Italianness at the mirror

The Juventus Club of Addis Ababa and the

“return” of children of immigrants to Ethiopia

Giuseppe Grimaldi, University of Trieste

ORCID: 0000-0002-0250-0362; [Link]@[Link]

Abstract. Colonial and post-colonial structures play a key role in the analysis of
the children of immigrants in Italy. However, little research has been done on
this topic in the former colonies. The purpose of this article is to analyse how
coloniality and post-coloniality play a key role in the determination of mobility
projects to Ethiopia by Italians of Ethiopian origins. Focusing on the Juventus
Club in Addis Ababa, the city’s postcolonial space par excellence and at the same
time one of the reference spaces for Italians of Ethiopian origin during their stay
in Ethiopia, the aim of the paper is to show the complex field of meanings within
which the children of immigrants reproduce their Italianness. The Italian post-
colonial structures, dynamics, and symbols that are considered, function as a
mirror that reflects the relation between children of immigrants and Italianness
both in Italy and in Ethiopia.

Keywords: Second generation; Italianness; Colonialism; Counter diasporic mo-

bility; Ethiopia.

Introduction

In recent decades there has been a consolidation of studies on the relation-

ship between Italian children of immigrants1 and Italian colonial and post-
colonial legacies.

1
For a panorama of the studies on the relation between children of immigrants and the Italian
context see, among others, Andall (2002); Giacalone (2011); Colombo, Rebughini (2012); Marinaro,
Walston (2010); Riccio, Russo (2011); Riccio (2016); Queirolo Palmas (2006); Ambrosini (2009).

Antropologia pubblica, n. 1, 2024 • Mimesis Edizioni, Milano-Udine © 2024 – MIM EDIZIONI SRL
ISSN: 2531-8799 • ISBN: 9791222312828 • DOI: 10.7413/2531-8799005
This is a peer-reviewed and open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (CC-BY-4.0)
 Italianness at the mirror

In some seminal works on children of immigrant the “legacy and memory”

of Italian colonialism (Andall 2002) have been central to the analysis. In the
last two decades, studies on the nexus between children of immigrants and
coloniality (Thomassen 2010; Marinaro, Walston 2010; Grimaldi 2022) have
discussed the notion of “second generation”2 giving it new meanings. The link
between the subjectivity of children of immigrants and coloniality has been
widely explored within the framework of the Black Mediterranean (the Black
Mediterranean Collective 2021; Grimaldi 2019a, 2022; Hawthorne 2022),
where the analysis of the structures of marginalization in Italy is directly linked
to the emergence of European modernity and its history of empire, colonial
conquest, and racism (Danewid 2017).3
However, despite the flourishing literature on this relationship and the specific
attention paid to children of immigrants from former Italian colonies (espe-
cially from Ethiopia4 and Eritrea),5 very few studies have focused on the ways
in which coloniality affects the subjectivities of Italian children of immigrants
outside Italy, especially when they refer to their ancestral land.
The paucity of literature on this subject is certainly related to the Italian con-
text and its relation to the colonial history: although since the seminal work
of Del Boca (1976) there has been an increase of studies on the colonial and
post-colonial structures in the former Italian colonies, there is still a long way
to go to explore the effects of the Italian imperial history on the subjectivities
of the people involved.6 On the other hand, the absence of a research tradition
on this topic has much to do with the political and analytical framework that
guides the analysis of the so-called “second generations”: in fact, the literature
on children of immigrants still tends to consider them as cultural and racial
“halves” (Silverstein 2005). With a few notable exceptions,7 in the analysis of
the relation of children of immigrants with the ancestral land, the place where
they were born or raised is almost absent from the inquiry. Influenced by a

2
The term “second generations” has been contested both as a descriptive concept and as an analyt-
ical tool. In reference to the Italian context see, among the others, Colombo, Domaneschi, Marchetti
(2009); Colombo, Rebughini (2012); Thomassen (2010); Andall (2002); Grimaldi (2022).
3
See, among others, Proglio (2017); Raeymaekers (2014).
4
The definition of Ethiopia as an Italian “colony” is a matter of a long debate (Triulzi 1982) which
goes well beyond the scopes of this article. Although Ethiopia was never fully occupied nor fully con-
trolled by Italy, it is undoubtable that before as well as after the AOI, Italians played a decisive role in
shaping Ethiopian policies and imaginaries (Trento 2012). In this sense I follow Marchetti (2014) in
using the term “postcolonial” in relation to the Italian presence in Ethiopia after the end of the AOI.
5
See Andall (2002); Arnone (2010); Martignoni (2016).
6
For the analysis of the postcolonial legacy in the former Italian colonies see Chelati Dirar (2007).
7
On the analysis of long-term mobility projects of the children of immigrants in the ancestral
land see among others King, Christou (2010; 2011; 2014) and Potter, Philips (2006; 2008; 2009).

