The Politics of Recognising Difference: Multiculturalism Italian Style

This title was first published in 2002: This volume seeks to extend and deepen an understanding of the Italian experience of immigration, going on to place it in a wider, international and comparative perspective. The text is concerned in particular to articulate the workings of the politics of difference that underpin the issue. Apart from its specific concerns with immigration and racism in Italy, this volume addresses wider field of migration and ethnicity in three ways: it explores experience in a society already post-industrial, undergoing demographic decline, and considers whether processes of integration, the formation of ethnicity and policies of multiculturalism will replicate North European examples; the studies engage with comparative questions concerning how responses are shaped, for example, by the Catholic church, or the colonial legacy; and finally, work on the politics of difference, sensitive to local variations, may provide a model and agenda for research elsewhere.