Irene Peano
University of Lisbon, Instituto de Ciências sociais, Faculty Member
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Anthropology, Social Sciences, Cultural Theory, Humanities, Culture, Silvia Federici, and 36 moreSocial Anthropology, Gender Studies, Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, Political Theory, Migration, Neoliberalism, Subjectivity, Sex Work, Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality, Social Movements, Queer Theory, Judith Butler, Critical Legal Theory, Social movements and revolution, Anarchist Studies, Queer spaces, Anarcha-feminism, Anarchism & Sexuality, Bonded Labour, Autonomous Marxism, Gender, Postcolonial Studies, Migration Studies, Violence, Human Trafficking, Sexuality, Colonialism, Farm Labor, Migrant workers, Migrant labour, Farm Workers (Anthropology), Militant Research, Activist Ethnography, and Giovanni Pirelli edit
The plain of Tavoliere, which makes up the largest portion of the district of Foggia, in the upper part of Italy’s southeastern Apulian region, today still bears the traces of a fascist infrastructural project of land reclamation that... more
The plain of Tavoliere, which makes up the largest portion of the district of Foggia, in the upper part of Italy’s southeastern Apulian region, today still bears the traces of a fascist infrastructural project of land reclamation that originally took shape in the 1920s and 1930s. Here, Mussolini’s regime had devised its largest feat of bonifica integrale (“integral cleansing,” or “reclamation”). Fascism’s overall project spanned various areas of “metropolitan” Italy and its overseas territories in Libya and East Africa, and aimed to fulfil the promise of land to peasants—a core element of fascism’s political platform in the aftermath of World War I—without upsetting that landowning elite which had supported the dictatorship’s rise to power. At the same time, these measures worked to quell internal opposition and build international reputation. While the scheme became progressively innervated by partially new ideals of racial purity and unity, it built on previous experiments dating as far back as the late eighteenth century, and would outlive the downfall and formal repudiation of the fascist credo at the end of World War II. The spectral survivals of these interventions on land, property, and people, which have stratified the landscape over the course of more than two centuries, haunt agribusiness enclaves and their migrant workforce today.
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The essay begins by analysing the forms of harnessing, on the one hand, and of flight, on the other, that characterize migrant farm-labour in contemporary Italy. Starting from field research in the agro-industrial enclaves of Tavoliere... more
The essay begins by analysing the forms of harnessing, on the one hand, and of flight, on the other, that characterize migrant farm-labour in contemporary Italy. Starting from field research in the agro-industrial enclaves of Tavoliere and of the Plain of Gioia Tauro, harnessing and flight are examined by articulating direct experience to statistical data and secondary sources. Yet, this dynamic cannot be taken simply as a recent development. Against a tendency to ignore or trivialise the historical depth underlying contemporary agribusiness' labour organisation, I undertake a genealogy of agro-capitalism in the two paradigmatic cases of Tavoliere and the Plain of Gioia Tauro. Since the transition from a feudal to a capitalist, and then industrial, system, starting from the last decades of the 18 th century, farmers, politicians and planners always relied on attempts to harness a recalcitrant labour force. Through a critical reading of archival and historical sources, projects of land reclamation and settler colonization emerge as experiments in harnessing-through, for example, recourse to forced, carceral, war-prisoner, heavily controlled settler-colonial labour, compounded with other forms of restriction and mobility regulation that characterized capitalist agriculture into the postwar period.
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This essay explores the author's engaged research trajectory into several agro-industrial enclaves in contemporary Italy. Stemming from solidarity work in support of migrant laborers living in slums and camps, and of their demands for... more
This essay explores the author's engaged research trajectory into several agro-industrial enclaves in contemporary Italy. Stemming from solidarity work in support of migrant laborers living in slums and camps, and of their demands for legal recognition and better living and work conditions, the essay shows how the interrogation of these spaces’ multiple, layered pasts helps to better understand and contrast forms of containment, extraction, and racialized and gendered violence in the present. In particular, the essay pits narratives that portray such agro-industrial enclaves and the people that inhabit them as anachronistic residues against deep genealogies of racial capitalism and of the rhetorical tropes that sustained them. Carceral-like containment and, more generally, spatial segregation are shown to run through and thus be foundational in the history of capitalist agriculture, across geographies that link Italy to global flows.
