In contemporary Italy, media and public actors frame the exploitation of migrant agricultural labourers as the outcome of caporalato. This concept – translated as labour brokerage or gang mastery – connotes the violent treatment of workers and their exploitation by powerful individuals, who are today increasingly racialised and understood as being Black and immigrants. However, our fieldwork in Apulia and Sicily uncovered a more complicated picture. This article considers a variety of sources to explore how caporalato is constructed and to what effect. Our argument is that, though rooted in real dynamics, caporalato is also a reductive, sensationalised, and racialising framing device that transposes historic tenets of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ onto ‘othered’ migrant workers. It affects policy by creating categories of people who are made ‘illegal’ and ‘deportable’. In also reinforcing derogatory stereotypes about the Italian South, it makes visible further South(s) of the Italian South(s) – offering insight into how and where borders are created and what their effects are.

中文翻译：

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南方的南方：种族、卡波拉拉托和当代意大利边界制定中重新出现的“南方问题”


在当代意大利，媒体和公共行为者将对移民农业劳工的剥削视为“caporalato”的结果。这个概念——翻译为劳工经纪或帮派控制——意味着对工人的暴力对待以及他们受到有权有势的人的剥削，这些人如今日益种族化并被理解为黑人和移民。然而，我们在普利亚和西西里岛的实地考察揭示了更为复杂的情况。本文考虑了多种来源来探讨 caporalato 的构建方式及其效果。我们的论点是，虽然植根于真实的动态，但 caporalato 也是一种还原性的、耸人听闻的和种族化的框架装置，它将意大利“南方问题”的历史原则转移到“其他”移民工人身上。它通过创建“非法”和“可驱逐出境”的人类别来影响政策。它还强化了对意大利南部的贬义刻板印象，让意大利南部的更远的南部变得可见——提供了对边界如何、在何处创建及其影响的深入了解。