
AuthorsIngrid M Hoofd (corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume11
Issue2
Pages129-146
Publication date2013-10-25
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1446-8123 • E-ISSN: 1837-8692
PublisherUniversity of Technology, Sydney (UTS) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5130/csr.v11i2.3663
OpenAlexW2003729862
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited2

NoBorder activisms and Italian philosophies are highly complicit in the ongoing fortification of the EU and the West, and of the West's subsequent global hegemonic spread through Eurocentric discourses and technologies. I will show that many radical Italian writings, through a metaphorisation of the 'migrant' or 'refugee', supplement the alter-globalisation movement in effectively reproducing the Eurocentric fantasy of the Enlightenment subject as the ultimate centre for social change, just as much as those despised EU policies do. I will do so by pointing out that this migrant metaphor functions primarily as a tool to make possible the claim for some sort of hegemonic 'unification of struggles' in 'the new world order' by these radical Italian thinkers. They will be shown to do so through a doubly romanticising move, leading to both the reproduction of the migrant or refugee as a heroic figure and the acting out of an unfinishable desire for communal self-identification with the migrant, through claims that s/he embodies the transcendental fantasy of the total subsumption of boundaries

Aesthetics · Art · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Fantasy · Globalization · Hegemony · Literature · Media studies · Metaphor · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Subject (documents · Turkish · Educational and Social Studies · Gender Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci

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