Transnationalism and Entrepreneurial Migrancy in Naples, Italy

Abstract

This article examines the conceptual limitations in the current literature about transnational migration, which tends to focus on forms of state control or the new ways offered by technological innovation for migrant subjects to maintain connections with their places of origin. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Naples, Italy, this article reconsiders how the concept of migrancy might force us to linger further over the actor's perspective in migration projects and see the fullness of possibilities available in migrant trajectories. I discuss migrant agency in the context of young male Bangladeshi street-vendors and West African day-labourers living and working in Naples and its immediate surroundings. What emerge from interviews and participant observation are imagined futures that disrupt the dominant narratives in the transnational literature as well as assumptions about settlement present among some Italian host institutions. This article, then, encourages researchers to reconsider the role of the imagination in theoretical treatments of transnationalism.

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