The New Racism in Europe: A Sicilian Ethnography

by Jeffrey Cole

• ISBN13: 9780521021494
• ISBN10: 0521021499
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-10-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In the last twenty years, immigration has become one of the most contested issues in Western Europe. The arrival of Africans, Asians, Eastern Europeans and others in Italy has reversed earlier trends of emigration. Debate, political activity and violence have raised questions of rejection and integration, of anti-racism and the new racism. Studies of these issues commonly focus on political activity and the plight of minorities, but this book breaks new ground in its emphasis on the everyday reactions of Italians to immigration and related issues. Drawing on research carried out in Palermo, Jeffrey Cole considers the role of class, culture, local history and political economy in the ambivalent responses of Sicilians to immigrants. He places Italian attitudes in a European context, and investigates why anti-immigrant politics are concentrated in the wealthy Italian North.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	x
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(24)
When the bottom looks down: working-class views of immigrants in Palermo	25	(49)
The view from the top: bourgeois views of immigrants in Palermo	74	(26)
The politics of race and immigration in the Italian north and south	100	(30)
Conclusions	130	(4)
Appendix	134	(2)
Notes	136	(7)
References	143	(9)
Index	152