Positive perspectives on migration discourse in early twentieth-century Italy

As discussed in Arcimaviciene and Baglama (2018: 1–2) and Taylor (2020), a large body of literature has shown that there is a tendency to negatively conceptualize migration in newspaper discourse by using specific metaphorical expression (Santa Ana 1999; El Refaie 2001; Gabrielatos and Baker 2008; Islentyeva 2018). However, the majority of these works are focused on newspaper representation of migration from the perspectives of their countries of destination. As previously discussed (Hart 2010), journalists, by discursively portraying incoming immigrants (them) as a threat to national security and social stability of the country they belong to (’our’), legitimize practices of inequality and exclusion. In contrast, this chapter focuses on the Italian context in early 1900s, where the writer/speaker and the people who actually migrated belonged to the same community. The investigation of the metaphorical representation of migration pursued in this chapter aims at clarifying the extent to which the writer/speaker’s perspective is a determinant of the metaphorical representation of migrant identities. To address this, I adopt a corpus-approach to Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004) to examine and define the linguistic and conceptual metaphors surrounding migration discourse in Italy. The dataset consists of an Italian corpus (approximately twenty million words) containing extracts from La Stampa newspaper published between 1900 and 1915. All metaphors retrieved using the corpus tool WordSmith 8.0 (Scott 2020) are discussed in a subsequent qualitative analysis. Results show that, unexpectedly, the metaphorical discursive images representing migration are largely positive. The quantity of migrants is represented as liquid and interpreted as a natural resource, and even invasion metaphors function to show the need to be militarily organized to overcome the difficulties of integration into a new country. In this case, the writer/speaker gives support to the emigrant’s journey, perhaps because migration has not been experienced as a threat to the community as these migrants constitute the group that decided to migrate for the good of the whole community. This might support the hypothesis that the writer/speaker’s perspective and the economic and political context in general play fundamental role in determining the discursive representation of migration.