Abstract
Undoing Nothing. Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance by Paolo Boccagni is a significant and timely ethnography that provides remarkable insights into how young male asylum seekers from West Africa negotiate their existence in a reception center in Northern Italy, a context of systemic irrelevance. The fieldwork for the book was conducted between 2018 and 2022; its findings are relevant to anthropologists, sociologists, and human geographers, and a rich source for social workers, practitioners, and those interested in learning about the conditions and consequences of life in asylum reception.
Undoing Nothing can be contextualized in migration research with regard to three different trends. First, it is part of the rise of qualitative and ethnographic work on (forced) migration in European migration research since the 2010s. Second, it follows what some have described as “local turns” (Muhammad 2023) in migration research, in which researchers seek to understand the complexity of migration by examining specific contexts, contrary to the growing trend toward multi-sited ethnography in this field. Third, while classic sociological and anthropological theories, such as structuralism or symbolic interactionism, have influenced the rationale behind this ethnography, Boccagni provides an original and captivating emic focus on the “nothing” of people who live at the margins of relevance. He pushes thinking with binaries, like inside/outside, present/absent, home/non-home, to its limits, and forces us to acknowledge the contradictions and complexity between migration as an endeavor of becoming, and institutional provision and restriction.
The book comprises an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter 1 presents the broader background of forced migration, EU and Italian policies, and migration as a transition to adulthood. Here, the ethnographer details his initial encounters with “nothing,” capturing his interlocutors’ feelings of being stuck, of irrelevance, and of the struggle for significance. Chapter 2 describes the reception center, highlighting its opacity as a social and material site, and its inhabitants’ navigation of waithood, balancing forced proximity with social isolation. The challenges of researching marginalized communities are also addressed here. Chapter 3 explores belonging and personal affiliation, discussing the complexities of being positioned both inside and outside institutional frameworks and societies, and the body as an arena of self-actualization and racialization. Chapter 4 examines the consequences of physical and existential stillness, reflecting on the impact of prolonged exposure to “nothing” implicit in the (im-)possibilities of moving forward. Chapter 5 delves into absence and presence, illustrating how different pasts haunt individuals and need to be kept at bay, while personal objects are associated with future prospects. Chapters 4 and 5, in my opinion, contribute most to understanding “nothing” and how it can(not) be undone. Chapter 6 discusses the moral categories of “dirty” and “clean” as part of a “moral battlefield” (p. 129), showcasing the residents’ resistance through self-care and spatial neglect amid staff-imposed orders. Chapter 7 addresses understandings of home as a negotiation of belonging and a matter of vision. The Conclusion relates residents’ struggles and the prolonged impacts of life in the reception center, a peripheral stage of irrelevance of the Italian asylum regime, to the millions of asylum seekers in comparable conditions worldwide.
What makes this book so compelling is the precision and consistency of its ethnographic focus, which remains closely tied to the people, things, and material infrastructures facing neglect. Boccagni gives dignity to his young, racialized interlocutors, reflects on their stories, thoughts and practices, and relates them to the larger societal conditions that constitute the mechanisms of the production of nothingness and its consequences. Moreover, Boccagni provides a refreshingly unvarnished reflection on his role as a researcher and on the benefits, as well as the power asymmetries and pitfalls, that his interlocutors address repeatedly.
While Undoing Nothing is written as an intellectually ambitious yet accessible ethnography, its book structure is theory-oriented, which contrasts with its immersive approach. This means the author must prune and readdress his empirically rich accounts according to categories (“in and out” in Chapters 2, 3 and 4; “the future” in Chapters 4 and 7, etc.). Given the complexity of the material, a structure centered on ethnographic narration rather than on conceptual binaries would have helped me orient myself better as a reader of this monograph, which does not aim to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework. Also, the main approach to “nothing” could be more clearly framed.
Nevertheless, through his rigorous long-term ethnography, Boccagni delivers on his aim of offering an alternative to common perspectives on (forced) migration and asylum reception, which tend to reproduce problematic binaries. While one can discuss the applicability of a mono-local research approach to other migration contexts, he compels us to consider the ambivalence of his interlocutors, who are both inside and outside, hyper-visible through racialization and invisible as inhabitants of the center, doomed to do nothing, yet having made it to Europe with purpose and a vision.
Undoing Nothing does not propose practical or political solution approaches to tackle the dilemmas it addresses. Rather, the book sustains throughout the unsettling tension of existential negation in asylum reception and the struggles of those who seek asylum for relevance. Therein lies the core of Boccagni's humanistic endeavor. It is up to us to challenge the dehumanization of others, regardless of whether it is exhibited in the bluster of racist policies and discourse or the disregarded backstages of the asylum regime.