Abstract

In this article I highlight the longevity of the racist stereotype of zingari as child kidnappers through four case studies from Italian state archives and fourteen case studies from Corriere della Sera and La Stampa in the early twentieth century. The four cases indicate a tension between local public racial prejudices against zingari and authorities who were seeking to take an efficient approach to controlling and surveillance of zingari. With the rise of modern positivist criminology, local public security authorities and the carabinieri (the paramilitary police force) seemed sceptical of the local public’s claims that ‘Gypsies’ were engaged in kidnapping. While employing racist police practices, they separated themselves from popular stereotypes and prejudices in favour of modern scientific ones, while using that “knowledge” to advance that agenda. The cases indicate the staying power of the literary racist trope on a popular level, and I argue that public “knowledge” of zingari was used by Italian state authorities to carry out their task of administrative control over law-and-order issues. These goals mark a departure from the 16th century literary invention of the trope, which focused on the necessity of assimilation of those marked as “disobedient” but bear some important similarities to the 21st century use, which seems to function as a “racial hoax” mobilizing citizens against migrants and acting as a justification for increased surveillance on the part of state authorities. Consistent throughout, however, are the important commonalities of the rise of mass and popular media as drivers of the racist trope.

Bio

Jennifer Illuzzi is an associate professor of history at Providence College.  She focuses on the intersections between institutional history and diasporic populations, particularly the Romani population in Europe. She studies modern German and Italian history, focusing on social and political history, and particularly gender history, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

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