6
The Mediterranean Sea
Open Port or Border Wall?
Paola Zaccaria
The [Mediterranean] sea extends like a belt, situated in the middle of the civilized world and in the middle of the land over which you rule. Around that sea lie the great continents. . . . Whatever each culture grows and manufactures cannot fail to be here at all times and in great profusion. The merchant vessels arrive carrying these many commodities from every region in every season and even at every equinox, so that the city takes on the appearance of a sort of common market for the world. One can see cargoes from India and even, if you will, from southern Arabia in such numbers that one must conclude that the trees in those lands have been stripped bare, and if the inhabitants of those lands need anything, they must come here to beg for a share of what they have produced. . . . Your farmlands are Egypt, Sicily, and all of cultivated Africa. Seaborne arrivals and departures are ceaseless. . . . What one does not see here does not exist.
—Aelius Aristides, Oration no. 26 To Rome.delivered for Emperor Antoninus (c. 155). Italics are mine.
1. At the Gate: Entering Cultural Studies through Feminist Lanes
Cultural studies and gender studies were essentially introduced to Italy by scholars working in the field of post-colonial and Anglo-American studies; they were accompanied by a few scholars in the field of German Studies who found nourishment in different research areas, and a large sector of academics working in ethnological and social studies who, although developing a great interest for cultural studies and contributing to their enhancement, barely touched the gender issue. Italian Studies called “Italianistica” were not even grazed by gender issues. Even works by feminist critics were more keen on following the French-Italian theories of pensiero della differenza (in Italy, basically through the Diotima school; in France, through the different, and yet interlaced, approaches of Irigaray-Kristeva-Cixous, but also through Derrida’s non-gendered but extremely useful methodology of deconstruction and difference) than the transatlantic preference for opening up to a more complex feminist and cultural perspective.
Generally speaking, until the twenty-first century, Italian academia, with the exception of a few groups of people working on comparative literature (among them: Iain Chambers, Armando Gnisci, Michele Cometa, Lidia Curti, Franca Sinopoli, and Liana Borghi); cultural anthropology (Massimo Canevacci, and Geneviève Makaping); cultural and gender studies (Paola di Cori); sociology (Alessandro Dal Lago, Renate Siebert, Donatella Barazzetti, and Carmen Leccardi); political sciences (Sandro Mezzadra); sociosemiotics (Patrizia Calefato, Antonella Mascio, and Cristina De Maria); and aesthetics (Giorgio Agamben, Mario Perniola) was allergic to the very word “cultural,” and even more so to the word “gender,” whereas the category of (sexual) difference was met with suspicion or even jeers. But, it must be said that those feminist philosophers who were eager to analyze and practice “difference thinking,” did not feel much empathy for gender and postcolonial studies. This is one of the reasons why, in Italy, we do not have such a subject or departments or an area of study called “Women’s Studies” or “Gender Studies.”
Being introduced to the output and analysis of cultural pluralism in post-colonial, post-imperial areas such as Great Britain and the United States, but also in creolized complex post-colonial territories such as Africa, South America, and the Caribbean, those of us who worked in Anglo-American, post-colonial, transnational and transatlantic studies inevitably came to learn of a different approach to sex/gender issues and learned to conjugate Italian-French thinking of difference with other categories such as race, gender/sex, class, age, cultural heritage, power, hegemony, and the like, both when analyzing the cultural production that was the object of our teaching and research and when taking action against Italian policies on social and civil issues.
Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, this transdisciplinary “we” came to acquire a complex perspective, a slanted view, capable of seeing the shadows of other different “foreign” strokes into the Italian national canonical cultural narrative-picture. We learned to see/read/interpret national reality, national production through the lens of transnationalism created by post-colonized and de-colonizing realities located elsewhere, beyond our borders. Consequently, we started to develop theories and methodologies that were critical of the very idea of a hegemonic homogenizing national culture.
