ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the politicization of emigration by London Italians who struggle for the formalization and institutionalization of political ties with Italy, while simultaneously claiming greater authority and autonomy over the definition of the status and lives of emigrants. It analyses how the experience of emigration and the promise of Italian national allegiance, are stitched together by a complex definition of culture. The chapter proposes to unpack the invention of a new political constituency of 'Italians abroad' emerges in tandem with the notion of the citizen as 'legal' and 'cultural' subject. Cultural identity is brought into contact with geographically and genealogically coded 'origins', thus transforming it into a pseudo-biological property of human life. Italian people's relationship to national identity is complicated by a history of emigration. The notion of 'Italians abroad' stems from a vexed position between the impossibility of return to Italy, and the quest for new solidarities based upon new forms of existence.
