“Heywood has done an admirable job in compiling this collection of essays… The overall quality of the selections is very good, and they all share a standardized format—an introduction, a discussion based on textual sources and fieldwork, and a conclusion, followed by endnotes and bibliography — making them ideal for advanced students and scholars… An afterword, succinct but insightful, brings together the common threads emerging from the varied essays and valorizes anthropological research as a useful tool in combating fake news and racism.” • Choice

“This is an outstanding and very timely collection that will make a notable and innovative contribution to the field of Italian studies and to the anthropology of Europe more generally. The volume gives a really clear illustration of how classic themes in the anthropology of Italy/Southern Europe/the Mediterranean remain salient (e.g. organized crime, politics, heritage) but have evolved with new and emergent trends...For this reason the volume will be a valuable resource beyond the localized field of Italian anthropology, for anyone interested in key themes in contemporary modernity like migration, populism and heritage.” • Paola Filippucci, University of Cambridge

“This is a necessary, well-organized and timely book. It tackles a set of conceptual and methodological concerns thoroughly and comprehensively that are central to anthropology and Italian history.” • Hannah Malone, University of Groningen

Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory (Berghahn, 2018), Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism (Cornell University Press, forthcoming), and the co-editor of Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation (Cornell University Press, 2023).

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations

Introduction: Back to the Future
Paolo Heywood

Part I: Migration

Chapter 1. Performing Incompetence: Race and Migration in Italy
Lilith Mahmud

Chapter 2. Not So ‘Other’: Challenging Ideas of Citizenship and Belonging
Anna Tuckett

Chapter 3. A Return to Life: Narratives of Birth and Death in a Southern European Periphery
Vanessa Grotti & Marc Brightman

Chapter 4. An Unjustified Revolt: Italian Political Discourse and Chinese Migrant Resistance to Inspection Culture
Elizabeth L. Krause

Part II: Populism

Chapter 5. Making Fascism History in the Land of the Duce
Paolo Heywood

Chapter 6. Mediatic Squadrism: Myths, Symbols, and Identity in Third Millennium Fascism
Maddalena Gretel Cammelli

Chapter 7. Before and after Fascist Bonifiche: Spaces of Occlusion and Recursion in Contemporary Tavoliere
Irene Peano

Chapter 8. Demonizing Fake News in a Post-Truth Political World
Noelle Molé Liston

Part III: Mafia

Chapter 9. Omertà: Violence and Cultural Practices
Jane & Peter Schneider

Chapter 10. Antimafia, Unscripted: on Discourse, Moral Borders, and the Public Space
Theodoros Rakopoulos

Chapter 11. Speech in Gommopoli
Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Part IV: Heritage

Chapter 12. Joyous Post-Politics: Street Art and the Pursuit of Consensus after the Morandi Bridge Collapse
Emanuela Guano

Chapter 13. Migrant Saints: Art, Religion, and Activism in Contemporary Naples
Magnus Course

Chapter 14. Expatriate Sentiment and Real-Estate Investment in Rural Sicily
Antonio Sorge

Chapter 15. Margins and ‘Neotarantism’ in Contemporary Apulia
Giovanni Pizza

Chapter 16. Heritage Populism: How a Hyperplace Turned into a Village
Berardino Palumbo

Part V: Regions & Language

Chapter 17. Contemporary Italian Regional Economies and the Contradictory Rhetorics of Development
Michael Blim

Chapter 18. Dialect Chronotopes: Politics, Nation, and Re-Imaginings
Jillian Cavanaugh

Afterword: Beyond Rhetorical Binaries: The Anthropology of Italy and the Politics of Critique
Michael Herzfeld