The Location of Truth: Bodies and Voices in the Italian Asylum Procedure

Abstract

This article analyzes the role increasingly played by oral testimony in asylum procedures in the years 2011–2013, when the “Arab spring” and the war on Libya caused a sudden increase in the number of migrants entering Italy, as well as a peak in rejections. Drawing from ethnographic cases, I suggest that in Italy this shift was based on assumptions about the scientific objectivity and neutrality of interviewing and translation techniques. I argue that such assumptions fall apart under scrutiny by revealing all assessment techniques (both of written evidence and oral testimony) as spaces of contestation. Furthermore, I suggest that they conceal the sharp hardening of European asylum politics under supposedly neutral technicalities. At times of a perceived “refugee crisis,” the mere assessment of the oral narrative allowed for easier and speedier rejections.

The craft of translation: documentary practices within immigration advocacy in the United States

“…Translation is also intrinsically collective through the complex identity that document translators assume. In that translations reproduce text from original documents (Sorgoni, 2019), translators express their own subject positions by subsuming their identities to those of original authors. Rebecca Tipton's comment about oral interpretation is also apt for those who translate documents: “The interpreter, in effect, represents the ‘Janus face’ of authenticity; in providing the voice of the ‘other’ they embody an inauthentic voice, but at the same time, they are positioned within the encounter as the impartial agent and hence representative of the ‘authentic voice of the other’ or voice of ‘truth’” (2008, 12).…”

Exposing the private, engaging in the public. Asylum seekers, intimate publics and normative performances of public participation

“…As several studies highlighted, eliciting a history of violence in the context of asylum involves profound asymmetries of power, as well as the requirement to comply with rigid – and often implicit – criteria of credibility and coherence (Blommaert, 2009; Coutin, 2001). Furthermore, in a context of increasing asylum applications in Europe and loss of credit of the concept of asylum itself (Sorgoni, 2019), private life details need to be closely scrutinised in order to retrace potential contradictions and inconsistencies. As a result, the alleged victim easily becomes a suspect, as the public hearing “is oriented towards the search for errors or contradictions, which could reveal the bad faith of the applicant” (Fassin, 2013: 18).…”

“…In the absence of material evidence to substantiate the truthfulness of an asylum claim, a growing role is played by private life details and appropriate “images of victimhood” (Cabot, 2013). In a historical period in which suspicion and rejection have become the predominant attitudes on asylum in wealthy countries (Bohmer and Schuman, 2007; Fassin, 2013), adjudication processes rely extensively on a close scrutiny of asylum seekers’ intimate lives (Kobelinsky, 2015) and personal narratives (Sorgoni, 2019).…”

“…Most of the insights on meta-pragmatical issues of the interview were personal judgments expressed by the caseworker present during the interview. For a more detailed analysis of the opaque nature of asylum documents and their methodological challenges, with specific reference to the Italian context, see Sbriccoli and Jacoviello (2011) and Sorgoni (2019).…”

Beyond Compassionate Aid: Precarious Bureaucrats and Dutiful Asylum Seekers in Italy

“…1111In her ethnography of asylum claims evaluations made by judges at the Bologna tribunal, Barbara Sorgoni (2019) also refers to the fading centrality of the suffering body. She situates her analysis within a wider shift from a “culture of suspicion” that emerged in the 1990s and a more recent “culture of rejection,” produced by European policies striving to deter the arrival of migrants in the European continent.…”