Working through ambivalence, seeking relevance through home-making: the effects of asylum policies and structural racism

This essay engages Paolo Boccagni's Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance. An ethnography of men housed in temporary reception centers in Italy, Boccagni reveals how asylum policies shape the practices, emotions and routines through which residents attempt to “undo nothingness.” Boccagni's main intervention is theorizing waiting as a condition of ambivalence through which asylum-seekers negotiate relevance and meaning in everyday life. While highlighting the book's strengths, I discuss the more implicit treatment of race and systemic racism, suggesting that the latter operates in conjunction with asylum policy to shape asylum seekers' ambivalence, home-making practices and future migration trajectories. I argue that Boccagni's work is a major contribution to the literature on asylum and waiting as state governance, and is central to future research on the long-lasting condition of ambivalence in migration and settlement processes.