Creative Urbanity. Emanuela Guano
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groups whose poiesis (Calhoun, Sennett, and Shapira 2013) has made substantial contributions to Genoa’s public image as a “city of culture”: street antique dealers and walking-tour guides. Chapter 4 describes how, since the mid-1990s, a proliferation of antique fairs have given chronically under- and unemployed middle-class women an opportunity for self-employment. This chapter explores how middle-class women antique dealers draw on their gendered and classed skills such as their aesthetic sensibility to stake out a place for themselves in an urban economy of culture, even though the domestic and decorative aura that at times surrounds women’s endeavors may still undermine their efforts. Drawing on an ethnography of how Genoa’s walking-tour guides describe and present the city as well as on the analysis of their professional histories and experiences, Chapter 5 suggests that these protagonists of Genoa’s newly found tourist vocation are agentive cultural intermediaries who mediate between high and popular culture as they shape the urban experiences of their publics. Acting independently from the political and corporate entities that traditionally drive the transformation of postindustrial cities into consumption hubs, Genoa’s walking-tour guides draw on their own creativity, their talents, and their educational background to generate venues of self-employment by spinning tales of concealment and discovery around the master narrative of Genoa’s industrial decline and its tourist potential.
While Chapter 4 and 5 focus on the experiences and biographies of some of Genoa’s creative individuals, Chapter 6 dwells on the kind of worlding practices that may emerge in the shade of revitalization. This chapter is an ethnography of the Suq (Souk): a multicultural festival held in Genoa every year under the supervision of two women who, since the late 1990s, have used their background in sociology, political science, and theater to further the cause of diversity in Genoa. Multicultural festivals have been frequently denounced as opportunities for the consumption of “other” cultures that are added as commoditized and politically irrelevant “spices” to the otherwise allegedly “bland” everyday life of mainstream groups (hooks 1992; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991). Yet these critiques often fail to explore how such events articulate with sensuous modalities of constructing dominant identities. This chapter seeks to contextualize the Suq within the broader politics of representing and consuming selves and others in contemporary Italy, and it argues that the Suq’s specific brand of strategic orientalism attempts to penetrate the Italian sensorium for the sake of challenging hegemonic representations of culture, identity, belonging, and roots. Just as importantly, this chapter suggests that, in a society where small businesses are a fundamental source of livelihood for both natives and immigrants, the Suq supports an alternative to forms of consumption increasingly shaped by the shopping malls and the big-box stores that, since 2000, have proliferated in Genoa’s deindustrialized peripheries, bringing about blight in formerly thriving neighborhoods.
As an ethnographic analysis of those aspects of revitalization that often go neglected in urban studies literature, this book argues that tourist guides, small business owners, artisans, festival organizers, and street antique dealers have given, and continue to give, a fundamental contribution to the process of transforming Genoa into a city of culture. Yet, in seeking to explore facets of this revitalization that range from the ever-present voracity of corporate commerce to the poiesis of the self-employed, this book also acknowledges the impossibility of experiencing—and analyzing—the city in its totality (Cinar and Bender 2007: xii). Hence, neither does it attempt to represent the city as a bounded and stable entity (Farías 2010: 9), nor does it claim to exhaust the range of creative practices that unfold in the shade of revitalization. Instead, it approaches the city through the exploration of some of the subjectivities, practices, expectations, things, logics, and the built environment that contribute to its emergent formation: a process whereby neoliberalism is, I suggest, only one of the forces at work (Farías 2010; Ong 2011).
Chapter 1
Chronotopes of Hope
It is useless to establish whether Zenobia should be classified as a happy or an unhappy city. It is not into these two species that one should divide the city; instead, one should ask whether it belongs to the category of those cities that continue to shape their wishes throughout the years, or to that of the cities that are erased by them.
—Italo Calvino (1972)
Genoa is the city of parting and oblivion. It is hard to stay, but it is even harder to leave and then return.
—Maurizio Fantoni Minnella (2014)
By presenting a series of chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981) that offer an insight into Genoa’s ever-changing quotidian since the 1970s, this chapter begins to investigate the tangle of place and hope that allows space to become “charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 1981: 84). The chronotopes it outlines depict a specific dimension of Genoa’s time-space as an arena for the experiential modulation of economies of hope mediated by communist and capitalist political projects: dreamworlds (Buck-Morss 2002) toward which the Genoese strove at different times in the history of their city, and that manifested through the urban everyday and its spatialities (Harvey 2000; Lefebvre 1991). These dreamworlds are not examined in their disembodied, ideal-typical form, but rather as a plurality of communist and capitalist cultures (Yanagisako 2002) emerging in and through the quotidian through the friction between globally traveling discourses and local circumstances (Tsing 2004). My purpose is to outline emergent forms of hope along with their blends of emancipatory qualities and mystifications (Bloch 1986). As Ernest Bloch (1998: 341) suggested, hope dwells in a “region of the not-yet” that is characterized by “enduring indeterminacy.” Hope’s dissatisfaction with the present and its orientation toward the future (Berlant 2011: 13), however, shape the “margin of maneuvrability” and the “opening to experimenting” (Massumi 2002: 212) through which this affect may foster initiative and the push for change (Crapanzano 2003: 6). The hope I explore here is the kind of potentially actionable affect that is driven by utopian dreams of modernization and the promise of happiness (Buck-Morss 2002; Miyazaki 2006). As an orientation toward the future that anticipates a happiness to come while simultaneously signaling a critical occupation with the past and the present (Ahmed 2010: 181; 174), the hope I tackle in this chapter is more specifically a “plausible narrative of progress” (Rorty 1999: 232): one that has the power of replicating itself interdiscursively across ideological boundaries, both on the left and on the right (Miyazaki 2004). This is the form of hope that drives the pursuit of a better life—a notion that has its roots in Christianity as much as it draws on the faith in progress promoted by the Enlightenment (Mayr 1992: 117). In Genoa’s case, hope includes first and foremost the possibility to make a living and improve the circumstances of one’s life.
In his ethnography of Zambia, James Ferguson (1999) provided a poignant analysis of the disconnection experienced by people when the modernization prospected by industrialization was suddenly derailed. In a similar vein, writing about how young Ethiopian men lost hope as neoliberal reforms curtailed their employment opportunities, Daniel Mains (2012) described the stagnation and despair that unfold when the narrative of personal and collective progress is interrupted. While the African settings of Ferguson’s and Mains’s ethnographies are quite different from the circumstances at hand in Genoa, the underlying collective narrative—the promise of modernization, its interruption, and the ensuing stagnation and despair—is remarkably similar. In Genoa, too, the relative prosperity and stability brought about by twentieth-century industrialization found an abrupt end in the 1970s. Blue-collar jobs that, up to then, had been readily available to the point of attracting a considerable migration from the south of the country became increasingly scanty. The tertiary sector that had been experiencing steady growth due to the expansion of the public administration and the state-run industries also slowed down. In the face of rising desperation, political parties and powerful individuals fastened their iron grip on the scarce employment opportunities, which they kept bartering in return for favors, cash, and power. It is in this context, I suggest, that the