Within and Against Racial Segregation

The pandemic brought migrant farm workers into the limelight once again, as has happened repeatedly in the last three decades, in Italy as in many other parts of the world. Here I examine how intersecting and sometimes conflicting discourses and interventions, that have this biopolitically conceived population as their object, decide upon these subjects’ worthiness of attention, care, and sympathy through criminalizing, victimizing, and humanitarian registers. I reflect on some of the affective dynamics that sustain both the governmental operations through which these populations were (sought to be) managed and reactions against them from a situated perspective, as an accomplice to many of the forms of struggle in which migrant farm workers have engaged in the last decade in Italy. The stage for many such occurrences is what I have elsewhere defined as the “encampment archipelago” that many such workers, and particularly those who migrate from across West Africa, inhabit—labor or asylum-seeker camps, but also slums or isolated, derelict buildings, and various hybrid, in-between spaces among which people circulate.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Genealogies of containment: migrant labour,bonifica integraleand bio-carceral regimes in an Italian agro-industrial enclave

This paper begins from the present condition of migrant workers in the district of Foggia, south-eastern Italy, one of the largest agro-industrial enclaves in the country, employing tens of thousands of workers who live and labour in conditions of extreme precarity and exploitation. Techniques of containment of such labour force range from the spatial to the juridical and symbolic, through interlacing discourses and their material dimensions and outcomes, in which migrants are constructed as a security (and health) threat or a humanitarian emergency. Drawing on over nine years of engaged participant research and on archival and secondary sources, I reconsider the genealogies of such “dispositifs”, which date back to pre-unification projects of agrarian and penal reform and to the emergence of a racialist paradigm in the post-unitary Italian context, in relation to criminal anthropology. In particular, I examine their application to carceral regimes of labour in projects of land reclamation, which have shaped many agro-industrial enclaves (and especially that of Tavoliere, in the district of Foggia). The current materialities of migrant containment can thus be shown to bear the stratified, spectral traces of past projects and modes of governance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Ethno-racialisation at the intersection of food and migration regimes: Reading processes of farm-labour substitution against the grain of migration policies in Italy (1980-present)

The paper puts the food regime model, as elaborated by scholars such as Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, into articulation with the analysis of migration/border regimes, as proposed by critical migration scholars. If by now it is well established that the policies that regulate the mobility of migrant labour play a crucial role in enabling capitalist accumulation in contemporary global agriculture, few analyses have delved into the actual mechanisms which make this possible, and into their histories. The argument is developed by reference to the Italian case, showing how subsequent waves of substitution of Italian labourers with migrants, that began in the 1980s, have followed different patterns. It argues that these can be understood by reading them against the grain of the changes accruing in the transnational migration regime. Thus, precarisation and segmentation of the labour force in the farming sector are shown to have been actively fostered by policies which have made of undocumented or differentially included labour one of the pillars upon which globally integrated food production has relied for the past three decades. Whilst based on national-scale statistics and secondary literature, the analysis also builds upon a sustained presence and engaged participant research in some of the Italian agroindustrial enclaves that record the highest presence of migrant labour.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The (im)possibilities of transgression, or, reflections on the awkward relation between Strathern and queer politics

Marilyn Strathern’s body of work is here analysed in its ‘partial connections’ to queer thinking, from an inescapably political dimension. The chapter engages in a work of reassemblage, making Strathern’s reflections compatible with those of Judith Butler and therefore also pointing to, and working through, their incomparabilities and limits. It is an exercise in cyborg-making, which draws on Strathern’s engagement with the work of Donna Haraway, operated by assembling two of Strathern’s terrains of inquiry in dialogue to queer thinking: institutional and disciplinary practices, on the one hand, and the awkward relations between feminist/Marxist theories and anthropological description, on the other. Here, issues of transgression and its aporias, and the necessarily relational character of identification, are interrogated for how they can guide the development of an insurgent mode of knowledge production which is founded on risk, vulnerability and the conscious search for a future that is already present in abject form. This, it is argued, cannot but mean dealing with politics in the ruins of university disciplines and institutions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Spectres of Eurafrica in an Italian agroindustrial enclave

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Turbulences in the encampment archipelago: conflicting mobilities between migration, labour and logistics in Italian agri-food enclaves

The paper analyses the proliferation of different but intersecting regimes of mobility, and resistance against them, at the point of articulation of agricultural production with migration flows in contemporary Italy. The development of agri-food districts responds to a rationality of spatial zoning that in turn derives from the logistical re-organisation of supply chains. Such dynamics are shown to interact in complex ways with specific migration routes and their control, which also bear the effects of an encroaching logistical rationality. At times, these feed into the demand for cheap, just-in-time labour in agribusiness, whilst at others they clash with the needs of this sector. Racialisation represents a crucial tool of containment, together with a sexualised division of labour. The analysis is based on over eight years of participant, engaged research in several agro-industrial districts and migration hubs in Italy, among its migrant-worker populations, as well as in the countries of origins of some such workers (Nigeria, Romania and Bulgaria).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Gender, Utopias and the Savage Slot: The Role of Anthropology in the (De)Construction of a Concept

