Immigrant Identities in the Italian Ethnic Press

This study is concerned with the discourse of immigration as it is embodied in press treatment of the social practice of immigration. In recent years a considerable number of studies in Italian social research have focused on the role of the Italian press in representing the practice of immigration (Belluati, Grossi and Viglongo 1995; Sciortino and Colombo 2004). Such research aimed at revealing the attitudes towards immigrant communities which emerged from their textual representation in Italian newspapers and dealt mainly with the type of situations immigrants are most frequently associated with and the criminalization of the immigrants in newspaper reports. The present study focuses on how the ‘ethnic press’, i.e. newspapers addressed to a specific immigrant community and written in the language used by that community, deals with the African community in Italy. Starting from the observation that “[…] identity options are constructed, validated and offered through discourses available to individuals at a particular point in time and place” (Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004:14) and that discourse “ […] constitutes situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and relationships between people and groups of people” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 258), the aim is to describe how Italian newspapers written in English construe the growing number of African immigrants in Italy.