Stolen time: The temporal captivity of migrants in the Italian border regime

Waiting – a structural condition in the lives of migrants – is a coercive tool built into all bordering practices and one we recognize as a form of captivity, holding migrants hostage through the stealing of their time. In this article, we posit temporal captivity as a critical lens for understanding experiences of migrant detention and deportability in the Italian context, in particular in relation to ongoing crisis narratives that legitimize restrictive immigration and border policies that put migrants at risk and hold their futures hostage. We first discuss the 2020 short film Waiting , in which directors Khosravi and Dagmawi Yimer present waiting as an instrument of domination and control over migrants. Following our discussion of the film, we apply the film’s emergent theory of waiting to the case of Lampedusa, (re)considering the island as a site of stolen time and showing how temporal captivity maintains precarious migration as a source of labour and a site onto which shifting notions of otherness are projected. Viewed as manifestations of ongoing crisis response strategies, temporal captivity is a clear consequence of the operations of border imperialism.