Available From UC Press

Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights.

Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Eleanor Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.
 

Eleanor Paynter is Assistant Professor of Italian, Migration, and Global Media Studies at the University of Oregon.
 

"This excellent book, while focused on the oppressive tentacles of what Eleanor Paynter calls the 'emergency apparatus,' navigates its way through the at times haunting accounts of survivors of the Mediterranean crossings, the forms of protest crafted in elegy to its victims, and the many literary and other artistic productions that document a rich and vibrant emergent cultural world often all but silenced in popular discourse. Paynter unearths the many symbols and tokens of a transformation of Italian society that many struggle to ignore: the fragments of shipwrecks, the ubiquitous detention centers, and the national commemoration of the loss of victims at sea that all signal a society caught in its own web of forgetting."—Donald Martin Carter, author of Navigating the African Diaspora: The Anthropology of Invisibility

"Exploring the multiple dimensions of danger that compose the transit of migrants to and in Italy, Paynter lays bare the workings of an emergency apparatus that perpetuates itself. But this passionate and timely book does something more than that. Mining memories and testimonies, it illuminates possibilities for a different future."—Sandro Mezzadra, coauthor of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (with Brett Neilson)

"Emergency in Transit brilliantly shows how emergency, as both a logic and an operation, ushers in a new age in Italy wherein virulent and violent forms of racism are given space to play out. This beautifully written book also holds space for the voices, texts, films, and sounds that serve as witness and testimony to this pernicious age. In so doing, Paynter expands the possibilities of agency for the many who are caught up in the churn of the emergency apparatus of migration."—Stephanie Malia Hom, University of California, Santa Barbara