Save

What is Left of Migrants’ Spaces?

Transversal Alliances and the Temporality of Solidarity

In: Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS)
Author:
Martina Tazzioli Department of Politics & International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London, martina.Tazzioli@gold.ac.uk

Search for other papers by Martina Tazzioli in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
Full Access

This article deals with the political legacy of migrants’ spaces across Europe that are the outcome of border enforcement policies but that are also shaped by migrants’ struggles and movements. It interrogates what is left, after their vanishing forced eviction, at the level of spatial-political traces, as well as in the collective memory of the citizens of those places. The main argument of the piece is that in order to come to grips with these spaces beyond their ephemeral dimension, we need to consider the temporality of migrant struggles and of solidarity practices – between migrants and citizens. The article focuses, first, on the French-Italian Alpine border, and analyses how the sedimented memory of the struggles in that valley has been reactivated in the present to support the migrants in transit. Then, the article moves on by developing the notion of transversal alliances through an insight into the Gilets Noirs movement in France, a collective of undocumented migrants which mobilised towards getting to permit to stay and accommodation, while at the same time framing their struggle as a broader battle against precarity and exploitation. The piece concludes suggesting that by bringing in the genealogy of struggles and solidarity practices, migrants’ spaces appear as part of a precarious mobile common in the making.

Calais, Ventimiglia, Eidomeni, Paris, Lampedusa, Berlin, Briancon, Lesvos, Bihac: these are only some of the ‘hotspots’ of what European states have called a ‘refugee crisis’. Border-zones have proliferated across Europe over the last few years, as spaces of containment, control, protracted strandedness and violence; at the same time, these spaces have been shaped by collective resistances, migrant struggles and solidarity movements. While some of these border-zones, such as Calais, have quite a longstanding history by now, others have become spaces-frontiers much more recently or have disappeared as “hotspots of crisis”: indeed, some of them are no longer part of migrants’ geographies and of their convoluted journeys; many experiences of collective migrants’ struggles have come to an end; and meanwhile, multiple informal migrant encampments had been violently evicted. 1 How to account for struggles, solidarity networks and collective movements that have been precarious and ephemeral – due to evictions and the widespread criminalisation of migrant support? Could we shift from subtraction, erasure and absence towards an analysis that draws attention to what is produced by these struggles and movements? How to build a memory of solidarity practices and struggles that have shaped the European space and that have opened up political spaces and generated collective formations? Over the last few years some migrant spaces have gained centre stage in our imagination, forcing us to “recognise a sort of parallel geography”, made of temporary makeshift camps, zones of confinement and migrant gatherings. 2 This confronts us with the methodological conundrum of studying vanishing spaces and “informal hotspots” 3 that mushroomed across Europe. Retracing the legacy of migrant struggles and presence is that concern migrants in transit, who are neither there to stay and struggle in a given place, nor to lay claims on the public scene but, rather, to cross on the sly.

This paper engages with what I define as the temporality of solidarity, investigating how the memory of collective struggles is reactivated in ongoing mobilisations in support of migrants in Europe. While solidarity has been widely analysed from a spatial perspective 4 – for instance theories of solidarity across borders – the temporal dimension of solidarity practices, including the memory of the struggles and its reactivation into the present, remains surprisingly unexplored. 5 How does our understanding of collective subjects change as long as we analyse these in light of a genealogy of solidarity practices? Which political spaces did they generate despite their temporary dimension? Such a perspective enables, firstly, bringing to the fore political spaces and collective subjects that are under-theorised and discredited both in migration literature and in political theory. Secondly, by mobilising such an analytical gaze we can unsettle the supposedly neat boundaries between migrants and citizens, highlighting the emergence of transversal alliances of solidarity. 6

In order to come to grips with the spaces and subjects generated through this parallel geography, we need, I contend, to bring temporality and temporariness in the analysis, and to interrogate how they both work in reactivating struggles and solidarity practices. Ultimately, as Abdelmalek Sayad has remarked, what characterises migration is its actual or assumed temporariness. 7 Adopting such an analytical angle enables rethinking collective subjects and solidarity practices, beyond punctual moments of political visibility. As Judith Butler has questioned, “how, then, do we think about these transient and critical gatherings?”. 8 This transience of collective subjects and of solidarity networks is particularly visible at the frontiers of Europe and in the border zones that have recently multiplied across the European space. Indeed, in places where migrants are constantly subjected to eviction and police harassment, migrant collective formations are highly precarious, ephemeral and temporary. Re-mapping Europe as a space of migrant and refugees’ temporary spaces, requires navigating through the interstices of the opacity of migrant encampments, for grasping the persistence of camps’ traces. Many of these transit zones and informal encampments have become key spatial landmarks of migrants’ enacted geographies. We might recall here Foucault’s text “The life of infamous men” and gesture towards an ethnography of Europe’s infamous spaces: this consist in drawing attention to temporary migration sites which are apprehensible only through “an encounter with power” and as something that is “beside what is usually estimated as worthy of being recounted” 9 .

The Alpine migratory route represents a case in point for exploring these themes, due to the history of struggles and solidarity that has shaped those places and the current transversal mobilisations in solidarity with the migrants in transit. In the second part of the paper, I focus on the movement of the Gilets Noir, a migrant collective that it is currently struggling in France to get documents and accommodation and that claims its legacy with the movement of the Sans Papiers in the Nineties.

What does it mean to mobilise genealogy, not with the aim of studying and destabilising regimes of power and truth but in fact for foregrounding struggles ? How to revert genealogy as a method that “fragments what was thought unified” and that “shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself” 10 into a way to account for heterogenous and dispersed struggles that took place often without leaving visible traces ?

1 The Making of Transversal Alliances

Through such a focus, this paper contributes to International Political Sociology debates about transversal lines 11 by drawing attention to the formation of transversal alliances between citizens and those who are racialised as “migrants”. In so doing, it unsettles analyses which are predicated upon neat boundaries between migrants and citizens and that, ultimately, essentialises migrations as sociological entities. The methodological gesture of undoing the migrant/citizen divide echoes McNevin’s invitation to shift away from migration-centered analyses towards “internationalist visions” that “tend to be hidden geographies” and towards “widespread experiences amongst citizens, aliens, imperial subjects and incipient cosmopolitans are suggestive of other forms of life”. 12 If ips scholarship has mainly focused on the transversality of fields of power, this article suggest to looking instead at the transversality of struggles and alliances. In this respect, literature on “history from below” and the analyses of historians like Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh about the reverberations and connections among struggles at sea and on the mainland, are crucial for elaborating on transversal alliances and on the heterogenous composition of temporary collective formations.

