Fiori Sara Berhane

Prisoners of Our Dreams: Eritrean Diaspora Politics in ‘Red’ Italy is a multi-sited ethnography of refugee political activism situated in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy—home of the historic left. Drawing on over 20 months of fieldwork, the manuscript engages in a diachronic historical analysis of both transformations in Eritrean state power and Italy’s migration regimes from the 1970s to the present. By considering two distinct historical conjunctures—the hegemony of the Italian Communist Party during the 1970s and Italy’s recent descent as a laboratory for the radical right—I demonstrate that Eritrean migrations to Italy have been imbricated in larger questions over the meaning of the colonial past, the transformation from state socialism to neoliberalism globally, and racial nationalism. Examining archival documents and engaging in an activist ethnographic practice with Eritrean dissidents, I proffer a concept of “disjunctive memory work” to describe activist memory practices that call attention to and rework colonial and postcolonial relations that have been severed from public memory for Eritreans and Italians alike. Emphasizing the importance of historical memory to my interlocutors, this book advances a vantage point to locate migrant political agency in a context of deep disincorporation and “exploitative” inclusion (Pero 2007).