I am delighted to announce that my book review of the The Horizon Line by Francesco Della Puppa, Francesco Matteuzzi, and Francesco Saresin has just been published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (click the link here). This ethno-graphic novel follows Bangladeshi families who built their lives in Italy, earned citizenship, raised children, and then moved again, this time to London. Why would you leave one of the most beautiful countries in the world? Because, as one voice in the book puts it, they would always have been foreigners there.
A couple of things to ponder about after reading this book:
- Citizenship does not end foreignness. Children born Italian still inherit their parents’ outsider status.
- Sacrifice is gendered. The quiet isolation of women who arrive through arranged marriages is among the book’s most affecting threads, and one I argue deserved even more space.
- Welfare is reframed through colonial history, not as charity but as a small return on what empire took.
- Sayad’s “double absence” stretches across time as well as space, widening with each generation.
- The horizon of a better life keeps moving.
I’d recommend it to scholars of migration, sociology, anthropology, and visual studies, and equally to policymakers and educators.