96
 Giuseppe Grimaldi

certain methodological nationalism (Wimmer, Glick Schiller 2002), this per-

spective reproduced the triad of “home – belonging – nationality” as a central
category of inquiry and implied a rupture between the place where children
of immigrants were born or grew up and the place of their ancestral origins
(Soysal 2002). Following this perspective, however, the risk is to frame the
very experience of the children of immigrants as the material representation
of a “rupture” between modern national identification and colonial otherness
(Said 1978) or to frame their “in-between” status as a starting point for analy-
sis rather than as an object of inquiry. It is no coincidence that, as King and
Christou (2010) point out, most analyses on children of immigrants’ patterns
of mobility to the land of their ancestors have largely focused on short-term,
holiday visits. Framed as the liminal space of holidays, the ancestral land
would represent a third space (Bhabha 1994) par excellence: a space where
children of immigrants negotiate their relationship with the ancestral land
within a framework of structural difference.8 In such a perspective, the role
played by the place where they were born or grew up in orienting their mo-
bility paths towards their ancestral land is obscured, denied, or simply consid-
ered a mere identity pole rather than a material reality. This is so even when,
as in the case of the relationship between the Italian nation-state and its for-
mer colonies, the relevance of colonial and post-colonial structures continues
to affect the very determination of spaces and identities (Hawthorne 2021;
Grimaldi 2017; 2021; 2022).
In this paper I try to shed light on how coloniality and its contemporary re-
verberations affect the relationship of the children of immigrants with their
ancestral land. I draw on research conducted in Ethiopia with Italians of Ethi-
opian origin who have undertaken medium and long-term mobility projects
to Addis Ababa. Specifically, I consider the ways in which Italian colonial
and postcolonial structures and discourses intersect with modern Ethiopian
national identification and affect the experiences of children of immigrants
with their ancestral land. I will focus on the Juventus Club of Addis Ababa,
one of the city’s postcolonial spaces par excellence (Fuller 2007). Through
an ethnographic lens, I will explore the reasons why children of immigrants

8
In her work on the Eritrean second generations short term mobility to Asmara, Bettina Conrad
(2006) poignantly showed the relationality between resemblance and difference by analyzing their
patterns of identifications within the ancestral land. They were locally labelled as Beles, a Tigrayan
word for “prickly pear”. Prickly pear in Asmara is harvested during the summer season, when children
of immigrants return to the ancestral land. Therefore, the term Beles indicates the seasonal nature of
their presence in Eritrea as well as their perception as a “resource” as they typically contribute through
remittances and gifts: a presence based on their structural differentiation from the local context.

97
 Italianness at the mirror

consider the club as one of the reference points in their experience of the an-
cestral land, despite the fact that it is also where they are constantly facing the
same processes of differentiation they live in Italy. By focusing on the ways in
which their being Italian is intertwined with the club’s function as both a hub
of cosmopolitan Addis Ababa and a trace of the Italian postcolonial presence
in the Horn of Africa,9 the article will reveal the club’s function as a mirror.
Drawing on Sayad’s metaphor of migrations as a mirror (2002), the analysis
of Club Juventus will reflect the relation between children of immigrants and
Italianness (Vicini 2021), not only in Ethiopia, but also in Italy. The article, in
this perspective, is an example of the processes of reterritorialization of the
symbolic borders in which racialized subjects reproduce their experience of
the nation (Dahinden 2022).
The present work is part of a multilocal ethnography (Giuffrè, Riccio 2012;
Riccio 2007) that I conducted between Italy, Ethiopia, and the United King-
dom for my Ph.D. thesis. I built my research in Ethiopia by following an Italian
of Ethiopian origin, Johnny,10 a cultural anthropology student enrolled in a
university in Amsterdam who was himself researching ethnographically the
return practices of “second generations” Ethiopians to their ancestral country.11
By following his research, I had the opportunity to meet the group of Italians of
Ethiopian origin who were staging counter-diasporic projects (King, Christou
2011) and investigate the relevance of Italian colonial and post-colonial struc-
tures in orienting their presence in Addis Ababa. I gained access to the Juven-
tus Club thanks to Marta, an Italian of Ethiopian origin, who was a member
of the club’s board of directors. The paper is based on the ethnography I con-
ducted with three children of immigrants in the club (two men and a woman in
their late twenties), and enriched with the narratives and interviews I collected
from members of the club (old white Italians or mixed Italian-Ethiopians born
or raised in Ethiopia), as well as with archive material (newspapers, books,
archival documents) of the club. The data on which this article is based were
collected in 2016, before the outbreak of civil war in 2020 that shook Ethiopia
and the entire Horn of Africa.12

9
It is out of the scopes of this article to analyse how during the Italian postcolonial presence in the
Horn of Africa, Ethiopia itself acted as a hegemonic power in the area reproducing a proper colonial
attitude especially regarding the issue of the Eritrean independence. See Iyob (2000).
10
Names and direct references to the people I worked with are changed for privacy reasons.
11
In this article I will refer to people born and raised in Italy from at least one Ethiopian parent and
not Italians or mixed Italians who were born and raised in Ethiopia whose relationship with national
identity, ancestral land, and the very concept of home is totally different. On the analysis of these rela-
tions see Grimaldi (2022).
12
On the civil war in the Horn of Africa see Plaut, Vaughan (2023).

