Undoing Nothing

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What does everyday life look like for young men who flee to Europe, survive, and are then assigned temporary housing? Hypersurveillance or parallel normality, irrelevance or even nothingness? Based on a four-year ethnography, Undoing Nothing recounts the untold story of Italian asylum seekers' struggles to produce relevance-that is, to carve out meaning, control, and direction from their legal and existential liminality. Their ways of inhabiting space and time rest on a deeply ambivalent position: together and alone, inside and outside, absent and present. They dwell as racialized bodies in the center while their selves inhabit a suspended trans-local space of moral economies, nightmares, and furtive dreams. This book illuminates a distinctly modern form of purgatory, offering both a perceptive critique of state responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a demographic rarely afforded narrative depth and grace.