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Irene Peano

University of Lisbon, Instituto de Ciências sociais, Faculty Member

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Noel B. Salazar

KU Leuven

University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

Antioch University

University College Cork

Speranta Dumitru

Université Paris Cité

Alejandra B Osorio

Wellesley College

Middlesex University

Central European University

Loyola University New Orleans

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Papers by Irene Peano

The camp, the zone, and sovereign sediments: Querying paradigms through the politics of Made-in-Italy agribusiness operations

Anthropological Theory, 2024

The article questions the paradigmatic nature ascribed to “the zone”—and the concomitant dismissa... more The article questions the paradigmatic nature ascribed to “the zone”—and the concomitant dismissal of the camp's—by some analyses of the politics of capital's operations, and problematizes the very notion of the paradigm. Elaborating on previous reflections concerning contemporary agro-industrial zones in Italy, the article rethinks camps against state-centric and exceptionalist readings that consider them purely as sites of exclusion. At the same time, it retains a stress on the symbolic dimension of forms of containment and extraction, going beyond a narrow political-economic approach. The zone and the camp, it is argued, are mutually imbricated “infrastructure spaces” of present-day agro-capital's operations, which, however, result from the sedimentation of spatialized techniques for labor disciplining, reproduction, and containment that have developed alongside capitalist forms of agriculture throughout the contemporary period. The camp is thus defined as a function of the political, sovereign dimensions of extraction, that may operate within but also beyond the state. Furthermore, it is underlain by differential attributions of humanness, and therefore by a specific biopolitical anthropology. Engaging in a genealogy of the (humanitarian and/as labor) camps that today proliferate in agro-industrial zones, I argue that to understand the spatial formations emerging from and sustaining the politics of contemporary capital operations a recursive analytics is necessary, that thus questions the purchase of paradigms on the grounds of their atemporality and complicates the positing of mere historical continuities.

Specters of Eurafrica in an Italian Agroindustrial Enclave

e-flux Architecture, 2021

The plain of Tavoliere, which makes up the largest portion of the district of Foggia, in the uppe... 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.

Imbrigliamento e fuga nell'Italia contemporanea: Il lavoro agricolo dipendente nel Tavoliere e nella Piana di Gioia Tauro in prospettiva genealogica

Cartografie Sociali, 2023

The essay begins by analysing the forms of harnessing, on the one hand, and of flight, on the oth... 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.

Boundary Crossings: A Festschrift in Memory of Sue Benson. Introduction

Cambridge Anthropology, 2007

Wrestling masculinities: Metaphors of purity and metonymical bodies in Senegalese arenas

Cambridge Anthropology, 2007

Spatiotemporal Stratifications: Engaging Containment and Resistance in Italian Agrifood Districts

Public Culture, 2022

This essay explores the author's engaged research trajectory into several agro-industrial enclave... 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.

Where Have Eastern Europeans Gone? Made-in-Italy Agribusiness, Mobility Control and the Great Resignation

LeftEast, 2023

This article is part of the multilingual ELMO series Transnational migration in CEE from intersec... 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.

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

SHS Web of Conferences, 2022

This paper begins from the present condition of migrant workers in the district of Foggia, southe... 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.

Within and Against Racial Segregation: Notes from Italy’s Encampment Archipelago

Lateral, 2021

The pandemic brought migrant farm workers into the limelight once again, as has happened repeated... 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.

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)

Social Change Review, 2020

The paper puts the food regime model, as elaborated by scholars such as Harriet Friedmann and Phi... 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.

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

Mobilities, 2021

The paper analyses the proliferation of different but intersecting regimes of mobility, and resis... 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).

Conflitti e sinergie della logistica: Enclavi agro-industriali, migrazioni e ZES

Quaderni di Scienza e Politica, 2020

The paper employs a logistical analytic to highlight convergences and conflicts between different... 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.

Mondragone: Behind the Scenes of Long-Announced, Recurrent Dramas

Dversia.net, 2020

For a couple of weeks, roughly between 22nd June and 7th July 2020, the otherwise anonymous town ... 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.

Fragmented citizenship: contemporary infrastructures of mobility containment along two migratory routes

by Francesco Vacchiano, Irene Peano, Francesca Esposito, and Alí Murtaza

Citizenship Studies, 2020

Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control ca... 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.

Fragmented citizenship: contemporary infrastructures of mobility containment along two migratory routes

Citizenship Studies, 2020

Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control ca... 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.

