Paper short abstract:

In this paper I trace a genealogy of the current spaces of containment, resistance and flight involving migrant workers in Italy's agro-industrial enclaves. Present-day encampments result from the sedimentation of centuries-old processes that have made use (or wished to) of several dispositifs.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will trace a genealogy of the current forms of containment, resistance and flight involving migrant workers in Italy's agro-industrial enclaves. If mainstream representations tend to either confine these workers and the encampments they inhabit into a timeless present, or to summarily compare their conditions to those of 19th-century Italian farm workers, more complex genealogies yield different insights. The encampments of the present day, and workers’ conditions more generally, are, in fact, the result of the sedimentation of centuries-old processes of primitive accumulation and labour disciplining that have made use (or wished to) of several dispositifs, from penal to settler colonies and labour camps, and the concomitant symbolic constructions that sustained them, which were founded on racist anthropologies. The accumulated failures of such projects, and their unintended consequences as much as (or more than) their successes, have led to processes of ruination in whose wake new forms of discipline, extraction and containment have nested. At the same time, the stubborn resistance to such policies of containment and extraction equally recurs across the contemporary period, through an excess that finds in various slum-like emergencies its persistent matrix.