Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2006
An Alliance of Women explores the creation and development of a women's anti-racist organization (Alma Mater) in Turin, Italy. Merrill places the emergence of Alma Mater in the context of immigration patterns in the 1990s, the conditions facing migrants in Italy, the spatial politics of racialization in Turin, and the history of labour and feminist politics in Turin. Hence the creation and ongoing experiences of Alma Mater is firmly located in space and place in Turin, and the reader is left to draw his/her own conclusions about broader implications or lessons that may apply elsewhere.
Merrill's book is based on an ethnographic study of Alma Mater over the course of a decade. In the context of a growing population of migrants, particularly from Africa, neo-liberal policies that heightened the precariousness of migrants' lives, and a growing political 'crisis' over immigration, Alma Mater was created by a number of women's groups in 1993.
Alma Mater is an organization of Italian and migrant women, a series of work cooperatives, and a physical space (a building). Hence Merrill argues that Alma Mater challenges and claims new spaces (psychic, social, and physical) for migrant women in Turin. Tellingly, the organization is named after the building in which it is housed, an abandoned school building, because "participants could not agree on a name representative of ethnically and religiously diverse migrants" (p. 20).
The diversity embodied within Alma Mater is both its strength and its weakness, a model of effective anti-racist activism yet rife with tensions between different migrant groups and between Italian and migrant women. Although "differences were acknowledged and hierarchy was emphatically denied in philosophical discourse", nevertheless Merrill points out that the entire organization is "framed by Italian feminists" (p. 120). The most influential positions also continue to be held by Italian feminists.
The particular history of feminism in Turin is tied to labour politics, so the emphasis of Alma Mater is firmly embedded in job creation. The building houses several businesses run by migrant women (Turkish bath, laundromat, seamstress shop, catering, and an Office of Cultural Mediation) operated by two different co-operatives (Mediazione, restricted to 'Black' women, and La Talea, open to all migrant women), as well as services for migrants such as translation, interpretation, nursing and elder care.
The emphasis of Alma Mater may be on labour, but there is much criticism about the type of work it creates for migrant women, mostly low-paid service work within the co-operatives, and cleaning and care-giving in the broader community. Much of the latter occurs within the informal economy, preventing many migrant women from obtaining legal status as migrant labourers. Thus although Alma Mater helps migrant women claim and redefine space in Turn, it has not disrupted the racialization of labour. For example, one of the interesting observations that Merrill makes is about the politics of racialized labour within Alma Mater: migrant women do not want to be seen to 'clean up' after functions because they complain the Italian women never do these tasks. For some this reaffirms a belief that Italian feminists at Alma Mater, like other Italians, are racist.
At the same time, there is some ambivalence among Italian women about the broader feminist movement in Turin, which seems to have been eclipsed by Alma Mater. While some feminists bemoan the decline of Italian feminism (with the familiar focus on the absence of young women taking up the cause), Merrill suggests a more positive shift in feminist politics. She argues that "immigrant women are becoming the agents of the reproduction of Turin feminism" (p. 154) while also acknowledging that many migrant women do not in fact see themselves as 'feminist', a term bound up with the history of feminism in Europe and North America.
The strength of An Alliance of Women is found in its intersectional analysis, attention to tensions and contradictions within a largely successful organization, and the richly woven ethnographic descriptions including the architecture of the building and the geography of space within Alma Mater and within Turin at large. Weaknesses include the author's failure to problematize the textual reproduction of the 'Italian/migrant' or 'citizen/other' dichotomies underlying racialized politics in Italy. In addition, not enough attention is paid to the voices of migrant women, and the contradictory ways they experience Alma Mater. There is little sense of how far or how deeply Alma Mater reaches into, or is differently connected with, the various migrant communities within Turin, or its influence in Italy at large. How do migrant women resolve tensions over this women-only space and their broader connections to family and community? How is Alma Mater viewed by, and connected with, migrant men, if at all? And how do migrant women negotiate their often ambivalent relationships to 'western feminism' within Alma Mater?
Overall, however, this is an engaging book and a 'hopeful' narrative about an important anti-racist women's alliance. It is worth reading for anyone interested in contemporary migration and effective forms of anti-racist activism across racialized divisions of citizen/other that permeate most contemporary societies, Canada included.
Gillian Creese
University of British Columbia
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/alliancewomen.html
October 2006
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