Missing farm workers in pandemic times: Is it really "the virus's fault"? The view from Italy

LeftEast, 2020

Operai agricoli, virus e regolarizzazione: Cosa nascondono i numeri ufficiali e le proposte di sanatoria

rivista Il Mulino, 2020

A quasi due mesi da quando le associazioni degli agricoltori hanno iniziato ad agitare lo spettro... 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?

Gendering logistics: Subjectivities, biopolitics and extraction in supply chains

Into the Black Box, 2019

In the domain of critical logistical studies, now a burgeoning field, the analysis of gender rela... 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.

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

Ethics in Progress, 2019

The paper addresses some of the ways in which anthropology, as a discourse and a discipline, has ... 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.

Containment, resistance, flight: Migrant labour in the agro-industrial district of Foggia, Italy

openDemocracy, 2017

The camp, the zone, and sovereign sediments: Querying paradigms through the politics of Made-in-Italy agribusiness operations

Anthropological Theory, 2024

The article questions the paradigmatic nature ascribed to “the zone”—and the concomitant dismissa... more The article questions the paradigmatic nature ascribed to “the zone”—and the concomitant dismissal of the camp's—by some analyses of the politics of capital's operations, and problematizes the very notion of the paradigm. Elaborating on previous reflections concerning contemporary agro-industrial zones in Italy, the article rethinks camps against state-centric and exceptionalist readings that consider them purely as sites of exclusion. At the same time, it retains a stress on the symbolic dimension of forms of containment and extraction, going beyond a narrow political-economic approach. The zone and the camp, it is argued, are mutually imbricated “infrastructure spaces” of present-day agro-capital's operations, which, however, result from the sedimentation of spatialized techniques for labor disciplining, reproduction, and containment that have developed alongside capitalist forms of agriculture throughout the contemporary period. The camp is thus defined as a function of the political, sovereign dimensions of extraction, that may operate within but also beyond the state. Furthermore, it is underlain by differential attributions of humanness, and therefore by a specific biopolitical anthropology. Engaging in a genealogy of the (humanitarian and/as labor) camps that today proliferate in agro-industrial zones, I argue that to understand the spatial formations emerging from and sustaining the politics of contemporary capital operations a recursive analytics is necessary, that thus questions the purchase of paradigms on the grounds of their atemporality and complicates the positing of mere historical continuities.

Specters of Eurafrica in an Italian Agroindustrial Enclave

e-flux Architecture, 2021

The plain of Tavoliere, which makes up the largest portion of the district of Foggia, in the uppe... 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.

Imbrigliamento e fuga nell'Italia contemporanea: Il lavoro agricolo dipendente nel Tavoliere e nella Piana di Gioia Tauro in prospettiva genealogica

Cartografie Sociali, 2023

The essay begins by analysing the forms of harnessing, on the one hand, and of flight, on the oth... 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.

Boundary Crossings: A Festschrift in Memory of Sue Benson. Introduction

Cambridge Anthropology, 2007

Wrestling masculinities: Metaphors of purity and metonymical bodies in Senegalese arenas

Cambridge Anthropology, 2007

Spatiotemporal Stratifications: Engaging Containment and Resistance in Italian Agrifood Districts

Public Culture, 2022

This essay explores the author's engaged research trajectory into several agro-industrial enclave... 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.

Where Have Eastern Europeans Gone? Made-in-Italy Agribusiness, Mobility Control and the Great Resignation

LeftEast, 2023

This article is part of the multilingual ELMO series Transnational migration in CEE from intersec... 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.

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

SHS Web of Conferences, 2022

This paper begins from the present condition of migrant workers in the district of Foggia, southe... 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.

Within and Against Racial Segregation: Notes from Italy’s Encampment Archipelago

Lateral, 2021

The pandemic brought migrant farm workers into the limelight once again, as has happened repeated... 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.

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)

Social Change Review, 2020

The paper puts the food regime model, as elaborated by scholars such as Harriet Friedmann and Phi... 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.

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

Mobilities, 2021

The paper analyses the proliferation of different but intersecting regimes of mobility, and resis... 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).

Conflitti e sinergie della logistica: Enclavi agro-industriali, migrazioni e ZES

Quaderni di Scienza e Politica, 2020

The paper employs a logistical analytic to highlight convergences and conflicts between different... 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.

Mondragone: Behind the Scenes of Long-Announced, Recurrent Dramas

Dversia.net, 2020

For a couple of weeks, roughly between 22nd June and 7th July 2020, the otherwise anonymous town ... 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.