In particular, while both in political theory and in ips scholarship, transversal alliances are conceptualised as connections across boundaries, I contend that such a horizontal and spatial perspective needs to be complemented with a historical and temporal view. To put it shortly, thinking about transversal struggles is not only a question of connections – among sites, claims and actors – but also of multiple genealogies of solidarity to be retraced and foregrounded. This involves first, intersecting heterogenous and widespread practices of solidarity with the historical density of the struggles and their sedimented memory that is eventually reactivated in the present. In the words of Marcus Rediker, the intertwining of spatial and temporal dimension of transversal struggles allows us to “escape the pervasive violence of nationalist history” 13 and, relatedly, to recognise different cycles of struggle that have historically been characterised by the alliances of workers, sailors, slaves and fugitives. Second, and relatedly, a politicised analysis of transversal alliances might benefit from the resonances with DuBois’ theory of “abolitionist democracy” and the most recent feminist elaborations. 14 Indeed, in retracing the history of the the slaves’ resistances, Du Bois has highlighted on the one side the partial convergence – but also the conflicts – between slaves, migrant workers and other subjects in struggles for rights; and on the other side, he has shown how the question of slavery “still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations”. 15 Today, we could argue, a focus on migrant struggles and the transversal alliances of solidarity illuminates the centrality of the “migrant question” for thinking about democracy, collective subjects and citizenry.

The composition of collective subjects and the inadequacy of traditional sociological categories – such as the people and the population – for grasping emergent collective formations received a lot of attention in the literature. In this regard, it is worth recalling Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s theorisation of the multitude and their work on the assembly to designate heterogenous collective subjects that has emerged over the last decade during many protests across the world. Assembly, according to them, “is meant to grasp the power of coming together and acting politically in concert” 16 . In her book Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly Judith Butler defines “assembly” as an “embodied and plural performativity” 17 that unsettles the exclusionary boundaries of the people and represents what constantly exceeds it. Indeed, as Butler highlights, even in its more inclusive conceptualisation and enactment, by naming “the people” we necessarily “indicate excluded populations through a further demarcation”. 18 More precisely, in Butler’s view, assembly refers to “bodies that come together to make a claim in public space” 19 without having a pre-established safe ground or fixed space from where laying these claims and being politically visible. In other words, for Butler assemblies are precarious collective formations in which the action of making claims and that of producing one’s own space for becoming visible, go together.

The body assemblies that Butler discusses, such as the Occupy movement, are “necessarily transient” but this transience is not actually an obstacle to the formation of collective subjects: indeed, even if they do not last in time, they “could appear anytime !’. Gatherings such as these serve as one of democracy’s incipient or ‘fugitive’ movement”. 20 Thus, the temporariness of assemblies is counter-balanced by their potential and virtual reproducibility that, it might be argued, guarantees the constitutive dimension of those gatherings, beyond the punctual moment and irruption of the event and of public exposure. In so doing, Butler draws attention to the potential reiterability (‘it can happen again’) of modes and experiences of assemblies, linking up in this way past, present and future temporalities, reminding us that sedimented practices might be reactivated. Nevertheless, the possibility of becoming visible and being exposed on the public space 21 remains a crucial condition of Butler’s account of body assemblies. Relatedly, in Butler’s work the reiterability of gatherings is connected with the enactment of an “ethics of cohabitation” that presupposes quite stable subjects, fixed in space. More broadly, scholars have extensively elaborated on the connections and the nexuses between different collective struggles across the world, on their commonalities, insisting in particular on precarity as shared condition. 22

In a nutshell, these works have interrogated how experiences and political vocabularies of struggles, social movements and solidarity practices have travelled across spaces. Yet, questions around the temporariness and the temporality of the struggles remain quite marginal and overlooked in these debates. Hearable claims and punctual moments of bodily exposure and irruption in the public spaces get centre stage in these analyses. But what about the sedimentation of practical knowledges and experiences of struggle? How are collective memories of solidarity reactivated in the present ? What is the practical and political purchase of struggles and movements that have been highly precarious and ephemeral?

The seminal work of the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker on the revolutionary Atlantic equips us with analytical lenses tool for studying the emergence of collective subjects that cannot be grasped through traditional sociological categories of “the people” or “the population”. In addition to that, by retracing the history of the struggles and collective refusals at sea performed by different criminalised subjects, Linebaugh and Rediker foreground what in this paper I have called the temporality of solidarity practices: yet, far from being a linear account, this temporality is highly fragmented and must be retraced differently, as it is marginalised in the official historical archives. In The Many Headed-Hydra they consider the emergence of the motley crew – made of sailors, pirates and slaves – in the Eighteenth century by taking into account “acts of resistance” not in an isolated way, but rather by “situating them in relation to each other” 23 . In fact, they suggest that only by reconstructing the historical continuity and the relationships among different episodes is it possible to keep a memory of collective subjects that are not narrated by the official historical narratives and that are missing from the archive. Along the same lines, in their Global history of runaways, Rediker and colleagues have foregrounded the centrality of struggles over mobility and, at once, of mobility as tactics of flight and resistance against modes of coercion and exploitation. 24

The making of collective subjects is not narrowed to the moments in which these collective formations are visible and act; the temporality of solidarity, that is the way in which practices of solidarity have been consolidated and sedimented over time, even if in a dispersed and disrupted way, allows grasping what lasts of collective struggles in the aftermath of evictions, changed political contexts and new configurations of power relations. Building on Chandra Mohanty, I take into account solidarity practices that “rather than assuming an enforced commonality of the oppression […] foreground communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together“. 25 Such an interrogation is particularly prominent when we are confronted with migration collective formations – what might also be called “migrant multiplicities”. 26 The difficulty in conceptualising migrant collective formations mainly depends on their temporary, precarious dimension and on their movement. Even if they stay put and they struggle in a place or they are blocked there, migrant multiplicities tend to move – not in group or in a coordinated way, but as a result of different individual paths of migration. Temporariness and movement (being on the move) are tightly connected to each other in shaping migrant multiplicities and our perception of them. In order words, the movement of “migration movements” – that is, the constant possibility that migrants who are there could no longer be there tomorrow or in few hours – is what makes difficult to come to grips and theorise collective formations.

How to take stock of migrant multiplicities that emerge precisely through movement and temporariness? For instance, the Italian city of Ventimiglia, located at the border with France along the coast, has witnessed the presence and passages of thousands of migrants over the last nine years. On some occasions, the migrants who were temporarily stranded there engaged in collective struggles that lasted for few days or weeks. Thus, the history of Ventimiglia is also a history of migrants in transit, whose visibility and frequency has been highly uneven. Some of the traces of migrants’ passages are spatially inscribed for instance in the form of signs written on some walls or as material left in abandoned encampments. Other traces of those passages are instead part of the collective memory of the citizens of Ventimiglia. And yet, the extent to which migrants’ presence and struggles are recalled by citizens, how this memory might persist in time, irrespective of migrants’ actual presence, is something that requires further investigation. In fact, “what is left of migrant spaces?” is not only a spatial and political question; it is also an interrogation about the legacies of migrants’ movements and presence in the memory of the citizens. The difficulty in conceptualising the virtual persistence of migrants’ passages primarily expends on the mobility and fleeting character of migration movements, as well as on their absence in the official archives. Ultimately, these traces might be seen as a “symptomatic space in the craft of governance”, 27 that is as an analytical vantage point for scrutinising, in backlight, how migrants’ presence is subjected to epistemic violence and material evictions.

