Through the concepts of the 'coloniality of asylum' and 'solidarity as method', this book links the question of the state to the one of civil society; in so doing, it questions the idea of 'autonomous politics', showing how both refugee mobility and solidarity are intimately marked by the coloniality of asylum, in its multiple ramifications of objectification, racialisation and victimisation. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, The Coloniality of Asylum bridges border studies with decolonial theory and the anthropology of the state, and accounts for the mutual production of 'refugees' and 'Europe'. It shows how Europe politically, legally and socially produces refugees while, in turn, through their border struggles and autonomous movements, refugees produce the space of Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hamburg in the wake of the 2015 'long summer of migration', the book offers a polyphonic account, moving between the standpoints of different subjects and wrestling with questions of protection, freedom, autonomy, solidarity and subjectivity.
Fiorenza Picozza is a researcher and activist who has been involved in refugee solidarity in different European locations for about a decade. She holds a PhD in Geography from King's College London.
Introduction Chapter 1. The Coloniality of Asylum: 'Race', 'Refugeeness' and 'Europeanness' Chapter 2. Solidarity as Method: On the Intractable Coloniality of Asylum Ethnographies Chapter 3. The Blackmail of the Crisis: Volunteering with Refugees in Transit and the Politics of 'Civil Society' Chapter 4. Here to Stay: Autonomous Movements Across Europe between Incorrigibility and Refugification Chapter 5. The Battleground of Asylum: Navigation, Co-optation and Sabotage Chapter 6. Thresholds of Asylum: 'Refugeeness', Subjectivity and the Resistance to the 'Coloniality of Being' Chapter 7. Refugees Welcome? The Production of Whiteness within Visual, Moral and Social Economies of Solidarity Conclusion: Consuming the Pain of Refugees References About the Author
In The Coloniality of Asylum, Fiorenza Picozza offers a new ethnographic study of autonomous border struggles in Hamburg, Germany, looking at how 'the coloniality of asylum' not only permeates the European border regime, but can also shape the various solidarity initiatives that seek to contest and trangress it. With the aim of contributing to 'an anticolonial political imagination that can sustain daily struggles against the asylum regime', this book is a politically committed, empirically and theoretically rich account that raises the question of who exactly is the subject of refugee solidarity in Europe. * LSE Review of Books *