For me, it was through my knowledge of colonial practices outside Europe that I was compelled to bring to consciousness what had been taught to me without comment or analysis in primary and secondary school: the soil I live(d) on, Apulia, my region, had been colonized so many times—by Greek and Roman empires in ancient times, later by Arab conquest; in modern times subjugated by French and Spanish dominions. The signs of conquest can be read everywhere in the old districts of Apulian towns. But we were educated not to interpret local signs, and to consider ourselves second-class Italians, in admiration of Florentine Renaissance artistic signs and of Venetian high architecture speaking of a past when Venice was the “signor(i)a” of the Adriatic shores. Our historical centers were architecturally neglected, we even looked with social disdain upon our fellow inhabitants, third-class Italians still speaking dialects when I was a child. Yes, we were educated to be blind, dumb, and ashamed of not being classical or humanistic or deliciously Florentine.
The so-called Murat district of my home city, Bari, I learned to see, speaks at the same time of French dominion but also of the early nineteenth century (should I say colonial?) elegant French architecture.1 The nearby old town of Ostuni, in Salento, a region that is attracting Americans and British people in the same way Tuscany did some decades ago, bears inscriptions of Greek, Roman, and Greek Byzantine times; the Turkish attacks; the Moorish (also called Saracen) incursions; the Norman and Swedish Frederician age; French Angioin dominion and Hapsburg reign. Its cake-like circular shape, all white and iron, looks wondrously fascinating from down the hillside, as the traveler drives up to taste the delicious cake spiraling along the olive-edged road. Once at the top of the historical center, looking out from the terrazzae, the viewer sees a scene of red soil fields swarming with huge centennial olive trees, brought to Apulia by the Saracens in 769 AC, sloping toward the green-blue sea.
It was not until I realized that in order to tell an American audience the story of cultural studies in Italy, I had to “re-memory” and reconsider my own research and pedagogical practices. I had to reread and reconsider the titles of my essays and books, the titles of the chapters in these books, the titles of subsections in my works, and I realized that I had to redefine my self-portrait as a researcher and writer, which, until now I had essentially classified as “gynocritic.” Together with words connected to the gender/sexual difference terminology, my work, since the beginning, was scattered with words generated by geography and psycho-spatial perception of landscape/literature/art. I realized that since the 1970s, my work almost inexplicably dealt with exile, or expatriate, or what I called “meteque” individuals (those who live outside the oikos, home, such as the female outsiders who did not simply identify themselves with one country, one culture, one language), investigating issues such as language and exile; the room of writing as the space of freedom for nineteenth century women poets; journey narratives; dislocated subjectivities; cultural networking and expatriation; transatlantic connections; and artistic transcodifications. My textual interpretations were concerned with the drive to mobility (from one place/culture to another—spatial and cultural crossings; from one genre to another—literary intertextuality; from one artistic language to another—transcodifications; from fixed identities to shifting self-perceptions/representations, etc).
It was not until the early 1990s, when I became part of a small but collaborative group of Italian women scholars of Anglo-American, post-colonial, and transnational Studies which started to use a cultural approach to literary and gender studies, that I became aware of the critical and political gap within mainstream Italian methodologies and hermeneutics. We created a network that extended from Florence to Palermo, Rome, Boulogne, Trento, Turin, Macerata, Naples, and Bari, and in 1994 we founded the Italian Society of Literary Women (SIL), an intellectual political “locality”2 in which Italian and French feminist theories sometimes conversed and sometimes conflicted with gender theories. We felt free to conjugate Irigaray and Muraro, via Braidotti, with Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and bell hooks and Teresa de Lauretiis, and Gloria Anzaldúa, and Michelle Cliff and Gayatri Spivak, Min-ha Trinh etc. and, of course, we conversed among ourselves.3
Finding my strength in this group of Italian scholars, I wrote various essays on women and space and eventually wrote my book Mappe senza Frontiere, written from 1995 to 1998 and published in 1999, in which I translated into Italian geographical words-concepts such as location, deterritorialization, dislocation, and (re-)mapping. Words such as transplanting, ungrounding, uprooting, indigenization traveled side by side with the more traditional terminology of emigration; cultural words/constellations like nationalism were deconstructed by notions such as situated perspectives/knowledges, creolization, hybridity, decolonization, diaspora, triangulation, liminality and border, meteco/a, borderlands and mestizaje, middle passage and passing, (auto)bio/mithography, coalitions, temporary affiliations; gender words such as male/female were turned upside down by new constructs: gender-bending, gender representation, normativity and queerness, new mestizaje, and so on.
