Out of Time: History, Presence, and the Departure of the Italians of Egypt, 1933-present

This dissertation studies the experiences of an Italian emigrant and colonial community in the shifting political regimes of the mid-twentieth century Mediterranean. It addresses the question of how the sense of community that emerged since the 1930s among “the Italians of Egypt” (gli italiani d’Egitto) positioned them within a constellation of competing geo-political domains. The community of over 60,000 Italian residents on the eve of the Second World War encompassed a wide range of national, ethnic, and religious identities that were brought closer together through their temporal and spatial displacement. Juxtaposing archival and oral-historical sources, this dissertation documents how the Italians of Egypt engaged national and imperial narratives by anticipating, experiencing, and remembering their departure from Egypt, processes which in turn constituted their sense of belonging to history. The structure of this dissertation works against teleological readings of history. Chapters one and two address imagined futures of the Italians of Egypt in the context of the imperial aspirations of the Fascist regime in the early 1930s and during the Second World War. Chapters three and four cover the events and legal regimes in Egypt and Italy through which departing Italians became “repatriates” and “national refugees” after the Second World War and into the 1960s. These historiographical chapters are interwoven with oral-historical vignettes that illustrate how repatriated Italians of Egypt in today’s Italy revisit their lived experiences. The vignettes examine the community’s origins, the consequences of political transformation in postwar Egypt, and the experiences of departure from Egypt and arrival in Italy. Italian communities in colonial settings in general, and those within the shifting borders of the Mediterranean in particular, remain marginal to scholarly work on colonial communities. This dissertation contributes to recent scholarship by providing a key example of the complex unraveling of the colonial Mediterranean. Demonstrating how departures and arrivals contoured the history of the Italians of Egypt, "Out of Time" underscores the importance of regional politics in shaping historical consciousness in the Mediterranean. In doing so, it challenges traditional periodization and studies that conceptually divide Europe from the Middle East and North Africa.PHDAnthropology and HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135848/1/viscomi_1.pd

Mediterranean futures: historical time and the departure of Italians from Egypt, 1919-1937

The entanglements and interactions that characterize the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Mediterranean pose a wealth of problems for historians. Many scholars turn to the slippery terms "cosmopolitanism" and "nationalism" to understand how the populations moving around the sea's shores changed over time. These accounts often portray a struggle between worldviews, one subverting or replacing the other. In this article, I argue that the problem at stake in the historiography of the colonial Mediterranean is rooted not in the epistemological categories we use to understand the period, but rather in our interpretive approach to the processes that contour the sea's history. In place of a focus on such categories, I attend to recent scholarship on histories of the future. By taking seriously the role of temporal imagination among historical actors, this approach can help historians better understand how historical processes unfolded in the colonial Mediterranean. In this case, the Italians of Egypt (italiani d'Egitto) and historical actors connected to their communities envisioned their futures during the interwar period in ways that reach far beyond the immediate political circumstances. Contrary to traditional interpretations, which see the 1950s as pivotal to the departure of Italians from Egypt, in this article I demonstrate that, in part triggered by Fascist propaganda and imperialist aspirations in the sea itself, by the late 1930s departure and repatriation were central to any discourse on Italian futures in Egypt. This case, I argue, challenges the foundations of traditional depictions of the twentieth-century colonial Mediterranean

1874 : la diplomatie migratoire italienne en Égypte

This brief article argues that Italian diplomacy in the Mediterranean took an important turn around 1874. This shift is made visible through the direct intervention and discursive mobilization of Italian emigrant communities in Egypt by the Italian consul. The article specifically addresses debates at the time around legal pluralism and the importance of extraterritorial jurisdiction for diasporic national communities. In attempting to gain imperial power relative to French strongholds in the region, the young Italian state struggled to articulate a position. In this article, I show how the Italian state and its diplomatic actors used emigrant communities, and these debates, to further its aims in the years between national unification and the aggressive colonial policies enacted by the 1890s and after the turn of the century

