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INTRODUCTION The Anthropology of Invisibility No matter where on the current spectrum ...anthropologists locate themselves,they have to find the“out there”by entering the land of anthropological“dreaming,”the field. —BERNARD COHN, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY: THE STATE OF PLAY Journeys are an active engagement with the world,and are at the very least transformative and irreversible. Journeys have a sense of agency that we must keep alive through our explorations. Let me paraphrase the beginning of an old tale. It is a song of diaspora and concerns the people of the African diaspora and the twists and turns that have time and again driven people off course, transformed by the struggle to regain their way and dignity, with renewed strength and vision for the journey ahead. I invoke the spirit of the Odyssey because it is deeply rooted in the anthropological imagination—the structure of our ethnographic encounters so closely follows the notion of the journey that our discourse is marked by the journey’s sequence.My work is also influenced by my location inWestern Europe on the rim of the Mediterranean, the porous host to the comings and goings of people from every corner of the world. I use the idea of navigation to focus on the agency and courage of those who must find their way in the aftermath of displacement.Some journeys are never completed, while others lead to unexpected destinations and leave their trace in the experiences of the traveler. I consider the nature and meaning of contemporary black subjectivity and presence through the notion of “invisibility.” The availability of invisibility often operates in tandem with ambiguous state practice or inaction, and there is a tendency to blame the individual migrant who clings to a makeshift boat and not the system of illicit labor 2 INTRODUCTION regimes, rigid immigration policies, and failed economic conditions that make such a voyage seem one of the only viable options for survival. In contemporary Europe, immigration commands center stage as traditional notions of national and cultural belonging are challenged by the reconfiguration of notions of sovereignty, territory, and community in the making of the European Union. The notion of the coming of this postnational world raises illuminating dilemmas concerning European relations with others, especially postcolonial Africa (Carnegie 2002; Williams 1991a; Malkki 1995).1 In the context of anxiety over the forms of belonging for members of the African diaspora, as race, gender, and historical legacy render blackness a marker of outsider status,it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate the waters of belonging. On a very hot Turin summer evening in 2006, just minutes from the site of one the many Olympic villages (now a kind of tourist beacon) on the outskirts of the city, my friend Babacar—who has traveled to his homeland only a handful of times over the last ten years—turns to me and, after a brief outburst in Wolof to his sister and brother-in-law in the next room, shifts to Italian. “Now everyone is dancing,” he says. For the better part of an hour we have been watching an endless stream of music videos on Senegalese television, an experience made possible in part by the new world of African mobility and underscored by the Senegalese diasporic spectatorship enabled by new satellite links to Europe that connect the diaspora directly with the nightly parade of television programming back home. In one of the videos, the momentary flash of a multicolored traditional fishing boat or pirogue brightens the screen and unleashes another kind of response—an unexpected (for me) sadness. Babacar’s comment on dancing is a not-so-veiled reference to the lack of opportunity for young people back home “who look around themselves in their villages” and, finding no way to contribute to the lives of their families, then look out to sea.Young people increasingly comb the shores south of Dakar seeking out former fishermen that might captain a tiny wooden canoe with precious little hope of ever making European landfall . This is not just folklore of the diaspora, as earlier that year in Thiaroye , a poor suburb of Dakar that is infamous as the site of a massacre of Senegalese soldiers by French troops in 1944, one of the countries worst navel accidents occurred, taking the lives of eighty-one young people from the village attempting to reach Europe in a converted fishing boat.2 The migration is inspired by a kind of perfect global storm. In European...

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