For me, the next meaningful turning point was the encounter with Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetics and thinking about borderlands and mestizaje, and with Audre Lorde’s enlightening and demanding analysis of women’s roles and race implications when you are a lesbian and an Afro-American (at the time it was still written with the hyphen) in a white-normated world.
We, the Italian network that felt an affiliation with a very peculiar stream of nonmainstream Anglo-American, often hyphenated or post-colonial intellectuals (Spivak, Bhabha, Gilroy, Stuart-Hall, Sandoval, Mohanty, Trinh, Benhabib, Anzaldúa, Alarcón, conjugated with Magrehbi writers such as Mernissi, Djebar etc.) and feminist thinkers such as Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretiis, Saskia Sassen, etc., were exhilarated to be participants in an in-country cultural (r)evolution that had its roots in the entrance of “women of color” on the transnational scene of Women’s Studies at the very moment when women and men of color were landing on our shores. Some of these lighthouse-women—the mestiza Gloria Anzaldúa, the African Caribbean-American Audre Lorde, the native “redskin” American Paula Allen Gunn—were the trio who guided me into cultural, ethnographical, post-colonial, transdisciplinary, transnational gender studies, spiced with post-colonial North-African intellectuals.
In Italy at the time (the 1990s), our critical narratives and teachings were considered unorthodox by academia, and not “properly” feminist by mainstream Italian feminism, if there is such a thing as mainstream feminism, but appreciated by the younger generation of women4 who did not entirely identify in their mothers’ feminism and were instead interested in conjugating gender issues with sociopolitical emergencies, such as migration, interculturality, and racism.
Surely, I realize while revisiting the winding roads of my research, geography as a sub-text to orient me in my studies, and geocriticism as a compass to direct me, were already one of my central interests in the 1990s, even when I still represented and considered myself essentially a feminist scholar. The texture of my essays was created through stitches such as: stillness and mobility, nomadism and nationalistic drives, emigration and exile, diaspora and border crossing, dislocation and decolonization, and the like. This view shaped a transitional critical horizon of intersectionality, erasing disciplinary and discourse boundaries, and generating a critical narrative that questioned the poetics of location, i.e., tried to determine whether it is possible to speak of a national literature/culture/language when the culture/literature/language of a given nation contains traces of elsewhere. As is the case with the United States, literature is a patchwork composed of texts narrated by residents and nonresidents, native citizens, immigrants, refugees, and exiles;5 the offspring of different colonizations is, as a matter of fact, made up of texts in transition created by subjects in transition. Later on, Anzaldúa showed me that subjects in transition live in/on physical, psychological, sexual, and inter/intra cultural borderlands.6
As a consequence of my view of America as a mestizajed society, my gaze and consciousness were awoken to European journeys of colonization from the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic, and I started to passionately teach and translate mestizo texts in order to make the voices of the “racially, culturally and linguistically” deslenguados7 heard: the “culturally crucified,” the “bastards”—I learned through chicano works—fight back the theft of land and language through a “living language” resistance, a mixed tongue that, although still bringing traces of signs and sounds of the consecutive cultural oppressions, has nonetheless transformed both the colonizing and the colonized idiom so much that it has become a language fully entitled to “overcome the tradition of silence.”8 This dense, rich, multilogical, translinguistic broken border language is, in my opinion, a model for contemporary cultural communities living in supranational conditions and thus experiencing linguistic inter-touchments (my nonscholarly way of defining linguistic mestizaje in order to stress the affection underscoring the mutual attraction between two or more linguistic systems) forbearers of intercultural constructions.