98
 Giuseppe Grimaldi

Club Juventus and its multiple configurations

J: I was in Addis in the summer of 2006, when the World Cup final between Italy and
France was taking place. The club was packed with hundreds of people and there were
strict access controls. When I got to the entrance, the guard stopped me and told me
there was no more room to get in. Meanwhile, lots of people were getting in without
any problem. It was ridiculous. I did not try to convince him, I just pushed him away
to get in. He grabbed my arm and pushed me violently out of the doorway. He shouted
at me to go away and threatened me with a stick.
G.: So you did not see the match?
J.: I eventually managed to get inside, but I spent the whole time thinking about the
guard. These are my memories of the day Italy won the World Cup.13

These words were spoken by Johnny the first time we entered the Juventus
Club, the Italian clubhouse in Addis Ababa. Officially known as the Circolo
Sportivo Italiano Juventus and – at the time of the research – widely regarded as
one of the city’s most important sporting centers,14 the Juventus Club was a sig-
nificant hub for the cosmopolitan circles of Addis Ababa, thanks to its western
standards, its facilities, and its renowned Italian restaurant and bar. At the same
time, the club was the social and symbolic reference space for Italians in Addis
Ababa, and a hub in the city for the social and institutional activities connected
to the “Italian community”.15
As clearly emerged in the previous ethnographic extract, Johnny was very sur-
prised when he came to know about the social relevance of the club among his
networks. Johnny was at his first non-holiday experience in Ethiopia, and he
never paid attention to the club: a place that, in his words, has never been of
great relevance for the Milanese children of immigrants who go to Ethiopia
for short vacations. He always insisted on the absurdity of going to a place that
made him feel uncomfortable in “his own” country.
This contradiction, as I will show in this article, impressively reasserts the so-
cial function of the Juventus Club in the counter-diasporic experience of the
children of immigrants. The club is a place of legitimation of the subjectivities
of children of immigrants and, at the same time, a space of radical marginaliza-
tion. In order to understand this function of the club as a “mirror” of the rela-
tionship that the children of immigrants have with the concept of Italianness

13
Fieldnotes, 13.01.2016
14
[Link] (last accessed 16.05.2024)
15
I will deepen the history of the club and its impact in the making of the Italian postcolonial pre-
sence in the Horn of Africa all along the article.

99
 Italianness at the mirror

in the ancestral land, it is first necessary to understand how and why these two
features are constructed. From this perspective, it is necessary to understand
why the cosmopolitan environment of the Juventus Club can be attractive to
people who have moved from Western environments to their “ancestral land”.
In doing so, the category of “modernity” will emerge as a significant trope that
links the contemporary configuration of the club to its postcolonial heritage.

Italians of Ethiopian origin and the “value” of difference

in the ancestral land

Looking at the second-generation return paths of Bajan Brits (British of Barba-

dian origin) to the postcolonial context of Barbados, Potter and Phillips (2006)
analyzed the ways in which they related to western modernity as a source of
identification in the ancestral land. The category of the West and, moreover,
the ways in which Bajan Brits performed their Britishness (from the English ac-
cent to patterns of behavior) allowed them to locate themselves in a position of
economic and social privilege within the Barbadian postcolonial context (Ivi,
p. 913). The narratives collected by Potter and Phillips (Ivi pp. 914-919) show
representations of the local environment within a framework of differential
power relations. Bajan-British children of immigrants explicitly self-represent
through the hegemonic values of the colonizer (determination, organization,
proactivity), in a relationship of contraposition with the devaluing tropes of
the colonized (laziness, disorganization, fatalism). Their positioning, from this
perspective, assumes a hybrid function, granting them a privileged status, but
at the same time preventing them from full assimilation within their ancestral
context (Ivi, p. 920).
There are striking similarities between the process highlighted by Potter and
Phillips16 and the way in which Italians of Ethiopian origin have constructed
their relational field within the ancestral land. Like the Bajan British, Ital-
ians of Ethiopian origin also presented their “western” and “modern” nature
as a primary source of legitimation within the Addis Ababa environment:
from this perspective, the Juventus Club, with its western and Italian style,
would represent the perfect environment for them, specifically because of
their “otherness” in relation to the wider Ethiopian environment. According

16
It is necessary to state that this process analysed by Potter and Philip is just an acid test of the
salience of the “returns” whose analysis in the Italian history (from the return of the Italian migrants
from all over the world to the so called colonie libere) goes well beyond the scopes of this work. For an
analysis of the relation among colonies and colonie libere see Calchi Novati (1992).

100
 Giuseppe Grimaldi

to this perspective, marginalized Italians – as they are considered in Italy –

would automatically turn into bearers of Western hegemony once in their
ancestral land: bearers with no intention (or even possibility) of “adapting”
to the ancestral environment. Their “Western” attitude towards the ancestral
land would, in this perspective, be the inevitable effect of their being “mod-
ern” in an “unmodern” society.
The analysis of the performance of “differentiation” in the ancestral land by
the children of immigrants, however, cannot be reduced to an (unconscious)
echo of the colonial and postcolonial structures that have oriented the rela-
tionship between Italy and Ethiopia, the former colonizer and the colonized
societies. This framework runs the risk of falling into what Said (1978) defined
as a binary framework: a Eurocentric way of thinking that produces an onto-
logical and epistemological “otherness” as a test to reproduce a self-validating
Western identification. The analysis of the “modern” attitudes of the children
of immigrants should take a different path: while the meanings associated with
Western modernity have indeed been the main source of legitimation of the
European colonial enterprise (Mignolo 2007; Bhambra, Holmwood 2021),
they are undoubtedly interrelated with the meanings that have spread “within”
the former colonies. In fact, the category of modernity, far from being abol-
ished (Appadurai 1996), has become one of the cornerstones of the postcolo-
nial panorama.
The case of Ethiopia is paradigmatic in this respect: modernity is a central cat-
egory to understand the very making of Ethiopia form the era of Menelik II17
and the need to “modernize” the country has been part of its nationalist dis-
course since the end of the Italian occupation.18 In recent decades, however,
the rhetoric of development (Lyons 2007) that has spread in Ethiopia has be-
come transnational: it has implied large investments and a strong involvement
of people of Ethiopian origin around the world. The Ethiopian government’s
effort to involve people abroad was so strong that the term “diaspora”19 itself

