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Fiori Berhane

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Fiori Berhane
Pronouns She / Her / Hers Email fioriber@usc.edu

Biography

Fiori Berhane broadly researches the ways in which African refugees challenge discursive and legal-juridical frameworks that undergird the Central Mediterranean crossing. In particular, she studies the ways in which Eritrean refugee activists engage with colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial policies and embedded histories in Italy within efforts to redress multi-modal violence– that which takes place in their country of origin, transit and settlement.

Education

  • Ph.D. Anthropology, Brown University, 5/2021
  • M.S. Education, City College, City University of New York, 2/2013
  • B.A. Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia College, Columbia University in the City of New York, 5/2007
    • Provost Post-Doctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity, University of Southern California, 2021-2022

  • Summary Statement of Research Interests

    As a political and legal anthropologist of migration, I examine the relationships between migrant activism, emergent legal and border infrastructures, and postcolonial and racial politics in Eritrea, Libya and Italy. My research asks the following: How do Black migrants engage in politics in a context of radical exclusion and structural abandonment? In my current monograph, I analyze political activism in the Eritrean diaspora in Italy, locating how struggles over migrant rights engage with disavowed colonial histories in unforeseen ways. What I have found in my research is that refugee politics take shape around long-standing communal concerns and encounters with various institutions—from asylum to detention, local political organizations, and transnational smuggling syndicates—across time and space. My work engages fundamental questions in Global Black studies, Refugee and Critical Border studies, and the Anthropology of Europe and the Mediterranean.

    I am currently working on my book project entitled Prisoners of Our Dreams: Eritrean Diaspora Politics in “Red” Italy. This project analyzes Eritrean dissident activism in the face of Europe’s migration crisis. To date, there have been few studies that investigate refugee activism across borders, no less ones that engage with the geopolitics of migration which implicates sending, transit and receiving countries. By considering two distinct historical conjunctures—the hegemony of the Italian Communist Party during the 1970s and Italy’s recent descent as a laboratory for the radical right—I demonstrate that Eritrean migrations to Italy have been imbricated in larger questions over the meaning of the colonial past, political shifts from state socialism to neoliberalism, and the resurgence of racial nationalism. Examining archival documents and engaging ethnographically with Eritrean dissidents, I proffer a concept of “disjunctive memory work” to describe activist memory practices that call attention to and rework colonial and postcolonial relations that have been severed from public memory for Eritreans and Italians alike. By emphasizing the importance of historical memory to my interlocutors, this book locates a form of migrant political agency in a context of deep disincorporation and “exploitative” inclusion.

    I have published in Cultural Anthropology, Migration and Society, and Allegra Laboratory.

    Research Keywords

    Refugees, Political and Legal Anthropology, Black Studies, Transnationalism and Migration, Collective Memory, Violence and Post-Colonial Studies

  • Contracts and Grants Awarded

    • Eritrea, A Diaspora in Two Parts, (Wenner Gren Foundation), Fiori S. Berhane, $12,956, 2017-2018

  • Journal Article

    • Berhane, F. S. (2025). “Integration is a Gift from God: Blackness, Externalization and the Figure of the Refugee”. Migration and Society. Vol. 2025 (8) Link to article
    • Berhane, F. S. (2024). The Paradox of Humanitarian Recognition: Blackness, Predation and Non-Statist Solidarities in the Migration of Eritreans to Europe. Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 39 (3), pp. 374-399. Link to article
    • American Academy at Rome, Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies, 2019-2020
    • Fulbright Award, Open Study Award to Italy, 2017-2018
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