Fragmented citizenship: contemporary infrastructures of mobility containment along two migratory routes

by Francesco Vacchiano, Irene Peano, Francesca Esposito, and Alí Murtaza

Citizenship Studies, 2020

Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control ca... 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.

Fragmented citizenship: contemporary infrastructures of mobility containment along two migratory routes

Citizenship Studies, 2020

Several authors have contended recently that the rationality of contemporary migration control ca... 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.

Missing farm workers in pandemic times: Is it really "the virus's fault"? The view from Italy

LeftEast, 2020

Operai agricoli, virus e regolarizzazione: Cosa nascondono i numeri ufficiali e le proposte di sanatoria

rivista Il Mulino, 2020

A quasi due mesi da quando le associazioni degli agricoltori hanno iniziato ad agitare lo spettro... 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?

Gendering logistics: Subjectivities, biopolitics and extraction in supply chains

Into the Black Box, 2019

In the domain of critical logistical studies, now a burgeoning field, the analysis of gender rela... 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.

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

Ethics in Progress, 2019

The paper addresses some of the ways in which anthropology, as a discourse and a discipline, has ... 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.

Containment, resistance, flight: Migrant labour in the agro-industrial district of Foggia, Italy

openDemocracy, 2017

Stacey Vanderhurst. 2022. Unmaking migrants: Nigeria's campaign to end human trafficking. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 210

International Migration, 2024

BELLONI, MILENA. The big gamble: the migration of Eritreans to Europe. x, 228 pp., maps, figs., illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2019, £30.00 (paper)

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute , 2023

Osband, Noam. Adelante. 50 mins, colour. DVD. New York: Filmmakers Library, 2014. $199.00

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2017

La «rivoluzione» produttiva che attraversa l'economia globale e la sue radici coloniali

by Irene Peano and Niccolò Cuppini

ilmanifesto, 2019

Recensione di G. Avallone a 'Un mondo logistico: Sguardi critici su lavoro, migrazioni, politica ... more

Dewey, S. and T. Zheng, 2013 Ethical Research with Sex Workers: Anthropological Approaches New York: Springer.

La scatola nera dove indagare il potere: Recensione a Zapruder n. 46, Block the box

ilmanifesto 12 January , 2019

GIORDANO, CRISTIANA. Migrants in translation: caring and the logics of difference in contemporary Italy. xiv, 288 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2014. £24.95

Cymene Howe. Intimate activism: the struggle for sexual rights in postrevolutionary Nicaragua. xii, 236 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2013. £16.99 (paper)

Vendere e comprare sesso: Tra piacere, lavoro e prevaricazione. Giulia Garofalo Geymonat, Il Mulino Press, Bologna, 2014, 128pp., ISBN: 978-8-8152-4485-7, euro11.00 (Pbk)

The space-times and afterlives of bonifica in contemporary Italy

by Irene Peano and Roberta Biasillo

This event will highlight contemporary approaches to the study of eco-systems and the importance ... 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.

Decolonising the Commune and its aftermaths: a dialogue with Bruno Bosteels and Massimiliano Tomba

by Irene Peano and Massimiliano Tomba

https://planetarycommune.org/Planetary-Commune

Abstracts UNICONFLICTS in spaces of crisis

by Irene Peano, Haris Tsavdaroglou, Matina Kapsali, urban conflicts, Eirini Avramopoulou, Mehmet Penpecioglu, chourouq nasri, and Adem Açar

UNICONFLICTS in spaces of crisis: Critical approaches in, against and beyond the University In... 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)

Gendering Logistics. Feminist approaches for the analysis of supply-chain capitalism

by Niccolò Cuppini, Irene Peano, Evelina Gambino, Carlotta Benvegnù, and Mattia Frapporti

(Open Access) "Un mondo logistico. Sguardi critici su lavoro, migrazioni, politica e globalizzazione"

by Niccolò Cuppini, Irene Peano, Sandro Mezzadra, and Mattia Frapporti

Ways of making a human otherwise: After-ethnography with migrant labourers in Italian agro-industrial enclaves

Modos de Fazer/ Ways of Making, V. Oliveira (ed.), Porto: CITCEM, 2020

The paper addresses the ways in which the management of migration and of migrant labour, with par... 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.

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

Queering Knowledge Analytics, Devices, and Investments after Marilyn Strathern - Edited by Paul Boyce, E.J. Gonzalez-Polledo, Silvia Posocco, 2019

Marilyn Strathern's body of work is here analysed in its 'partial connections' to queer thinking,... 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.