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This article is part of the multilingual ELMO series Transnational migration in CEE from intersectional perspectives of race, gender, class and citizenship. Recent limitations to the freedom of movement imposed to contain the spread of... more
This article is part of the multilingual ELMO series Transnational migration in CEE from intersectional perspectives of race, gender, class and citizenship. Recent limitations to the freedom of movement imposed to contain the spread of COVID-19 led farmers' organisations (as well as other employers') across Europe to sound the alarm, lamenting the sudden dearth of workers needed for highly timesensitive harvesting. These restrictions cut across workers' nationalities and legal statuses and were especially strict between March and June 2020, when agricultural activities normally resume after the winter. This was often portrayed by mainstream media, and perceived by the general public, as an unprecedented, generalised, and totally unpredictable crisis. However, a further, more careful look into the recent history of employment policies and trends in the agricultural sector might lead one to think again, at least as far as the Italian case goes.
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This paper begins from the present condition of migrant workers in the district of Foggia, southeastern Italy, one of the largest agro-industrial enclaves in the country, employing tens of thousands of workers who live and labour in... more
This paper begins from the present condition of migrant workers in the district of Foggia, southeastern 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.
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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... more
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.
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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... more
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.
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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... more
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).
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The paper employs a logistical analytic to highlight convergences and conflicts between different processes of spatialisation, and the mechanisms of resistance and subtraction that invest them. The spaces with which the paper deals are... more
The paper employs a logistical analytic to highlight convergences and conflicts between different processes of spatialisation, and the mechanisms of resistance and subtraction that invest them. The spaces with which the paper deals are located at the intersection between the politics of migration management and the forms of spatial organization of supply chains, with particular reference to agribusiness. By means of case studies drawn from different contexts, among which the Tavoliere and the Plain of Gioia Tauro, the progressive articulation of forms of zoning is examined, which relies on the institution of Special Economic Zones within agro-industrial enclaves. Not only are forms of management of the mobility of commodities and people not necessarily mutually reinforcing. Forms of subtraction and resistance are also enacted by the subjects of containment policies.
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For a couple of weeks, roughly between 22nd June and 7th July 2020, the otherwise anonymous town of Mondragone, located on the Domitian littoral in the district of Caserta, just north of Naples, became the stage of a socio-political drama... more
For a couple of weeks, roughly between 22nd June and 7th July 2020, the otherwise anonymous town of Mondragone, located on the Domitian littoral in the district of Caserta, just north of Naples, became the stage of a socio-political drama that crossed Italian borders and made the international news. What captured attention were the clashes that erupted on 25th June between the Bulgarian community, a decade-long presence that mostly feeds the local farm-labour market, and citizens angered at its members’ violation of the quarantine measures that had been imposed some days before. Racist attitudes, long simmering among the local population, found a violent outlet, as in previous instances, and were fueled by politicians and the media, compounded with claims and innuendos, aired in national and international public discourse, that behind the riots were rather unspecified ‘mafia’ interests. In this piece I seek to provide an analysis of the events that takes into account the longer-term, political and economic developments in the district and beyond.
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Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control can be most adequately grasped by the notion of ‘containment’, conceived as the redirection of people’s autonomous movement into restricted and... more
Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control can be most adequately grasped
by the notion of ‘containment’, conceived as the redirection of
people’s autonomous movement into restricted and defined pathways. Following this idea, this article proceeds in three steps. First, it
proposes an analysis of the ‘infrastructures’ through which containment is enforced, showing the plural dimensions (regulatory, humanitarian, commercial, social) of which they are composed. Second,
analysing two cases of transnational mobility towards (and across)
the EU, it shows the effect of containment on people’s spatial and
existential trajectories. And third, through the analysis of such
cases, it contends that the ultimate effect of containment is the
fragmentation of citizenship into a variety of intermediate ‘latitudinal’ positions characterised by partial and conditional access to
rights, which are functional to several forms of exploitation, including labour but also profit extraction through the operations of
containment infrastructures themselves.
by the notion of ‘containment’, conceived as the redirection of
people’s autonomous movement into restricted and defined pathways. Following this idea, this article proceeds in three steps. First, it
proposes an analysis of the ‘infrastructures’ through which containment is enforced, showing the plural dimensions (regulatory, humanitarian, commercial, social) of which they are composed. Second,
analysing two cases of transnational mobility towards (and across)
the EU, it shows the effect of containment on people’s spatial and
existential trajectories. And third, through the analysis of such
cases, it contends that the ultimate effect of containment is the
fragmentation of citizenship into a variety of intermediate ‘latitudinal’ positions characterised by partial and conditional access to
rights, which are functional to several forms of exploitation, including labour but also profit extraction through the operations of
containment infrastructures themselves.
