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Notes Introduction The epigraph is drawn from the famous essay by Bernard S. Cohn,“History and Anthropology: The State of Play” (1990, 21). Cohn was fond of saying that in anthropology we needed to“create a new sociology,”to in a sense upend our routine ways of doing things and start all over again, considering what in anthropology was useful and what needed a serious rethinking or reconceptualization. I hope this book reflects and captures some of the spirit of his great vision and his dedication to scholarship, filtered through my experiences in the field. 1. Many anthropologists have considered the legacy of race, nationalism, and gender in postslavery and postcolonial societies and the contested terrain in these societies that results from this legacy.In this book I follow these insights for Europe (see Carnegie 2002; Williams 1991a; Malkki 1995). 2. Relatives of the young men now comb the coast trying to discourage other Senegalese from making the dangerous journey. They are joined by political officials , local women’s organizations, and others who join in the fight to save a generation .On the waterways of the Mediterranean,on the islands of its interior,and in the territories of nation-states that jut out into its heart, small cemeteries have been erected under the modest solemnity of everyday practice. Many are tended by shipmates who survived the crossing, the undocumented, and even the local residents of such areas who have been drawn into the misfortune of strangers. 3. Eastern European migrants tend to return to their countries of origin when economic conditions improve and therefore present only a temporary solution to labor shortages.Their presence in the labor market,however,helps to degrade labor conditions for non-European migrants, because non-European’s informal employment impacts their right to stay but effects no change in European workers’ residence status. Other European Union residents can work in the informal sector and legally stay in the country once the job comes to an 272 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION end, while migrants from outside the European Union face deportation once their job disappears. 4. Today, work is often subcontracted out to firms that hire migrant workers and others on limited or indeterminate term contracts. In the past, many contract jobs, which are increasingly rare today, afforded workers relative job security and benefits. 5. In medium and large firms today it is common for benefits to be held up in litigation between trade unions and employers over the details of agreements made in the past. Both Italian and migrant workers are held in limbo while they await final determinations. In the case of Babacar’s back wages the union won, but the final allocation of the settlement has yet to take place. 6. Immigration legislation tied to worker status in a number of countries, such as Spain and Italy, confuses the distinction between, for example, legal and undocumented workers. As Kitty Calavita and Liliana Suárez-Navaz have pointed out, “few real distinctions exist between the two” since “legal status is always a fragile state and almost inevitably gives way to periods of illegality” (2003, 116). In periods of economic decline, for instance, many of the Senegalese I work with in Italy fall from official to unofficial work, making them vulnerable to a denial of permission to stay in the country because they cannot claim their off-the-books income. 7. The L Word, a television series produced and written by Ilene Chaiken for the cable television network Showtime, is a good example of treatment of a population previously subjected to a kind of invisibility. The title of the show invokes this social invisibility and entreats the viewer to discover the world of Los Angeles women in the hip, young center of the world of cinema pursuing their lives and loves and exploring the dimensions of gay and straight experiences . This well-written drama first aired on January 18, 2004 and received one of the fastest green lights for its second season of any show in the network’s history . In some measure, the drama has an aura of “newness” due in part to the invisibility of the individuals’ lives in the community it explores. 8. The late cultural critic and philosopher Madan Sarup (1930–1993) once wrote of the classical boundary-maintaining social mechanism in the work of Emile Durkheim: the deviant suggesting that we might replace him with the contemporary migrant (Sarup 1996, 12). In Durkheim...

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