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Open interdisciplinary panel on Lampedusa and Beyond

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre

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Free event, booking required via Eventbrite

This panel will feature the following speakers: Martina Tazzioli (Swansea University), Sarah Turnbull (School of Law, Birkbeck), Lorenzo Pezzani (Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths), Monish Bhatia (Birkbeck School of Law), and Federica Mazzara (University of Westminster)

The event will be chaired by Birkbeck Institute of Humanities Fellow, Gaia Giuliani (CES - University of Coimbra).

Dr. Gaia Giuliani will introduce the discussion with a postcolonial reading of Lampedusa and the Mediterranean in the age of the migrant and refugee crises. Her introductory remarks will focus on Lampedusa and the Mediterranean as prosceniums when the polysemic border is performed (Balibar, Cuttitta), and gates between past, present and future'"for memories of colonial violences to come back, for potential/future postcolonial violence to enter the space of the Self. Giuliani's argument is that the discourse around Lampedusa and the Mediterranean reveals the persistence of the foreclosed memories of colonial conceptions of the global space. She will then introduce participants' contributions to a panel that aims at framing Lampedusa and the Mediterranean into a global context.

Sarah Turnbull's paper "Insularity, and the Racialised Logics of Border Control: Europe's 'southern borders' and Fortress Britain" considers the relationship between the racialised bordering practices at Europe's 'southern borders' with 'Fortress Britain,' drawing attention to themes of insularity and dangerousness. It will explore the rhetorical performance of Britain as 'small island' in need of protection from migrant others and how the geographic distance from Lampedusa is linked to this performance of the border.

Martina Tazzioli's presentation of "Containment beyond the island. Migrant disrupted geographies between Lampedusa and Lesbos" revisits the notion of "containment" which by focusing on the ways in which migrants are controlled, contained and selected after landing in Lampedusa and on the Greek island of Lesvos. It draws attention to the Hotspot System aimed at disciplining mobility and showing that it is not narrowed to detention infrastructures. In particular, through a critical engagement with carceral geography, Tazzioli point to the limits of the island studies arguing that there is a need of mapping the geographies of containment that go beyond the migrant spatial confinement on the hotspot-islands. The latter, this presentation contends, should be seen as chokepoint of mobility disruption, deceleration and filtering.

Lorenzo Pezzani will present his paper "Drifting Images, Liquid Traces: the aesthetic regime of the EU's maritime frontier," in which he considers the aesthetic and spatial conditions that have turned the Mediterranean into a military-humanitarian border zone. Whether it is through the logic of the spectacle or of that of state secrecy, the very act of exclusion that underpins the EU's politics of migration takes place as well within and through its various visualisations. Struggling for the rights of migrants then, he will suggest, means also intervening in this regime of (in)visibility and challenge the borders of what can be seen and heard.

Monish Bhatia will present "Social Death: (White) Racial Framing of Calais and 'Illegal' Migrants in British Tabloids and Right Wing Press." Bhatia will argue that the Calais 'jungle' has come to represent the dirt, savageness and ferocity of 'illegal' migrants, their lack of restraint and adherence to the law, where the only law perceived is the survival of the fittest. The inhabitants of the 'jungle' are increasingly represented as dangerous, pathologically 'criminal', inferior 'other', sub-humans, who do not deserve to exist in the civilised West. The 'jungle' has not only become spatially but also symbolically bordered. This paper aims to highlight the racialised construction of the Calais 'jungle' and manner in which the 'illegal' and 'criminal' (white) racial framing (Feagin, 2013) is used and strategically deployed by tabloid and right wing press, to legitimise violence against refuge seekers, deny their suffering, their personhood, and distance them from humanitarian discourses. This 'illegal' migrant framing renders them hyper-visible and at the same time hyper-invisible. Bhatia will argue that racial framing and legitimisation of state violence and border control practices have produced a social death of refuge seekers in Calais.

Federica Mazzara's paper "Aesthetics of subversion: Practices of resistance through art" looks at some examples art practices as a way of disrupting and challenging the politics of representation of mainstream discourses around Lampedusa. According to the perspective of this paper, art is able to unveil the contradictions and paradoxes of the securitarian regime, which regulates immigration into Europe, thereby contributing a vital form of political dissensus.

Gaia Giuliani is a Birkbeck Institute of Humanities Fellow for 2018. She is an Associate professor in Political philosophy (ASN 2017, Italy), an investigadora/researcher at CES - Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra (Portugal), the Principal Investigator of the FCT 3 years project "(De)OTHERING: Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: hegemonic scripts and counter-narratives on migrants/refugees and 'internal Others' in Portuguese and European mediascapes" (2018-2021).

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