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Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control can be most adequately grasped by the notion of ‘containment’, conceived as the redirection of people’s autonomous movement into restricted and... more
Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control can be most adequately grasped by the notion of ‘containment’, conceived as the redirection of people’s autonomous movement into restricted and defined pathways. Following this idea, this article proceeds in three steps. First, it proposes an analysis of the ‘infrastructures’ through which containment is enforced, showing the plural dimensions (regulatory, humanitarian, commercial, social) of which they are composed. Second, analysing two cases of transnational mobility towards (and across) the EU, it shows the effect of containment on people’s spatial and existential trajectories. And third, through the analysis of such cases, it contends that the ultimate effect of containment is the fragmentation of citizenship into a variety of intermediate ‘latitudinal’ positions characterised by partial and conditional access to rights, which are functional to several forms of exploitation, including labour but also profit extraction through the operations of containment infrastructures themselves.
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A quasi due mesi da quando le associazioni degli agricoltori hanno iniziato ad agitare lo spettro degli “scaffali vuoti” per carenza di manodopera stagionale nelle raccolte, il governo italiano sembra deciso a metterci una pezza con una... more
A quasi due mesi da quando le associazioni degli agricoltori hanno iniziato ad agitare lo spettro degli “scaffali vuoti” per carenza di manodopera stagionale nelle raccolte, il governo italiano sembra deciso a metterci una pezza con una sanatoria ad hoc. In questo lasso di tempo, il dibattito sul tema è stato fitto e acceso. Da ogni parte (esponenti politici, sindacali e del mondo agricolo in primis) sono rimbalzate cifre allarmanti: 370.000 operai in meno nel comparto, e cioè, statistiche alla mano, l’intera compagine dei lavoratori stranieri in agricoltura. Ma la stragrande maggioranza dei cittadini di altri Paesi che lavora in Italia lo fa in maniera relativamente stabile, per quanto si possa utilizzare questo aggettivo per definire il lavoro in un comparto strutturalmente tra i più precarizzati. Quali sono, dunque, le ragioni di un’emorragia così copiosa?
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In the domain of critical logistical studies, now a burgeoning field, the analysis of gender relations is largely neglected, being a rare occurrence in scholarly as much as in political, activist and militant reflections. One explanation... more
In the domain of critical logistical studies, now a burgeoning field, the analysis of gender relations is largely neglected, being a rare occurrence in scholarly as much as in political, activist and militant reflections. One explanation for this might lie in the fact that logistics, as some analysts contend, is (still) a male-dominated industry-and this in more ways than one. Whilst in and of itself this should not rule out a gender analysis (quite to the contrary), it may be the case that, alas, academically and politically gender is here implicitly equated with women and the feminine-despite four decades of arguments against this sort of essentialist reductionism. At the same time, as this brief essay aims to show, the very assumption of logistics' masculine character can and should be put to the test for what it blinds us to.
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The paper addresses some of the ways in which anthropology, as a discourse and a discipline, has contributed to the forging as much as to the problematisation of the concept of gender, not only within the feminist, queer and LGBTQI camps,... more
The paper addresses some of the ways in which anthropology, as a discourse and a discipline, has contributed to the forging as much as to 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 to the apparatus of gender itself.
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Within the latest wave of anti-austerity protests in Europe and beyond, the Italian case is often considered to be a sort of anomaly. The country has not experienced the same coherently organized and readily recognisable forms of... more
Within the latest wave of anti-austerity protests in Europe and beyond, the Italian case is often considered to be a sort of anomaly. The country has not experienced the same coherently organized and readily recognisable forms of opposition to the neoliberal onslaught that have characterized others, such as Spain or Greece. At the same time, it has never lacked radical anti-capitalist politics, which developed in different forms. Indeed, for decades Italy has constituted, in some ways, a reference point for social movements outside its borders. Here, I wish to reflect on the presence within the heterogeneous constellation of struggles that has emerged in recent years of specific subjects, namely migrants, and on the importance of the labour dimension in their mobilizations. If not always self-evident or acknowledged, both aspects are central in understanding some of the most significant instances of struggle that have shaken Italian public opinion and the social-movement scene-all the more so following the current mediatized hype about a supposed 'migration crisis' across the EU, with Italy as one of the main locations in this spectacle.
The paper analyses the role of " reproductive labour ", and particularly of sexual labour, in relation to global agro-industrial commodity chains, with specific reference to the district of Foggia, in southeastern Italy. Drawing on a... more
The paper analyses the role of " reproductive labour ", and particularly of sexual labour, in relation to global agro-industrial commodity chains, with specific reference to the district of Foggia, in southeastern Italy. Drawing on a critical appraisal of world-system theory through the lens of gender, the article looks at different arrangements in the sexual division of labour and in (transnational) household management. In particular, it contrasts the organisation of West-African shantytowns to eastern-European settlements. The paper also points to the potential for non-commodified forms of care labour to foster solidarity among workers and support their struggles for better working and living conditions, which however are usually blind to the gendered dimensions of exploitation. Given this ambivalence of care labour, as both a form of exploitation and as a potentially subversive practice, and the importance of acknowledging the interrelation between global care chains and the production of agricultural commodities, the article suggests it is more appropriate to speak of " care-commodity chains. " The article also argues that such relationships and ambivalences question any straightforward distinction between " productive " and " reproductive " spheres.
