Dr Federico Faloppa of the University of Reading, co-editor of the recent “Destination Italy: The representation of migration in Italian cinema, media and literature” (Italian Modernities, 2015)

When modern languages are in the news, Reading Reacts. In a regular feature, we’ll invite members of the Reading community to comment on current events, sharing their insights about what is happening in the world beyond the university. With European immigration once again in the news, we’ve asked Dr Federico Faloppa, Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies at the University of Reading, to reflect on the ways in which we think and talk about international mobility in contemporary politics. For over twenty years Dr Faloppa has been investigating the representation of migrants in Italian political and media discourse, and the relation between language and power. Here are some of his reflections:

Mobility. Next year, one of the lectures of the module ML3LP “Language and power” will be devoted to the concept of mobility and its related semantic field. More generally, we’ll look at the verbs of movement in order to further investigate the use of these verbs (and concepts) in public discourse, to see who is moving from where (to where), how and why, when we read a newspaper article, watch a talk show, listen to a politician’s speech.

It is going to be relatively easy to introduce this topic. If you think about it, my students will be back from their Erasmus exchange, and will be able to say plenty of things about their own mobility across Europe. I will be back from a trip to East Asia, where borders for an Italian citizen are relatively easy to cross. Everybody will have something to say about her or his own mobility in the last few months: and how cool has it been what we have experienced during the summer.

Recent polls show that immigration is the main concern of Europeans, more than the economy or unemployment.

On the other hand, by analysing public discourse, we might be surprised to see how the same kind of verbs (travelling, flying, driving, wandering, etc.) we use to refer to our experience could not be applicable (or not in the same way) to many other people over the same period of time, i.e. during the same bright summer. We might be surprised to find out how the same verbs have been either implied or – I assume – avoided or omitted when talking about the thousands of people who tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea, the borders of Eastern Greece, the walls of the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, and the Channel. We might be surprised to see how the same words can have different usage, connotations, and occurrences if referring to middle-class European citizens or to Syrian kids, Somali women, Nigerian adolescents. We might be surprised to see how a word like jungle may mean the exotic, fascinating space I have crossed in Cambodia to reach Angor Wat in August, or else to the campsite near Calais (called “the Jungle”) where thousands of people are amassed, waiting for a chance to leave France and to look for a better life in the UK.

If we do some corpus-driven research by using specific software or close discourse analysis of a few texts, for instance by looking at agency, we will find a lot of useful information: I am sure we will. Then, if we had more time, we could also look at some other lexical items to get a further idea about frequency, collocations, and connotations. Items such as swarm, for example: to see if this word has occurred more when referring to insects and animals – as the Oxford English Dictionary says – or to human beings, as David Cameron has argued when he talked of a “swarm of people” trying to reach Britain through the Channel.

Or words such as disruption. We have heard this word so many times, while traveling: when an underground train is delayed, when a train is cancelled, when a road is closed in our neighbourhood for maintenance works. But would we use it when talking about an unprecedented human crisis, as Harriet Harman, the interim Labour leader, has just done in a letter addressed to PM David Cameron, asking for compensation to British holidaymakers and British companies because of the disruption caused by the “migrant crisis”? “Your discussions with the French government – Harman wrote to PM Cameron – should… include a request for compensation backed up by any diplomatic pressure that may become necessary. Compensation should cover all losses.” And, by the way, what about “losses”? Has this word had a higher frequency when talking about the lives of non-European people lost trying to cross the Channel, or when referring to economic losses of British tourists?

I would maybe stop at this point, in that lecture of ML3LP. But – who knows – and I would maybe ask my colleagues teaching Italian, French, German and Spanish to test their students’ pronunciation – in their language classes – on some unusual words like Lampedùsa, Calais, Ceuta and Melilla or Freital: the village close to Dresden where several asylum seekers have become prisoners in the hotel in which they have been housed, while locals outside shout abuse and threaten to burn the building down. At least, other students will have the chance to ask themselves if they know more about what is going on in our fortress Europe: about who is (not) moving where and why.

Of course, it will then be up to them to decide which side they are on, to recall Florence Reeve’s song made famous by Pete Seeger. When I was a 19-year old student – more or less their age – together with a group of friends, I founded in my hometown of Cuneo an anti-racist association, hoping to reflect (and to make other people reflect) on human rights, discrimination, migration, and mobility. Some of my students are already volunteering for NGOs, some others will be travelling around the world and see with their own eyes how lucky they are to own a British passport and to move freely. Some others may simply say “this is none of my business.” My job is not to persuade them to take a particular political position, or to be committed to some humanitarian cause. I would consider myself lucky if I could inform them not only about the beauty of my discipline, linguistics, but also about the dramatic issues out there, and could give them some tools to face complexity and to multiply their points of view. Maybe they will not be able to grant, or will not be interested in granting, other people’s right to mobility. But they should be made aware of what the polysemy of moving may imply to different people, in 2015, in Europe.

Lo strage di Bologna (The Bologna Massacre), 2 August 1980.

PS: Today is the 2nd of August. 35 years ago a bomb went off at the train station in Bologna, killing 86 people. The massacre was attributed to a neo-fascist organisation, but we still do not know who was behind the explosion, and why. We still do not know why those 86 people – who were going back home for their summer holidays – were prevented from “moving” to join their families. I will make sure to mention this to my students who have been – and will go – to Bologna for their Erasmus exchange, when we talk about people’s freedom of movement, about people’s right to live their own lives.

