In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 NAVIGATING DIASPORA THE PRECARIOUS DEPTHS OF THE ITALIAN IMMIGRATION CRISIS DONALD CARTER Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they still sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. —ZORA NEALE HURSTON, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD The immigration crisis commands center stage in Europe as reconfigured notions of sovereignty, territory, and community challenge traditional concepts of national and cultural belonging. The advent of this post-national world raises illuminating dilemmas concerning European relations with other nations, especially those from postcolonial Africa (Carnegie 2002; Williams 1991; Malkki 1995).1 In this context of great social and cultural anxiety, different forms of belonging become complicated for members of the African diaspora, as race, gender, and historical legacy render blackness a visible marker of outsider status and as it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate the waters of belonging. This essay explores the new contours of closure in the emergent European Union and the symbolic role of the outsider in the process of reconfiguring ideas of belonging. On a very hot Turin summer’s evening in 2006, just minutes from the site of one of 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, turned to me and, after a brief outburst in Wolof to his sister and brother-in-law in the next room, shifted into 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. This experience is made possible in part by the new world of African mobility, underscored by Senegalese Donald Carter 60 diasporic spectatorship and enabled by satellite links to Europe connecting the diaspora 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 life of their families, look out to sea. Increasingly, young people comb the shores south of Dakar seeking out former fishermen who might captain a tiny wooden canoe with precious little hope of ever making European landfall. This is not just the folklore of the diaspora, as earlier that year in Thiaroye, a poor suburb of Dakar (infamous as the site of a massacre of Senegalese soldiers by French troops in 1944), one of the country’s worst naval accidents occurred, taking the lives of eighty-one young people from the village who were attempting to reach Europe in a converted fishing boat.2 The migration is inspired by a kind of “perfect global storm” in European countries like Italy, where a quiet search has been going on for some time to continually replenish a declining and increasingly aging labor force. In addition, Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. Despite official denials, Europe will be dependent on migrant labor for years to come.3 Across the satellite channels, having consolidated the direct window into Senegalese experience, more and more programs referred in one way or another to the exodus of a new generation and reflected back a dimension of its exasperation. It was literally what everyone was talking about from the local news reports to the sports commentators at popular wrestling matches. At some point all seemed preoccupied with the boats. Babacar ’s sister calls out from the other room, “Many of them leave but where do they go—their families don’t hear from them . . . their families don’t hear from them.” And Babacar picks up the theme: “What has happened to all of these people?” he asks. “We know that they have left but then no one has heard from them again. Many . . . many of them and where have they gone? How can you travel to France in this?” he says, pointing at the passing of a tiny multicolored pirogue. “They must be somewhere but their families never hear from them again—dead,” he says in...

Share