Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / During the early to mid-1900s, an infatuation with the “gangster” grew in American popular culture. In response to historical events of the early twentieth century that polarized the United States class system, especially the Great Depression, those in the growing lower class became fascinated with actual and fictional figures that could demonstrate the ability to live “in-between;” that is, anyone who did not benefit from corporate capitalism but, rather, from standing on the dangerous middle ground between the classes, challenging economic, ethnic, and even legal boundaries. Both fictional and nonfictional figures of the “gangster” arose in American media in the form of a hyper-masculine character who could transform his humble origins into a luxurious life by committing brilliantly brutal crimes with bravado. As the gangster became more established over the course of the following decades and expanded in popularity beyond the original working-class audience, the gangster also became a nostalgic figure who offered a sense of tradition, which in part accounts for the gangster’s continuing popularity in modern media. As the first chapter explains, due to the association of southern Italian immigrants with crime and patriarchy in the United States, gangster and mafia fiction most largely concern southern Italians and Italian- Americans. Since its inception, the Italian-American gangster hero, or the “Mafioso,” has commanded a strong following among American audiences. Due to the saliency of the Mafioso figure and the widespread influence of the genre, both the figure and the narrative merit critical discussion and analysis. The first chapter of the following article outlines the ways in which traditional mafia fiction, epitomized by Puzo and Coppola’s sensational The Godfather, extrapolates from historical phenomena, like the hyphenate individual, with the tools of genre fiction in order to craft the classical Mafioso. The chapter considers the reliance of the Mafioso on such elements as bella figura and omertà, as well as socio-cultural norms assigned to Italian-Americans in the media, and considers the characteristics of the Mafioso by examining the character system present in The Godfather. In outlining the evolution of the Mafioso character, the first chapter explores what it means for the character of the gangster hero to perpetuate the values that once popularized it. In response, the second chapter provides a close reading of the work of parodist and multi-genre writer Giose Rimanelli, who takes bold and innovative steps in questioning the mafia narrative in his novel Benedetta in Guysterland. Rimanelli, a writer undoubtedly more focused on high-literary intertextuality than a genre writer, includes characters branded by the same traditional elements of The Godfather’s Mafioso but, instead of aggrandizing the Mafioso in the traditional fashion, utilizes these elements to question the foundation upon which classical mafia fiction relies. The chapter explicates Rimanelli’s clever use of referential language, unique narrative structure, and complex characters in order to analyze the ways in which Rimanelli demonstrates the potential for Italian-American literature to evolve. The chapter discusses Rimanelli’s recognition and distortion of mafia fiction tropes, scrutinizing key characters, and ultimately assays the potential for expansion in the mafia fiction genre. By providing a close reading of two texts, related in content but highly divergent in their method and objective, this article juxtaposes the historical Mafioso against his reexamined counterpart. Through an analysis of the history and canonical figuration of the gangster hero in The Godfather, and an examination of Rimanelli’s extensive reworking, the following two chapters call readers to recognize the historical context in which the Mafioso formed and rethink the literary outcomes of reinventing the tradition of both the character and the narrative. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: English.

Esta dissertação analisa o papel da comunidade brasileira na revitalização da região central da municipalidade de Framingham em Massachusetts. A reestruturação do capitalismo internacional transferiu grande parte do setor manufatureiro dos países de economia avançada para os países em desenvolvimento, esta circulação do capital provocou deslocamentos de mão de obra em todo o mundo. Durante a década de 1980, muitos brasileiros deixaram o país em busca das oportunidades de trabalho oferecidas pelo setor de serviços existente nos Estados Unidos. De Governador Valadares partiram muitos emigrantes para a municipalidade de Framingham, no estado de Massachusetts, para executar trabalhos de menor remuneração, como os de faxina doméstica e reformas. Ao chegarem a seu destino ocuparam espaços residenciais que se encontravam disponíveis devido ao declínio econômico da região central (Downtown) da municipalidade, e ao se instalarem na região criaram um pequeno circuito comercial que em muito contribuiu para a revitalização do lugar. Através dos conceitos de Espaço e Paisagem essa trajetória é reconstituída e analisada. / This dissertation examines the role of the Brazilian community in the revitalization of the downtown district in Framingham, Massachusetts . The restructuring of international capitalism transferred a large part of the manufacturing sector of the economy of advanced countries to developing countries , this movement of capital caused displacement of labor worldwide . During the 1980s , many Brazilians left the country in search of work opportunities offered by existing services sector in the United States . From Governador Valadares, many emigrants left Framingham , Massachusetts, to perform lower-paying jobs , such as domestic cleaning and renovations . When they reached their destination occupied residential spaces that were available due to the economic decline of the central region ( Downtown ) of the municipality , and settle in the region, creating a small commercial circuit that greatly contributed to the revitalization of the place . Through the concepts of space and landscape that trajectory is reconstructed and analyzed.