2. Outbound Journey: From the Atlantic to the Mediterranean
At the end of the 1990s, as a result of the new diasporas produced by new wars and new forms of colonialism, boats, rubber dinghies, and worn-out ships started sailing in the opposite direction of colonial times. When the departure harbor was located in North Africa, the sea became the route to the closest Mediterranean shores: Southern Italy, especially the island of Lampedusa, but also Sardinia, Calabria and Apulia; Malta; Spain. When the departing point is in Eastern and Middle Eastern countries, the landing point is usually in Cyprus and Greece, from whose islands many crossers reach my region, Apulia.
In January 2009, as a consequence of the new Italian laws (Maroni law) regarding the transformation of the detention camps called CPT (temporary holding centers) into Center of Identification and Expulsion (CIE), citizens of Lampedusa took part in a march demanding the removal of the camp, followed in February by an arson attack on the CIE.
To understand why Lampedusa is called the gate/wall to fortress Europe and how Lampedusa itself is a mestizo, hybrid, colonized, and never decolonized place, I will offer a snapshot of its history and destiny as a penal colony through the words of a Sicilian historian, Tino Vittorio, chosen as our guide precisely because he is a native informant who strives to interpret contemporary threads of illegality and social battles in his island:
Lampedusa does not like Italy, since Italy does not like Lampedusa and, indeed, Italy has never liked it. More than a Sicilian island, it seems to belong to Tunisia (113 km away) and Malta (150 km). The Arabs did not like Lampedusa either: all through their settlement raids all over the Asian and Middle Eastern Mediterranean to spread Muhammad’s preaching, they did not seem to like Lampedusa. . . . It is Italian, but only marginally; it is extra-marginal . . . a peripheral assaulted and exploited island, deforested to be turned into an arid, bare place. . . . It was transformed into a penal colony during the period of Italian Unification, in 1872; something that foreshadowed future horror: the 1998 CPT (temporary holding center), and the 2007 CSPA (centre for first relief and reception), . . . They come in swarms, strangled in the clutches of contemporary pirates: the “mafiosi” boatmen. From Libya to Tunisia, from Morocco, Egypt, Turkey and Algeria, they land in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, in . . . Southern Europe. . . . Sicily . . . does not fight Islam but it combines hybridizations and métissages, even of the linguistic and gastronomic kind. . . . For example, babbaluci, the typical Sicilian snails, have a Greek Islamic origin—boubalakion and babbus; the cous-cous in Trapani is made also with pork, which is considered impure by Islamic law. Libya—namely Zuwarah9—after Tunisia is the second departure gate for migrants heading for Europe through Lampedusa. In May 2008, the de-Christianized policy of rejection began and, since then, it has taken the form of a reversed jihad that our fishermen are forced to practise in obedience of Italian laws and, at the same time, against sound judgment, Christian solidarity and the guiding principles of the EU. Italy, after the Bengasi agreement in August 2008,10 has welcomed less and less “stowaways,” but it has received more and more gas and petrol. Every rejected sans papier corresponds to a liter of Libyan petrol; for each stowaway arrested there is, indeed, an extra percentage of Libyan gas. . . . Moreover, Libya has been provided with Italian-made pick-up trucks to transport stowaways in like dogs. And lots of sacks for the corpses, kindly offered by the Italians with some foresight: during the passage, you know, people die. Christian charity, namely the Italian religion as a whole, has been swapped in Lampedusa with Libyan concentration camps like the one in Kufrah, in the Sahara Desert, and with detention places such as Misratah. There is no religion left. Neither here, in Italy, nor in Libya. . . . In the Mediterranean there are no longer three religions, not even two, not one. None. There is no religion anymore. The politics of shame has won. . . .11
At this point, it is necessary to inform a non-Italian readership that the Italian government and many European policies on migration had chosen, in 2004, the externalization of asylum, an implementation of the detention and return schemes which extends Italian and European borders across the sea, as far as the Libyan desert. It is an extremely serious form of persecution which does not simply relocate the asylum procedures outside the European Union’s external borders, but actually deprives asylum seekers of the opportunity of access to asylum procedures and “illegalizes” the movement of migrants between Libya and Italy and between Libya and the neighboring African states. The construction of Italian-funded detention centers on Libyan territory transforms the border into a confining barrier. Some years ago I called this aberrant strategy “delocalization of the entrant” who, through the act of departure, had already delocalized himself from his own land. Dramatically, the entrant is very often the child of a colonized subject who, notwithstanding post-coloniality, has not succeeded in decolonizing his land and his children.
