Sandro MEZZADRA (Italy) 

Title of Speech: Bringing Capital Back In: A Materialist Turn in Postcolonial Studies?

Sandro Mezzadra (1963) works as Associate Professor of “History of Political Thought” at the Department of Politics, Institutions, History of the University of Bologna, where he teaches “Colonial and Postcolonial Studies” and “Frontiers of Citizenship”. He has been “eminent research fellow” at the Centre for Cultural Research of the University of Western Sydney, Australia (2006-2008).

His research work has focused on the classical modern European political philosophy (especially on Hobbes, Spinoza and Marx), on the history of political, social, and legal sciences in Germany between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth centuries (especially on the constitutional debates in the years of the Weimar Republic) and on several issues at stake in the development of contemporary political theory. 

In recent years his work has particularly centered on the relations between globalization, migration and citizenship. Considering migration as a “social movement” (within the framework of the so called theory of “autonomy of migration”, which he contributed to develop within a wide network of researchers and activists based in different European countries) he has tried to analyze migration itself from the point of view of migrants’ practices of citizenship. The general hypothesis that these practices challenge the institutional borders of citizenship both at the national and at the European level has been developed in a series of historical and theoretical publications, where the general relevance of the issue of borders for the discussion of citizenship is underscored. As far as European citizenship is concerned, this approach has led on the one hand to highlight a tendency to the reproduction of border, with its constitutive violence, within the space of European citizenship, on the other hand to stress the chance to look at Europe from its borders, considered as contact zones, where new forms of political belonging are continuously born. In his research, Sandro Mezzadra further posits his interest for migration within a discussion of the transformations of labour (especially contributing to the ongoing “post-workerist” discussion on the issue of “multitude”) and within a dialogue with the developments of postcolonial theory, which he contributed to introduce into the Italian and Spanish intellectual discussion.

 Sandro Mezzadra is currently involved in two major research projects: the first has to do with the work and biography of W.E.B. Du Bois within the development of African-American culture and political thought (he is currently editing a reader of Du Bois, to be delivered to the publisher il Mulino by the end of June 2009). The second has to do with the transformations and multiplication of borders in the global age: a book project by Sandro Mezzadra and his friend and colleague Brett Neilson (Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor) has been presented last February to Duke University Press).