The futures of post-displacement

Abstract

The rich set of articles collected here and edited by Emma Bond and Stavroula Pipyrou raise provocative questions about post-displacement generally and post-displacement futures in Italy specifically. In proposing the concept of post-displacement, Bond and Pipyrou highlight the deep and entangled histories of migration and colonialism that inform present day experiences of and contests over migration in Italy. At the same time, in their use of the prefix ‘post’, they shift attention to future oriented visions, hopes, potentialities, and anxieties. In particular, they focus on ‘the gaps, intervals, pauses and delays between hope and disillusionment that characterize displacement, because it is in this gap that speculation resides’. This move underscores the contingencies of historical processes and disrupts easy linear narratives, despite the ways that the ‘post’ tag conventionally stands for what comes after in a chronological sequence. In a now distant 1992, Anne McClintock cautioned scholars about the ‘almost ritualistic ubiquity of “post” words in current culture’, noting how the ‘term post-colonial . . . is haunted by the very figure of linear “development” that it sets out to dismantle’ (McClintock 1995, 10). As the articles reveal, the editors and authors reference multiple meanings and registers of ‘post’ displacement. To be sure, in some instances post here does signal something that follows another state or period, as with Giuliana Sanò and Francesco Zanotelli’s exploration of migrant experiences after their reception within the bureaucratic machinery of the Italian/E.U. mobility regimes. Yet Sanò and Zanotelli do not restrict their meaning to mere posteriority, exploring the multiple temporalities and spatialities (or im-mobilities, as opposed to mere immobilities) that characterize migrants’ experiences beyond institutional reception centres. This conjoins notions of after and beyond, time and space, as well as North and South, to reread the experiences of migrants like the young Malian man Djon interviewed by Sanò. Whereas in the eyes of anti-immigrant populists Djon might appear to be ‘doing nothing’ to improve his living conditions and opportunities, Sanò and Zanotelli consider Djon’s non-action as ‘a tactic . . . . . . the capability of Djon to practice his future while standing still’. This reminds us that waiting does not JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 2023, VOL. 28, NO. 4, 495–502 https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2023.2202975