Supply chain affettive tra agro-industria e migrazioni, contenimento e rifugio

Un mondo logistico: Sguardi critici su lavoro, migrazioni, politica e globalizzazione, 2019

Il contributo analizza l'emergere e il proliferare di 'zone' di produzione agro-industriale in d... 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.

Un mondo logistico. Sguardi critici su lavoro, migrazioni, politica e globalizzazione

by Niccolò Cuppini and Irene Peano

Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics: Desire, Affect, and Representation in Pornography

by Irene Peano and Eirini Avramopoulou

Containment and excess: Techniques for the pacing of mobility, idioms and forms of resistance (P138)

This panel addresses techniques for the control of mobility as central features of contemporary p... 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.

Plantations and their Afterlives: Materialities, Durabilities, Struggles

by Irene Peano and marta macedo

Plantations have been crucial institutions for the expansion of imperial and post-imperial projec... 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.

Call for Papers Logistica Horisma

by Niccolò Cuppini and Irene Peano

Nigeria: Genealogies of an elusive polity and their social consequences

Summer School on Forced Migration and Asylum: a Multidisciplinary Approach, II Edition, Bologna July 2017 - NOTES FROM THE SCHOOL, 2018

In this brief paper, I trace a summary sketch of some of the most salient political-economic char... 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.

Dentro gli archivi dell’imbrigliamento, leggendo le fughe in controluce

Cartografie Sociali, 2023

In different forms and in direct relation with some of the contributions contained in the previou... 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.

Lavoro, mobilità, migrazioni. Ripartire dal concetto di salariato imbrigliato

Cartografie Sociali, 2023

This special issue revisits the notion of «bridled labour», introduced by Yann Moulier Boutang 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.

Tony Duvert: A political and theoretical overview

by Ezio Puglia and Irene Peano

Whatever, I.1, 2018

The late French writer Tony Duvert gave voice, scandalously, to the child-lover he never hid he w... 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.

Humanitas. Le scienze umane nel mondo contemporaneo

by Cristina Rebuffo, Ionut Untea, Francesco Striano, Irene Peano, and Ethics in Progress - Research Journal

Summer School Cespec X edizione (2017) - Atti del convegno - Ethics in Progress Vol 10, No 1 (2019).

Before and after Fascist Bonifiche: Spaces of Occlusion and Recursion in Contemporary Tavoliere

New Anthropologies of Italy: Politics, History and Culture, 2024

Starting from the material cues disseminated across the urban and agrarian landscapes in the dist... more Starting from the material cues disseminated across the urban and agrarian landscapes in the district of Foggia (also known as Tavoliere) - whether in intact, ruined or spectral form, in their absence or removal - as well as considering discourses, materialities and events across a range of contexts, in this chapter I examine the contemporary attraction for specific pasts to the neglect of others. I explore how, if at all, these are reinhabited, referenced and worked through - deliberately or spontaneously - in the present, scrutinizing their complex foldings. In particular, I analyse the tropes and spaces of bonifica (where the latter signifies at one and the same time reclamation, redemption and cleansing of land, people and society) as they are evoked in various guises. While largely referencing the Fascist period, if often in covert or uncanny ways, I argue that such attachments to Fascism and its contemporary hauntings serve to occlude much deeper and more ingrained mechanisms, that operate to dehumanise and criminalise farm labourers, despised for their “African” origins, rejecting bodies perceived as invading and foreign based on recursive articulations of the paradigm of “blood” and descent and demonising their living spaces.

Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times

Global Plantations in the Modern World Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives, 2023

In this chapter, we outline our contribution to the study of plantations, building upon a wide an... 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.

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

Global Plantations in the Modern World Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives, 2023

With reference to the Italian agribusiness sector, this chapter probes the specters of “the plant... 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.

(a cura di, con Martino Sacchi Landriani), Logistica delle migrazioni, Scienza & Politica, Quaderno n. 11, 2020

by Christian G. De Vito, Giampaolo Salice, Marco Caligari, Evelina Gambino, Giorgio Tosco, Niccolò Cuppini, Mattia Frapporti, Irene Peano, and Maurizio Ricciardi

La logistica si è recentemente imposta come una prospettiva privilegiata per la comprensione del ... 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.

Labour, class, fascisms: A roundtable

Marxist analyses of the rise of historical Fascisms in interwar Europe have typically foregrounde... 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.

Lavoro, mobilità, migrazioni. Ripartire dal concetto di salariato imbrigliato

by martino sacchi and Irene Peano

Cartografie Sociali, 2023

This special issue revisits the notion of «bridled labour», introduced by Yann Moulier Boutang 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.