The paper addresses some of the ways in which anthropology, as a discourse and a discipline, has contributed to the forging as much as of the problematisation of the concept of gender, not only within the feminist, queer and LGBTQI camps, but also among Catholic fundamentalists. It argues that, despite some recent genealogical critiques of the concept of gender and its origins in mid-20th century bio-medical governance, insufficient attention has been paid to the role of the so-called ‘savage slot’ - as Rolph Trouillot defined the domain of knowledge carved out for anthropology, in a wider scheme of thought that has its origins at the same time as ‘the West’ became a reality. A more thorough genealogy of the ways in which anthropological thinking and evidence contributed to the construction, and then the deconstruction, of gender, can provide fruitful tools for a deeper challenge of the apparatus of gender itself

“New Slavery”, Modern Marronage and the Multiple Afterlives of Plantations in Contemporary Italy

With reference to the Italian agribusiness sector, this chapter probes the specters of “the plantation” as the (ob)scene of discourses on “modern slavery,” and traces alternative genealogies of the current organization and representation of migrant farm labor. The history of the transatlantic trade and the New-World plantation has a prominent presence in this field of representation. But multiple, geographically and temporally heterogeneous plantation pasts and specters of enslavement haunt contemporary agribusiness districts, the slums and labor camps which punctuate them, and their patterns of labor management, in different and even contradictory ways. “The plantation” and “slavery” as its principle of organization may be evoked in diminishing or oppressive terms that work as a distancing mechanism to occlude subjectivities and struggles. At the same time, redemptive and oppositional conjurings of the New-World plantation emerge from the coinage of the notion of a “Black Mediterranean” as a redemptive parallel to the “Black Atlantic,” and in workers’ myriad references to practices and cultures of marronage first developed in cross-Atlantic exchanges. Yet, other scenes, recursive patterns, localized geographies and buried genealogies are shown to be equally crucial to understand contemporary forms of extraction, containment and racialization, and for truly abolitionist struggles.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Δραπετεύοντας από την εξαίρεση: εργάτριες του σεξ ανάμεσα στην υποκειμενοποίηση και την υπερβολή

Το άρθρο εξετάζει την αλληλεπίδραση πολλαπλών καθεστώτωνυποκειμενοποίησης που σχετίζονται με τον εκτοπισμό και τον εντοπισμό, όπως αυτά επενεργούν στις εμπειρίες ζωής Νιγηριανών μεταναστριών εργατριών του σεξ. Το κείμενο διερευνά επίσης τους τρόπους με τους οποίους οι υποκειμενικότητες των γυναικών αυτών ενδέχεταινα υπερβαίνουν αυτά τα καθεστώτα. Μηχανισμοί (dispositifs), όπως αυτοί της μεταναστευτικής πολιτικής και της ανθρωπιστικής πολιτικής, της επισφάλειας και της θεσμοθετημένης υφαρπαγής στις νεοφιλελεύθερες οικονομίες, καθώς επίσης και αυτοί του φύλου και της συγγένειας, συνυφαίνονται μέσω περίπλοκων γενεαλογιών που δεν ανάγονται σε μια ξεκάθαρη διάκριση ανάμεσα σε υποκείμενα-θύματα και υποκείμενα-θύτες. Παρομοίως, η κινητικότητα και η στατικότητα ή η διάσχιση των συνόρων και η τακτοποιημένη ζωή δεν μπορούν εύκολα να χαρτογραφηθούν με όρους υπέρβασης ή περιορισμού: η μετανάστευση και η επιστροφή βιώνονται με τρόπο αμφίσημο, τόσο απελευθερωτικό όσο και περιοριστικό

Tony Duvert: A political and theoretical overview

The late French writer Tony Duvert gave voice, scandalously, to the child-lover he never hid he was. He outlined, with rare precision, a desiring subjectivity struggling for existence in a hostile society, which portrayed him as a criminal. The right to homosexuality; the battle against the condemnation and the repression of underage sexuality; the deconstruction of the scary image of the ‘paedophile’, a bugbear typically represented as a rapist ogre; the invective against parents (the actual source of violence and of the castration forces deployed against children) and the institution of the family (the backbone of a morbid and unjust society); the ferocious criticism towards sexual and emotional capitalism, parenthood and the “bourgeois economic scheme of libidinal investment”: those are some of the themes Tony Duvert deals with in his essays, and on which we focus in this paper.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio