Ethnographies are usually based on the conventional one- to two-year field projects that, once the ethnographer returns home and begins the write-up process, may allow for the crafting of truth claims that are frozen in time. Geographical distance becomes temporal remoteness, thus immobilizing a culture, a society, and a country in the authoritative meshes of the ethnographic present (Fabian 2002). Being ensconced in a thick web of relationships that preexisted my ethnography, and returning to Genoa several times a year, year after year, for a range of purposes that include, but also exceed, scholarship, I never had the luxury of regarding my ethnographic research as a completed project. In fact, at times the dynamics and conditions I was observing kept shifting so fast that the attempt to write about them generated anxieties. I often started tackling a topic only to realize that the realities I was analyzing were no longer quite as current, and something new had already entered the scene. My way of overcoming this impasse was to destabilize the ethnographic present by incorporating temporal depth whenever possible.
Furthermore, given my own identity as a diasporic Genoese who has lived and worked in the United States for more than twenty years, mine was not quite the “going back to the field” that characterizes the work of many anthropologists who “leave home” to go “elsewhere” (Reed-Danahay 1997). Instead, it was a form of circulatory migration whereby “home” was, more than anything else, an ever-shifting center (Baldassar 2001: 6–11): a modus vivendi based on shuttling back and forth between two countries while never really leaving either home or the elsewhere behind. As time went by, my ethnographic research both unraveled and intensified multiple affective threads, which in turn opened up new areas of investigation before my eyes where the personal was never divorced from the anthropological. As several of my friends became my informants, many of my informants became my friends: I started intellectual collaborations with some of them and volunteered to help others with their businesses, sharing their enthusiasms and their worries as they sought to preserve their livelihood in the face of a fluctuating economy. In all of this, Genoa always loomed large as the city that never ceased to intrigue, charm, and disappoint me. It tantalized me with memories of my youth and with the changes it superimposed on them; it also tormented me with its imperviousness, and, most importantly, it marked my personal life through its refusal to host my future and its simultaneous unwillingness to let fully go of me. My decision to conduct this project in Genoa was a way of deepening my connection to this city even as I looked for answers whose relevance was both anthropological and personal. Hence, this book is the labor of love: a contrasted love where an intermittent distance intensifies both longing and disappointment, and whose bitter breakups are often followed by the temporary pleasures of a renewed romance.
In this vein, the first chapter of this book is a semi-historical excursus set against the backdrop of my own experience. Moderately autoethnographic, this chapter is steeped in the assumption that our own stories are more than just personal experiences (Ellis 2004: 37), and that my own narrative has received its words from other voices (Bakhtin 1982: 202): those of the family members, friends, acquaintances, and mentors who contributed to my formative years, who walked with me through innumerable experiences, who helped me process them, and the many more who, in recent years, volunteered to take on the role of ethnographic informants. My stories are never fully mine, in that they are also implicitly interwoven with the voices of all those who provided me with critical perspectives even as they helped me shape my own (Bourguignon 1996). The latter category includes the historians, the sociologists, the anthropologists, but also the writers whose musings provided a springboard for this work. Due to the hybrid quality of the story I set out to tell, I opted for replacing the sanitized, objective, historical contextualization that is required of any book-length ethnography with a chapter where I provide chronotopic perspectives on the urban everyday starting with the 1970s—that is, the decade when Genoa’s deindustrialization process and its decline began. Drawing on formal histories and personal stories, on my own memories and those of people I met and interviewed, but also of those with whom I grew up and grew older, as well as on the works of local poets, novelists, and songwriters, Chapter 1 explores how, in the 1980s, the promises of neoliberalism led many a Genoese to hope for a better future. These promises hinged among others on the gradual but radical process that, by the end of the decade, had begun transforming Genoa’s cityscape, flashing glimpses of optimism for what had become a ghost city—or, in the words of local novelist of national renown Maurizio Maggiani (2007), a city of shattered mirrors. Unfortunately, even these promises were destined to be broken as—with the complicity of the recession that began in 2008 and deepened in 2011—Genoa’s newly found tourist vocation failed to provide the deliverance for which many had hoped.
Chapter 2 interrupts the narrative of local middle-class urbanity to present a different kind of aestheticization of the city: one that, unlike the other ethnographies in this book, does not emerge from the residents’ creative practice but rather from the transformation of Genoa into a stage for the performance of a global political drama in which the state played a paramount role. The Genoa that hosted the 2001 Group of Eight summit was one in a series of great events meant to contribute to Genoa’s revitalization by, among others, showcasing the city to global audiences. Yet in spite of the promise it allegedly held, this event was characterized by the exclusion of the local population through a top-down intervention on the cityscape at the hands of state representatives as well as by the ensuing backlash by a resistive multitude. As it shows what may happen when mutually antagonistic social groups lay a symbolic as well as a material claim to a cityscape, this chapter is a reminder of the potentially highly contested nature of urban revitalization—even when what is at stake is neither the commercialization of public space nor corporate profit per se, but rather the very same role of the urban as an arena for political performance. Just as importantly, this chapter outlines the contours of a collective trauma that marred the collective hope in the face of a state violence that had no antecedents in post–World War II Western history.
Written against the grain of political economy scholarship, Chapter 3 is an ethnographic analysis of the gentrification that has unfolded in Genoa’s centro storico since the early 1990s, thus repopulating a neighborhood that had been largely abandoned in the nineteenth century. This, however, is not the same phenomenon as described by much Anglophone scholarship. To date, most scholarly approaches to gentrification have cast cities as playing fields of planetary capitalism (Farías 2011; Ong 2011; Roy 2011), thus engaging in a “sameing” process that not only disallows difference through the universalization of North Atlantic modernity (Blaser 2013), but that also reduces cities to arenas for the class struggle between globalized bourgeoisies and the poor (Ong 2011). While there is no doubt that the gentrification of Genoa’s centro storico served the speculations of developers even as it increased the municipality’s revenues, this chapter approaches this phenomenon as a more complex reality whereby capitalist dynamics are just one component of the story. More specifically, this chapter tackles gentrification as an assemblage of people, logics, and materialities (Farías 2010; Collier and Ong 2005): one whereby a nexus of neoliberal rationality, the built environment, and old and new neighborhood residents and users contribute to making a world whose emergent dynamics may at times unfold along the lines of the well-researched template of the capitalist “spatial fix” (Harvey 2001)—and yet, at other times they are considerably more complex. The protagonists of this chapter are marginal gentrifiers who, unlike the revanchist yuppies described by much Anglo-American literature, are neither part of a fleeting stage of gentrification nor upwardly mobile. Instead, they are residents and small business owners who, keen on consuming and producing culture on a budget, have found a modus vivendi with the local crime scene, and negotiate their daily lives along the increasingly thin line that separates them from poverty even as they seek to resist the crushing pressure of corporate commerce with its new spatialities.
Chapters 4 and 5