Postcolonial Citizenships and the “Refugeeization” of the Workforce. Migrant Agricultural Labor in the Italian Mezzogiorno

Postcolonial Mellino 2013; Mezzadra and Ricciardi 2013). Miguel Mellino, for example, has adopted the category of postcolonial citizenships in place of terms more familiar in mainstream debates, such as new or multicultural citizenships, in order to underline the “material” and “radically conflicting” grounds upon which multiple citizenships are necessarily constituted (Mellino 2013, 63). Within this perspective, migration does not represent an external phenomenon that encroaches upon the prefixed, political, legal, and symbolic boundaries of citizenship, but is rather one of its inner constituent elements. [72]1. The translations of non-English texts are ours when not stated otherwise. This chapter concentrates on sub-Saharan migrant laborers employed in southern Italian agriculture in order to examine how migration and citizenship have been reshaped by broader economic, political, and institutional changes in the Euro-Mediterranean region. While this chapter is the product of a collective effort, the Introduction and first section (“Representing the Excess”) are written by Nick Dines, and sections two and three (“Governing the Extraordinary” and “Beyond the Spectacularization of Border Italian South (Schneider 1998; Dines 2012) as well as on critical border theory (Rigo 2007; Squire 2011; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013), both of which are characterized by a “postcolonial sensibility” in how they scrutinize the epistemological premises upon which ideas about the South and borders have been traditionally based....