Paper short abstract:

Based on longitudinal research in Puglia and Basilicata (Southern Italy), this paper offers an invitation to consider migrant infrastructures as itinerant urban morphologies that re-allocate the meaning of marginality and exclusion in the interstices of contemporary capitalist modes of production.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is concerned with migrant fugitive sites as an expression of emergent Afropeanness: the liquid form of citizenship and belonging that embody the multiple borders of the Black Mediterranean. In the wake of dramatic events during the past decade, migration infrastructures have been serving the ambiguous function of mobility containment and migrant refuge. Beyond legitimate concerns around humanitarianism and border security, this ambiguity does raise a wider question about the immanent configuration of these infrastructures in terms of future urbanity/rurality and territorial citizenship – particularly if we consider their allocation in the context of historical capitalism in the Mediterranean. Adopting a deliberate infrastructural lens, the paper investigates how contemporary migrant infrastructures function both as dynamic embodiments of the boundaries between citizenship and non-citizenship and as sites of cultural negotiation on the edge of Europe and Africa. The paper – which foregrounds two contrasting examples of Afro-Italian ‘citizenship-in-action’ in Puglia and Basilicata (Southern Italy) – offers an invitation to consider migrant infrastructures as itinerant urban morphologies that re-allocate the meaning of marginality and exclusion in the interstices of contemporary capitalist modes of production.