Solidarities with Migrants: Thinking with Gramsci’s Southern Question Perspective

Keywords: migration; solidarity; social movements; civil society; Gramsci, Southern Question
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper grows out of my Ph.D. research which is informed by an ethnography of projects shaped through encounters between migrants and self-organizing solidarity groups in Milan, Italy, in the years following the 2015 so-called European refugee crisis. The research at large attends to the interrelationships between "civil society-state," "state-migrants," and "civil society-migrants."

This paper focuses on the civil society solidarities with migrants by thinking through Gramsci's perspective in 'Some Aspects of the Southern Question'. I look into case studies of various alliances of social movements and migrants, which aimed at challenging the hegemonic order of exclusionary immigration politics and policies, emphasizing the need to overcome what, in Gramscian terms, can be interpreted as avoiding particularism.

The paper reflects on case studies through questions such as:

What political formations did the subaltern activists constitute? How were they setting forward the claims? How did they understand the common sense of the claims? Were the positions of various actors mutually constitutive? What was their potential to form a new historical bloc, comprised of migrants and non-migrants, to bring about social and political transformations?

How they managed, or not, to identify the diverse oppressive effects of the dominant order on the heterogeneous actors, migrants and non-migrants? How were they opting to avoid the dominance of certain forms of particularism in the search for convergence of migrants and non-migrants in ongoing social struggles? How were they trying not to subordinate relations of race, ethnicity, and nationality while not letting them cause division and fragmentation?