Description: Leaving their depleted fields for better prospects, Senegalese immigrants have made their way to Italy in significant numbers. What this migration means, in the context of both the migratory traditions and conditions of Africa and the history and future of the European nation-state, is the subject of this timely book.

Focusing on Turin, the northern Italian point of entry for so many Senegalese, State of Grace chronicles the arrival and formation of a transnational African Islamic community in a largely Catholic Western European country. With no colonial relation to Italy, the Senegalese represent the vanguard of population movements expanding outside of the arch of former colonial powers.

Donald Martin Carter locates the Senegalese migration in the context of past African internal and international migration and of present crises in West African agriculture. He also shows how the Senegalese migration calls into question the European interstate system, and the nature and future of the nation-state and its relationship with non-European states.

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