It has become utterly banal to speak of “the crisis” in Europe, even as there have proliferated invocations of a veritable “crisis of Europe” – a putative crisis of the very idea of “Europe.” This project, aimed at formulating New... more
It has become utterly banal to speak of “the crisis” in Europe, even as there have proliferated invocations of a veritable “crisis of Europe” – a putative crisis of the very idea of “Europe.” This project, aimed at formulating New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe,” was initiated in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in January 2015, and has been brought to a necessarily tentative and only partial “completion” in the aftermath of the subsequent massacre in Paris on 13 November 2015. Eerily resembling a kind of uncanny pair of book-ends, these spectacles of “terror” and “security” (De Genova 2011; 2013a) awkwardly seem to frame what otherwise, during the intervening several months, has been represented as “the migrant crisis,” or “the refugee crisis,” or more broadly, as a “crisis” of the borders of “Europe.” Of course, for several years, the protracted and enduring ramifications of global economic “crisis” and the concomitant policies of austerity have already been a kind of fixture of European social and political life. Similarly, the events in Paris are simply the most recent and most hyper-mediated occasions for a re-intensification of the ongoing processes of securitization that have been a persistent (if inconstant) mandate of the putative Global War on Terror (De Genova 2010a, 2010c). Hence, this collaborative project of collective authorship emerges from an acute sense of the necessity of rethinking the conceptual and discursive categories that govern borders, migration, and asylum and simultaneously overshadow how scholarship and research on these topics commonly come to recapitulate both these dominant discourses and re-reify them.
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“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration.
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“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies... more
“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times. The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity.
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Since the mid-1980s, sexual services (like other forms of affective and care labour) in Italy are increasingly provided by migrants, many of them women (estimates speak of around 25 to 30,000). In this article, I focus on Nigerian female... more
Since the mid-1980s, sexual services (like other forms of affective and care labour) in Italy are increasingly provided by migrants, many of them women (estimates speak of around 25 to 30,000). In this article, I focus on Nigerian female prostitution drawing on my doctoral research (carried out between 2005 and 2010, with eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Benin City, Nigeria, and Turin, Italy), and on ongoing, follow-up studies. This form of migrant sexual labour, which involves between 10 and 20,000 women at any one time, usually entails bondage arrangements, whereby (ever-younger) women commit to repay a madam or a sponsor a large debt, in the order of 70,000 euros or more, in exchange for their passage to Europe. Different forms and degrees of coercion, violence and inter-dependency subtend to such agreements, fostered by a political, legal and economic context in which both migration and sexual labour are criminalised through various means and thus heavily exploited. Hence, following other critical analysts of migrant sexual labour, I deliberately avoid employing the widely used term 'trafficking' to describe these migration trajectories, on account of its imbrications in a specific power formation with evident gender biases and relations to that criminalising regime that fuels such forms of exploitation. If Italian immigration law grants the right of protection to recognised trafficking victims, my research (and others') shows that it is rarely applied to the letter, that it often entails a project of 'moral rehabilitation', and that it forces the complexity of individual stories into a narrow category of victim which is extremely difficult for the women to inhabit and embody, giving rise to existential distress on various counts. To adequately understand these phenomena, I argue, and the predicaments of the subjects involved, these have first of all to be contextualised within a trans-national political-economic regime where corruption and criminalisation are two sides of the same coin, where affective relations and care (like other human capacities) are increasingly commercialised and privatised, and where humanitarian concerns do not seem to be able to adequately contrast these dynamics. The starting point for my analysis, however, are the women's own life stories, as they recounted them to me, from which emerge the complexity of different desires, obligations and oppressions as well as the capacity to escape them.