In this regard, autonomy of migration literature has notably conceptualised migration as a social movement, 28 as a collective force that exceeds border controls and pushes states to reinvent their strategies of capture. Such an analytical perspective enables transcending a conceit of social movement as a defined group and to “highlight the elements of subjectivity that permeate migration movements” 29 together with the struggles that migrants make to resist exploitation, expulsion and illegalisation. Nevertheless, I want to point here to a slightly different way of engaging with “migrant movements”, taking them more literally: migrants often gather in border-zones and temporarily assemble, in a visible or hidden way, in the attempt to cross or to build tactical alliances and lay common claims. This collective dimension can be captured neither through the notion of population nor in terms of (consolidated and homogeneous) groups. This enables keeping open and interrogating the specificity and the actual composition of migrant incipient collective subjects and of their politicalness instead of assuming a pre-established collective subject – like the multitude, the people or the population. The emergent collective subjects I refer, are the outcome of transversal alliances of solidarity – between citizens and migrants – or they might be formed by migrants only. Ultimately, as Engin Isin has observed, the difficulty in grappling with migrant movements as collective formations depends on the implicit territorial geography associated with the image and the notion of “the people”. 30

Dealing with the limits of theories centred on the production of the event and on punctual irruptions into the public space, Sandro Mezzadra has gestured towards a “temporality of struggles” which is not the one of the event but of “the material practices that create the conditions of possibility of insurgence through clashes and solidarities” 31 ). More recently, in a remarkable article, he has argued that claims and struggles for freedom of movement that today are carried on by migrants should be situated within broader genealogies which are not confined to migration and that might be traced back to the abolitionist movement in the US: “While I emphasize the prominent roles played by migrant practices of freedom of movement, I am far from celebrating the isolation of migrants […] Going back to the history of abolitionism in the U.S. can help us once more to discern the stakes of the struggle for freedom of movement. 32 In so doing, Mezzadra adds a fundamental step in a genealogy of migrant struggles, as long as he points to the importance of de-bordering and de-containerising migration by retracing historical transnational and transversal connections with other struggles.

2 The Memory of the Struggles at the French-Italian Alpine Border

The Italian-French border is one of the main geographical signposts in Europe of what states have named a “refugee crisis” and of migrants’ convoluted routes. Bardonecchia is an Italian small town on the Alps located in the Susa Valley and few kilometres from the French-Italian border. Since the late 2016, many migrants have tried to cross to France by hiking on the Colle d’ Echelle, a mountain pass that divides France from Italy. Indeed, Bardonecchia can be easily reached by regional train from Turin, and it is the last train stop before the French village of Modane. Every day, in late afternoon or with the last train from Turin which arrives at 22.38, few migrants get off the train in Bardonecchia and stop for a while in front of the small rail station, that is however closed at night to prevent migrants from sleeping there. Some of the migrants who catch the train stop few kilometres before Bardonecchia, in Oulx, and from there they reach the Italian village of Claviere, which is 1850 meters above the sea level and only two kilometres from France. The migrant Alpine route is in part the outcome of the increasing of border controls and violent push-back along the coast, that pushed migrants to divert their journeys to the Alps. 33 Indeed, over the last three years the border crossing point from the Italian city of Ventimiglia to the French city of Menton has become increasingly policed.

Even if the number of migrants who try to cross to France passing across the Alps is quite small, their presence has become quite visible in the Italian Alpine small towns, where locals are not used to seeing them. Or more accurately, migrants’ visibility on the Alps has been the object of an ambivalent dynamic. On the one hand, the Alpine migrants’ passage remains more overshadowed and marginal in the media than Ventimiglia, which has been under the spotlight for long time. On the other, with the increasing of migrants’ passages and presence, “they suddenly became visible to the local residents […] as ‘people excess’” 34 and the French police engaged in a systematic migrant hunt across the mountains in order to detect the migrants and to push them back to Italy. Migrants who cross the Alps are exposed both to environmental risks – due to the possible snow, the low temperatures in winter and the possibility of getting lost – and to repeated border violence on the part of the French police. In this regard, it is important not to naturalise the dangerousness of the Alps: indeed, border enforcements and police violence have transformed the mountains into a hostile environment. 35

Both on the Italian side of the border, in the Susa Valley, and in the French town of Briançon many people have mobilised in support the migrants in transit – putting into place what I call here the mobile infrastructures of solidarity. This widespread mobilisation does not consist of a coordinated single network, but of different groups and heterogenous ways of acting in solidarity with the migrants. In Bardonecchia, “Rainbow for Africa”, a local organisation of doctors, obtained the authorisation from the municipality to use a small room next to the rail station for hosting the migrants in transit overnight and providing medical aid and mountain clothes. This organisation defines its activity in terms of “humanitarian help to the migrants who risk their lives”; and the volunteers involved contend that they “are not there to support migrants who want to cross but, rather, to provide them with a safe space to stay at night and prevent them from being injured and suffering in extreme temperaturesz. Therefore, this organisation defined its work as a form of humanitarian intervention; and, yet, in practice, through their logistical and medical intervention, they provide, to some extent, an active support.

In the village of Claviere, locals and activists occupied the room of a church in March 2019 and renamed it “Chez Jesus – occupied shelter”. The strategic choice of the name depended on the opposition of the priest to the occupation in solidarity with the migrants: in order not to be evicted, the activists defined the shelter as a sanctuary space. Inside that room, where the migrants in transit used to stop for one night or more, before trying to cross – or after being pushed back at the border – the activists showed a map to any group of migrants who reached the shelter. The mapping-orienting activity was for explaining to the migrants where and how to cross, which paths should be used and which ones to be avoided, and so on; one hand-written map for migrants – with the main dangers and tips – and a traditional map with the mountain paths were used together for illustrating the doable crossing to them. The occupation of the church in Claviere and the counter-mapping activities conducted there – to dodge the cartography of police control – are examples of transversal alliances between migrants and citizens that unsettle the hierarchies and the top-down relationships that characterise humanitarian actions. In Oulx, locals, many of whom are also part of the No Tav movement against the construction of the high-speed railway, opened a temporary shelter, similar to the one in Bardonecchia next to the rail station where migrants who want to reach Claviere can stop at night and get some warm clothes.