We are witnessing disturbing new forms of colonialism, perpetuated by both the ex-colonial state and the post-colonial country which does not imply the imperium of one nation over another territory, but complicity between two nations that impose a supranational economical social imperium on subaltern (mostly dark-skinned) classes, depriving migrants and refugees of rights both in the country of origin and in the place of arrival.
Thus the Mediterranean Sea, through this kind of “shameful politics” becomes a wall to all kinds of migrants—undocumented, trafficked people, refugees, asylum seekers, and even environmental immigrants. It is time that we, the European residents not at ease with deportation, interrogate our silence and the silence of the mainstream media about those shameful episodes one can only track down on the internet, such as what happens to immigrants who, rejected by Italy, are sent back to Libya where they are detained for years in the camps built using Italian subsidies, documented by Fabrizio Gatti in the video “Morire nel deserto.12 Many bloggers and Slavoj Zizek in his book Politica della vergogna have written about what happened on the night of August 7, 2009, when the people on board a Tunisian fishing boat were awoken by cries and saw a rubber boat overcrowded with immigrants, including women and children extremely tested by hunger, thirst, and the rough sea, on the verge of sinking. The Tunisian captain rescued them on his boat and took them to the nearest port, on Lampedusa Island, where the whole crew was detained in jail. The feeling of shame and “the burden of the white (wo)man” participating in the expulsion and murder of the wretched of the earth, requires responsible reactions from us. And by “us” I mean me; I mean the Lampedusa fisherman who can no longer act according to human pietas and human rights, who is forcibly “dechristianized”; I mean the everyman expressing a resounding silence in agreement with the dictat of Fortess Europe. Is it enough to wear the button or T-shirt saying “I do not expel”? Is it enough to sign petitions? Is it enough to participate in rallies?