In this paper, I consider the economic-affective exchanges between migrant Nigerian sex workers and a variety of subjects, including their clients, lovers or husbands, but also the governmental and non-governmental organizations involved... more
In this paper, I consider the economic-affective exchanges between migrant Nigerian sex workers and a variety of subjects, including their clients, lovers or husbands, but also the governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in programs of trafficking prevention and protection for recognised victims. Whilst these may seem as disparate relationships with different rationales, I argue that subtending to all of them lie several kinds of interrelated ambiguities that are defining of the exchanges. On the one hand, a preoccupation with transparency, clear-cut definitions and 'truth' is belied by constantly erupting dissonances and active manipulation of relationships. On the other hand, this also points to the ambiguity between the economic and the affective domain, between the instrumental and the selfless, between love and money. These, in turn, highlight the ways in which processes of subjectification are ever-incomplete and points to escape as defining what exceeds them. The analysis is based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, corroborated by shorter research trips and the collection and analysis of secondary material.
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The paper examines the play of multiple, displacing and emplacing regimes of subjectification as they impinge upon the life experiences of migrant Nigerian sex workers, as well as the ways in which the women's subjectivities might exceed... more
The paper examines the play of multiple, displacing and emplacing regimes of subjectification as they impinge upon the life experiences of migrant Nigerian sex workers, as well as the ways in which the women's subjectivities might exceed such regimes. Dispositifs such as those of migration policy and humanitarianism, of bonded labour, existential precariousness and institutionalised predation in neoliberal economies, but also of gender and kinship, interweave through complex genealogies that do not yield unequivocal victim-subjects or, on the contrary, subjects enforcing exploitation and abuse from a position of power. Likewise, neither mobility nor stasis, or border crossings and settled lives are straightforwardly mappable on excess or constraint: migration and return are experienced ambiguously, alternatively as liberating and constraining. They are described as openings and closures, sometimes in the same breath. Rather, the paper argues, hope and excess may emerge, unexpected, from any situation, or be quashed in contexts in which they may be expected to thrive.
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In this paper, I propose an analysis of the apparently contradictory attitudes towards transactional sexual exchanges, as they have emerged in public debate and informed legislation and policies in Italy over the past few years. The... more
In this paper, I propose an analysis of the apparently contradictory attitudes towards transactional sexual exchanges, as they have emerged in public debate and informed legislation and policies in Italy over the past few years. The ambiguity towards commercial sex is linked to a specific dynamic of power, which denies sexual labour the status of work and makes it the object of repressive and criminalising policies, whilst at the same time habitually demanding sexual services in exchange for money, gifts or favours. The article shows how criminalisation functions as a prominent form for the control of subjects, related to the workings of sovereignty. In particular, I consider the ways in which the criminalisation of prostitution and of undocumented migration, which compound in the figure of the migrant prostitute, represents a means for the exertion of sovereignty and relates to the centrality of desire, transgression and their disciplining in the contemporary context. However, closer examination of the subjective experiences of those who are supposedly excluded and criminalised, such as undocumented migrant sex workers in detention centres, reveals the incompleteness of disciplinary mechanisms.
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Recensione di G. Avallone a 'Un mondo logistico: Sguardi critici su lavoro, migrazioni, politica e globalizzazione'
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This event will highlight contemporary approaches to the study of eco-systems and the importance of keeping human, more-than-human and mechanical components within the same frame of analysis. Whether defined as anthropo-, capitalo- or... more
This event will highlight contemporary approaches to the study of eco-systems and the importance of keeping human, more-than-human and mechanical components within the same frame of analysis. Whether defined as anthropo-, capitalo- or plantationo-cene, these understandings of the current epoch emerge from the inextricable intertwining of multiple (spatial, symbolic, affective, material) dimensions, and immediately summon geological as well as human temporalities.
In this symposium, we propose to approach such topical issues from the vantage point of the bonifiche, as a series of discourses, assemblages and interventions that took shape in Italy (including its colonial possessions) since the end of the 18th century. Mobilizing multiple bodies of knowledge (from hydraulic science and agronomy to criminology and racial anthropology), plans to redeem, cleanse, reclaim and exploit land, water, flora, fauna as well as people have left significant (if at times unintended) marks on todays’ landscapes, memories and imaginaries. With this symposium we aim to identify and understand a few instances of such traces, opening up a conversation about how to speculate on possible alternative futures.
In this symposium, we propose to approach such topical issues from the vantage point of the bonifiche, as a series of discourses, assemblages and interventions that took shape in Italy (including its colonial possessions) since the end of the 18th century. Mobilizing multiple bodies of knowledge (from hydraulic science and agronomy to criminology and racial anthropology), plans to redeem, cleanse, reclaim and exploit land, water, flora, fauna as well as people have left significant (if at times unintended) marks on todays’ landscapes, memories and imaginaries. With this symposium we aim to identify and understand a few instances of such traces, opening up a conversation about how to speculate on possible alternative futures.