In the second quarter of 2013, 7,944 people were detained in the UK ‘for the purposes of immigration control’ (Home Office, 2013). While 1,138 of those detained were women, major shortcomings are identified in their treatment and calls made for a more gender sensitive asylum system. Although 35% of these women went on to be released there is a lack of research that investigates the on-going legacy of detention and the consequences for the sense of belonging, social integration and wellbeing of ex-detainees. This thesis draws on in-depth narrative interviews with 16 migrant women in the UK who were detained and then released from UK Immigration Removal Centres and five charity workers. Within migration scholarship the paradigm of exclusion has been traditionally adopted to understand how states seek to protect borders, keeping unwanted individuals out or contained. A spatial examination of respondents’ critical geographies of home reveals however that despite their release from detention these women continued to negotiate multiple and fluctuating boundaries. It is argued therefore that this paradigm obscures a nuanced perspective and proposes instead a discourse of precarity. Not only can the ‘state of precarity’ implicit within narratives of detention seep into and define the everyday geographies of home beyond release, respondents’ everyday negotiations with home remained central to the construction and proliferation of everyday precarity. This is achieved through a home-infused geopolitical rhetoric and interventions in the name of immigration enforcement which were revealed through (in)secure spaces of home. An exploration of emotional and embodied geographies also exposes erosive implications for feelings of belonging and health and wellbeing. A discourse of precarity therefore allows for a differentiation and critical inquiry of subjective gendered positions, citizenship and importantly, emergent accounts of resilience, reworking and resistance on predominantly social trajectories.

The thesis sets out to examine the debate on national identity and immigration in Italy. It analyses whether Italy, in reacting to immigration, is following any classic model of integration of foreign citizens following the example of countries such as Britain and France, or whether it has developed an alternative long-term strategy more adequate to its own situation. It also questions whether the debate on immigration has triggered a discussion on the renegotiation of the meaning of national identity, in order to make it more inclusive of minority identities within the country. The thesis traces the debate as it emerges in the public sphere. It identifies the main actors involved, and analyses the rhetoric used by the leading voices to put forward their respective views and claims. It aims at providing a picture of the discussion within each group as well as investigating the relationship between different actors, their alliances and the dissent they express. The role of three main actors taking part in the discussion is explored in detail, namely Italian intellectuals, the Catholic Church and the Northern League. It addresses their role in shaping public opinion and influencing the state policy-making on immigration. Through the final analysis of Italian legislation, the thesis concludes that Italy is moving towards the construction of a highly exclusive identity, where the idea of integration does not feature.

L'immigration familiale algérienne en France s'est développée entre le début des années 1950 et le début des années 1980, selon des configurations variées, fonction du contexte et des situations sociales. Le nombre de familles algériennes en France est ainsi passé de quelques milliers à 100 000 environ. Dans un premier temps, seuls les travailleurs les plus stables ont fait venir leur famille, mais la guerre d'indépendance a entraîné des arrivées précipitées de familles fuyant les violences de guerre. Dès l'indépendance, des mesures ont été prises pour encadrer et limiter de façon stricte les arrivées de ces familles, alors que les familles étrangères soumises au régime général d'immigration affluaient. Le logement a été le principal instrument de cette politique d'immigration familiale discriminatoire. La présence d'importants bidonvilles algériens, dans un contexte de grave crise du logement, a été utilisée comme prétexte à cette politique, malgré l'existence d'autres bidonvilles et la capacité financière de la plupart des familles à se loger autrement. Mais dans le même temps, des mesures ont été prises pour améliorer les conditions de logement des familles étrangères installées en France, qui ont largement bénéficié aux familles algériennes - en dépit de discriminations de la part de certains bailleurs sociaux -, du fait de l'ancienneté de leur implantation et de la taille des familles. Un certain nombre parviennent également à se loger dans le parc privé ordinaire, éventuellement en devenant propriétaire. La minorité de familles issues des bidonvilles et relogées en cités de transit, dont la vie quotidienne est retracée dans cette thèse, ont cependant été durablement exclues de l'accès au logement et à la ville contemporaine. / The Algerian family immigration in France has developed between the early 1950s and early 1980s, under a variety of configurations, depending on the context and social situations. The number of Algerian families in France has risen from a few thousand to about 100,000. At first, only the most stable workers brought their families, but the war of independence led to hasty arrival of families fleeing the violence of war. After independence, measures have been taken to control and limit strictly the arrival of these families, while foreign families subject to the general immigration system flowed. The housing has been the main instrument of this family discriminatory immigration policy. The presence of large Algerian shantytowns, in a context of severe housing crisis, has been used as a pretext for this policy despite the existence of other slums and the financial capability of most families But at the same time, measures were taken to improve the housing conditions of foreign families living in France, who have largc1y benefited the Algerian families - despite discrimination by certain social housing landlords - because of the seniority of their location and family size. A number also manage to fit in the ordinary private park, eventually becoming owner. The minority of families coming from shantytowns and cités de transit, whose daily life is recounted in this thesis, nevertheless, have been excluded for a very long time from access to decent housing and the contemporary city.