17
On the process of construction of the modern Ethiopia from the Highland empire to its present
configuration see Zewde (1991).
18
Haile Selassie, in his act of “forgiveness” of the Italians said that he hoped that: “Italians (techni-
cians, businessmen and workers) would remain numerous in Addis Ababa to ensure that industry and
commerce flourished and that the level of civilization in the capital did not drop” (Calchi Novati 1996).
19
In Ethiopia there is an ID card for people of Ethiopian origin, the so-called “diaspora card” des-
ignating the “foreign rational, other than a person who forfeited Ethiopian nationality and acquired
Eritrean nationality, who had been Ethiopian national before acquiring a foreign nationality; or at
least one of his parents or grandparents had been”. This card allowed the Ethiopian abroad to access
specific regulations advantaging them in their engagement to Ethiopia (Kuschminder, Siegel 2013), in
working and economic activities, in taxation, in housebuilding processes (Grimaldi 2018).

101
 Italianness at the mirror

became a proper institutional category and a form of recognition within the

Ethiopian public sphere.20 The category of diaspora has specific social attrib-
utes in Ethiopia: diaspora people are “mobile”; diaspora people are “modern”;
in short, diaspora people are the material representation of the developmental
paradigm that underlies the Ethiopian nation-state (Grimaldi 2018).
From this point of view, the meaning taken by the concept of diaspora in Ethi-
opia seems to be crucial in order to understand the social positioning of Italians
of Ethiopian origin in their ancestral country. It makes it possible to under-
stand the reasons why they put in place practices of social, economic, linguistic,
and symbolic differentiation from the average Ethiopian social setting, with-
out falling into an epistemological essentialization of their being “Italians”. Far
from being proof of their inability to adapt to the ancestral land, their West-
ern-style behavior is in fact a real source of recognition which allows them to
build their mobility to Ethiopia as an asset (Moret 2016). Juventus Club is the
material representation of this paradigm. But while it is one of the “symbols”
of modern Ethiopia, it is still marked by colonial and post-colonial structures.

The Juventus Club: between cosmopolitanism and coloniality

Club Juventus is structurally linked to the reorganization of the Italian presence

in the Horn of Africa immediately after the end of the AOI experience.21 Of-
ficially founded in 1952 to form an Italian football team to play in the Ethiopian
championship, the club gradually acquired institutional value. Since 1959, when
the foundation stone of the current building was laid, the Juventus Club has con-
figured itself as a mirror of the structures reproducing the Italian post-colonial
presence in the region.22 On the one hand, the club was completely cut off from
the rest of Ethiopian society – non-Italian members were only admitted in 1997.
On the other, it was a center of transregional postcolonial Italianness, organizing
leisure activities such as football tournaments or car races aimed at connecting

20
In December 2023 the Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali launched a proper campaign
worldwide to engage children of immigrants in order to – following the prime minister words – “con-
nect to your multicultural roots, connect to your history and leave your legacy”. The hashtag is very
revelatory: #BackToYourOrigins campaign. See [Link]
second-generation-ethiopians-worldwide-to-return-home-in-back-to-your-origins-campaign/ (last
accessed 16.05.2024)
21
Another institution directly connected to the colonial past is the Italian school of Addis Aba-
ba; for the analysis of the Italian school in the former colonies see Pesarini (2022); Ghidei Biidu,
Marchetti (2010).
22
On the link between sport and colonialism see Stoddart (1988).

102
 Giuseppe Grimaldi

the geographically distant contexts of the former empire, first and foremost Ad-
dis Ababa and Asmara. The club’s attitude as a center of post-colonial Italian-
ness declined drastically after 1974, when the fall of Haile Selassie and the rise to
power of a communist military junta led thousands of Italians to leave the former
colony (Del Boca 1976). Since then, however, the club has grown in institutional
importance as a link between Addis Ababa and Italy: the Juventus Club was a
reference point for Italians during the political upheavals that swept through
Ethiopia from the seventies until recently,23 and it was (and still is) a de facto
interlocutor with the Italian institutions both in Ethiopia and in Italy.24
However, with the turn of the millennium and the spread of Ethiopia’s nation-
state development policies, the club once again transformed its social function.
It opened up to the wider Ethiopian social space and gradually reconfigured
itself as a hub of cosmopolitan circles in Addis Ababa. At the time of the re-
search, most of the people who participated in the daily activities of Club Ju-
ventus were not Italian nationals. Middle-class Ethiopians and Western expa-
triates attended the dozens of sports courses that Club Juventus offered, dined
in the club’s Italian restaurant or attended the evening parties organized by the
club’s bar. Today, Amharic and English, rather than Italian, are the most com-
monly spoken languages at the club.
At the time of the research, however, I even met people who explicitly defend-
ed their fascist affiliation and their racial superiority over the Ethiopians, or
even their nostalgia for General Graziani.25 The vast majority of these people
were born or grew up in post-colonial Ethiopia: some of them never left Ethio-
pia, others returned after the fall of the Derg and the opening of the Ethiopian
nation-state to neoliberal policies. As one of them told me, explaining his de-
cision to leave Ethiopia when Haile Selassie was overthrown: “I was born a
fascist. I couldn’t live or die under a communist regime”.26
The club, in short, is a place where multiple and often contradictory meanings
circulate. In the same space, it was possible to feel in a cosmopolitan place ori-
ented towards the West and to be the target of racist and supremacist rhetoric
linked to Italian imperialism in Ethiopia.