Temporary mountain shelters, mapping activities, 36 medical aid and the opening of safe places have been put in place by local organisations, citizen networks and independent volunteers for supporting the migrants in transit on the Alps. Nevertheless, these collective solidarity practices have not come out of the blue. Rather, as this paper shows, they take place in spaces characterised by an important history of struggles and mobilisations that, in their diversity and specificity, had fights for social justice in common. Hence, we can speak of a sedimentation of practical knowledges and memory of the struggles that have been reactivated in the present in support of the migrants in transit. In this way, this paper argues, solidarity practices are not merely spatialized, travelling across borders (cross-border solidarity); they are also informed by temporality, or better by the peculiar temporality of the struggles and of its collective memory that has been at play in a certain space. “I mobilise now to support in many ways the migrants who try to go to France, as for me it is a matter of social justice, in continuity with my involvement in the other struggles we carried on here in the Susa Valley”: 37 this conversation I had with a volunteer from the city of Bardonecchia shows that practical knowledges and the sedimented memory of struggles for social justice have been reactivated in the present, as part of “border struggles”. 38 Indeed, the Susa Valley has been characterised by a longstanding history of struggles and solidarity practices: during the ii World War, the Valley mobilised against the German occupation; in the Seventies protests and road blocks took place against the construction of the highway and then, in the Nineties, locals have notably put into place the NoTav movement, which is still very active and that gather people from everywhere, to oppose the high-speed railway train the Valley. Today, many of them, are engaged as part of local groups or individually, in solidarity practices with the migrants who try to go to France and who are repeatedly subjected to police violence and push-back measures along their route.

The French-Italian journal Nunatak 39 constitutes a kind of archive of the struggles that took place over the years on the Alps – tracing also a connection with solidarity practices and struggles that happened on other mountains, in Europe and beyond. Many of the struggles that are recorded and described in the journal are not migrant struggles, nor solidarity practices supporting refugees; rather, Nunatak keeps memory of heterogenous mobilisations that pursue goals which might be broadly defined as social justice – in the field of environmentalism, popular resistances, infrastructures and exploitation. Today, with the increasing passages and presence of migrants on the Alps, there has been a parallel growing attention to the collective experiences of migrant solidarity, which are taking place both on the Italian and on the French side of the border. Yet, even if mobility struggles have gained centre stage in the media and migrants’ presence on the Alps is quite unusual for locals, it is worth noticing that the mobilisations in support to the migrants are presented in the journal as part of a wider range of struggles and solidarity practices.

However, we should caution against any romanticisation of struggles and solidarity practices in support with the migrants. Indeed, the focus on the mobilisations in the Susa Valley should not lead us to conclude that migrants are welcome by locals at large and that the majority of the population there engages in support to the migrants. On the contrary, migrants who transit on the territory are mainly the object of a silent adversity mixed with indifference 40 . Indeed, the widespread mobilisation in the Valley was intentionally not so much under the spotlight of the media, as the goal was to provide logistical support to the migrants, avoiding the triggering of racist reactions. These heterogenous solidarity practices put into place invisible mobile infrastructures in support to the migrants in transit. They are invisible not because they are hidden -although in some cases they might be, in order not to be spotted by the police – but, rather, because they appear only while they are enacted. Indeed, while some of these infrastructures are localised and might remain in place for a relatively long time – as the shelter in Oulx – others are not: Alpine guides who help migrants along the path or who rescued them in the snow, activists making maps to give to the migrants and volunteers who give clothes and provide information about the risky places are kind of human mobile infrastructures that exist while they are actively deployed.

3 Towards a Genealogy of Mountain Rescue

“The Alpine passage has always been a site of migrants’ transit, ‘illegalised’ border crossing and rescue”, G. a citizen of Bardonecchia and member of the Alpine Rescue (Soccorso Alpino) told me. In fact, in speaking of sedimented knowledges at the Alpine border we should widen the spectrum of practices beyond struggles and include also rescue activities. These latter are neither driven by social justice goals nor are they conceived for saving or supporting migrants in particular. Rather, rescue operations respond to a civic and state duty and do not make any distinction in terms of nationality and legal status of the people who are rescued. And yet, as I managed to reconstruct through an archival research and through interviews, the history of mountain rescue is also a history punctuated by the encounters between rescuers and “migrants” in distress. The longstanding practice of rescue people in danger or who got lost on the Alps is by now part of the collective memory in the city of Bardonecchia and Claviere – on the Italian side – and of Briançon – on the French side – among many. Much less popular is the memory about the “migrants” who had been saved there over the decades. Nevertheless, few people in Bardonecchia, in particular the elderly, recall the fleeting passage of “migrants” there, during the ‘70s and the ‘80s; or better, as one of them told me, “it was not easy to spot them in the city, but we knew about their transitory presence as some of them had been rescued or we found them dead on the mountains”. 41 That Alpine passage has been shaped by a longstanding history of “illegal” border crossings from Italy to France, in particular for work purposes. But, who were the “migrants” who hiked on the Alps to reach France on the sly? Actually, as well reconstructed by Sandro Rinauro in his book The Pathway of Hope 42 (“Il Cammino della Speranza, 2009), a relevant number of Italian citizens tried to cross to France “illegally” in the first decades of the nineteenth century; and the Italians’ illegal crossing on the Alps increased in the aftermath of World War ii, due to the mobility restrictions implemented under fascism by Mussolini, and the bilateral agreements on workers quota between France and Italy. 43

In the late ‘40s and in the ‘50s’, the “migrants” rescued on the Alps were therefore Italians. Later on, in the ‘60s and in the ‘70s, as I found out in the archive of the Alpine Rescue in Bardonecchia, the “migrants” became third-country nationals, mainly from the former Yugoslavia and from Eastern Europe.

June 29, 1956: “in the attempt to expatriate to France the people we rescued, of Italian nationality, ended up in danger”; September 2 and September 12, 1956: “we rescued an Italian citizen who was trying to reach the French city of Modane”. March, 24 1974: “A person of foreign nationality has been rescued today – he is without documents, and he is likely to be a Moroccan citizen”; February 2, 1982, “three persons of Yugoslavian nationality who were not well equipped, had been rescued while they were trying to expatriate in a clandestine way”; March 8, 2003: “search and rescue intervention was conducted to find out non-European citizens who got lost while they were trying to cross in a clandestine way”; June 6, 2003: “four Rumanian citizens have been saved while they were trying to enter France illegality and they found themselves in danger”; April 1, 2009: “a Moroccan national, that was without regular documents, was found in danger and rescued in the attempt to cross to France”. Alongside the archives, oral history is crucial for retracing migrants’ fleeting presence. Paolo, a retired doctor in Bardonecchia who was the head of Soccorso Alpino in the ’70s and then continued the activities there even in the ’80s, recalls the few Turkish and the by now citizens of Yugoslavia Republic they rescued in the snow in the mid ‘70s: “probably many more crossed to France in summer, but we do not have trace of those who just passed and were not found dead or in danger by us”. “Migrants” got lost hiking from Bardonecchia to Modane mostly when they crossed via the dangerous La Rochelle Valley: “indeed, unlike today, they did not have phones at that time, and therefore, they were not updated about the most feasible routes, they just followed the rail tracks”. And yet, the fleeting presence of those migrants was not noted in Bardonecchia, nor was it considered “a problem”, as they did not actually stay – they just transited through – and even if some of them might have spent some hours or days in the city, given that they are not “black” they weren’t in the spotlight. 44

