“It’s Complicated, isn’t it? Citizenship and Ethnic Identity in a Mobile World”

This article explores the experiences of second-generation migrants with a focus on Chinese in Prato (Italy), for whom the relationship between citizenship and identity is tightly linked. Most studies maintain that the link between citizenship and identity is instrumentalist or ambiguous. In contrast, we focus on the affective dimension of citizenship and identity. We argue that citizenship status functions as a key defining concept of identity in Italy, in contrast to countries like Australia, where the notion of ethnicity is more commonly evoked. Several factors have contributed to this situation: the strong essentialist conception of ius sanguinis in Italian citizenship law, the recent history of Italian immigration, the European politics of exclusion and the repudiation of the concept of ethnicity in Italian scholarship as well as popular and political discourse. We conclude that the emphasis on formal citizenship, and the relative absence of alternative identity concepts like ethnicity, limits the possibilities for expressions of mixity and hyphenated identities in contemporary Italian society.