Be Exotic, Become Italian: Assimilation and Exoticism in Cooking Classes for Migrant Women in Italy

This paper focuses on hygiene and cooking courses offered to African labor migrants and refugee women in Rome Italy. Aid workers often refer migrants and refugees to such courses that aim to introduce them, and help them assimilate and adjust to Italian life and culture. Moreover, these courses further aim to equip migrants and refugees with basic skills that, in turn, would help them obtain a job, most likely as domestic workers. The health, hygiene and cooking courses I discuss, provide an ethnographic glimpse to the way the Italian state and various institutions perceive the new immigrants, and a framework to examine the kinds of discourses of citizenship that are invoked by the various players. Declaring their goal as facilitating immigrants and supporting their assimilation, these courses strive to “Italianize” immigrant women and their bodies, however, they simultaneously further solidify the outsider-immigrant status of the participants, implicitly emphasizing instead that as immigrants, they would never be able to truly become Italians and marking them as non-citizens. These encounters are informed by larger debates over naturalization and citizenship for immigrant populations in Italian society. These contemporary approaches towards the new immigrants’ assimilation into Italian society are not novel, but are rather situated in Italy’s liberal and fascist historical periods and in the Italian colonial enterprise in Africa and its own configuration of citizenship. Such spaces of encounter between African immigrants and Italians, especially at the institutional level, reveal the logics of inclusion and exclusion in the new Europe.