This brief and partially lacking history of mountain rescue at the French-Italian border sheds light on the constant presence of “migrants” there and on practical knowledge – saving people in danger on the mountains – sedimented over time. Although mountain rescue is not a migrant-oriented activity, what emerges from the archival records and the testimonies collected in Bardonecchia is that “migrants” are ultimately part of that history and that, in a way or in another, mountain rescue has always been also about rescuing foreigners or unauthorised crossers. An insight into the history of mountain rescue and migration enables widening the focus from the sea to other geographical environments and showing that rescue is not a response to a migration “crisis”. Significantly, the practice of mountain rescue and the interventions for saving foreigners, fugitives and “illegalised” workers, are quite enshrined in the Susa Valley – at the level of oral history and direct testimonies. “This valley” as the mayor of Bardonecchia stressed to me “has been ultimately shaped by those fleeting presences of migrants and ‘clandestine’ Italians, as well as by the whole economy of border crossing, as many locals were of course involved as mountain guides and were paid for helping people to make it to France”. 45

4 “We are not a Collective, we are a Movement”

In summer 2019, about two hundred undocumented migrants, who named themselves Gilets NoirsBlack Vests – started a massive mobilisation, with its epicentre in the city of Paris, to claim their right to an accommodation and to get documents. On July 12, they occupied the Pantheon in Paris for few hours as a collective protest to reiterate their demands and become politically visible. That protest and the many others that followed had been violently repressed by the French police that caught and arrested many of them. 46 What particularly matters for the purpose of this article is that the Gilets Noirs grounded their collective struggles on very specific and situated claims – demanding the paper and an accommodation – while at the same time they sheerly exceeded these latter. Indeed, the unbearable character of the Gilets Noirs movement for the authorities was the articulation of a radical struggle with punctual demands, together with their much broader claims and goals that do not concern illegalised migrants only.

As two members of the Gilets Noir have declared in a recent interview, “the Gilets Noir is not a collective, is a movement”: 47 by saying so, they have highlighted the peculiar nature of that collective formation, which in fact cannot be codified through self-contained categories such as “groups” and “collective”. Indeed, as they explain, those who take part to the Gilets Noirs movement might be at the same time member of collectives. By speaking of movement, they shifted the attention from identity belonging towards the participation to struggles that appear to be transversal, that is not confined into pre-established categories nor wedded to particularistic claims only. The Gilets Noirs see their movement as a process of construction of common practices and knowledges, and as a collective attempt to get out of “political ghettos”:

“We want to bring this struggle out of the political ghetto in which it has been enclosed, and re-inscribe it within a social movement, in order to show that the claims raised by migrants might be endorsed by everyone – no matter if they are sans-papier or not, migrants or not. This struggle is as much as general as a struggle for workers’ dignity or against precarity. The idea is to unify all forces, not just around simple solidarity, but through a common cause, with shared objectives”.

Thus, the Gilets Noirs movement has unsettled the very boundaries in which institutions have been trying to confine them – for instance, as a battle narrowed to the demand for regularisation. The radical dimension of their struggle consisted precisely in the ‘incorrigibility’ 48 of their claims and goals, that could not be fully codified through a legalistic or unionist vocabulary. Rather, they have pivoted their struggle around very specific and punctual demands – documents and accommodation – to raise broader points and claims about exploitation and precarity. 49 Importantly, the very way in which they framed their specific claims that could not be addressed in binary terms. For instance, through their motto “neither in the street, nor in prison” (“ni rue, ni prison” 50 ) they carried on their struggle to get an accommodation for all sans-papiers and denouncing at the same time the semi-carceral condition that migrants who live in accommodation provided by state authorities live. It is not by coincidence that they define themselves as “residents of foyers and tenants of the street”. Importantly, the movement of the Gilets Noirs was born building on the longstanding experience of struggle of the sans-papier movement that has been active in France since the Nineties. Indeed the Sans Papier movement did not just raise fundamental political and rights claims and struggled for these, to get out of their own clandestinity; as Etienne Balibar famously argued through their collective struggles they also taught fundamental lessons to the French citizenry, showing for instance that citizenship “is not an institution nor a status, but a collective practice. They did it for themselves […] but also by stimulating new forms of activism and renewing old ones”. 51 The invention of new modes of political action and of collective assembling – that might appear unusual if seen through the citizen-gaze perspective – is something that can be potentially reactivated beyond punctual events.

The Gilets Noirs framed their collective struggle in a way that cut across the migrants-citizens divide, as long as their claims actually concerned condition of deprivation and precarity that do not affect exclusively illegalised migrants. Significantly, the self-designation of Gilets Noirs recalls the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement that notably got centre stage in France between 2018 and 2019 in struggling against precarity, and the most recent ecological movement called Gilets Verts. 52

Therefore, the movement of the Gilets Noirs sheds light on the transversal alliances that are built in solidarity networks and collective struggles and that might (but not always) unsettle neat oppositions between migrants and citizens – without however disregarding the asymmetries at play between the two and the differential way of being racialised. Nevertheless, beyond the connections and reverberations with other contemporary struggles, the claims of the Gilets Noirs echoes the protests of “irregular” migrants that took place in France in the ‘70s and in the ‘80s, even before the emergence of the sans-papiers movement in the ‘90s. The first migrant struggles in France started between the late ‘60s and the early ‘70s, when they both organised protests for getting the permit to stay and work in the country, and they were part of broader mobilisations that were not specifically about migration and that involved French citizens too.

In the early ‘70s migrants were aware of being an important component of the French society and many of them “engaged in struggles against racism and the life conditions in the bidonvilles and in the cities of transit, but also in the factory strikes”. 53 And yet speaking of transversal struggles does not mean that the alliances between migrant workers and citizen workers were easy to be formed: both the unions and individual activists criticized migrants’ mobilisations as these were deemed to be not properly organised or, reversely, to be to reformist, when they were “just” demanding papiers. It is only with the wide mobilisations in 1968 and of the following years that a significant convergence of struggles – of migrants and non-migrants – happened, around transversal themes – such as access to the health system, jobs, police violence, and individual rights. Internationalist political projects contributed to partially overcome the divisions and conflicts between foreigners and citizens who were struggling for the same rights and to strengthen practices of solidarity. In 1983, in the aftermath of the first violent urban riots in the periphery of Lyon, the sons of migrants from the Maghreb organised the first national march against racism and for equality- called “march des beurs”, 54 from Marseille to Paris. The march, which was joined by around 100000 French in Paris, marked “the appearance of postcolonial migrants’ sons in the French public space”; 55 it also important turn in migrants’ claims, as long as issues of racism, discrimination and rights got center stage. 56 Notably, the widespread social turmoil led also to political activism around migrant rights, with the goal of carrying on both struggles for the rights of workers at large, with struggles to support migrants’ claims. 57 Hence, in the claims and mobilisations of the Gilets Noirs we can hear the “distant roar of battle” 58 of migrant movements and of laborious convergences of struggles and practices of solidarity.

