Encounters with the clandestino/a and the nomad: the emplaced and embodied constitution of non-citizenship

Taking the ‘encounter’ as an analytic, this paper will argue for an understanding of citizenship as an emergent condition that is emplaced and embodied, rather than as simply a collection of rights to be possessed or endowed. This is not to deny the importance of legal status to the ways in which one inhabits the city (and therefore the nation-state), but show how this status is modulated in the everyday to constitute a range of legitimately and illegitimately present non-citizen subjects. The nature of the encounter as a constitutive event in which particular bodies are deemed in- or out-of-place will be discussed relative to two imagined figures that have been used to represent outsiders that are deemed to be illegitimately present in Italy: the clandestino/a and the nomad. These figures have been invoked in legislation and in political and popular discourse. In this paper, they are also imagined to be encountered in the spaces of the city.