23
These events go form the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974 and the instauration of the Derg
(Pankhurst 2001), to the liberation of Ethiopia in 1991 (Zewde 1991) from the war against Eritrea in
1998 (Iyob 2000), until the civil war that erupted in November 2020 (Tronvoll 2022).
24
Club Juventus Archives. Gazzetta del Circolo sportivo Juventus (1991).
25
Graziani, the so-called “butcher of Ethiopia”, was one of the most famous and brutal fascist
generals. Among the many atrocities he perpetrated during the repression of the Ethiopian resistance
against the Fascist occupation, he was responsible of mass murderers by using toxic gas on the popu-
lation. For an overview on Graziani and his postcolonial legacy, see Morone (2013), Campbell (2010).
26
Fieldnotes, 01.04.2016.

103
 Italianness at the mirror

It is therefore necessary to understand how the Italians of Ethiopian origin

who frequented the club made sense of these contradictions that constituted
the everyday life of the place.

Children of immigrants at the Juventus Club:

keeping coloniality invisible?

During my fieldwork at the club, I met Marta, an Italian Ethiopian in her late
twenties who had moved from Italy to Ethiopia to work for an Italian NGO
two years before. She was on the board of Club Juventus, so I asked her how
the organization dealt with the presence of fascists and colonial rhetoric in
the place. She was obviously aware of this presence but did not attach any im-
portance to it. She classified the nostalgic discourses about the Italian fascist
period, led by its oldest members, as a “folkloric” element. She said that it was
impossible to change their minds, but that it was tolerable because they had
no decision-making power. She added that it was unfair to send them away
as they were in their room playing cards – they spent most of their time in
a member only room separated from the rest of the club – and keeping each
other company.27
In Marta’s view, the Manichean distinction between “Italians” and the oth-
ers, which the old fascists had reproduced, belonged to the club’s past. A past
that is still present, but that does not affect the day-to-day dynamics of the
Juventus Club.
This apparent coexistence seemed to be confirmed in the analysis of the way in
which Jack, the other Italian of Ethiopian origin I met in Addis Ababa, made
sense of his social experience at Club Juventus. Jack was born and raised in
Milano and he moved in Addis Ababa in 2013 to work in his father’s construc-
tion agency but specially to escape from financial problems he had in Milano.
In 2015, Jack decided to attend a taekwondo course at Club Juventus. The
course was run by an Italian-Ethiopian man who had lived in Italy for over 20
years, and the students were people of Jack’s own status and age. Most of them
were Western expatriates. Although he had never practiced taekwondo in Mi-
lan, he said he decided to start because it was a way of dealing with the stress of
his life in Ethiopia. Jack felt disoriented in Ethiopia – he was almost forced to
leave Italy – and he constantly remarked on his difference from the wider local
environment. It was precisely for this reason that he chose the Juventus Club

27
Fieldnotes, 21.03.2016.

104
 Giuseppe Grimaldi

as his routine space. In addition to being able to speak his mother tongue, share
Italian food or watch Italian television, the club allowed him to make his being
Italian a source of differentiation from the Ethiopian setting and a source of
identification in the cosmopolitan niche of the city where he made most of his
friends and social relations.28
In his experience of the club, Jack never clung to the institutional function of
the club, nor to its value as a discursive pole of national belonging. At the same
time, he never had problems with the “hidden” part of the club, which consist-
ed of nostalgia for the post-colonial era. In short, he usually neither joined nor
suffered from the differential order that reproduces Italianness in the club in its
(post)colonial configuration.29 Alongside Marta and Jack’s explicit representa-
tions of a denial of the relevance of the colonial and postcolonial paradigm that
sustains the club, however, the ethnographic practice revealed other processes.
The “spatial” division between one club configuration and another was any-
thing but fixed: while it was true that the “nostalgics” spent most of their time
in a private room, they were certainly not barred from accessing the rest of the
club. On the contrary, it was that room to be the “members only” area, the space
where the “others” could not enter. It was common, instead, to encounter these
“nostalgics” at the bar counter, at a restaurant table, or in the outdoor courtyard
of the Juventus Club. People who, more or less consciously, enacted micro-
practices related to an Italianness linked to postcolonial imaginaries. The fol-
lowing extract from my fieldnotes shows how the two seemingly coexisting
paradigms structurally overlap in the Juventus Club.
I sat at the table with Johnny, Marta and Tesfay, an American of Ethiopian
origin. Tesfay was Marta’s flat mate and Johnny had asked her to arrange a
meeting with him to carry out an interview for his research. Jack reached us
because he was there for his taekwondo training. Because of Tesfay’s presence,
we mainly spoke in English rather than Italian. In the middle of the conversa-
tion, a middle-aged white Italian interrupted to ask for some information about
the club. When Marta answered him, he complimented her on her wonderful
Italian and began to talk about his trip to Ethiopia and his plans to move to
Addis Ababa for good. What impressed me the most was the way he addressed
differently each of us based on his own assumptions about our own degree of
“Italianness”. When he spoke to me, he spoke proper Italian, whereas, when
he talked to the others, he uttered words very slowly, building simple seman-

