Addams wrote extensively on the significance and value of immigrant cultures of origin, both for immigrants themselves and for nonimmigrant Americans. Her theory of cul¬tural pluralism is democratic and cosmopolitan. However, in the few essays she wrote on African Americans, she does not extend her theory to encompass African American culture. In this paper I develop Addams's theory of cultural pluralism. I then point out resources in her theory with which she could have extended it to include African American culture, (...) in light of knowledge available to her at the time. I also identify barriers in her theorizing that made it difficult to do so. (shrink)

According to IOM, there have been 20.000 dead or missing migrants in the Mediterranean since 2014. According to the NGO United, there have been 44.000 dead people on the European borders since the beginning of 1990s. more than the 75% of these people goes missing in the sea. In Italy only a small part of retrieved bodies can be identified and sometimes repatriated. In most cases, the bodies are buried with no names in coastal cemeteries. In the face of the (...) expeditious disposal of the bodies, linked to public health issues and to the working of the devices that connotate the border regime, those communities that accommodate these corpses face the need to “integrate” someone else’s death in their own universe of sense thanks to specific practices of “hospitality” dedicated to the defunct. Through a project that maps buried migrants in the cemetery of Catania and in collaboration with the local committee of Red Cross and the municipality of Catania, since 2017 we have started, with the program Mecmi, an ethnography of the practices of body disposal and of burial rituals dedicated to more than 260 corpses. (shrink)

The global city is a new frontier zone. Deregulation, privatization, and new fiscal and monetary policies create the formal instruments to construct their equivalent of the old military “fort”. The city is also a strategic frontier zone for those who lack power, and allows the making of informal politics. At the same time the border is a mix of regimes, marked by protections and opportunities for corporations and high-level professionals, and implies confinement, capture and detention for migrants. The essay discusses (...) the transformation of the city in a frontier zone and analyses the separation between the capabilities entailed by territoriality and the geographic territory tout court. The analysis focuses on the effects of neoliberal policies that, far from making this a borderless world, have actually multiplied the bordered spaces that allow firms and markets to move across conventional borders. Cities are therefore one of the key sites where new neoliberal norms are made and where new identities emerge. (shrink)