Undoing Nothing by Paolo Boccagni - ePub + PDF - University of California Press

About the Book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

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.

About the Author

Paolo Boccagni is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento. He has extensively researched and written on migration, home, displacement, absence, and everyday life. He is the author of Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants' Everyday Lives and the editor of the Handbook on Home and Migration.

Reviews

“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’.”
— Ethnic and Racial Studies

“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.”
— Ethnic and Racial Studies

“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.”
— International Migration Review

“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.”

— Contemporary Sociology

“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.”
— Ethnic and Racial Studies

“Ilustrates, 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.”
— Ethnic and Racial Studies

“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.”
— Ethnic and Racial Studies

"Within the magnitude of academic work on asylum seekers and African migrants in Europe, Undoing Nothing is an exceptional book. Not only is it beautifully written and meticulously researched, but it provides us with an analytical approach that manages to capture the ambivalent being and presence that characterize the circumstances of many migrants within the EU. The book thus moves us away from dramatic and sensational descriptions of refugee predicaments and toward a detailed and perceptive analysis of the ways people navigate and manage their lives in the interstices between being stuck and in motion, surviving and aspiring. An essential read for anyone working on everyday spaces of marginality."—Henrik Vigh, Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen

"Paolo Boccagni's ethnography of the absurd confronts the existential question of what it means to live in limbo while waiting for asylum. This is a serious work from a leading thinker on how migration shapes experiences of being 'home.'"—David FitzGerald, Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

"A must-read book in the age of legal and existential liminality for asylum seekers. Boccagni shows how young racialized West African men live their everyday lives in the context of an asylum-seeker center that is framed as 'apparent nothingness.' The challenge is, How to undo this nothingness?"—Ilse van Liempt, Associate Professor of Human Geography, Utrecht University

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews