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Is the Mediterranean a White Italian–European Sea? The multiplication of borders in the production of historical subjectivity

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Abstract

In this essay, I try to view the Mediterranean not only as a sea but also as an excess space of signification, a site of accumulation of discourses centred on Italy/Europe. In particular, it is the Black Mediterranean that interests me: the physical and symbolic realms of memory of several diasporas in Europe. Some scholars have shown the simultaneous presence of different Mediterraneans, some of which are located outside its basin. Others have grasped its function as a “middle sea”, a connection space between cultures, societies and economies, so that even a desert can be a Mediterranean. This essay will analyse the Black Mediterranean – the realms of memory of part of the diasporas from the Horn of Africa: those who have followed the Sahara–Sudan–Libya–Lampedusa route.

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... Moreover, we see the sea -in its conceptualisation and its empirical realities -as a product of locations cultivated to a significant degree by (European) imperial projects and projections (Borutta and Gekas 2012;Fogu 2018Fogu , 2020Lorcin and Shepard 2016;Silverstein 2002). Like Proglio et al (2020), Proglio (2018) and Grimaldi (2019) show in their articulation of the Black Mediterranean, regional configurations demarcate lived and remembered paths across space and through time that interconnect migrants' experiences and yet distinguish them from other experiences within a political contested Mediterranean (see also di Maio 2012). ...
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Until today, anthropological studies of locality have taken primary interest in local subjects leading local lives in local communities. Through a shift of conceptual emphasis from locality to location, the present volume departs from previous preoccupations with identity and belonging. Instead, Locating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. In doing so, it stimulates debates on the interplay between location and region-making in history as well as anthropology. The volume’s deeply empirical contributions illustrate how historical, material, legal, religious, economic, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located in the geographical space commonly known as the Mediterranean region. Drawing from research in Melilla, Lampedusa, Istanbul, Nefpaktos/Lepanto, Tunisia, Beirut, Marseille, and elsewhere, the volume articulates location through the overlapping and incorporation of multiple social and historical processes. Individual contributions are linked by the pursuit to rethink the conceptual frames deployed to study the Mediterranean region. Together, the volume’s chapters challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and suggest how the ‘Mediterranean’ can function as a meaningful anthropological and historical category if the notion of ‘location’ is reinvigorated and conceptualised anew.
... In the contemporary context, the term "Black Mediterranean" has emerged in the context of migration management in the Mediterranean Sea. It was coined by Di Maio (2013), building upon Gilroy's "Black Atlantic" (1993) to emphasise the racial logic underpinning the governmentality of this sea and the growing rate of death in this maritime geography (see also Proglio, 2018). The emergence of this term, Black Mediterranean, signifies the creation of a sea where bodies are lost without political significance. ...
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... The third contribution of this special issue is of a more general nature, and has to do with providing a perspective from the social sciences on the emerging literature on the postcolonial Mediterranean, which has hitherto received more attention in the humanities (Chambers 2004(Chambers , 2008Proglio 2018). If, as argued above, the Mediterranean is from the EU's perspective the most salient North-South border, it becomes imperative, especially in the wake of the implementation of ever more exclusionary migration policies on the part of the EU and its member states (Palladino and Gjergji 2016), to explore what a postcolonial gaze tells us about the political, economic and social hierarchies that still structure relations between the North and the South of the Mediterranean. ...
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... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
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... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
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The chapter discusses how (post-)immigrant activism in the Netherlands currently impacts Dutch and European cultural heritage and their cultural archive and memory complex. The discussion focuses on the Tropenmuseum and the way postcolonial (post)immigrants carried out interventions there, resulting in new ways of visually and textually representing the colonial past. Though the end result is not a final ideal decolonized situation, it did evince de-essentializing processes in which intersectional perspectives are taken up. The interventions coincide with other national and international protests and processes, making it part of a project or movement that produces decolonial counter-narratives to ethno-nationalist discourses. The case indicates how heritage is sought to be transformed by demanding greater visibility for injustices from the colonial past, for the resistances against these injustices, and for their implications for the present.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
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... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
Chapter
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Lähdesmäki analyses the heritage-policy discourses of the EU and the Council of Europe. She particularly discusses how these institutions deal with the challenges the idea of heritage faces in today’s Europe and the opportunities that these may present to respond to these challenges. The analysis shows how the EU and the Council of Europe seek to reconcile heritage-related conflicts by approaching heritage as a space for civil participation, interaction, intercultural dialogue, and conversation about divergent values and narrations of the past. However, their policy discourses often relay on a static and materialist notion of heritage. This kind of discourse maintains geographical, cultural, political, socio-economic, and religious power hierarchies and an exclusive understanding of a common European cultural heritage.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
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Kaasik-Krogerus scrutinizes the European Heritage Label (EHL) as an authorized heritage discourse (AHD) in the making. She analyses how the discourse is formed in a politics of mobility and stability between the local, national, and European scales resulting from the interplay of europeanization (of the national and local) and domestication (of the European). The chapter asks how this politics of mobility and stability is conducted to manage the scalar dissonance in one of the sites, the Great Guild Hall in Tallinn, Estonia. Kaasik-Krogerus argues that the politics conducted in the exhibitions works in two controversial ways: legitimizing mobility and stability as natural and simultaneously challenging these as problematic. The analysis illuminates the dissonance between the national-scale intents and their consequences on the European scale concerning power relations, multiscalarity, and future imaginaries.
... As argued above, the Black Mediterranean is an excess space of (re)signification used "to reinvent the individual and collective condition of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe" (Proglio 2018). From a global perspective, this excess space of signification allows for imaginative geographies marked by the role of emotions. ...
Chapter
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Trakilović theorizes the airport as a site where cultural/European notions of belonging are negotiated and controlled. Focusing on Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, the chapter approaches both the airport itself as well as its nearby detention center as one complex cultural phenomenon, from which Schiphol emerges as a site of heritage dissonance. Taking a phenomenological approach, the chapter explores what it means to be an embodied subject at the airport, taking the narrative of a Syrian newcomer who is relocated to the detention center as well as the author’s own experience of the airport as its analytical starting points. The selective processes of in- and exclusion at the airport are thereby seen as emblematic of larger exclusionary practices towards the Other in Europe.
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Globalizing Europe explores modern Europe's myriad entanglements with the wider world, considering the continent not only as an engine but also as a product of global transformations. It looks at the ways in which the global movements of peoples and ideas, goods and raw materials, flora and fauna have impacted life on the continent over the centuries. Bringing together a group of leading historians, the book shows how the history of Europe can be integrated into global history. Taken together, its chapters will help reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe – and the field of modern European history.
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In 1911, the Italian liberal government launched the colonial occupation of what is now known as Libya, which was met with unexpected local resistance. The government resorted to mass deportations to the metropole to sedate the resistance, which continued for more than two decades under both the liberal and Fascist regimes. This chapter of Europe’s and Italy’s colonial history has been almost entirely removed from collective memory. The article explores the extent to which colonial deportations are remembered on the Sicilian Island of Ustica, which witnessed the deportation from Libya of more than 2000 people. Currently, the island is home to the only cemetery in Italy that is entirely dedicated to Libyan deportees. I argue that the visits of Libyan delegations, which took place from the late 1980s to 2010, succeeded in challenging colonial aphasia at the local level. Yet, as a result of Ustica’s peripheral position within the national space, the memory work developed through the encounter between local and Libyan actors remained marginal, despite its potential to redefine the Mediterranean as a symbolic space where colonial histories are articulated and remembered. Italy’s outsourcing of the memory work in relation to colonial deportations implies a missed opportunity to interrogate the postcolonial present and thus question persistent dynamics of power in Europe that exclude the constructed Other.
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Music is intimately implicated in racialising discourses. This is particularly pronounced in the case of so-called black music, i.e. the types of music that are commonly associated with African-American identity, most notably jazz and various forms of popular music. Genres of popular music are furthermore constructed continuously on the basis of a notion of their “black roots.” The idea of the “black roots” of jazz and popular music is an essential ingredient of Paul Gilroy’s (1993) analysis of a specific authenticity of blackness. To stress the history and consequences of the pre-twentieth century slave trade and institutionalised racism, Gilroy has coined the concept “Black Atlantic” that builds on the idea of a distinct double consciousness inherent in blackness as simultaneously a fundamental constituent and the ultimate other of the West. In the article, I aim at rethinking the notion of the Black Atlantic in relation to North-Eastern Europe. By way of marine analogy I ask, and building on the notions of the Black Pacific and the Black Mediterranean, how to formulate an analytical design “the Black Baltic Sea.” In addition to addressing the impact of global racialising tendencies in music, this entails considering the cultural dynamics at issue in relation to the dynamics of postsocialism in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and Northern European indigeneity. On the basis of such a consideration, I argue that the styles of “black music” have been appropriated and adopted throughout the BSR, albeit in clearly different national manifestations which for their part imply variegated intersections between postcolonial and postsocialist processes. These intersections become manifest in the discourses over “new Europeanness” in music and the construction of national musical traditions, particularly when juxtaposed with the prevailing Islamophobia as regards treatments of Muslim music in mainstream media.
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This article focuses on emerging forms of ethnic identification among Italians of Ethiopian and Eritrean origins. In 2013, in parallel with the so-called refugees’ crisis in Europe, children of immigrants engaged in the Milanese management of forced migrations in the diasporic neighbourhood of Milano Porta Venezia. They legitimated their actions by emphasising a shared Habesha ancestral ethnicity with the asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa. The article considers their ethnic identification in relation to the changes in the public discourse on the Mediterranean route. These ethnic identifications and mobilisations are interpreted as claims for social recognition as Italians rather than a form of the revivification of their ancestral ethnicity in the analysis. The Black Mediterranean represent a privileged analytical and physical space to work on the resignification of Afro-European subjectivities in contemporary Europe.
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Lo spazio adriatico ha caratteristiche ambivalenti, sintetizzabili nella combinazione costante di unità e diversità sia in senso ambientale che socio-culturale. La coesistenza di un insieme di somiglianze e differenze in diversi campi fornisce comunque una connotazione specifica a quest'area. Nella loro evidente diversità, i testi che compongono "Immaginare l'Adriatico" riflettono un desiderio comune agli autori e ai curatori del libro: analizzare da una prospettiva multidisciplinare un territorio estremamente diversificato dal punto di vista naturale, culturale e sociale, che tuttavia viene sempre più spesso evocato, in maniera retorica, come spazio di cooperazione e unificazione. L'Adriatico rimane un territorio comune e allo stesso tempo divisibile: su di esso agiscono forme di appropriazione immagi-naria capaci di recuperare un capitale di simboli e immagini comuni, ma che spesso ridistribuisco l'appartenenza secondo tracce diverse e attraverso geografie conflittuali. Tuttavia, una condivisione di modelli istituzionali trans-adriatici non è certo impensabile: forse oggi più che mai sembra essere a portata di mano.
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Using the borderscapes concept, this book offers an approach to border studies that expresses the multilevel complexity of borders, from the geopolitical to social practice and cultural production at and across the border. Accordingly, it encourages a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuring regimes in the era of globalization and transnational flows as well as showcasing border research as an interdisciplinary field with its own academic standing. Contemporary bordering processes and practices are examined through the borderscapes lens to uncover important connections between borders as a ’challenge' to national (and EU) policies and borders as potential elements of political innovation through conceptual (re-)framings of social, political, economic and cultural spaces. The authors offer a nuanced and critical re-reading and understanding of the border not as an entity to be taken for granted, but as a place of investigation and as a resource in terms of the construction of novel (geo)political imaginations, social and spatial imaginaries and cultural images. In so doing, they suggest that rethinking borders means deconstructing the interweaving between political practices of inclusion-exclusion and the images created to support and communicate them on the cultural level by Western territorialist modernity. The result is a book that proposes a wandering through a constellation of bordering policies, discourses, practices and images to open new possibilities for thinking, mapping, acting and living borders under contemporary globalization.
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The European Union and the Italian state have currently implemented a state infrastructure enabling to govern the migration flows towards Europe. This infrastructure has involved the formation of an ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections that raise the efficiency of migrants' reception, integration or expulsion. Expertise on intercultural communication has been celebrated as a key resource of this infrastructure. In this article, I discuss the status of expertise on intercultural communication within an infrastructure managing migration in Italy. I focus on the circumstances by which expertise on intercultural communication has emerged as a crucial technology of this infrastructure and on ways this knowledge contributes to the regulation of migrants' access to the life projects migration stands for.
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Da qualche anno lavoro insieme a un gruppo di volontari, ricercatori e educatori in una rete progettuale tesa a favorire l’ascolto, l’auto-rappresentazione e la raccolta di memorie, narrazioni e testimonianze di persone migranti in provenienza soprattutto dalle regioni del Corno d’Africa. Scopo della ricerca è favorire e diffondere una maggiore consapevolezza delle grandi questioni che si celano dietro la questione migrante in Italia e dare spazio autonomo alle voci narranti dei diretti interessati nella necessaria ricostruzione/ricomposizione delle loro identità in cammino.
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The emergence of Italy as a receiving country of postcolonial immigrants from all over Africa and other parts of the economically developing world involves the reproduction of deeply rooted prejudices and colonial legacies expressed in territorial concepts of belonging. Yet geographical discussions of borders seldom begin their explorations from the vantage point of what Hanchard has called, "Black life worlds", complex experiences of place among African diasporic populations in relationship to race. This paper examines situated practices, negotiations, and meanings of place, identity and belonging among first generation African-Italians in Northern Italy whose experiences suggest that the borders between Africa and Europe are far more porous than they appear to be. This essay develops a theory of relational place to study the meaning of place in Black life worlds as indexed by the everyday materiality of bodies in relation to racial discourses and practices, and the profound interweavings of Africa and Europe through space and time. The essay examines African-Italo experiences in relation to the transformation of political culture in Turin, the rise of ethno-nationalism, and legacies of Italian colonialism.
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The island of Lampedusa is known as an EU border hotspot. Its high degree of 'borderness', though, is less the result of its geographical location than the product of a 'borderization' process carried out through specific policies, practices and discourses. The introduction explains what Lampedusa's 'borderness' consists in: irregular landings and the changed anthropic and human landscape have turned the island into an ideal observatory for all major issues of the current debate on migration-related border controls. The first section analyses the main factors of the 'borderization' process. Specific political choices (establishing a detention centre, concentrating migrants, dispatching border guards, employing patrol boats, involving humanitarian workers etc.) suggest that borders are the result of the placing and interaction of 'spatial bodies', as well as of legislative measures and international relations. The paper also regards Italian immigration control policies as a 'political spectacle', and Lampedusa as the theatre of the 'border play'. The second section therefore analyses the two narratives (the securitarian one of the 'tough' and the humanitarian one of the 'humane' border) prevailing in five different acts of the play, and shows that both are strictly connected and serve the same purpose of governing and managing human mobility.
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No analysis of contemporary refugee protection and identity should take place without consideration of historical perspectives. An understanding of historical (and religious) antecedents is crucial to appreciate fully some of the key questions of this volume: who is a ‘refugee’; how that label influences state behaviour towards those seeking asylum; and the broader implications for refugee identity and protection. This chapter has two aims: (i) to provide a foundation for subsequent contributions in this collection and to highlight some of the major concerns with both the Refugee Convention and the framework for international protection in the 21st century; and (ii) to focus on the Middle East, where the majority of states are not party to the Refugee Convention or Protocol, but which currently hosts millions of displaced people. The discussion opens with a consideration of the Refugee Convention and its Protocol (‘the Refugee Convention’) in their historical contexts, briefly describing the change from group-based to individual protection, the emergence of a legal identity of the refugee, and the subsequent shifts in conceptualisation of both refugee protection and refugee identity that have occurred in the past 60 years. The importance of the UNHCR in this development is highlighted. The chapter then moves on to the second, and main part, and addresses the historical context of forced migration in the Middle East, before exploring the current problems associated with law, refugee identity and protection in the region.
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Com’è avvenuta la trasformazione di Lampedusa in sinonimo della frontiera euro-africana? I confini sono fatti sociali, e trasformare un luogo in confine, o trasformare il ruolo simbolico e pratico di un confine, è sempre frutto di determinate azioni. Da questa prospettiva l’articolo analizza i principali atti che hanno accresciuto la “confinità” di Lampedusa, determinando la “frontierizzazione” dell’isola, tra gli anni Novanta e il 2011. L’analisi tocca alcune scelte del legislatore, l’evoluzione delle relazioni con i paesi nordafricani e certe pratiche di controllo e gestione delle frontiere: l’apertura di un centro di detenzione, la scelta di dirottare quasi tutti i migranti a Lampedusa, concentrandovi così anche le attività di accoglienza, e la produzione di emergenze artificiali.2.
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This article investigates the reshaping of the military-humanitarian border in the Mediterranean, focusing on the Italian military-humanitarian mission Mare Nostrum, that started for rescuing migrants at sea after the deaths of hundreds of migrants in October 2013 near the coasts of the island of Lampedusa. The main argument is that in order to understand the working of the military-humanitarian border at sea and its impacts, we must go beyond the space of the sea, and analysing it in the light of the broader functioning of migration governmentality. The notion of desultory politics of mobility is deployed here for describing the specific temporality of the humanitarian border working and its politics of visibility. In particular, an analytical gaze on the military-humanitarian operations at sea to rescue-and-control of migrants’ movements shows that what is at stake is the production of some practices of mobility as exceptional. Then, this article takes on Mare Nostrum operation for exploring the ways in which the military and the humanitarian are rearticulated and how they currently work together.
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Many names have been attached to regional spaces of migration around the edges of the European Union, including the Mediterranean, Africa-Europe, EU, and Schengen. These regional distinctions and the image of contiguous boundaries assume certain territorial stabilities that can be known, mapped, and policed: the African continent, the European Union, the Mediterranean and even the notion of territorial waters. Yet, territoriality itself is an unstable concept, and the many crises unfolding in the interstitial spaces in the Mediterranean signal precisely the fluidity of the region. Regional solutions are popular within the current panoply of enforcement strategies used to manage migration, but they function to reify and stabilize the concept of the region and obscure violence happening at other scales. In this paper we build on political geographers’ examinations of the social construction of scale to investigate the ways in which the region has been created through “migration management.” Building on the work of feminist geographers, we contend that attention to the scale of the migrant body shows the violence obscured by regionalized migration management and opens up spaces and strategies of political engagement. This approach highlights the multiple places where the EU-Africa borderlands are constructed and shifts the conversation from a state-centric discourse of migration management enacted at the region to one of embodied migration politics that addresses violence transpiring at finer scales.
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In this collection of essays, an international group of renowned scholars attempt to establish the theoretical basis for studying the ancient and medieval history of the Mediterranean Sea and the lands around it. In so doing they range far afield to other Mediterraneans, real and imaginary, as distant as Brazil and Japan. Their work is an essential tool for understanding the Mediterranean, pre-modern and modern alike. It speaks to ancient and medieval historians, to archaeologists, anthropologists and all historians with environmental interests, and not least to classicists.
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'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
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Migration in the Mediterranean offers a unique multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework, bringing together scholars from different subject areas. This book aims to address the following research questions: What are the main characteristics of migration movements in this region? What are the most important theoretical challenges? What are the perspectives for the future? This book begins with an overview of the economic perspective of the Mediterranean migration model, with a particular focus on labour market outcomes of migrants. It then presents the original results of field studies on the unintended effects of the EU's external border controls on migration and integration in the Euro-Mediterranean region, before addressing the themes of mobility, migration and transnationalism. This volume focuses on migration with a multidisciplinary approach, with scholars from various areas including sociology, economics, geography, political science and history. This book is well suited for those who study international economics, migration and political sociology.
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Sixty years on from the signing of the Refugee Convention, forced migration and refugee movements continue to raise global concerns for hosting states and regions, for countries of origin, for humanitarian organisations on the ground, and, of course, for the refugee. This edited volume is framed around two themes which go to the core of contemporary ‘refugeehood’: protection and identity. It analyses how the issue of refugee identity is shaped by and responds to the legal regime of refugee protection in contemporary times. The book investigates the premise that there is a narrowing of protection space in many countries and many highly visible incidentsof refoulement. It argues that ‘Protection’, which is a core focus of the Refugee Convention, appears to be under threat, as there are many gaps and inconsistencies in practice. Contributors to the volume, who include Erika Feller, Elspeth Guild, Hélène Lambert and Roger Zetter, look at the relevant issues from the perspective of a number of different disciplines including law, politics, sociology, and anthropology. The chapters examine the link between identity and protection as a basis for understanding how the Refugee Convention has been and is being applied in policy and practice. The situation in a number of jurisdictions and regions in Europe, North America, South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East is explored in order to ask the question does jurisprudence under the Refugee Convention need better coordination and how successful is oversight of the Convention?
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Foucault’s shift from an analytical focus on discipline to governmentality saw the theme of visibility move into the background of his attention. In this article we ask how the debates about governmentality and visibility can be brought into a mutually productive relationship. Building on recent arguments for greater rigour in conceptualising visibility, we proceed to examine what visibility means and does in the context of migration control in Europe. Focusing on the EU’s recently deployed programme of border surveillance, EUROSUR, we elaborate how multiple forms of visibility are at play. We conclude that the politics of visibility is an important theme for future studies in the governance of migration.
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The migration route towards Italy, which, from various African regions, converged to Libya to reach the Sicilian coasts, reached substantial proportionsbetween 2005 and 2009 and has been, on the Italian media, highly spectacularized and misrepresented at the same time. Migrants and asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa formed an important part of this flow of people coming through this "Libya-Lampedusa route". The article questions the prevalent representations of this route and of migration corridors in general as unitary phenomena by highlighting their time-specific processes of formation, the social categories generated in them as well as the emerging socio-political dialectics of migration corridors from Africa to Europe.
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The first part of this article discusses the different approaches to Mediterranean history. People talk of the Mediterranean and refer to the waters that stretch eastward from the Straits of Gibraltar, linked to the Red Sea by the man-made channel of the Suez Canal and to the Black Sea by the natural channel of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. The discussion insists that the study of Mediterranean history encapsulates many important aspects of world history: it involves the investigation of connections between societies separated by extensive physical space, focusing on commercial networks, the building of empires, and the movement of peoples, These phenomena can be traced across the surface of the sea across which Europe, Africa, and Asia meet one another and over which Christianity and Islam have vigorously competed for dominion. The second part of this article focuses on the development of the 'classic Mediterranean' over time.
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Talk of a ‘migration crisis’ calls forth three related spatial renderings of the Mediterranean Sea. Their social production involves a particular politics of visualization. First, the Mediterranean is but one leg of a longer migration corridor, yet as such substantiates a geo-racial border zone. Second, scenes of rescue at sea have functioned as border spectacles, naturalizing migration politics. Third, expanding surveillance infrastructure has undermined a firewall between border patrolling and search-and-rescue, thereby helping to create and sustain an ethical landscape of response-ability to routinized emergency. Visualizing and disseminating this landscape has, for the moment, created a political space between wanted and unwanted mobilities.
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This paper presents the island of Lampedusa as the theatre stage on which the “border play” of immigration control is performed. The paper first introduces the performers and spectators of the play, outlining their roles and places with respect to the architecture of the theatre space as well as the dramaturgy of the play. Next, the paper analyses the five acts of the play, notably examining the time period in which each of them transpires and the most marking or spectacular events. Each act is analysed with regard to its dominant narratives. The war against irregular migration is waged and justified in resorting to two different narratives: one being security, and the other humanitarian. On the Lampedusa stage, while both narratives take turns commanding the scene, they both are in fact always present. The two rhetorics are intertwined with one another, and together they contribute to constituting and strengthening the policies and practices of migration and border control.
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This article deals with this ongoing spatial and political recrafting of the Mediterranean sea as a space of migration governmentality. It retraces the recent political and spatial transformations occurred with the starting of the military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum in the channel of Sicily and then the handover to the Triton operation coordinated by Frontex. The two specific angles from which it tackles this issue are the politics of and over life that is at stake in the government of migration at sea and the politics of visibility that underpins it. In the first section it analyses the politics and the scene of rescue that has been put into place with the start of Mare Nostrum, tacking stock of the re-articulation of military and humanitarian technologies for governing and containing migrant movements. Then, it discusses the recent transformations occurred with Triton operation and the effects on the level of political actions undertaken by activist migrant groups. The article moves on by taking into account the peculiar politics of visibility that is at stake in the government of migration in the Mediterranean.
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By adopting the borderscape as "method", the paper inquires into the Euro/African border nexus by assuming a multi-sited approach, able to combine not only different places where borderscapes could be observed - both in borderlands and wherever specific borderscaping processes have impacts, are negotiated or displaced - but also different socio-cultural, political, economic, and historical settings. From this viewpoint, the paper proposes a shift from exclusively national borders between EU member states and African countries to the multiplying material as well as epistemological borderlands at the interface of their dis-location and re-location, which are producing new forms of borderland in Africa originated by the externalization of European borders.
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In today's Europe, migrant domestic workers are indispensable in supporting many households which, without their employment, would lack sufficient domestic and care labour. Black Girls collects and explores the stories of some of the first among these workers. They are the Afro-Surinamese and the Eritrean women who in the 1960s and 70s migrated to the former colonising country, the Netherlands and Italy respectively, and there became domestic and care workers. Sabrina Marchetti analyses the narratives of some of these women in order to powerfully demonstrate how the legacies of the colonial past have been, at the same time, both their tool of resistance and the reason for their subordination. © 2014, Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.
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In the aftermath of the Jasmine revolution, one of the main concerns of European leaders in the summer of 2011 was to find collective solutions on ‘managing’ rapidly evolving migratory fluxes. Although migration and refugees are not a new phenomenon in the region, the Libyan and Syrian conflicts have further increased uncertainties for populations fleeing unemployment, conflict and poverty. Since March 2011, 9 Million people have fled Syria, going mostly to neighboring countries with 6.5 million in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Migrants leaving mostly from Libya to reach Europe are also more likely to die in the Mediterranean Sea, which has become sadly an open-air cemetery. Solidarity amongst European Union (EU) countries has proven to be difficult, with difficulties to relocate and resettle people, while countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have to cope with huge numbers at times of economic, political and sometimes security difficulties. So far, research on migration and refugees in the Euro-Mediterranean area have been scarce, focusing either on Palestinian refugees or border management. Evolving migratory practices and geopolitics in the region however necessarily call for new ways to think about this common challenge for the European Union and MENA countries. The three books under study fill this gap by providing different, yet refreshing and complementary analyses of the current situation.
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In this final contribution to this theme issue on Luisa Passerini's important scholarship, the guest editors and Passerini discuss her current EU Research Council-funded collaborative project, BABE, which is meant to bring together oral and visual forms of memory that reformulate the concept of Europe (and Fortress Europe) in more inclusive ways. Its distinctive features are discussed, including the collection and analysis of drawings and other visual itineraries by artists and other subjects, including students, from the global diaspora in Europe. Other topics include the importance of conversation in oral history work, the ‘mobility turn,’ and the gendered nature of mentorship.
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Résumé Repenser l’idée de frontière pour refonder d’urgence nos politiques migratoires.
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Post-Orientalism is a sustained record of Hamid Dabashi's reflections over many years on the question of authority and power. Who gets to represent whom and by what authority? Dabashi's work picks up where Edward Said's Orientalism left off. Said traced the origin of the power of representation and the normative agency that it entails to the colonial hubris that carried a militant band of mercenary merchants, military officers, Christian missionaries, and European Orientalists around the globe. This hubris enabled them to write and represent the people they sought to rule. Dabashi's book is not as much a critique of colonial representation as it is of the manners and modes of fighting back and resisting it. He does not question the significance of Orientalism and its principal concern with the colonial acts of representation, but he provides a different angle that argues for the primacy of the question of postcolonial agency. Dabashi uses the United States as an example of a country that initiated militant acts of representation in Iraq and Afghanistan. He attempts to unearth and examine the United States' deeply rooted claim to normative and moral agency, particularly in light of the world's post-9/11 political reality.
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Migration controls are more and more transforming borders. In this regard, this paper is a border case study focusing on the Strait of Sicily. It analyzes the border regime between Italy and its North African neighboring countries Tunisia and Libya from the point of view of the transformations of territorial borders in space and time. It provides an inventory of border control measures and instruments, and analyzes the way they actually work. The evolution of policies and practices of migration controls results in transformations of territorial borders not only in terms of their location (inward and outward flexibilization of the border) but also in terms of their shape (from boundary lines to border zones or points) and operational modalities (from fixity in space and continuity in time to mobility and intermittency). Border transformations are analyzed before the background of Ratzel's idea of Grenzsaum, that is of a borderland both in the sense of a border strip straddling two bounded territories or lying on just one side of a territorial linear border, and in the sense of a buffer zone lying between two territories.
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Events in the Somali regions on the Horn of Africa beginning with the establishment of the U.N. Trusteeship Territory of Somalia under Italian Administration in 1950 and culminating with the introduction of a written orthography for Somali in 1972 and the subsequent influences and aftermaths of this event on language and literacy in Somalia make a study of this region ideal for generalizing to some degree on the subject of orality and literacy. In this paper, I wish to give a brief overview of literacy in Somalia and address the relationship between literacy and orature (oral literature). I will also comment on two theoretical issues concerning orality and literacy in Africa, namely whether literacy adds complexity to human thinking and whether or not it truly influences human mentality. Only a brief overview of the history of literacy in Somalia is required, as detailed descriptions have already been published outlining the vernacular literacy movement that culminated in the development and legalization of a writing system in the Somali Democratic Republic on 21 October, 1972, and the multifaceted activities leading up to it as well as its political aftermath. Part of this movement resulted in a nationwide literacy campaign in 1973, the results of which easily rival the historical literacy reforms of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s. Moreover, the orthography adopted by the Somali government in existence at that time has survived civil strife and the resulting breakdown of organized government in Somalia. The Latin script adopted in 1972 can be found in the various current Somali governments on the Horn and in the diaspora of Somalis worldwide. Furthermore, the decision to employ Latin script for the politically dominant dialect for the country in 1972 may well have determined the choice for Latin based scripts developed for other Cushitic dialects (languages?) spoken in the regions between the two main rivers of Somalia.
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This paper is concerned with the portrayal of conflict through the written word and oral recollection, and the popular perception of war over time, with particular reference to Ethiopia and Eritrea between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. It seeks to explore the roles played by the regional chronicles and traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by orality and literacy in the modern age of armed struggle and revolution, in the creation and assertion of identities. The basic aim of the paper is to demonstrate continuity between apparently distinct forms of ‘war and remembrance’. The first is the chronicle tradition of the Ethiopian highlands, dating back several centuries, both contemporary and retrospective in composition, and in which the seminal role of conflict is continually emphasised. The second is the rhetoric and symbolism of the modern era of liberation struggle in Eritrea, as represented by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. In this context, the memory of war, and the articulation of that memory in various forms, is as crucial as war itself in the creation and consolidation of identity, most dramatically in nationalist discourse.
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The paper explores the oral origins and political motivations of two written documents drafted by the Oromoo rulers of Leeqaa-Naqamtee in western Ethiopia at the turn of the nineteenth century. The first document, the ‘Chronicle of the Warra Bakaree family’ is the history of the ruling family of Wälläga-Naqamtee written by Kumsaa Morodaa, alias DÄJJACH Gäbrä Egzi'abehér, who ran the western Ethiopian province under Ethiopian administration from 1889 till 1923. The second document, titled ‘Boräna Geneaologies,’ was drafted by order of the same Oromoo ruler who put into writing genealogies collected by local elders as a way to claim legitimacy for his family rule over the region. The two documents, and the correspondence exchanged between the Ethiopian court and the western Oromoo rulers, reflect the intricacies and ambiguities of the semi-autonomous rule of Wälläga-Naqamtee under Ethiopian administration. They also show the gradual inroad of centrally-imposed rules and regulations (mainly concerning land, taxes and tributes) inevitably eroding local prerogatives (and consensus) and discouraging accumulation of local wealth to comply with the growing needs of the central Ethiopian state at the peak of its territorial expansion. The paper reconstructs the history of these documents and explains the motivations of the ‘unequal exchange’ which led the Naqamtee court to preserve into writing what had been presumably conceived and transmitted till then within the traditional bounds of an oral discourse.
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In treating memory as a cultural rather than an individual faculty, this book provides an account of how bodily practices are transmitted in, and as, traditions. Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written, or inscribed transmissions of memories. Paul Connerton, on the other hand, concentrates on bodily (or incorporated) practices, and so questions the currently dominant idea that literary texts may be taken as a metaphor for social practices generally. The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that performative memory is bodily. Bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected. An innovative study, this work should be of interest to researchers into social, political and anthropological thought as well as to graduate and undergraduate students.