Suspended identities. The concept of Ius soli among memory, boundary and otherness

Abstract

This paper aims to deepen the explosion of the term Ius Soli in relation to the current conditions that have placed it at the center of socio-cultural and crisis processes. The idea of ​​the Ius soli seems to go both in the cultural universe and in the natural one, creating a knot between what is innate, or inherited, and what is constructed, or not inherited. The media construction further exaggerates the forms of representation, ensuring their circulation and at the same time causing alterations and confusions. We are currently talking about an escape from the other. In such a context, the exclusion is increasingly linked to distortions and to what Barthes calls the myths of communication. The concept of identity, in relation to the Ius soli, takes multiple meanings; they turn into political representations, and are brought to the media debate, and into social representations of interpretations, which circulate on social media. On one side, this concept incorporates the idea of national identity, evoking a membership principle, and on the other, it reminds the idea of identity of the subject, with a principle of identification. Some semantic categories, such as those of identity / otherness, foreign / member, and acceptance / refusal, are emblematic of this phenomenon and allows us to understand how specific events represent an ideal opportunity to comprehend the relation amongst memory, identity, and dialectics, which is able to destabilize those aspects apparently unchanging, but actually constantly negotiated