28
The sporting activity, in fact, placed him in a space of validation of his black masculinity in the
white niche of the expats of Addis Ababa: Stuart Hall called this phenomenon of ambivalent admira-
tion and alterization orienting the white gaze on black men in sport “the spectacle of the other” (1997).
29
Fieldnotes, 17.03.2016.

105
 Italianness at the mirror

tic structures, and often conjugating verbs in the infinitive tense, or avoiding
using articles. He also kept tapping or leaning on Marta’s shoulder while he
spoke. Ten minutes after he left, while Marta and Jack immediately began to
laugh, Johnny nervously began to speak against the old man. On the contrary,
Marta was much more concerned about what he was saying than about his
behavior. She thought his behavior was a matter of ignorance. In her words,
although she did not find it justifiable, it was understandable that an old Italian
man who saw four black people had behaved that way.30
It is crystal clear that the man behavior was part and parcel of the structures
that maintain hegemonic Italianness in the club. From the man’s attitude, my
whiteness was the mirror where to reflect his self-ascribed hegemonic condi-
tion. On the contrary, his behavior towards the others reproduced, even in a
physical way, their supposed “deviation” from a normative Italianness: a devia-
tion that he explicitly represented through his use of language and body.
The main aspect that emerges from the extract, however, is that while Marta
and Jack did not react strongly to this process, Johnny found the behavior of
the man unacceptable. In trying to understand such a different reaction it is
possible to shed light on the value of Italianness for children of immigrants in
their counter-diasporic journey. It is necessary to start from an assumption.
Jack and Marta’s presence in Ethiopia was very different compared to Johnny.
They were in Addis Ababa respectively from two and three years with no pro-
jects of leaving the city. In their experience of the ancestral land, therefore, the
Juventus Club had a crucial relevance. The club was a space of social identifica-
tion, legitimation, and recognition, and one of the most important locations
for giving meaning to their experience of Ethiopia. In the club Jack found his
cosmopolite niche, while Marta invested so much in that space to become part
of the board. The relevance of the club as a gauge to reproduce their Italian-
ness in Ethiopia to them was incomparably more important than an episode of
“differentiation”.
Johnny’s positioning about the club, on the contrary, was totally different:
his presence in Ethiopia was short termed and not intended to be permanent,
therefore he never thought of the club as a space of social legitimation, nor as
a context where to fund his perspective about the ancestral land. Johnny was
an international student with a strong political commitment: his reaction mir-
rored the processes of differentiation that he had experienced in Italy during
his whole life, but with the aggravation of being racialized even in his own
place of origin.

30
Fieldnotes, 26.03.2016.

106
 Giuseppe Grimaldi

The excerpt above clearly shows that it is impossible to think of the club as a
space where the meanings associated with a certain configuration can be selec-
tively deactivated: what makes the club a source of legitimation for Italians of
Ethiopian origin can – at any moment – overlap with colonial and postcolonial
structures. The effects of these ongoing superpositions, furthermore, differ-
ently act on the people depending on the ways they make sense of their counter
diasporic project.
The overlapping between these different meanings, as I will show in the next
paragraph, can even be institutionally driven. I had the opportunity to see the
salience of these processes during the visit of the President of the Italian Re-
public, Sergio Mattarella, to the Juventus Club. On this occasion, the club be-
came a real mirror that reflected the differential condition of Italians of Ethio-
pian origin.

Losing domesticity at “home”: the Juventus Club

and the bare citizenship

I heard about President Mattarella’s official visit to the club a few days before
the event. The purpose of the visit was to meet the Italian community in Addis
Ababa after an institutional trip to Ethiopia. In the days leading up to the visit,
the club was in turmoil. Marta, as a member of the Club’s Directory Commit-
tee, spent most of her days there.
She had to organize the reception and was involved in the security of the club
and the organization of accesses. It was the question of who to let in that inter-
ested me most. Throughout my fieldwork I met many people who frequented
the Italian clubs in Addis Ababa, even if they were not Italian citizens. Many
of the Ethiopians who returned from Italy did not meet the requirements to
apply for Italian citizenship,31 even though they had lived in Italy – sometimes
for decades.32 Some others, born in Ethiopia (or Eritrea) of extra-marital rela-

31
According to the law 91/92, Italian citizenship to extra EU members may be “conceded” to im-
migrants regularly residing in Italy for at least 10 years. The concession of the citizenship is subor-
dinated to a series of legal, economic and cultural requirements the applicants need to satisfy. On
the procedures to obtain Italian citizenship see [Link]
iani-all-estero/cittadinanza/ (last accessed 17.05.2024).
32
I am not considering here the people who had the possibility to benefit of the Law 218/1995,
“Reform of the Italian System of Private International Law”, who stipulates that foreign judgments are
automatically recognized in the Italian legal system provided they meet certain requirements. This law
became a means to regularise various pending situations regarding Italian citizenship in the former
occupied territories, see Fusari (2020).

