Forgotten Refugees: Decolonization, Displaced Persons, and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945-1960

FAIN: FB-54933-10

Pamela Ballinger
Regents of the University of Michigan (Brunswick, ME 04011-8447)

This project examines processes of reconstruction in post-1945 Europe through a focus on the continent's "displaced persons" crisis. Refugees put into question the symbolic and literal borders of nations and states after war, even as they raised more immediate issues regarding social integration and housing. Employing historical and anthropological methods, the study examines such questions for Italy, which had large populations of both foreign and national refugees (i.e. persons from formerly Italian territorial possessions lost with the defeat of fascism). The conceptual and material differentiation of refugees into categories of "foreign" and "national" and the creation of distinct regimes of refugee relief constituted key sites at which understandings of Italian (and, more broadly, European) identity were renegotiated.