The angle of transversal alliances does not reveal collaborations among equals nor does it involve the erasure of juridical and economic differences, between the illegalised migrants and the citizens. In fact, it would be misleading to think of transversal alliances as of peer-to-peer relations and overshadow the inequalities between citizens and migrants in terms of legal status. Rather, the Gilets Noirs laid claims that pertained to their specific condition – of as undocumented migrants. – oriented at reaching specific goals and that, at the same time, raised much wider demands that exceed the boundaries of any legal concession. In so doing, the movement of the Gilets Noirs crafted a political discourse that, building on particular and well defined claims, enabled accommodating struggles against precarisation and labour exploitation. A focus on transversal alliances and claims ultimately speaks to Bridget Anderson’s call for a “methodological denationalism” 59 in migration literature, as it consists in unfixing migrants from pre-established and bounded positions and categories; and yet, instead of highlighting transversal connections around exclusion, we see how the Gilets Noirs movement sets such a potential common ground as a struggle for, more than just as a subtraction from – exploitation, precarity and exclusion.

Paying attention to the transversal alliances or “transversal solidarities” 60 that are produced is not merely for emphasising connections as such, and for the sake of them. In fact, an insight into the transversality of struggles cannot dispense from scrutinising the peculiar modes of subjection and of violence that migrants are affected by, and that cannot be elided through understanding of power relations as ‘processes’. Methodologically, it enables reversing a state-based approach to migration which would consider migrant struggles as byproducts of politics and not as constituent movements opening up political spaces. In fact, starting from the “transversal configurations” 61 that migrants struggles build up, we turn the attention to what they have enacted, to “the mobile mode of sociality that emerge[s]” 62 through their presence and silent or noisy struggles.

5 Conclusion

Confronted with the ephemerality of emergent collective subjects and with the defeat of many migration movements, Angela Davis’s contentions to look at “the history of struggle, the history of solidarity movements” enables seeing how “seemingly indestructible forces can be easily broken”. 63 In this sense, following Davis, transversal alliances show how even punctual claims – for papers and rights – might turn into more expansive and inclusive struggles that end up in unsettling the migrant/citizen divide. A focus on transversal alliances of solidarity helps undoing the containerisation of critique within the field of migration. In this respect, we should not stop asking “where we [could] find […] the writings of the sans-papiers, the place of those without a place, the claims of those without rights and the dignity of those without images? Where shall we find the archive of those we don’t want to record and whose memory sometimes we want to kill?” 64 .

The incorrigible presence and the struggles of temporary migrant collective formations, and the infrastructure of solidarity put into place have in fact reshaped the political geography of Europe. Nevertheless, many of the migrant struggles that occurred across Europe have remained invisible, “silent” or they have been violently repressed. The memory of the struggle and of dispersed solidarity practices constitute a shared mobile political ground that can be potentially reactivated in different mobilisations 65 . Drawing attention to the temporalities of solidarity means moving beyond the punctual protests, bodily exposures in public space and events with a high political visibility to interrogate “what is left” of collective movements, fleeting safe spaces and ephemeral camps. 66 The temporary collective formations that emerged in many border-zones across Europe cannot be subsumed under a single label – e.g. assembly, coalition – because of their heterogeneity, both in their scopes and in their composition.

Migrant multiplicities tend to be temporary and volatile, and this makes it hard to record and make an archive of their existence, as well as to recognise them as collective political subjects. To what extent are migrant struggles and presence now part of a collective memory? Far from being safely stable, mobility struggles are persistently exposed to dispersal measures, violent evictions and dismantling police operations apt at taking terrain away from migrants and destroying collective “spaces of livability”. 67 And yet, some traces remain that emerge from within “cramped spaces”. 68 So, what is left of migrants’ spaces? As this paper has shown, we cannot stop with the punctual moments when struggles happen or become visible, nor we can focus exclusively on organised collective formations. Through retracing and foregrounding the memory of the struggles, it enables supplementing the question “what is left?” with “how have solidarity practices sedimented over time?” and, jointly “how have precarious and temporary movements shaped some places?”. Ephemerality, temporariness and fleetingness do not exclude nor are in contradiction with invisible constituent movements – that open up new political spaces and might contribute to a collective memory of migration. Thus, asking “what is left of migrants’ spaces?” is a way for investigating the unstable “mobile commons” 69 which might emerge from transversal alliances that are nevertheless constantly subjected to processes of making and unmaking. Unstable mobile commons are spatially unbounded as they can potentially be reactivated in different sites.

If practices of solidarity are sedimented in the collective memory, this is by no means a guarantee of their reactivation in the present. If we shift away our cartographic imagination from geopolitical frontiers to the multiplication of border-zones that have punctuated the European space, behind their temporariness and fleetingness we might see the disrupted and dispersed sedimentation of struggles and movements. The precarious and fleeting life of migrant spaces does not preclude keeping traces of these. Indeed, the presence and the struggles of migrants might remain alive in the collective memory in those places; and the frequent re-emergence of these spaces, upon eviction, reiterates their actual or potential existence.

Bibliography

  • Abdallah, Mogniss Les sans-papier d’hier a auhourd’hui, pour une memoire collective de l immigration. 2003. Available at: http://1libertaire.free.fr/Mogniss23.html (last access January 3, 2020).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Altin, Roberta and Claudio, Minca . “Exopolis reloaded: fragmented landscapes and no man’s lands in a North-Eastern Italian border region”, Landscape Research, 42:4, (2017a): 385399.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Altin, Roberta and Claudio, Minca . “The ambivalent camp. Carceral Mobilities, Interrogating Movement”. In Incarceration, (2017b): 3044.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • s.Anderson, Bridget . “New directions in migration studies: towards methodological de-nationalism.” Comparative Migration Studies 7, no. 1 (2019): 113.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Aradau, Claudia Performative politics and International Relations.” New Perspectives, 25(2) (2017): 27.

  • Aradau, Claudia , Jef, Huysmans , and Vicki, Squire , “Acts of European Citizenship. A Political Sociology of MobilityJournal of Common Market Studies 48 (4) (2010): 945965.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Atti parlamentari (1947) Assemblea costituente. Seduta del 18 dicembre 1947 .

  • Balibar, Étienne . “What we owe to the Sans-Papiers”. Eipcp (1996). Available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0313/balibar/en.html (last access, October 5, 2019).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Beneduce, Roberto . “Calais: mappe dell’ abbandono e della rivolta”. In M. Agier (ed). La Giungla di Calais. (Verona, Ombre Corte, 2018): 157166.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Butler, Judith . Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. (Harvard University Press, 2015).

  • Bigo, Didier . “International political sociology: rethinking the international through dynamics of power”. In Basaran, Tugba , Didier Bigo , Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet , and Rob BJ Walker , (eds). Political Sociology: Transversal Lines. (Routledge, 2016), 2448.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bigo, Didier , and Emma McCluskey . “What Is a paris Approach to (In) securitization? Political Anthropological Research for.” The Oxford Handbook of International Security (2018): 116132.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Birey, Tegiye , Celine, Cantat , Ewa, Maczynska and Eda Sevinin . Challenging the Political Across Borders: Migrants’ and Solidarity Struggles. (Budapest, CEU, 2019).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bouamama, Said . Dix ans de marche des Beurs – Chronique d’un mouvement avorté (LaDecouverte, 1994).

