The Moral Economy of Lying: Subjectcraft, Narrative Capital, and Uncertainty in the Politics of Asylum

Based on narratives of asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan Africa in northern Italy, in this article I analyze the narrative strategies used by immigrants to meet the eligibility criteria established by asylum law. For many of them, this means "arranging" biographical details within what I call "a moral economy of lying." The first question I discuss is what types of experience and 'subject positions' these narrative strategies reveal or generate. I then examine the arbitrariness and the bureaucratic violence of the asylum evaluation process, and the role of these procedures in the making of nation-language and current technologies of citizenship. Finally, I consider the politics of testification, recognition, and memory these discourses and practices combine to shape. I analyze these issues from an historical point of view of the politics of identity, truth, and falsehood as imposed in a recent past by colonizers onto the colonized.