This dissertation traces the state-directed agricultural migration of 200,000 Japanese farmers to rural Brazil in the 1920s and 30s. From its origins in late nineteenth century Japanese interpretations of German economic and colonial theory to its end in the mid-1930s under the populist Estado Novo government of Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas, my research connects this migration scheme to nation-state and empire-building projects in Japan and Brazil. Using Japanese, Portuguese, and English-language sources from archives in Japan, Brazil, and the United States, it argues that this state-directed migration scheme was an attempt by Japanese and Brazilian intellectuals and policymakers to use international migration to solve the crises of rural labor that stemmed from rapid industrialization and economic development. Japanese policymakers believed that their surplus agricultural labor could be settled in isolated Brazilian nucleos, where daily life for settlers was still dominated by Japanese cultural and government institutions. Japanese emigrants in Brazil saw themselves as imperial subjects performing service for a Japanese settler colonial project, and Japanese state institutions continued to define their everyday lives. Japanese government-produced guidebooks and migrants’ own writings in Brazil’s Japanese-language newspapers reveal how the unique circumstances of state-directed migration blurred the distinctions between migrants and colonists. In Brazil, the Japanese found themselves trapped between two competing visions of the Brazilian nation. They owed their existence there to the loose federalism of the Old Republic (1889-1930) that allowed individual Brazilian states to set their own immigration policies. Under the terms of the 1891 Brazilian Constitution, wealthy Southern states, like São Paulo, could offer land concessions to foreign immigration companies without federal oversight, meaning they were free to enact racial preferences for immigrant labor at the expense of the country’s poorer, racially-mixed citizens in the Northeast. However, when the Old Republic fell in the 1930 Brazilian Revolution, the Japanese community quickly became a racialized symbol of the old political order’s regional political and economic inequality. Influenced by new fascist governments in Europe and anti-immigrant sentiment that had swept the Western Hemisphere, the Getúlio Vargas-led Provisional Government redefined national identity and redistributed political power. Furthermore, Vargas’s expansion of participatory politics in the early 1930s merged a strain of nativism with his efforts to erase São Paulo’s regional dominance. His government limited the economic rights of non-citizens in 1932 and introduced the first national immigration policy, a strict quota, in 1934. Through an analysis of Brazilian constitutional theory and the debates surrounding the country’s first national immigration policy – which was written directly into the 1934 Brazilian Constitution – my research demonstrates how regional competition motivated and racialized Brazilian immigration policy at the expense of the country’s Japanese community. As neither Europeans nor Brazilians, the Japanese found themselves victims to more powerful political and racial ideologies in 1930s Brazil. In response to nativist efforts to close Japanese language schools in 1935 and 1936, the Japanese government attempted unsuccessfully to intervene on the community’s behalf. When news of the restrictions on Japanese Brazilian life reached Japan, the Japanese government used it to further justify its withdrawal from the international community and ramp up its colonial efforts in Manchuria. By 1937, when the Japanese settlement experiment came to an end, both the Japanese government and the Japanese in Brazil had already shifted their gaze to Manchuria as the preferred destination for surplus Japanese farmers, and Japanese government officials applied many of the same organizational techniques to facilitate agricultural emigration to Japan’s East Asian colonies.