Should the fishermen, should we who are not workers of the sea but who know at least part of the truth about the Black Mediterranean, we who have been educated to think of Europe as the fortress of human rights and humanitarian help, act like those who knew of the lagers and pretended they did not see anything, participating in the Nazi scheme of making invisible what was visible? Here I am reversing Jacques Rancière’s formula “making something invisible visible” that, as he says in a 2008 interview, “is still too religious a formula. . . . specific to the process of the extermination is the fact that it unfolded silently and applied itself to destroying its own traces.”13
So, if the processes of extermination are accomplished as silently as possible—how can we hear cries and howls in the desert or from the cargoes and boats crossing the Mediterranean?—and its traces are erased, how can I/we practically and politically dissociate ourselves from a community that seems to have gone deaf and dumb and from governors who become those who pass judgment without even having summoned the convicted, whose “respingimento-confinamento” takes the shape of a death sentence, a verdict of nonacknowledgment of the immigrant as a human being: for the new laws on migration, the status of man as “a human being as such”14 is unconceivable. Of course, this is reminiscent of the colonized’s oppression in colonial times, when Italy and other European countries which today act in defiance of international laws exploited these people’s goods, expropriated their lands, etc. And yet, if we go to Rosarno (Calabria), to Lampedusa, to the tomato district in Foggia area (Apulia), noise is being made about this. Searching on the web for alternative information, I heard a lot of noise coming from the migrants and from those who try to get “visible minorities” recognized. Rancière considers the noisy migrants and those trying to get them heard and visible as “political subjects”: “for me a political subject is a subject who employs the competence of the so-called incompetents or the part of those who have no part. . . . “Visible minorities” means exceeding the system of represented groups, of constituted identities. . . . It’s a rupture that opens out into the recognition of the competence of anyone.”15
Actually, this vision of politics descends from a different idea of democracy and of Western states as the embodiment of modernity and democracy. In the last decades the so-called post-colonial people are coming to our places, not to exploit and expropriate, but to nurture hope for themselves and their families, to make a living, to dream of a future, to save themselves from political persecution: to restore their own dignity as human beings having a right to resist social and political injustice through dislocation which, of course, entails transformation. As the Somali-Italian author Cristina Ali Farah beautifully writes, there is a life drive behind the drive to escape:
You fly away from conflict, but above all you fly away from impossibility. One dies just once in life, but living in destitution, living in impossibility is a slow torture, a prolonged death. . . . You depart all of a sudden to free yourself from the intimate stench of violence. It does not matter why and when you leave, if you go, you have been thinking about it all the time, it’s like a primeval impulse, an irrepressable urge. But when you leave, you leave all of a sudden. . . . you leave in the afternoon, all at once, leaving unfinished actions, incomplete works. The trace of your absence. There is always one who must go first and search for lusher pastures for those who will come later.16
Hannah Arendt wrote in “We Refugees” that the condition of the refugee is the paradigm of a new historical consciousness,17 and recalling that the first camps in Europe built in order to house refugees suppressed the constitutional state, she explained that until the break of World War II, Jewish people persecuted by Nazism used to call themselves “newcomers” or “immigrants,” but with the flight from Europe due to the concentration camp system, “the meaning of the term ‘refugee’ has changed. Now ‘refugees’ are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee Committees.”18 The lager system was conceived in the colonies, and it was made possible because the constitutional state was suppressed in the colonies. Giorgio Agamben—following Arendt’s analysis—adds that we perceive the refugee as an unheimlich figure because s/he dislocates Western identification of any human being with citizenship and nationality: the refugee, in being “bare life,” naked humanity, is—writes Agamben—a “border concept” that calls into question the categories of state and nation. Paradoxically, the “permanently resident mass of non-citizens”19 strolling in the streets of contemporary Western nation-states, come from post-colonial countries which, having inherited and interiorized the Western concept of nation-state, oppress, rape, expel and even kill those who do not fit in—the dissident, the poor, the marginal, the mongrels, the homeless.
If the borders were really porous, as post-modern theories affirm, then there would be no need for “citizenship” because, as Agamben explains, “the concept of citizen is no longer adequate to describe the sociopolitical reality of modern states”;20 if the borders were politically and ethically porous, innovative deterritorializing non-apartheid discourses would/could contribute to enhancing human emancipation and human rights. Instead, as Seyla Benhabib explains, the politics of conformism and the control of inside information is a strategy used by xenophobic governments to make citizens accept oppressive immigrant policies: the strategy is to discipline the “foreigners within” the nation(al), the dissidents, in order to abolish any form of dissent or demands for reform inside the non-porous borders of the nation state.21
Instead, we, the “foreigners within,” are relocated, often unaware, back into another shameful (his)tory, also recounted by Arendt: before sending the Jews to the lagers, the Nazis deprived them of citizenship. The denial of rights followed various steps: internment camp, concentration camp, extermination camp.
