Paper short abstract:

Aim of the paper is to analyze a ‘postcolonial archive’, concerning the social production of adoptable migrant children today, inside Western Institutions. Starting from an ethnographic field with Nigerian women in Italy, the paper will focus on the consequences of these dispossessed kinships

Paper long abstract:

Many Nigerian women arrived in Italy are qualified as 'victims' of human trafficking when they denounced their 'pimps' and they are protected by the State through its social Institution. When they became mothers, something changes in the relation between them and the Institutions for care and assistance: no more perceived as vulnerable women to protect, they became dangerous and annoying mothers for their children. As recently Bailkin (2009) underlines for the British context African mothers had failed to embrace the Bowlbyist gospel of maternal care.

Moving from an anthropological and psychological perspective and starting from an ethnographic field-research conducted with 20 Nigerian families, the paper will analyze this postcolonial archive: how Italian Public Institutions work hard to product an 'adoptable child', especially when brings into the world by a Nigerian mother. The paper will focus on the consequences of these 'dispossessed kinships' and the challenges of African motherhood today in Europe. "Bureocraft" shows there all its socio-political magic power (Sayad, 1999): these mothers are constructed as affected by psychiatric disorders, and their children too are exposed to the diagnosis of mental disease or to the moral discourse of 'sauvagerie'. The author would like to stress how this cultural and social construction of African immigrant babies introduces ruptures and challenges in the relationship between African immigrant mothers, their children and their families in Nigeria. "I'm not dead, yet", shout Nigerian mother out of the Court; but they never see again their children, became magically Products of Italy: new citizens.