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UNICONFLICTS in spaces of crisis: Critical approaches in, against and beyond the University International Open Gathering UNICONFLICTS in spaces of crisis Critical approaches in, against and beyond the University 11-14th June... more
UNICONFLICTS in spaces of crisis: Critical approaches in, against and beyond the University
International Open Gathering
UNICONFLICTS in spaces of crisis
Critical approaches in, against and beyond the University
11-14th June 2015
at the Department of Architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
International Open Gathering
UNICONFLICTS in spaces of crisis
Critical approaches in, against and beyond the University
11-14th June 2015
at the Department of Architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
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The paper addresses the ways in which the management of migration and of migrant labour, with particular reference to Italian agro-industrial enclaves, has relied upon forms of de-humanisation, whose targets (mainly West African migrants)... more
The paper addresses the ways in which the management of migration and of migrant labour, with particular reference to Italian agro-industrial enclaves, has relied upon forms of de-humanisation, whose targets (mainly West African migrants) identify as forms of animalisation. Manhunts and lynchings are the crudest forms of such violent exclusions, which however also manifest in more subtle and generalised patterns, characteristic of the humanitarian regime of migration management itself. Against what, drawing on Derrida and Vaughan Williams, I term «zoopolitical» violence, I consider the emergence-in the slums of agro-industrial enclaves where West African workers live-of relations between humans and animals that flag the possibility of a human or animal being treated in an equivalent way. Such reflections are the result of a protracted engagement in these settings, founded on a form of participant observation which aims not at neutral description and analysis, in the ethnographic mould, but at actively supporting and elaborating alternative futures. To do so, the notions of anthropos and ethnos which have informed anthro-pological scholarship since its inception also need to be radically rethought, precisely through engagement with other ways of making and being human.
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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... more
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.
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Il contributo analizza l'emergere e il proliferare di 'zone' di produzione agro-industriale in diversi territori dell'Italia contemporanea, in relazione alle catene globali retail-driven. In particolare, si considera l'emergere di... more
Il contributo analizza l'emergere e il proliferare di 'zone' di produzione agro-industriale in diversi territori dell'Italia contemporanea, in relazione alle catene globali retail-driven. In particolare, si considera l'emergere di diverse tipologie di campi di lavoro, più o meno formalizzati – baraccopoli, tendopoli, campi container (in un continuum tra diverse forme, sempre meno distinguibili fra loro), come dispositivi di contenimento e frammentazione su base razziale/etnica della forza-lavoro migrante, resi possibili da politiche di controllo della mobilità e dalla sistematica sospensione del diritto del lavoro. Tali processi si sviluppano in relazione ad una più vasta riorganizzazione della produzione e alla sua zonizzazione, nella quale un ruolo centrale giocano le attività di cura, organizzate su base transnazionale tanto quanto localizzate all'interno delle zone, di cui il contributo fornisce un'analisi.
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This panel addresses techniques for the control of mobility as central features of contemporary power relations through anthropological analyses of simultaneously spatial, relational, symbolic and bodily forms of containment that pace... more
This panel addresses techniques for the control of mobility as central features of contemporary power relations through anthropological analyses of simultaneously spatial, relational, symbolic and bodily forms of containment that pace people's movement according to multiple logics and goals, including those related to the organisation of (re)productive labour. We are interested in practices and techniques of containment implemented by international migration policies-through militarisation, externalisation and filtering, among others-that have a significant racialising dimension. These include detention as a paradigmatic dispositif of pacing, as well as other forms of containment through migrant reception centres, internal and international deportations, checkpoints, 'hotspots', push backs, and other bureaucratic practices that impede or impose, slow down or speed up and channel people's movement. We also welcome reflections on other forms of mobility control enacted through techniques that may trace longer genealogies (such as residency laws, incarceration, the revival of anti-vagrancy laws or labour regimes echoing the old plantation systems) plus analyses of the forms of gendered mobility containment which may be effected through various means of discipline, violence, deception, within the household or through religious and lay institutions. This panel aims at exploring the means through which containment is sought, along the symbolic, material, embodied rationalities and irrationalities of power relations, dispositives and techniques, seeking to find the relationships as well as the disjunctures between different regimes of mobility control. Finally, it looks into the forms of resistance, flight and camouflage employed to avoid or mitigate the effects of such containment.
