Book Review: Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration In The Colonial Present by Eleanor Paynter  

Guest post by Janica Ezzeldien. Janica Ezzeldien is a Doctoral Researcher in Politics and International Relations at the University of Glasgow. In her research, she focuses on migration, race, and visuality, examining potential forms of affective experiences generated by news television. She can be found on X: @JanicaEzz and reached at Janica.ezzeldien@glasgow.ac.uk.  

Review of: Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration In The Colonial Present by Eleanor Paynter (University of California Press, 2024) 

In her book, Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present, Eleanor Paynter confronts the perpetuation of an endless 'emergenza immigrazione' (immigration emergency), an imperial entanglement of discourses, policies, and practices "projected onto the bodies and lives of migrants" (12) and obscuring migrant voices and experiences, whilst hyper-visibilising others (144-6). Her reading of the Afro-European borderzone as a site of colonial relations, racialised anti-immigrant violence, and migrant agency follows a critical refugee studies approach, demonstrating how Mediterranean mobilities shape space through positing a reengagement with collective memory, colonial history and notions of belonging (4-5, 13). Paynter grounds her critique of how present Afro-European Mediterranean migration is, as Dionne Brand  highlights, "washed in this emergency" (6) in a nuanced spectrum of theorisations. From Michel Foucault’s notion of dispositif to Giorgio Agamben's account on the State of Exception to Sara Ahmed's understanding of "coloniality", she reflects on how the histories of colonialism link to "contemporary modes of encounter" (11). Denoting the continuation contemporary mobilities exemplify, Paynter challenges the reproduction of an "endless, ahistorical now" across geographies (2-3).  

Paynter follows Janet Roitman and James Baldwin's observations that emergency "raises the dilemma of the very possibility of bearing witness, or of representation" (4). She brings her exploration of emergency into conversation with this critical scholarship on witnessing, to rethink emergency as sites of contested witnessing that determines "the possibilities for people in transit to bear witness to their experiences on their own terms" (4). Looking at how people narrate, mediate, and navigate experiences of "emergency" through testimonies via interviews, film, writing, and visual art, the book introduces an original methodological approach of "testimony as method". This allowed Paynter to explain forms of witnessing by moving between these diverse forms of testimonies, and combining oral history interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in migrant reception centers, camps, and public spaces across the four Italian regions (4, 23-8, 207). 

Examining the progression of the immigration emergency across time and space, the book traces the journeys of African migrants from maritime crossings to the enduring condition of liminality in which they remain confined. Articulating a comprehensive explanation of the paradoxes of in-betweenness, proximity and (in)visibility, Part I focuses on the instant effects of the emergency apparatus, the Mediterranean crossings, and Italy’s official accoglienza (reception) system alongside the encampments in Rome keeping individuals in limbo. Here she shows how necropolitical practices in Afro-European borderzones and representations of migrant arrivals as sudden and unforeseeable forms part of how the apparatus reproduces a fixation on the present, constituting critical sites of struggle and agency and "spaces constructed through multiple acts of witnessing" (27).   

Shifting focus to consider the enduring impact of emergency imaginaries on the lives of migrants across temporalities and spaces, distant from the spectacle of arrivals (115-167), Paynter presents an empirically diverse elaboration of realities produced through the "Right to Remain", where she deepens the examined link between historical entanglements and present lives of migrants shaped by the imposed crisis narratives of the emergency apparatus. She uses "Operation Safe Beaches" as an example of anti-immigration policies aimed at "liberating" Italian spaces from the "invasion" of migrant vendors (115-6) as an icon of foreignness, inhibiting the connection between precariousness, mobility, and labour. The observation leads her to argue that this precariousness is dehumanising, removing the human from the body, space and history. Paynter demonstrates this point by elaborating how the emergency apparatus is inherently connected to the invisibilisation of migrants’ economic role (28), as the movements of migrants […] disrupt whitewashed, heteronormative notions of identity and citizenship" (141). Illustrating how "bearers of crisis" is marked onto some bodies, casting certain newcomers as "embodying dominant notions of […] non-belonging," her work with vendors in the Tuscany region resituates migrant street vendors as witnesses, showing "how testimony outside of dominant practices of consumption operate” (116-8).  

Extending her study to Italy’s housing crisis, she sheds light on "acts of citizenship that emerge through acts of witnessing" (143), exemplified by the guided narrations performed by migrant workers during sound-walking tours produced at the centro sociale Città dell’Utopia. Therein, Paynter shows how through the "refugeeization of labour" the emergency apparatus enables and relies on the maintenance of a "deportable, exploitable and […] invisibilised workforce" (163-73). The book’s critical engagement with the caporalato system of labour exploitation strongly resonates with other precarious labour constellations in the North African region. The book could be brought into conversation with works such as Leila Tayeb’s reflection on whiteness and racialised enslavement in North Africa, Afifa Ltifi’s article on (anti)blackness in Tunisia, or Ghassan Hage’s work on colonial whiteness and racialised bodies. By doing so, there could be an avenue for future investigation that broadens Paynter’s examination of Mediterranean exploitation to develop an account of structural nuances underwriting migration, labour dynamics, and racism across regions. With reference to Massimo Sestini’s famous photograph, she closes by inviting the reader to consider witnessing not necessarily as transformative but to ask, "who is witnessing whom?" rethinking the work of witnessing itself (194-7). 

Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present gives a timely, self-reflective, and remarkably critical account on the "immigration emergency". In this empirically-diverse work, Paynter challenges dominant framings through a historicising and re-theorising perspective that neatly links critical refugee studies with visual politics, memory studies, literature on witnessing and biopolitics to show the re-inscription of coloniality. By bringing together this wide diversity of theories, Paynter is able to open interdisciplinary space for further discussion beyond these areas. This is a testimony to the development of alternative visions of mobility and belonging, and thus a groundbreaking new resource for researchers, authors, activists, and anyone interested in how contemporary migration and the borderscapes are reproduced via this emergencification of migration (4).  

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