Until last year, upon arrival in Italy the immigrant was met by: internment or detention camp (CPT), very often followed by expulsion. Since the latest Maroni laws on expulsion came into force, the most commonly-used procedure is the immediate expulsion without any check on status, possibly without even consent to land on European shores. The fluidity of the sea creates a fluidity of borders, there is no one to check if the boats are stopped by the border patrol in international waters or in national waters, so they are sent back as soon as possible toward the shameful lagers in Libya, often at Kufrah, in the desert, where the detention camp very often implies the extermination procedure. Second possibility: those who succeed in landing in Lampedusa or Pantelleria are detained in the centers of identification which, without any restrain, are also named centers of expulsion, where there is no guarantee that you will be identified, or have documents attesting you can be considered a refugee. After a long period spent in the camp waiting to be identified, the newcomer is very often expelled. To where? In the best case, to his/her own country, but more often in Libya, where the steps are the same as the ones described before, i.e., similar to the lager policies.
The feeling of destitution, dispossession, and placelessness Judith Butler speaks of in Who Sings the Nation-State?,22 apropos of populations from war-torn areas deported to extraterritorial prisons, such as Guantanamo, or sometimes to places whose names they do not even know, are similar to the conditions experienced by migrant individuals and populations, although their extraterritorial destitution can, on the surface, be read as a conscious choice. Actually, individuals and populations in migrancy become stateless the very moment they depart without permission; they remain stateless because they are in the best cases allowed to live in the no man’s land of the borderlands; they are de facto stateless because the country in which they apply for asylum does not offer them a place and an ID card, but often sends them back to no man’s land.
These individuals and multitudes are reduced to a stateless, powerless, tortured humanity by those who, in the name of national sovereignty, strip asylum seekers of human rights, expel them and throw them in places which detain them as pariahs, in conditions of slavery: being stateless, they cannot request documents from any nation; at the same time, being stateless, they can be sent, as a packet, across the borders, and deposited in the Bartlebian “office of the dead letters”—the detention-extermination camp. As Nazist procedures taught us, this is possible because the stateless condition strips each human stateless body of all agency and rights. They are forced to become dead letters nobody will ask for: no stamp of delivery will ever free them of their condition in the limbo of being “undelivered.” Thus they become illegal because they are stateless, hence they are very often detained until death in the no man’s land of transnational detention camps founded with the financial aid of nations which signed the non-refoulement act of 1951, such as Italy.
And yet, we should not do the stateless on the move wrong by describing them as individuals without agency, as weak subjects to be considered by the more radical part of European society as objects needing care: in this way we would step away from the inhumane fascist logic of the Bossi-Fini and Maroni laws to enter a paternalistic new-colonialist logic considering the individuals and populations on the move in a condition of oppression without resistance. We should never forget that the act of leaving, the courage necessary to undertake such a journey—that the subject fleeing the impossibility of being entirely human knows will be very perilous—makes of each migrant a figure of resistance with entrepreneurial abilities.