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Plantations have been crucial institutions for the expansion of imperial and post-imperial projects. They function as racialised and gendered systems of land appropriation and of labour recruitment, control, extraction and reproduction,... more
Plantations have been crucial institutions for the expansion of imperial and post-imperial projects. They function as racialised and gendered systems of land appropriation and of labour recruitment, control, extraction and reproduction, aiming at the intensive cultivation of cash crops for export. Such operations have also had political, sovereign dimensions. Furthermore, plantations have been central to the emergence and reproduction of the capitalist world system, which in turn heavily transformed ecosystems and landscapes, leading some scholars to coin the concept of 'Plantationocene'. However, plantations are not homogeneous forms: in the past as much as in the present, they have relied on a range of technologies, relations and patterns of circulation, extraction, and design-they depend on specific knowledges and practices shaping both environments and labour relations. We welcome papers that examine the materialities of plantations across multiple times and places, their mutations, durabilities and spectral survivals, taking into account the conflictual dimension of these processes.
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In this brief paper, I trace a summary sketch of some of the most salient political-economic characteristics of Nigeria, starting from its pre-colonial and colonial history and up to the present, through the period of structural... more
In this brief paper, I trace a summary sketch of some of the most salient political-economic characteristics of Nigeria, starting from its pre-colonial and colonial history and up to the present, through the period of structural adjustment of the early 1980s. In many ways, these periods and their dynamics have defined some of the most important characteristics of Nigerian society and subjectivities. I will elaborate on some key themes which I believe are important in understanding patterns of migration and migrants' subjective attitudes. Drawing on my research experience as an anthropologist, whereby I analysed the bonded-labour migration of Nigerian women from Edo State, I will analyse aspects relating to gender, perceptions of Europe and its relations to histories of racialisation, colonisation and migration, the development of cultures of secrecy (again in connection with violent histories) and their impact on subject formation, all the while seeking to contextualise these dynamics within broader political, economic, cultural and social processes. At the same time, I also point to the ways in which subjectivities are formed as much in the diaspora (where similar patterns and processes to those occurring at 'home' are sometimes reproduced, whilst also contaminating with others and in their turn feeding back into 'home culture') as in the country of origin.
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In different forms and in direct relation with some of the contributions contained in the previous sections of the Special Issue on Labour, Mobilities, Migrations, the documents and images we gathered here speak of attempts at harnessing... more
In different forms and in direct relation with some of the contributions contained in the previous sections of the Special Issue on Labour, Mobilities, Migrations, the documents and images we gathered here speak of attempts at harnessing labour but also of moments of flight and/or resistance. This is a modest and utterly partial attempt to contribute to the construction of an archive of bridled labour, against whose grain, necessarily in fragments and flashes,to glimpse at the propelling role of flight and refusal in determining the continuous renewal of policies for the control of labour mobility.
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This special issue revisits the notion of «bridled labour», introduced by Yann Moulier Boutang in his book «De l’esclavage au salariat», published in France in 1998 and in Italy in 2002. We are not interested so much in verifying in... more
This special issue revisits the notion of «bridled labour», introduced by Yann Moulier Boutang in his book «De l’esclavage au salariat», published in France in 1998 and in Italy in 2002. We are not interested so much in verifying in detail the book’s theses; rather, we wish to discuss some of its general presuppositions, in light of the most recent developments in social-scientific research on the relations between labour, mobility and migrations. More specifically, we wish to take up again the foundations of Moulier Boutang’s argument: the idea that the autonomy of mobility– that is, its status as a social fact unavailable to total control – constitutes a privileged epistemic viewpoint, from which to analyse the cycles of emergence and erosion of what the author defined as the «bridling» of labour onto the market. For Moulier Boutang, it was a matter of examining the mechanisms through which capital historically attempted to hamper the flight of workers from their job, and thus avoid the associated costs. The conflict between harnessing and flight, from this perspective, is therefore productive of social innovations as well. As Moulier Boutang’s book shows in great detail, across different places and times the harnessing of labour was secured through a multiplicity of political and juridical tools (indenture, apartheid, enslavement, the criminalization of contract breach, indebtedness, laws against vagrancy, the territorialization of welfare and poverty alleviation…). Their underlying logics, according to the author, can in turn provide a key to read the condition of contemporary migrant labour.
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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... more
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.
Summer School Cespec X edizione (2017) - Atti del convegno - Ethics in Progress Vol 10, No 1 (2019).
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In this chapter, we outline our contribution to the study of plantations, building upon a wide and important body of critical literature that has developed on the subject over more than a century of reflections and struggles. Plantations... more
In this chapter, we outline our contribution to the study of plantations, building upon a wide and important body of critical literature that has developed on the subject over more than a century of reflections and struggles. Plantations are analyzed according to three main axes: an eco-material dimension that articulates to racial injustices; the long-term material, affective and symbolic imprints of plantations; and their sovereign dimensions. We explore these topics through a variety of examples and transdisciplinary approaches that cut across chronologies, geographies and political contexts and provide a navigation tool through the edited volume’s contributions. By stressing plantations’ more-than-human relations and their all-too-human (modern, colonial, imperial) dynamics, we want to both call into question any monolithic notion of “the” plantation and pinpoint the common features that accrue to the different plantation experiences and experiments addressed by authors. Contributing to the current discussion on the predicaments of the Plantationocene, we argue that this book’s breadth and vision might help imagine more nuanced ways of narrating plantation regimes and forms of resistance against them—past, present and future.
