ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 introduces the notion of intimacies of exclusion by exploring intimacy and intimate identities as they emerge in Northern Italian narrative practices. The chapter starts with a historical and political contextualization of the book to better explain how people’s exclusionary stances can get created and solidified across spatiotemporal scales. It then shows that the concept of multiculturalism cannot be applied to the Italian linguistic, political, and sociocultural landscape. Italy has always had many multilingual communities of practice given the linguistic diversity that has existed for centuries. This particular linguistic and sociocultural landscape has been recently enriched by other languages thanks to the arrival of migrant groups from across the globe. Thus, given the present and ongoing transnational flows in and out of Italy, especially considering that this was already a historically fragmented country, this chapter proposes a new way to understand the present Italian landscape, namely as characterized by an inclusion-resistant superdiversity. This adaptation of Vertovec’s (2007) and Blommaert’s (2010) conceptualization adds an important layer that captures the present, aggressive anti-immigrant stances, and thus an emergent, overall resistance to accepting migrants in Italy.
