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What does everyday life look like for young men who flee to Europe, survive, and are then assigned temporary housing? Hypersurveillance or parallel normality, irrelevance, or even nothingness? Based on four years of ethnographic research, Undoing Nothing recounts the untold story of Italian asylum seekers' struggles to produce relevance—that is, to carve out meaning, control, and direction from their legal and existential liminality. Their ways of inhabiting space and time rest on a deeply ambivalent position: together and alone, inside and outside, absent and present. Their racialized bodies dwell in their assigned residence while their selves inhabit a suspended translocal space of moral economies, nightmares, and furtive dreams. This book illuminates a distinctly modern form of purgatory, offering both a perceptive critique of state responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a demographic rarely afforded narrative depth and grace.
“Undoing Nothing asks us to take seriously the mundane details of life in reception, to think with the intimacies of shared ‘nothingness’ and to look again at periods of waiting and apparent banality. As Boccagni illustrates there is much to see in the work of undoing ‘nothing’.”
“Undoing Nothing unravels the concept of ‘nothing’, through a beautifully-written ethnography situated in a temporary housing building for asylum seekers in northern Italy. . . . Boccagni’s account centers on the lives of young men in their early twenties, mostly from West Africa, who have been housed for years in this temporary building (which he refers to as ‘the center’) while they wait for their asylum cases to be resolved.”
“A significant and timely ethnography that provides remarkable insights into how young male asylum seekers from West Africa negotiate their existence in a reception center in Northern Italy.”
“Paolo Boccagni’s Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance stands out. Empirical and detailed in the best sense, fully concentrated on its migrant protagonists and devoid of sensationalism, it explores themes that resonate far beyond the academic or existential field of migration.”
“Through rigorous and carefully analyzed research, [Boccagni] illustrates the subtle and ordinary processes through which asylum-seekers create meaning, battle ‘nothingness’, and find relevance in their lives. In doing so, he expands the academic vocabulary used to characterize the state of “limbo” that asylum-seekers occupy.”
“Illustrates, respectively, the transcontextual significance of notions such as ambivalence, nothing and relevance; the emergence of forced irrelevance as a mode of sovereign power, and an instance of the analytical and political struggles between what is (to be) foregrounded and backgrounded; the value of experiential narratives of home and good life to illuminate migrants’ constructions of the future.”
“Boccagni’s portrayal of the tedium and anxiety involved in waiting is such that almost all of his interactions with residents that are described in the book occur within its walls.”
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Background
2. The Center
3. Inside, Outside
4. Still, Moving
5. Present, Absent
6. Dirty, Clean
7. Home, Non-home
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index