107
 Italianness at the mirror

tionships between Italian men and Ethiopian women, had no formal recogni-
tion.33 I asked Marta how they decided to deal with these cases and whether it
was necessary to present an Italian passport at the entrance. Marta reassured
me that a passport was not required and that the guards would have selected
people at the entrance. She added that the decision of the club’s directory com-
mittee was aimed at avoiding a direct link between being Italian and having a
defined legal status.34
However, the decision not to use a formal tool to identify who could enter
made the recognition of who was “Italian” a subjective matter; the guards had
to decide in a discretionary and arbitrary manner for each case. Paradoxically,
this situation led most Italian citizens of Ethiopian origin to bring their pass-
ports and use their legal status as a source of recognition on the day of the
President’s visit. At the end of Mattarella’s institutional visit to the club, in fact,
I met Lili, a returnee from Milan in her fifties. Born and raised in Asmara, she
moved to Italy in the Nineties, acquired Italian citizenship, and decided to set-
tle in Addis Ababa with her family in 2010. She told me that she arrived late
at the club (the entrance was closed thirty minutes before the President’s visit
for security reasons), so she had to wait outside the club for the whole of the
President’s speech. As she told me, there were a lot of people with her. And
almost all of them spent all of the time waving their Italian passports in front
of the guards and claiming to be allowed in. Once inside, however, she and
her friends, who had also returned to Ethiopia from Italy as “Italian citizens”,
seemed far from being shaken by their previous experience. On the contrary,
they started taking pictures of the stage from which Mattarella was speaking
and posting them on Facebook.35
While Lili and her friends had no problem showing their passports, Johnny’s
case was different. Unlike most of his Italian network, Johnny decided not to
go to the club that day. As he told me the morning before the event, he thought
it was crazy that Italians of Ethiopian origin wanted to take part in a discourse
from which they were excluded in their Italian daily lives. When I got home
after the event, I met Johnny. He seemed quite shaken. He told me that since
most of the people he knew were at the club and he was bored at home alone,
he had considered joining us. As he prepared to leave the house, he instinc-
tively put his Italian passport in his pocket. It was one of the first times he took
his passport all over his staying: normally the passport was well secured in a

33
For the analysis of this phenomenon, called “Madamato”, in Ethiopia and Eritrea, see among oth-
ers Sorgoni (1998); Iyob (2000); Barrera (1996); Pesarini (2015); Le Houérou (2015); Trento (2011).
34
Fieldnotes, 12.03.2017.
35
Fieldnotes, 15.03.2016.

108
 Giuseppe Grimaldi

hidden part of his room in order to avoid the risk of losing it. Yet when he real-
ized the implications under this instinctive act, he immediately dropped his bag
and decided to stay at home. He said that he did not know what had made him
think of taking his passport, but that it was one of the most humiliating things
that had happened in his whole life.36
The “humiliation” that Johnny felt was quite understandable. He perceived that
even in his ancestral land he had to “prove” to be Italian and that he had no
other means to do it than his passport.
Johnny’s experience shows that the reproduction of a hegemonic Italianness
can trace such a deep line of differentiation to produce a condition where cit-
izenship is the only source of recognition in the experience of the children
of immigrants. In his work on the concept of the future (2013), Appadurai
introduces the notion of bare citizenship, drawing on Agamben’s “bare life”.
Bare citizenship describes a state of deprivation of social capital and cultural
credibility (p. 122), divesting citizenship of its social and political meaning and
reducing it to a statistical fact (p. 123). Appadurai’s “bare citizenship” serves as a
yardstick for exploring the contrasts between the celebration of a transnational
Italianness and its social effects on structurally differentiated Italians. On the
day of the Italian President’s visit, the admission policy to the club was not
based on Italian citizenship or other “tangible” criteria. It was a legally empty
space (Agamben, 2003); a space in which the mechanisms of recognition – and
admission – were implicitly founded along those racial and class lines repro-
ducing a hegemonic Italianness. In this perspective the admission policies of
the club became a mirror of the power relations that reproduce a hegemonic
Italianness in Ethiopia: and as it emerged in the ethnographic extract, it pro-
duced different reactions.
In the case of Lili and her friends – who despite the Italian citizenship self-
perceived as “locals” the lack of their recognition was offset by the social value
of their entry into the club: an entry that was configured as a source of legiti-
mation in relation to their wider Ethiopian network. They had no problems in
showing or even waving their passport in front of the guards. On the contrary,
these self-validating characteristics were completely absent from Johnny’s ex-
perience. Born and raised in Milan, he constantly had to confront the issue
of social recognition in Italy since his childhood, with his differential condi-
tion compared to the hegemonic representation of Italianness. However, in his
counter-diasporic journey to Ethiopia, with the exception of his transnational
family, most of his social networks were linked to Italy. While most of them