Pontremoli's cry: personhood, scale, and history in the Eastern Mediterranean

This article explores the relationship between personhood and participation in wider political worlds that encompass (and dismantle) national, transnational and regional scales. It does so through a microhistorical study of Moise Pontremoli, an Italian Sephardic Jew displaced from Izmir to Alexandria and finally to Rome between the 1920s and the 1960s. After having returned to Egypt from the First World War as a ‘wounded Italian veteran’, Pontremoli purchased a plot of desert land from local Bedouin. This land became home to his experimental farm. He wrote expressively on his greening of the desert landscape during the interwar years, until he was cut off from it by the Second World War. Between 1952 and 1956 local authorities destroyed his crops and sequestered his land. He petitioned the Egyptian Sequestrate and received minor compensation; then, in a much longer and unanswered battle, he pursued Italian diplomatic authorities for what he saw as their abandon in favour of state interests and a diplomacy of political ‘friendship’ with Egypt’s emergent nationalist regime. He wrote obsessively to journalists, politicians, lawyers, human rights activists, and to anyone who might listen to his case. With great frustration, Pontremoli repatriated in 1963 and settled in Rome to continue his campaign. His letters gained attention only in the turbulent years of late-1960s Italy, just before his death in 1968. This article argues that Pontremoli’s articulation of personhood through his wounded body and lost land knotted histories of migration, empire, war, and decolonization into one tale of twentieth-century Mediterranean discontent

From immigrants to emigrants: Salesian education and the failed integration of Italians in Egypt, 1937-1960

With Italy’s entry into the Second World War, Anglo-Egyptian authorities repatriated Italian diplomats from Egypt, arrested around 5,000 Italians, and sequestered both personal and business accounts. Italian institutions were indefinitely closed, including the Italian state schools. Hope for a future in Egypt among the roughly 60,000 Italian residents faded. The Salesian missionary schools, whose goal since the late nineteenth century had been to inculcate nationalist-religious sentiment in Italy’s emigrants, remained the only active Italian educational institution by claiming Vatican protection. As such, the missionary schools assumed a central role in the lives of many young Italians. After the war, these same young Italians began to depart Egypt en masse, in part driven by the possibilities opened up by their vocational training. Building on diplomatic, institutional and private archives, this article demonstrates how the Salesian missionary schools attempted and failed to integrate Italian immigrants into the Egyptian labour force through vocational training. This failure combined with socio-economic and geopolitical changes to propel Italian departures from Egypt, making emigrants out of immigrants

Introduction: Locating the Mediterranean

In recent years, the Mediterranean region has reasserted itself in the world: popular uprisings have unsettled long-standing political regimes, economic crises have generated precarity, and nationalist movements have reified some borders while condemning others. The circulation and stagnation of people, ideas, and objects provoked by these events draw attention to regional connections and separations that, in turn, challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In considering this resurgence of interest in the Mediterranean, this introduction asks: what role does ‘location’ play in our conception of region and region-formations? What kinds of locations are generated in the contemporary Mediterranean? How do historical, legal, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located somewhere in particular? Furthermore, the introduction explores how, by placing in dialogue diverse approaches and traditions, this collective volume works on two levels at once. First, each contribution posits its own Mediterranean ‘constellation’. Second, the collective volume presents a wider understanding of what historically inclined anthropologists might conceive of as a Mediterranean ‘constellation’. In doing this, the introduction proposes a theoretical apparatus through which we can understand cultural and historical values of region and region-making in and beyond the Mediterranean

Limits on the high-energy gamma and neutrino fluxes from the SGR 1806-20 giant flare of December 27th, 2004 with the AMANDA-II detector

On December 27th 2004, a giant gamma flare from the Soft Gamma-ray Repeater 1806-20 saturated many satellite gamma-ray detectors. This event was by more than two orders of magnitude the brightest cosmic transient ever observed. If the gamma emission extends up to TeV energies with a hard power law energy spectrum, photo-produced muons could be observed in surface and underground arrays. Moreover, high-energy neutrinos could have been produced during the SGR giant flare if there were substantial baryonic outflow from the magnetar. These high-energy neutrinos would have also produced muons in an underground array. AMANDA-II was used to search for downgoing muons indicative of high-energy gammas and/or neutrinos. The data revealed no significant signal. The upper limit on the gamma flux at 90% CL is dN/dE < 0.05 (0.5) TeV^-1 m^-2 s^-1 for gamma=-1.47 (-2). Similarly, we set limits on the normalization constant of the high-energy neutrino emission of 0.4 (6.1) TeV^-1 m^-2 s^-1 for gamma=-1.47 (-2).Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure