ABSTRACT
Sicily’s liminal geographical position as a Mediterranean crossroads positions it as a key site of arrival for irregular migrants from across the Global South. As an economically depressed region in Italy, it is rarely more than a stepping stone to a destination elsewhere in Western Europe. This chapter examines a range of narratives derived from interviews with refugees in the process of navigating the Italian immigration bureaucracy in Sicily and discerns within their accounts a view of Sicily that positions it as a socially, culturally and economically intermediate zone between Europe and the Global South. Caught in a conceptual limbo, these newcomers are forced to reckon with their decision to come to Europe to start a new life, and in so doing recapitulate several common assumptions about the meanings of Europe that both confirm and upset Sicilians’ accounts of their own marginality. In turn, the newcomers’ perspectives are complemented by those of many Sicilian emigrants who return seasonally, and whose perceptions of Sicily and its marginality are conditioned by their own experience as mobile subjects.
