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May 14, 2008, Wednesday
Time: 3:30 - 5:00pm
Location: University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper Memorial Library, 1116 E. 59th St., Room 102
Giovanni Semi, Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture, Department of Social and Political Studies, University of Milan, Italy
"The Symbolic Economy of Ethnicity: Consuming Moroccan Culture in Turin's Gentrified Inner-City"
In the last decade the “discovery” of the inner city by both public institutions and private investors of Torino, in northwestern Italy, has been accompanied by a large display of representations of a both reinvented “local” and “foreign” culture.
Bars, cafés and restaurants with high-fashioned shop-windows offer consumers a highly considered atmosphere of a “quartier latin”, a place where you can taste Moroccan mint-tea while rambling through an exposition of pictures by local artists while, only 15 years ago, the same place was considered as one of the worst to live in. If one of the reasons for the early dismissal of the inner-city was the local, popular and rather marginal culture, now some selected elements of it are taken as symbols of renewal and regeneration. Migrants who were considered as one of the reasons to avoid walking the streets are now part of the urban landscape, selling their “culture” to young urban cosmopolites.
Background paper >>
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