  • Davis, Angela. Y. (2016). Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement. Haymarket Books.

  • De Genova, Nicholas , (ed). The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. (Duke University Press, 2017).

  • De Genova, Nicholas . “The queer politics of migration: Reflections on “illegality” and incorrigibility.” Studies in social justice 4, no. 2 (2010): 101126.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Del Biaggio, Cristina . “On a fermé la montagne”. L’Alpe, Glénat – Musée Dauphinois, 2019, 4249.

  • Didi-Huberman, George . Peuples exposés, peuples figurants: l’oeil de l’histoire, 4. (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 2012).

  • Du Bois , William Edward Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. (1935). (The Free Press, 1998).

  • Foucault, Michel . Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (Vintage, 2012).

  • Foucault, Michel . “The Life of Infamous Men”, In Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (eds) Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, (Sydney: Feral Publication, 1979), 7691.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Foucault, Michel . “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”. In John Richardson & Brian Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 139164.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Gisti. Memoire des luttes de l’immigration en France. (Presses du Gisti, 2014) .

  • Hajjat, Abdlellali . “Retour sur la Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme”. Hommes et migrations, 1304, 2019: 151155.

  • Hardt, Michael , and Antonio Negri . Assembly. (Oxford University Press, 2017).

  • Isin, Engin . “Mobile peoples: Transversal configurations”. Social Inclusion, 6(1) (2018), 115123.

  • Isin, Engin Citizens without frontiers. (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2012).

  • Lecadet, Clara and Jean-Frederic London (eds.) Apres les camps. Traces, mémoires et mutations des camps de réfugiés, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Linebaugh, Peter , and Marcus Rediker . The many-headed hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Beacon Press, 2013.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Lorey, Isabell . State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso Books, 2015.

  • Mc Cluskey, Emma . (2019). From Righteousness to Far Right: An Anthropological Rethinking of Critical Security Studies (Vol. 2). McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • McNevin, Anne . (2019). Mobility and its discontents: Seeing beyond international space and progressive time. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space: 118. DOI: 2399654419871966.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mezzadra, Sandro . “Abolitionist Vistas of the Human. Border Struggles, Migration, and Freedom of Movement ”.Citizenship Studies (2020, forthcoming).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mezzadra, Sandro . “The gaze of autonomy: Capitalism, migration and social struggles”. In V. Squire (ed) The Contested Politics of Mobility. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010): 141162.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mezzadra, Sandro . “The Right to Escape.” Ephemera. 4(3) (2004), 267275.

  • Mohanty, Chandra Talpade . Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. (Duke University Press, 2003).

  • Papadopoulos, Dimitrios , Niamh Stephenson , and Vassilis Tsianos . Escape routes: Control and subversion in the 21st century. (Pluto Press, 2008).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Pinelli, Barbara . “Borders, politics and subjects. Introductory notes on refugee research in Europe.” Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa, 1, (2017), 524.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rediker, Marcus . “A motley crew for our times? Multiracial mobs, history from below and the memory of struggle”. An interview with Marcus Rediker, Radical Philosophy, (2020, forthcoming).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rediker., Marcus , Titas Chakraborty , and Matthias van Rossum , eds. A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850. Vol. 28. Univ of California Press, 2019.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rinauro, Sandro . Il cammino della speranza. L’ emigrazione degli italiani nel secondo dopoguerra. (Einaudi, 2009).

  • Sayad, Abdelmalek . “L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité. Les enfants illégitimes.” Lectures, Les rééditions (2006).a

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stierl, Maurice . Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe. (Routledge, 2018).

  • Stoler, Ann Laura . Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. (Princeton University Press, 2010).

  • Tazzioli, Martina . The Making of Migration. The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe’s Borders. (London: Sage, 2019).

  • Tazzioli, Martina . “Containment through mobility: migrants’ spatial disobediences and the reshaping of control through the hotspot system.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, 16 (2018): 27642779.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Tazzioli, Martina , and William Walters . “Migration, solidarity and the limits of Europe.” Global Discourse: An interdisciplinary journal of current affairs 9, no. 1 (2019): 175190.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Trimikliniotis, Nicos , Dimitris, Parsanoglou, D. and Vassilis Tsianos . Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City. (New York: Springer, 2014).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Van Baar, Huub . “Evictability and the biopolitical bordering of Europe.” Antipode (49), 1 (2017): 212230.

  • Walters, Walters and Barbara Luthi The politics of cramped space: dilemmas of action, containment and mobility. International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, 29(4) (2016), 359366.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Webber, Frances . “On the creation of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’.” Race & Class 60, no. 4 (2019): 7687.

1

Huub, Van Baar. “Evictability and the biopolitical bordering of Europe.” Antipode (49), 1 (2017): 212–230.

2

Roberto., Beneduce “Calais: mappe dell’ abbandono e della rivolta”. In M. Agier (ed). La Giungla di Calais. (Verona, Ombre Corte, 2018): 162. See also Roberta, Altin and Claudio, Minca. “Exopolis reloaded: fragmented landscapes and no man’s lands in a North-Eastern Italian border region”, Landscape Research, 42:4, (2017a): 385–399.

3

Martina, Tazzioli. “Containment through mobility: migrants’ spatial disobediences and the reshaping of control through the hotspot system.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, 16 (2018): 2764–2779.

4

Tegiye, Birey Celine, Cantat, Ewa, Maczynska and Eda Sevinin. Challenging the Political Across Borders: Migrants’ and Solidarity Struggles. (Budapest, ceu, 2019); Engin, Isin. Citizens without frontiers. (Bloomsbury Publishing usa, 2012); Maurice, Stierl. Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe. (Routledge, 2018).

5

But see Clara Lecadet and Jean-Frederic London (eds.) Apres les camps. Traces, mémoires et mutations des camps de réfugiés, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018).

6

Without nevertheless disregarding the asymmetries between migrants and citizens, in terms of legal status, power relations and class.

7

Abdelmalek. Sayad “L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité. Les enfants illégitimes.” (Lectures, Les rééditions 2006).

8

Judith, Butler. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. (Harvard University Press, 2015): 11.

9

Michel, Foucault. “The Life of Infamous Men”, In Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (eds) Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, (Sydney: Feral Publication, 1979): 79.

10

Michel, Foucault. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”. In John Richardson & Brian Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978): 148.

11

Didier Bigo and Emma McCluskey. “What Is a paris Approach to (In) securitization? Political Anthropological Research for.” The Oxford Handbook of International Security (2018): 116–132; Emma, Mc Cluskey. From Righteousness to Far Right: An Anthropological Rethinking of Critical Security Studies (McGill-Queen’s Press-mqup, 2019).

12

Anne, McNevin,(2019). Mobility and its discontents: Seeing beyond international space and progressive time. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space: 12.

13

Marcus, Rediker. “A motley crew for our times? Multiracial mobs, history from below and the memory of struggle”. An interview with Marcus Rediker, Radical Philosophy, (2020, forthcoming).

14

Angela, Y,. Davis, Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement. (Haymarket Books, 2016)

15

William Edward Burghardt. Dubois. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. (1935). (The Free Press, 1998): 184.

