Observing the law. Racism in the video production-circulation of Nigerian asylum seekers in Italy

Abstract

The article aims to reflect upon the political dimension of affects and moral values, which take shape and circulate from the daily experience of racism. Going through the author’s past work experience in refugees’ reception centres, reflections are based on an anthropological analysis of videos that were produced and shared by Nigerian asylum seekers between 2017 and 2018. At the intersection of anthropology of migrations and ethnography of social media, the article explores the subjectivation processes at stake in the practices of racization and racism that affect migrants in their daily life in Italy. Beside the “community of affects”, which the embodied experience of racism engenders, a moral economy of legality seems to bring together the securitarian logics against the migrants and the moral discourses produced by them. The analysis of video circulation in the Nigerian diaspora, however, shows how these tensions give rise to a multiplicity of voices rather than a univocal political subjectivity, simultaneously revealing the potentialities and risks that it can comprise.