Redrawing the Boundaries of Italianness: Televised Identities in the Age of Globalisation

Two irremovable axes of national identity, race and gender are still pivotal parameters in contemporary attempts to redefine the existing boundaries of Italianness. While cultural identity is not strictly limited to notions of gender and race, I argue for the centrality of these two concepts in the Italian context. Indeed, more than class or religion, television adopts the lens of race and gender to visually codify the essence of national identity and promote unambiguous images of Italianness. In this paper, I will first summarize recent trends of immigration to Italy, which have turned the country from a land of emigrants to one of immigrants. This directional shift has coincided with a (patent or veiled) need to rephrase the limits of identity and belongingness. The second section of this essay focuses on some specific television programs that question the relationship between race and Italian identity. Here, attention will shift towards the insistent focus on the issue of colour to connote diversity. Decoding these programs in light of postmodernist understandings of race and nationalism will better assess their role in the Italian mediascape. In September 1996, Italian public television broadcast the election of the first black Miss Italy in the country's history. Denny Mendez, the controversial beauty queen, was an 18-year-old of Dominican origins at the time of the election. Mendez was a naturalized Italian who had moved to Italy in the early 1990s when her mother married an Italian citizen. Besides the age requirement, Italian citizenship is the only necessary prerequisite for all the contenders. Clearly, the official rules of the national beauty pageant do not emphasize the need for a particular skin colour, facial features, or command of the Italian language. As proven in 1996, the vagueness of the terms of participation leaves ample ground for unexpected endings, particularly at the end of the twentieth century when Italy, like much of Western Europe, could no longer eschew the ubiquitous presence of ethnically different citizens.