16

Michael, Hardt and Antonio Negri. Assembly. (Oxford University Press, 2017): xii.

17

Judith, Butler. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly: 8.

18

Ibid. 11.

19

Ibid. 70.

20

Ibid. 11.

21

Although Butler stresses that public space should not be taken for granted and it is rather the outcome of struggles through which public space is produced, claimed and reconfigured.

22

Isabell, Lorey. State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. Verso Books, 2015.

23

Peter, Linebaugh, and Marcus Rediker. The many-headed hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. (Beacon Press, 2013): 193.

24

Marcus Rediker, Titas Chakraborty, and Matthias van Rossum, eds. A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1600–1850. Vol. 28. Univ of California Press, 2019.

25

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. (Duke University Press, 2003): 7.

26

Martina, Tazzioli. The Making of Migration. The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe’s Borders. (London: Sage, 2019).

27

Ann Laura. Stoler. Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. (Princeton University Press, 2010): 7.

28

Sandro, Mezzadra. “The gaze of autonomy: Capitalism, migration and social struggles”. In V. Squire (ed) The Contested Politics of Mobility. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010): 141–162; Dimitrios, Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos. Escape routes: Control and subversion in the 21st century. (Pluto Press, 2008).

29

Sandro, Mezzadra. “The Right to Escape.” Ephemera. 4(3) (2004): 270.

30

Engin, Isin. “Mobile peoples: Transversal configurations”. Social Inclusion, 6(1) (2018), 115–123.

31

Sandro Mezzadra. “The gaze of autonomy”.

32

Sandro, Mezzadra. “Abolitionist Vistas of the Human. Border Struggles, Migration, and Freedom of Movement”. Citizenship Studies (2020, forthcoming).

33

Cristina, Del Biaggio,“On a fermé la montagne”. L’Alpe, Glénat – Musée Dauphinois, 2019: 42–49.

34

Roberta Altin and Claudio, Minca. “The ambivalent camp. Carceral Mobilities, Interrogating Movement”. In Incarceration, (2017b): 33.

35

Frances, Webber. “On the creation of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’.” Race & Class 60, no. 4 (2019): 76–87.

36

Some activities have been supporting migrants at the Alpine French-Italian borders by giving them maps of the area, as well as by drawing themselves maps that report the main risks and dangers migrants might encounter in specific locations along their route, and that trace the safe paths.

37

Interview with S., a citizen of Bardonecchia, November 28, 2019.

38

De Genova, Nicholas (ed). The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. (Duke University Press, 2017).

39

https://revuenunatak.noblogs.org : “Nous voulons effectuer des recherches pour fournir des documents sur les histoires de révoltes, de désertions passées et actuelles, individuelles et collectives, spécifiques à ces zones géographiques”.

40

In so doing, migrants’ presence is partly invisibilised – they are there, but people tend not to look at them.

41

Interview with C., a citizen of Bardonecchia and member of the Alpine Rescue section.

42

The Pathway of Hope (1950) is also the title of a famous movie by Pietro Germi that shows a group of Italians from Sicily who were crossing “illegally” to France on the Alps, with the help of some locals.

43

See Sandro Rinauro. Il cammino della speranza. L’ emigrazione degli italiani nel secondo dopoguerra. (Einaudi, 2009). Restrictions to Italian emigrations were enforced by the Italian government under Mussolini, in particular since 1926 and then with the 1930 law which aimed at hampering the flight of anti-fascists. In the aftermath of the war Italy and France signed many agreements between November 1945 and 1948 to regulate labour mobility to France through the National Office of Immigration (see for instance Atti Parlamentari, 1947).

44

Interview with Paolo, ex Head of Soccorso Alpino in Bardonecchia, December 16, 2019.

45

interview with the mayor of Bardonecchia, 23 October 2019.

48

De Genova, Nicholas. “The queer politics of migration: Reflections on “illegality” and incorrigibility.” Studies in social justice 4, no. 2 (2010): 101–126.

51

Étienne, Balibar. “What we owe to the Sans-Papiers”. Eipcp (1996). Available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/0313/balibar/en.html (last access, October 5, 2019).

52

These multiple resonances that the movement of the Gilets Noir remarks, are particularly telling of how labour struggles enable laying claims that transcend the racialised condition of “being a migrant”. This is also the main argument carried on by Aboubakar Soumahoro, a migrant unionist leader in Italy that pushes for organising a common platform between migrant workers, ploughmen and exploited Italian workers in order to prevent the ghettoisation of migrant struggles (Soumahoro, 2019).

53

Mogniss Abdallah, Mogniss Les sans-papier d’hier a auhourd’hui, pour une memoire collective de l immigration. 2003. Available at: http://1libertaire.free.fr/Mogniss23.html (last access January 3, 2020).

54

“Beur” in the French means “arab”.

55

Abdlellali, Hajaat. “Retour sur la Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme”. Hommes et migrations, 1304, 2019: 152.

56

Said, Bouamama, Dix ans de marche des Beurs – Chronique d’un mouvement avorté (LaDecouverte, 1994).

57

Gisti. Memoire des luttes de l’immigration en France. (Presses du Gisti, 2014).

58

Michel, Foucault. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (Vintage, 2012): 308.

59

Bridget, Anderson, “New directions in migration studies: towards methodological de-nationalism.” Comparative Migration Studies 7, no. 1 (2019): 1–13.

60

Didier, Bigo. “International political sociology: rethinking the international through dynamics of power”. In Basaran, Tugba, Didier Bigo, Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet, and Rob BJ Walker, (eds). Political Sociology: Transversal Lines. (Routledge, 2016): 32.

61

Engin, Isin. “Mobile peoples: Transversal configurations”.

62

Claudia, Aradau, Jef Huysmans, and Vicki Squire. “Acts of European citizenship: A political sociology of mobility.” jcms: Journal of Common Market Studies 48, no. 4 (2010): 945–965.

63

Angela, Y. Davis. Freedom is a constant struggle: xxi.

64

George, Didi-Huberman. Peuples exposés, peuples figurants: l’oeil de l’histoire, 4. (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 2012): 32.

65

Martina, Tazzioli and William Walters. “Migration, solidarity and the limits of Europe.” Global Discourse: An interdisciplinary journal of current affairs 9, no. 1 (2019): 175–190.

66

Barbara, Pinelli,“Borders, politics and subjects. Introductory notes on refugee research in Europe.” Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa, 1, (2017), 5–24.

67

Claudia, Aradau, “Performative politics and International Relations.” New Perspectives, 25(2) (2017): 7.

68

William, Walters. and Barbara Luthi “The politics of cramped space: dilemmas of action, containment and mobility. International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, 29(4) (2016), 359–366.

69

Nicos, Trimikliniotis, Dimitris, Parsanoglou, D. and Vassilis Tsianos. Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City. (New York: Springer, 2014).

Content Metrics

All Time Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 671 0 0
Full Text Views 519 213 16
PDF Views & Downloads 742 277 21