Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows how those practices that constitute the political community through the identification of that which threatens it, in fact result in multiple modalities of citizenship and non-citizenship. It examines the dual enactment of citizenship, showing how political subjectivity is produced through practices of exclusion and claims to inclusion. The book also examines the situation of undocumented live-in care workers in Milan. By outlining the role of migrant domestic workers in Italy, the book shows how irregular domestic workers were considered as legitimate outsiders as a result of processes of regularisation. The book moves from the figure of the clandestino/a to that of the nomad, and the situation of Romanian Roma living in Italy. It considers specifically how Roma nomadism was deployed in various legislations to facilitate the deportation of these excessively mobile' European citizens.