"States of Grace "was first published in 1997. Minnesota Archive
Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books
once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the
original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Leaving their depleted fields for better prospects, Senegalese
immigrants have made their way to Italy in significant numbers.
What this migration means, in the context of both the migratory
traditions and conditions of Africa and the history and future of
the European nation-state, is the subject of this timely and
ambitious book.
Focusing on Turin, the northern Italian point of entry for so
many Senegalese, States of Grace chronicles the arrival and
formation of a transnational African Islamic community in a largely
Catholic Western European country, one that did not have immigrant
legislation until 1991. With no colonial relation to Italy, the
Senegalese represent the vanguard of population movements expanding
outside of the arch of former colonial powers.
Donald Martin Carter locates the Senegalese migration in the
context of past African internal and international migration and of
present crises in West African agriculture. He also shows how the
Senegalese migration, constituting a "phenomenon" and catalyzing
new immigration restrictions among European states, calls into
question the European interstate system, the future of the
nation-state, and the nature of its relationship with non-European
states.
Throughout Europe, protectionist immigration policies are often
crafted in chauvinist and racist tones in which "migrants" is a
euphemism for blacks, Arabs, and Asians. States of Grace uses
Senegalese migration to demonstrate that racial conceptions are
crucial to understanding the classifications of non-national
"outside" and internal "other." The book is a bracing encounter
with the ever-increasing cultural and ethnic heterogeneity that is
the new and pressing reality of European society.
Donald Martin Carter is visiting assistant professor of
anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
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