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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... more
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.
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La logistica si è recentemente imposta come una prospettiva privilegiata per la comprensione del mondo contemporaneo a partire dall’interazione tra mobilità multiple – di persone, merci, capitali, informazioni. Tuttavia, questa... more
La logistica si è recentemente imposta come una prospettiva privilegiata per la comprensione del mondo contemporaneo a partire dall’interazione tra mobilità multiple – di persone, merci, capitali, informazioni. Tuttavia, questa prospettiva rischia di risolvere nel presente dinamiche che sono ricorse storicamente in modalità diverse, non lineari e reversibili. I contributi di questo volume si pongono l’obiettivo di mettere in evidenza le specificità storiche e geografiche dei processi logistici. Essi contribuiscono alla definizione di una “logistica delle migrazioni” a partire da casi di studio specifici, proponendo al tempo stesso alcuni elementi utili a problematizzare continuità e rotture storiche all’interno di un confronto tra scienze storiche e scienze politico-sociali.
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Economic History, Early Modern History, History of Labour Migration, Logistics, Labor Migration, and 15 moreHistory of Capitalism, Forced Migration, Migration Studies, Social History, History of Migration, Historia, História, Historia Moderna, Storia moderna, LOGISTICA, Critical Logistics, Storia Contemporanea, Logística, Storia Sociale, and Free and Unfree Labour
Marxist analyses of the rise of historical Fascisms in interwar Europe have typically foregrounded the crisis of a professed "lower middle class" and the spectre of its proletarianization as the political and social basis on which such... more
Marxist analyses of the rise of historical Fascisms in interwar Europe have typically foregrounded the crisis of a professed "lower middle class" and the spectre of its proletarianization as the political and social basis on which such movements relied. The consolidation of Fascism's base was of course supplemented by support from the bourgeoisie, deriving from the need to contain and suppress the growing labour movement and the perceived communist threat. Today, no comparably coherent labour-let alone revolutionary-movement is in place, such that contemporary, neo-fascist and more broadly neo/ethnonationalist politics across different contexts has been defined as "pre-emptive" (cf. Angela Davis' and Herbert Marcuse's analyses, and more recently Alberto Toscano's). At the same time, a similar "devaluation" (that, following Don Kalb, comprises both an economic and a discursive/symbolic dimension) of the "higher classes of labour" (Bernstein) in the context of neo-liberalism's spatial reconfigurations of production and extraction, that have left zones of abandonment in their wake, seems to be at the heart of the current ascendancy of the far right in many parts of the world. Yet, such perspective might be complicated if "fascism" is expanded to include political developments taking place outside the Euro-American sphere of influence, and taking into account deeper genealogies.
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This special issue revisits the notion of «bridled labour», introduced by Yann Moulier Boutang in his book De l’esclavage au salariat, published in France in 1998 and in Italy in 2002 (Ibid.). We are not interested so much in verifying in... more
This special issue revisits the notion of «bridled labour», introduced by Yann Moulier Boutang in his book De l’esclavage au salariat, published in France in 1998 and in Italy in 2002 (Ibid.). We are not interested so much in verifying in detail the book’s theses; rather, we wish to discuss some of its general presuppositions, in light of the most recent developments in social-scientific research on the relations between labour, mobility and migrations. More specifically, we wish to take up again the foundations of MoulierBoutang’s argument: the idea that the autonomy of mobility– that is, its status as a social fact unavailable to total control – constitutes a privileged epistemic viewpoint, from which to analysethe cycles of emergence and erosion of what the author defined as the «bridling» of labouronto the market. For MoulierBoutang, it was a matter of examining the mechanisms through which capital historically attempted to hamper the flight of workers from their job, and thus avoid the associated costs. The conflict between harnessing and flight, from this perspective, is therefore productive of social innovations as well. As MoulierBoutang’s book shows in great detail, across different places and times the harnessing of labourwas secured through a multiplicity of political and juridical tools (indenture, apartheid, enslavement, the criminalization of contract breach, indebtedness, laws against vagrancy, the territorialization of welfare and povery alleviation…). Their underlying logics, according to the author, can in turn provide a key to read the condition of contemporary migrant labour.