Border Lampedusa: Subjectivity, Visibility and Memory in Stories of Sea and Land

189 Pages·2018·4.339 MB·English

by  Gabriele Proglio, Laura Odasso (eds.)

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Subjectivity, Visibility and Memory in Stories of Sea and Land
Border Lampedusa
Gabriele Proglio • Laura Odasso
Editors
Border Lampedusa
Subjectivity, Visibility and Memory in
Stories of Sea and Land
Editors
Gabriele Proglio Laura Odasso
Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES) CNRS, Laboratoire Méditerranéen de
Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal Sociologie (LAMES) & Temps, Espaces,
Coimbra, Portugal Langage, Europe Méridionale,
Méditerranée (TELEMME)
Aix-Marseille Univ
Aix-en-Provence & Marseille, France
ISBN 978-3-319-59329-6 ISBN 978-3-319-59330-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59330-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947196
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
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Cover illustration: Grooving Lampedusa / Mario Badagliacca
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To those people who are escaping wars, dictatorships, persecution, economic
crisis, famine, climate changes and other difficult living circumstances in
search of a new home and a better future;
To the memory of those people who lost their lives while crossing the
Mediterranean Sea;
To the bravery of those people who are trying to rebuild their lives in a new
socio-political environment participating actively in the European societies;
To those people who, despite the growth of racism and intolerance in Europe,
operate to erode borders and boundaries between nations and social groups,
and to fight all forms of discrimination.
Contents
1 General Introduction 1
Laura Odasso and Gabriele Proglio
2 The Traces of Journeys and Migrants’ Perspectives:
The Knots of Memory and the Unravelled Plans 13
Rosita Deluigi
3 “Half Devil and Half Child”: An Ethnographic
Perspective on the Treatment of Migrants on their
Arrival in Lampedusa 33
Gianluca Gatta
4 O Hear Us When We Cry to Thee 53
Katy Budge
5 Th e Colour(s) of Lampedusa 67
Gaia Giuliani
vii
viii Contents
6 A Politics of the Body as Body Politics: Rethinking
Europe’s Worksites of Democracy 87
Simona Wright
7 ( Un)framing Lampedusa: Regimes of Visibility and 
the Politics of Affect in Italian Media Representations 103
Chiara Giubilaro
8 C onnecting Shores: Libya’s Colonial Ghost and 
Europe’s Migrant Crisis in Colonial and Postcolonial
Cinematic Representations 119
Sandra Ponzanesi
9 D efragmenting Visual Representations of Border
Lampedusa: Intersubjectivity and Memories from 
the Horn of Africa 137
Gabriele Proglio
10 Objects, Debris and Memory of the Mediterranean
Passage: Porto M in Lampedusa 153
Federica Mazzara
11 Nossa Senhora de Lampedosa, Protectress of Slaves
and Refugees: On Mourning, Cultural Resilience
and the Oniric Dimension of History 175
Fabrice Olivier Dubosc
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 R. Deluigi, The cemetery of boats: sunny silences 16
Fig. 2.2 R. Deluigi, The cemetery of boats: sharp perspectives 19
Fig. 2.3 R. Deluigi, The cemetery of boats: the yield 21
Fig. 2.4 R. Deluigi, The cemetery of boats: broken trails 22
Fig. 2.5 R. Deluigi, The cemetery of boats: empty spaces 25
Fig. 2.6 R. Deluigi, The cemetery of boats: human joints I 26
Fig. 2.7 R. Deluigi, The cemetery of boats: human joints II 27
Fig. 3.1 G. Gatta, No title - figure from fieldwork 36
Fig. 3.2 G. Gatta, No title - figure from fieldwork 37
Fig. 3.3 G. Gatta, No title - figure from fieldwork 45
Fig. 8.1 Morgan Knibbe, Shipwreck (S. Ponzanesi screen shot) 120
Fig. 8.2 Dagmawi Yimer, Asmat (S. Ponzanesi screen shot) 124
Fig. 8.3 Stefano Liberti and Andrea Segre, Mare Chiuso
(S. Ponzanesi, screen shot) 128
Fig. 9.1 G. Proglio, Meron’s map 142
Fig. 9.2 G. Proglio, Screenshot from Liveuamap 146
Fig. 10.1 F. Mazzara, Museum of migration in the first Askavusa headquarter 162
Fig. 10.2 Nell’aria, nella terra, nel mare, Giacomo Sferlazzo
(F. Mazzara screenshot) 163
Fig. 10.3 F. Mazzara, Main entrance of Porto M 164
Fig. 10.4 F. Mazzara, Pots and pans in Porto M 165
Fig. 10.5 F. Mazzara, A temporary installation of religious texts
and an isothermal blanket 166
ix
1
General Introduction
Laura Odasso and Gabriele Proglio
Lampedusa is many things to many people. The thousands of lives
claimed by the Mediterranean Sea make it a symbol of death. Yet, to the
white, mostly European tourists crowding its sunny beaches, lulled by
that same sea, Lampedusa is a metaphor for life, holidays, happiness and
leisure. It has become a trope of hope for those who flee wars, famines,
and a bleak future, but the small island also embodies European borders
and boundaries, as well as the double face of migration policies1—
similarly poised between selection procedures and hospitality. Finally,
Lampedusa is an emblem of fear for many European neo-nationalist
L. Odasso (*)
Laboratoire méditerranéen de Sociologie LAMES-CNRS, Aix-Marseille
Université, Marseille, France
G. Proglio
Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES), Universidade de Coimbra,
Coimbra, Portugal
European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy
© The Author(s) 2018 1
G. Proglio, L. Odasso (eds.), Border Lampedusa,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59330-2_1
2 L. Odasso and G. Proglio
movements that see migrant landings as the prelude to an invasion. All
these dichotomies are firmly implanted in the media-driven discourse
(de Genova 2013; Cuttitta 2012) on the small Mediterranean island,
whose narratives have long emphasised and continue to stress today the
liminal nature of Lampedusa as the last outpost of Italy—but in close
proximity to other worlds. These worlds are distant and remain so in the
discursive production on the sharp distinction between “us” and
“them”—the Others, the “invaders”—who materialise on our TV screens
and fill newspaper columns. They are a menace we need to counter. At
times, they briefly disappear from the media and political discourse only
to reappear a short while later as scapegoats for the problems of liberal
societies themselves. Since 1992, we have grown accustomed to the dia-
lectic image of the situation; yet, on a closer look, we find that it goes
back much further—to the colonial era. What Lampedusa seems to sug-
gest is that reality is a multifaceted conglomeration of the past and pres-
ent that we are called to study both for its tangible aspects and for the
emotional and symbolic ones.
The duplication of reality through the production of an oppositional
couple is part of a visual device where the self-identity is confirmed
through the categorisation and identification of the Other as different
from the Self. But who is the “Self”? This is the question we as scholars
should answer, if we are to understand the reasons behind the prevail-
ing narrative strategy. From a sociological and historical point of view,
we might have to deconstruct the notion of Italian imagined commu-
nity and investigate how legacies of the past—of the colonial past and
fascism, in particular—exerted considerable influence on the construc-
tion of a collective identity. Depending on the positionality of the sub-
ject, this collective identity is multiple and variable: “multiple” because
it consists of a range of possible shared identities; “variable” because
every positionality involves a specific genealogy of power relations. In
our opinion, this intersectional perspective is crucial to understanding
the multiplication of borders inside as well as outside the national
frontier (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). The border is unmistakably a
space-constructing device.