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

189 Pages·2018·4.339 MB·English
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eeddiitteedd bbyy GGaabbrriieellee PPrroogglliioo .. LLaauurraa OOddaassssoo BBB OOO RRR DDD EEE RRR LLL AAA MMM PPP EEE DDD UUU SSS AAA 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 the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Grooving Lampedusa / Mario Badagliacca Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland 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.

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