No description available.

Under the Labour governments of 1997–2010, Britain's economic immigration policy was transformed from one of the most restrictive to one of the most liberal in Europe. This development was especially puzzling given the noted path dependence of immigration policy, as well as the absence of any public demand for liberalisation. Based on over 40 elite interviews coupled with document and archival analysis, the thesis sets out to explain why economic immigration policy changed so radically in Britain between 1997 and 2010 by examining how organised interests, political parties and the institutional context influenced policy and policy change. The thesis argues that policy change was a result of a combined set of favourable conditions. The overarching change in the policy framework was also not preconceived and the repercussions were not intended. The shift in policy framing was a consequence of an accumulation of policy reforms from different departments with different agendas. However, the logic and idea behind the policy reforms were fundamentally underpinned by the Labour Party's third way framework, in particular the Party's business-friendly approach and its fixation with globalisation. The thesis demonstrates that immigration policymaking in Britain is an elite-driven pursuit, that the institutional context is pertinent to explaining policy change and that parties, and the ideas which configure them, shape immigration policy.

A bicultural approach to the politics of settler-indigenous relations, rapidly increasing ethnocultural diversity and its status as an ex-British settler society, make Auckland a fascinating and complex context in which to examine contemporary British migrants. However, despite Britain remaining one of the largest source countries for migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the country's popularity as a destination among British emigrants, contemporary arrivals have attracted relatively little attention. This thesis draws on twelve-months of qualitative research, including in-depth interviews with forty-six participants, photo-elicitation with a smaller group, and participant observation, in order to develop a nuanced account of participants' narratives, everyday experiences and personal geographies of Auckland. This thesis adopts a lens attentive to the relationship between the past and the present in order to explore British migrants' imaginaries of sameness and difference, national belonging, place and ‘the good life' in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, through attention to the ‘colonial continuities' of participants' popular geographical and temporal imaginaries of Aotearoa New Zealand, and the lifestyles they associate with it, this thesis is part of growing attention to historical precedents of ‘the good life' in international lifestyle migration literature. Secondly, by examining participants' relations with Māori, other ethnicised groups, bi- and multiculturalism, I expand on whether these migrants' invest, or not, in ‘the settler imaginary' (Bell 2014). In doing so, I bring crucial nuance to understandings of ethnic and cultural difference, and settler-indigenous relations, in globalising white settler spaces. As neither fully ‘them' nor ‘us' (Wellings 2011), British migrants occupy an ambiguous position in ex-British settler societies. Finally, I examine participants' notions of shared ancestry and of cultural familiarity with Pākehā, and, in doing so, problematise the notion of Britishness as a natural legacy or passive inheritance in this context.

This thesis deals with the historical evolution, social networks, and – above all – the political participation of Italian citizens who are resident in London. The value of my research stems from an increasing interest – evident in the literature – in migrant transnational identities and in the political participation of migrant groups both in their home and host countries. Also relevant is the growing importance of London as a destination for Italian migrants. The study adopts a theoretical framework based on political opportunity structure and on the construction of social and community identity. It deploys a mix of methods that involve a questionnaire, ethnographic methods such as open and semi-structured interviews and participant observation, and some elements of discourse analysis, in order to analyse the social and political activity of three components of the Italian communities who are resident in London: the “old” migrants who arrived in the UK between the end of World War Two and the late 1970s; their descendants, the British-born Italians; and the “new” migrants, who have moved to London since the mid-1980s. Comparison across these three waves produces important insights into the development of Italian identity in London over more than half a century. In the three main empirical chapters the thesis examines (1) what characterises the Italian presence, in terms of socio-economic characteristics and identification; (2) how an Italian institutional and associational network, active in London, influences the building of a collective identity in the Italian communities and helps mobilise them; and (3) to what degree and how London Italians think they may contribute to political, social, and cultural change in their home and host countries. The primary data that I present show that belonging to one of the three generational groups outlined above has a great impact on the ties with both the UK and Italy and, in particular, with the Italian institutional and associational network in London; that this network plays an important role in the emergence of a new discourse on “Italianness” among recently arrived Italian migrants; that different forms of Italian identity are constructed and performed by Italians from the three different groups in their interaction with the social and political opportunity structure they experience in London; and finally that all this affects local and transnational political loyalties and behaviour.