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Paper short abstract

The paper addresses the recursive carcerality of containment projects aimed at Italian agrocapital's labour force. Starting from today's encampment archipelago, housing migrant farm workers across different districts, I draw on archival and historical sources to trace its carceral genealogies.

Paper long abstract

The paper addresses the recursive carcerality of projects of containment aimed at Italian agrocapital's labour force. Starting from today's encampment archipelago, which houses migrants employed in the agrifood sector across different districts, and drawing on archival and historical sources (and their occlusions), I trace the carceral genealogies of spaces that feel like prisons to those that inhabit them today, on account of restrictions on movement, intimacy and conviviality that are predicated on processes of racialisation. The very places where these encampments are located today have been the experimental grounds for forms of containment across the contemporary period, since whose dawn a drive to the rationalisation of both agriculture and state governance led successive polities (from the Kingdom of Naples to the Kingdom of Italy, the Fascist regime and the Italian Republic) to resort to convict labour for works of land reclamation, among others. Directed against the idle poor - racialised southern peasants and semi-nomadic sheperds who became the target of policies of reform and discipline in the wake of processes of primitive accumulation -, these projects did not always materialise, but arguably inflected a much wider range of practices of labour containment that, for all their differences, reverberate in the present.