»The Long Line They Must Make in the Night«: Performative Realism in the Italian State’s Relations with Outsiders

This article provides a first-hand account of waiting in line to deliver migration documents at an office of the police department known as the Questura in Italy, in 2006. The spectacle of migrants suffering in line day after day, subjected to threats from police and the jostling, complaints and aggression of others in line, provided a stage for the performative realism of the widescale exclusion, criminalization and scapegoating of migrants in Italy at the time. Moreover, migrants’ relations to the state and Italians’ relations to migrants were embodied and felt through the line, marked on bodies and in memories as visceral marginalization.