Crystallizing race into socio-spatial configurations. A genealogy of urban camps for Roma in Italy and France, public lecture by Giovanni Picker (CEU IAS)

Giovanni Picker (Research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, CEU): Crystallizing race into socio-spatial configurations. A genealogy of urban camps for Roma in Italy and France

Several Romani families in Italy and France are currently forced to live in peripheral urban camps. The paper traces a comparative genealogy of these camps by looking at the shift from the colonial to the metropole's urban spatial order which camps for civilians imposed. Both state authorities used camps for civilians in the colonies, and the three Fascist authorities (Pétain, Nazi occupiers, and Mussolini) constructed concentration camps. All three authorities deported Roma to camps in Italy and France, as well as in Germany and Poland. Against the backdrop of this common pathway, my question is under what conditions Italian authorities forced Roma into camps in the mid-1980s, while French authorities waited until as late as 2007. I show that the ideas behind, as well as the functions of, colonial camps and post-WWII camps for Roma reveal historical continuity and a cross-national convergence as the sites of the crystallization of a peculiar form of racial doctrine. My argument is that, having its roots in the colonial experiments of population management, race as a logic of population governance has re-emerged in neoliberal urban Europe. And I put forward the hypothesis that Italy's deep-rooted tradition of racialist theorizing, from Lombroso (1876) to Patellani (1912) to Semizzi (1939), has elicited and legitimized that re-emergence earlier than in the République.