36
Fieldnotes, 15.03.2016.

109
 Italianness at the mirror

minimized or denied their differential condition in relation to a hegemonic

Italianness to perform their presence in Ethiopia (as Marta and Jack did), he
had no reason to do so. His initial decision to take his passport to the club was
all but irrelevant in this perspective. In his unconscious gesture, he felt he had
to accept his differential condition as a given: by taking his passport he implic-
itly acknowledged that his legal status – and not the way he spoke, behaved,
dressed or lived his life – was his only source of recognition of his Italianness.
In this way, even in Addis Ababa, he felt that he had to prove to be Italian: same
as when he was stopped and searched by the police during his adolescence in
Milano.
The act of taking his passport, in short put Johnny under a mirror that reflected
the processes of differentiation he lived in Italy even in the ancestral land. The
way he had always thought about Ethiopia since his trips with his parents dur-
ing his childhood was of a place where he could feel legitimized because of
his difference, of his being part of the western world, and even of his being
Italian. The fact that the very categories that he had always putted in place
in his counter diasporic journeys – modernity and Italianness – marginalized
him represents a loss of the references that have always oriented his staying
in Ethiopia. Johnny loses his orientation, finds himself lost. Ernesto de Mar-
tino (1977) defines this phenomenon of loss of cultural horizons as a crisis of
domesticity. In showing his passport Johnny did not just experienced (outside
of Italy) the same processes of differentiation connoting the most of his life in
Milano. The very categories through which he built his relation with the an-
cestral land entered in crisis.

Conclusion. Researching the “second generation” condition

The paper focuses on the dynamics of the counter diasporic projects (King,
Christou 2010) of the Italians of Ethiopian origin, exploring the importance of
postcolonial spaces in shaping their mobility trajectories and identity patterns:
postcoloniality, far from being a mere historical trace, represents a living real-
ity that acts on their lives and produces social meanings (Potter, Philips 2006).
The article moves beyond an epistemological approach based on an alleged
“in-betweenness” of the children of immigrants (Silverstein 2005). At the same
time, it rejects a perspective that imagines the context of residence and the
ancestral land as structurally separated (Soysal 2002). Instead, it shows how
children of immigrants understand their Italianness as an asset for better social
positioning in Ethiopia (Moret 2016). In this sense, the Juventus Club – a space
with a distinctly postcolonial matrix – turns out to be revealing of the complex-

110
 Giuseppe Grimaldi

ities and stratifications (Altin 2024) on which children of immigrants represent

and practice their ancestral land. In the club, Italians of Ethiopian origin can,
on the one hand, emphasize their Western and cosmopolitan status in order
to reproduce a precise and recognizable positioning in Ethiopia. On the other
hand, the analysis shows the performativity of the colonial and postcolonial
dynamics and rhetoric that run through the Juventus Club. These dynamics
can reproduce the differential structures that characterize the experience of the
children of immigrants in Italy, their constant being placed “beyond” the social
and symbolic fences within which a hegemonic idea of Italianness is repro-
duced (Grimaldi 2022).
In this sense, the article opens up to central questions in the existential trajec-
tories of the children of immigrants, which go far beyond their relationship
with the land of their ancestors. Rather, the social dynamics studied turn out
to be a mirror (Sayad 2002) that reflects the condition of Italians with a mi-
grant background even in the context in which they were born and grew up.
A mirror that reflects the field of possibilities and constraints, of marginality
and privilege that underpins the transnational life of children of immigrants,
showing the historical continuities and interactions that reorganize the post-
colonial in the contemporary scenario. It is a mirror that, in addition, questions
the processes of the de-territorialization of the symbolic border of citizenship
and belonging in the contemporary scenario. The processes of “migrantiza-
tion” (Dahined 2016) in the children of immigrants’ experience – both in Italy
and in their ancestral land – show that the lack of recognition of their Italian-
ness turns to become part and parcel of a real border regime (Dahinden 2022).
The ethnographic process, in this perspective, reveals the performativity of the
category of “second generation” as a “condition” (Grimaldi 2021; 2022) rather
than a sociological descriptor. Ethnography shows how this condition stays for
the material representation of a set of differentiation patterns, emphasizing a
never-ending continuity (racially, culturally, symbolically) with what is per-
ceived as an incommensurable “otherness”.
The article is based on the analysis of dynamic with a clear postcolonial con-
notation: although the postcolonial lens constitutes a central element of my
argument, it can also be seen as a potential limitation of the research. An ur-
gent question that needs to be addressed is: how useful can Italianness be as a
heuristic concept in the construction of the “return” of Italians with a migrant
background, whose contexts of ancestral origin were alien to the Italian colo-
nial dimension? How Italianness enters in the definition of returnees’ practices
in a space where it is not as relevant as it is in Ethiopia? How its “modern”
configuration can be played by children of immigrants in their ancestral con-
texts? And how it can “turn” into a differential structure? Further analysis can

111
 Italianness at the mirror

take into consideration the role of the structures of Italianness in orienting the
“counter-diasporic” mobilities of children of immigrants well beyond colonial
and postcolonial settings.
This paper aimed at emphasizing the necessity to add complexity to the debate
on children of immigrants in Italy, their mobility patterns and their place in
the national scenario (Vicini 2021), showing the necessity of an urgent need
for political change.

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