For more news and commentary about modern languages in the news, we invite you to check out the Reading Reacts section of our blog.

For news about the students, staff, and alumni of the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies at the University of Reading, follow this blog, like us on Facebook, and subscribe to our Twitter feed.

If you would like to receive regular updates from our blog, with the latest news about languages at Reading, please enter your email address below:

[subscribe2]

Dr. Federico Faloppa, Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies at the University of Reading

More than 900 migrants were killed off the coast of Libya late Saturday night and early Sunday morning, 18-19 April. This brings the death toll in the Mediterranean in 2015 to over 1,500 victims. In the wake of this tragedy, we’ve asked Dr Federico Faloppa, Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies at the University of Reading, to share his thoughts. For over twenty years Dr Faloppa has been investigating the representation of migrants in Italian political and media discourse, and the relation between language and power. He has recently coedited the collection Destination Italy: The representation of migration in Italian cinema, media and literature (2015), and continues to lecture on issues of migration throughout Europe. Here are Dr Faloppa’s reflections on this ongoing catastrophe:

Which side are we on?

“It’s not our fault if we were born on the wrong side of the world. You do not have the merit for being born on the right side of the world” (Awas Ahmed, Somali refugee).

Yesterday almost 950 people died in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to reach the Italian coast and to migrate to Europe. This is not a tragedy due to misfortune. It is a real massacre: this is only the latest episode of a genocide, one that has gone on for several years in that Sea, and one that we – both Italian and European citizens – knew how to avoid.

This new massacre has provoked a strong reaction throughout Europe, as many people think that this carnage must be stopped, that this is a time actively to start saving lives, instead of passively accepting their death with indifference.

Since 1997 I have taken part in many public debates and discussions, in Italy and throughout Europe, on the linguistic representation of otherness and migrants. My aim has always been to raise awareness on how migrants and ethnic minorities have been portrayed in Italian and other European languages, by the media, within our societies. And as a researcher I have written several publications (among which 4 monographs in 15 years) on this topic. My work has gained national and international esteem, and I have been often invited to public events and talks, radio and TV shows, roundtables and workshops. Four years ago, when I published my monograph Razzisti a parole (“Racists by words”), I toured universities, schools, communities, and for this public engagement I was included in a couple of black-lists by Fascist and Neo-nazi movements. But instead of withdrawing, I keep being more and more engaged, publicly.

Yesterday, I was asked to join an Italian campaign called “Basta Naufragi” (“No more shipwrecks”), and of course said yes. When I join these kinds of campaigns – and I have done so many times, ever since I was 19, when I co-founded an anti-racist association in my home town Cuneo – I do it as an individual. As a citizen, first of all. And then as student, a scholar, an intellectual. But yesterday, when I said yes, I imagined to join the campaign first as a member of Reading’s Department of Modern Languages and European Studies: “my” department. I did not say yes as an individual. I said yes as a member of an intellectual community: my community.

I had this strong feeling for two main reasons. First, I think that is part of our duty, as teachers and intellectuals, to take a stand: to make our voice heard inside and outside the university on matters like this. As teachers we try to pose questions to our students every time we get into a classroom: questions about the world, its representation, and the need to challenge received wisdom. As scholars, we try to have an impact not only on our own “closed” community, but also on our society, to repay what our society invests in us. As a teaching and research unit in Reading’s Department of Modern Languages and European Studies we are – by definition – one of the main cultural bridges between our institution (the University of Reading) and the complex world out there.

We are not just entitled, then, to have an opinion, but we should actively participate in social and political debates. Second, as a member of our distinguished Department of Modern Languages and European Studies, I am fully aware of the fact that this commitment, this role is a core issue for us at Reading. At MLES we teach our students how our European cultures have been always multilingual and multicultural. What the connections between Dante and Islam are. What foreign words we have taken from Asia, Africa, the Americas. What influence our literature(s) have had worldwide (and how the richness of the world has been distilled by our authors across centuries). How postcolonial approaches and studies could be fruitful to better understand the relations between the colonizers and the colonized. What Europe is and should be. Why migration is such a relevant phenomenon in our countries. How identities are shaped within the contexts of language and power. What being an intellectual should mean, and why critical thinking can change the representation of the world, if not the world itself. We do all this at MLES, and we are proud of it. For us, the word “overseas” means the countries with which we engage for pedagogical and cultural exchanges: places and persons from which we can learn on an everyday basis. We say to ourselves, and to our students, that Modern Languages are the passport to the world. But we are much more than that: we are one of the (metaphorical) gates to diversity, multiplicity, mutual understanding.

This is why, when I said yes to that campaign, I was not alone: I had an entire community standing behind me, backing me up, sharing my awareness, concern, commitment. And this feeling of giving voice to my Department through that signature meant that our voice will be heard: and it’s a collective voice of students, teachers, researchers, who are still dreaming of a fairer world. I do not know if this can really change something, challenge our leaders’ indifference and cynicism, or save some lives from that bloody Sea. But at least we can proudly say which side are we on. And we will not regret it.