Remapping Italy's Migrant and Migrated Archives: An Agenda.

This essay complicates pervasive claims of amnesia about Italy's fascist and colonial pasts by examining the "migrated archives" produced by decolonization in tandem with emerging migrant archives designed to give voice to those experiences often excluded from state or other official archives. Archives, understood here in the broadest sense, thus serve as critical sites in which to investigate processes of multidimensional and multidirectional remembering, particularly those associated with Italy's many, entangled migrations. The analysis asks: how might a notion of "multidirectional diasporas" inform imaginings by scholars and activists alike of new forms of solidarity and more inclusive forms of citizenship? While taking cues from Michael Rothberg's writings on the multidirectionality of the Holocaust, transatlantic slavery, and colonialism as "singular yet relational histories," the discussion also draws upon Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz's productive concept of memory citizenship to describe a form of belonging that draws upon what they refer to as migrant archives of remembrance. Memory citizenship offers a critical tool for remapping Italy's migrant (and migration) archives in ways that take account of a diversity of diasporic histories, most notably those being recuperated by scholars of the black Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]