Boys feel black : race and the erotics of minor migrant governance in Sicily
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Known officially as MSNA (minori stranieri non accompagnati), over 80,000 'unaccompanied foreign minors' have entered Italy since January 2014. Italy immediately assumes guardianship of migrants under 18 and legally must act in their 'best interests.' Policymakers perceive young migrants as 'future Italians' and instruct them to embrace mandatory language courses and cultural competency lessons in migrant centers. Officially, care and integration programs make no reference to racial difference and aim to slowly transform young (ages 14- 17) migrants into Italians. In practice, however, such programs foster exploration of racial categories meanings. Young West African (Senegalese, Nigerian, and others) males develop understandings of blackness in Italy that are affective, bodily, and intellectual at once. These understandings often cast doubt for migrants over the benevolence of state care and the possibility of integration. My research examines 'unaccompanied foreign minor' as a remarkable category of governance alongside the emergence of novel racial subjectivities that complicate such governance. I ultimately demonstrate that youth migrant centers are affectively thick institutions where state-mandated care and integration policies entangle with the bodies and passions of young West Africans in unforeseen ways. In these centers, migrants forge notions of ethnoracial difference in the ambiguous and generative zones between feeling and knowing. Italian migrant centers are thus 'erotic' spaces where the interplay of bodies and affect produce racial understandings and practices that complicate African life-making and trouble the state ordering of foreign subjects.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Jones, Torin Salih |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Thesis advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Thesis advisor | Fullwiley, Duana |
| Thesis advisor | Thiranagama, Sharika |
| Degree committee member | Fullwiley, Duana |
| Degree committee member | Thiranagama, Sharika |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Torin Jones. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/tf389jd0420 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Torin Salih Jones
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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