Palermo Spring: Hopes and Frustrations of Young Italian-Born Tamils in a Rebranded City

Over the last three decades, Palermo has been rebranded and re-imagined as a cosmopolitan and hospitable Mediterranean city reborn after a long interlude of corruption, crime and economic decline. This article critically interrogates these new dominant imaginaries by centring the experiences of Chandy, a young Hindu woman of Tamil descent, alongside those of the broader Tamil community in Palermo, one of the largest and oldest migrant communities in the city. Through a focus on devotion to the patron saint Rosalia we explore both how young Tamils forge a sense of spiritual citizenship through their ritual practices, and how their involvement in these practices is inserted – and in turn altered and flattened – in political imaginaries of cosmopolitan Palermo. We argue that the encounters that unfold through Sicilian popular devotion offer alternative modes of relating across difference, highlighting the exclusionary effects of liberal cosmopolitanism while also cautioning against efforts to celebrate and define these encounters as Mediterranean.