Ethnic identity and race: the “double absence” and its legacy across generations among Australians of Southern Italian origin. Operationalizing institutional positionality.

Abstract

The paper provides a discussion on the concept of “double absence” and its legacy among participants originating from Calabria, Italy. It illustrates the impact of such an embodied affective state in light of race-ethnic relations perceived intergenerationally. While the first generation of participants manifest a condition of feeling “absent”, the second generation present a condition of “liminality”, as a result of a socialization process between “the world” of their immigrant parents and the Australian one. The third generation, due to a perceived positive evaluation about their ethnic background, manifests its ethnicity proudly. A pivotal role is played by the amount of cultural capital accumulated by the participants, dynamics of assimilation and the exogenous pressures the participants perceived from the “common sense” of the dominant society, as Gramsci terms it. Individuals’ ethnic identity appears to be shaped by their institutional positionality, which is their ethnic perception of “being in the world”.

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