Specials

The condition of young emigrants of second and third generation is that of who, while belonging to a society and culture of adoption and to a country where he was born and in which he is a citizen, feel the urge to rediscover the traces of their land of origin and adapt them to present day.

This has its origin or in what Deleuze calls the "great legacy", a genealogy through which the inner identity of being Italian is transmitted, or in a conscious and intimate desire to renew a bond of belonging. The construction of identity of the young emigrant goes through a process of identification that finds in the family and in the original group of affiliation the models of a culture, the Italian one, reinforced by the community of origin and enlarged through languages, behaviours and tales. This "nuclear" identity (Stoller, 1985) will be enriched as time passes by through additional identification processes that refere to "other" subjects, reconductable to the community of which the young emigrant is part. The result is an open, porous, and "intersubjective” identity (Benjamin, 1995).

The migrant absorbes the culture of the context surrounding him and the one of his country of origin, constantly transformed by media and internet: music, sports, politics. All this leads to a double sense of affiliation: first to the real community in which he lives and second to the ideal community to which he will still belong to. Being with other people, being able to find the same instances in other people, facilitates his approach to this double reality.

The participation -  both instrumental, finalized to the aim to reach, both expressive, in the search of his own Ego with and inside the others, in the passage from the Ego to We, from individual identity to the social and cultural one - is the instrument through which he can move from the dimension of reflection to the one of action (Amerio, 2002). It is necessary to move from spontaneous, active and discontinuous forms to durable and organized forms: we need a youth associationism that intentionally takes  distances from the associative structures of their fathers’ generation, in order to better express new instances of dialogue, exchange and intercultural projects.

All this reflects, in general terms, the situation of a globalized world that, going over the specific affiliations, puts in the foreground post-materialistic and universalistic goals. The globalization involves, in fact, not only the circulation of goods, but also of behaviours and ways of life, where the "nomadism" (Braidotti, 2002) is an inner dimension. In the post-modern society either...or..., which excludes a double "rational" possibility of decline, is overcome by both...and... prevails. This allows the coexistence of opposite dimensions and ways of being in an unstable and contrasting equilibrium, that for its own carachteristics gets richle tense and desirable.