Stories from the Border. The Representation of Border Zones and Migrant Subjectivities in Italian Contemporary Literature

Abstract

The Central Mediterranean migratory route has made itself notorious for being one of the most dangerous illegal ways to reach Europe. Not only shipwrecks and deaths at sea: we continue to hear stories of disappearances in the desert, of tortures in detention centers and abuses perpetrated by smugglers as much as by local authorities in North Africa and Italy. All these stories have a common refrain; that the peaks of violence are registered there where a country establishes its frontiers. For migrants, crossing the border can entail forced political desubjectivation that, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, reduces them to bare life: to nothing more than living bodies subjected to state power. Studying the literary representation of the relationship between migrants and border zones, this thesis hosts an attempt to disclose a nuanced understanding of how space influences subjectivation processes. Without rejecting the concept of bare life, this research puts it into dialogue with reflections on agency and resistance in order to find out whether an opposition to the biopolitical structure that binds individuals to the State is possible from the condition of non-political subjects at the border. The argument underpinning this investigation is that literary representations of border- crossing can disclose a thinking of the border as a third space, an elsewhere that enables specific forms of resistance and “re-existence” to come into being. In its literary representations, the in- between space of the border is often depicted as a fertile ground for the proliferation of violence. At the same time, it is the space that can let processes of subjectivation emerge and alternative ways of political existence be envisaged, against the idea that a depoliticized human being would automatically be excluded from all political sphere.