If it is true that new migrants are dragged along by the global new-colonialist mobilization of capital, we must be aware that in order to be on the side of the subjects on the move, we must not fall into a migration rhetoric representing migrants as overwhelmed by hunger and injustice at home and abroad, hence subjects without agency. For these reasons Mezzadra’s proposal to make use of the concept of “right to escape” is instrumental: some of us insist on repeating23 that a migrant is not the fashionable rootless, nomadic post-modern subject crossing and recrossing cultures and identities. Perhaps, the migrant is more properly embodied in what Jacques Rancière calls the “sans part,”24 and this obviously implies being sans papiers, but also signifies a sociopolitical movement beyond citizenship and belonging.25 As Rancière explains very well in an interview where he goes deeply in the definition of “politics” he gave in La Mésentente, politics is not the interaction between government in power and opposition, but the activity that will “make that which did not possess grounds to be seen, make a discourse heard where once there had been nothing but noise, make heard as a discourse that which had merely been heard as noise.”26 Unheard noise, if listened to, is speech:
Throughout our society there is speech that is heard merely as noise. . . . If we take the case of immigration, the people who negotiate with illegal immigrants [sans-papiers] on hunger strike know full well that they are talking not with suffering bodies, but with people who argue, who have learnt in Africa the art of discussion, and for whom speech is an important element of social life. This does not prevent the situation of the sans-papiers from generally being regarded as a phenomenon of suffering and treated as such. So you don’t have noise which is going to become speech, but speech which is always an issue of interpretation. Will it or won’t it be heard as speech? Where is it going to be heard as noise or as speech?27
I believe that in many non-mainstream media, such as Fortress Europe, Melting Pot Europe, Storiemigranti, Progetto confini, to quote a few of those working in Italy, the noise has become speech. Moreover, it is not even perceived as noise, but as interpellation28 which asks for conversation with those who hear the speech of the sans-part. And this ongoing conversation is already political, although governments pretend not to hear, not to see. If the paradigmatic status of the migrant’s condition is transformation, the migrant journeying towards transformation in being the inscription of diversity already accommodating him/herself to transformation in the gesture of departing/detaching/delocating from his/her “part,” in coming in contact with the resident who can hear the noise as speech and speak back, passes on the seeds of transformation to the resident who is politically and ethically ill at ease with the deafness and blindness of national government policies.
3. Restoring the Sea Fluidity
If you have been infected by the germ of transformation, you cannot feign not to know that the Maroni migration laws have transformed coast guard duties in a kind of border defense reminiscent of the fascist institution called Milizia volontaria per la sicurezza nazionale (1926),29 also called camicie nere30 and its branches called Milizia portuaria (1927) and Milizia confinaria, which had the task of watching the borders, so that all access to Italy was under control and no “illegal (it.: clandestino) trespassing of the border” was allowed.31 The citizen who is not too much of an “insider” (in the sense of not complying to almost-fascist and racist laws) cannot be at ease with the guardia di frontiera (border patrol) transformed in state police, whose officers are tasked with national security; s/he can feel the strangling ties to freedom and the nauseating sensations of a resurgence of colonialist and fascist practices. In the practices of containment of migration one can see the reflection of the policies used in the colonies to repress the struggle for independence: the compilation of dossiers, the preemptive detention of presumed suspects, usually described through their ethnic or religious identities, the authorization of paramilitary civilian troops in Northern Italy should speak to us, should reawaken images and horrors still “en abyme.” The Italian temporary holding centers, “the panopticon of our times”32 and the CIEs, be they in Lampedusa or the Palese district on the outskirts of Bari, or in Libya, descend both from the penal colonies in colonial and fascist regimes and from the eugenic schemes used for sick, “imperfect” migrants arriving in the United States in the early twentieth century. At the same time, Europeans cannot pretend not to know about the policies of removal and detention of undocumented migrants, which recall the Nazi policy of building the concentration camps outside Germany’s borders, or the Russian procedures of establishing the gulags in the most far-flung regions of its empire. I need at this point to update what I wrote in two essays in 2006 and 2008 about borders (Italian: confine) and confinement (Italian: confino).
In those essays, in reference to the electrified wire between Mexico and the United States, to the wall erected in the no man’s land between Israel and Palestine, to the barricades built around temporary holding centers everywhere in Europe, Africa, Australia, I wrote:
The border, cum-finis in Latin, which is that line drawn on a map to define a nation-state, has a meaning and a materiality akin to confinement, in as much as both border and confinement contain the meaning of barrage, fortification, (hudud in Arab). . . . The Iraqi villages and towns which have been transformed into de facto camps, fenced off with razor-wire, with roadblocks and curfews, provide further examples of confinement, jailing and denationalization. To confine and exclude is the goal of the military ships patrolling international waters between Sicily and Libya. The sea, an international area, becomes the territory where the powerful can confine the desperate, the stateless, the landless before they can reach a land. . . . We should ask ourselves both if this is not a strategy as violent and shameless as colonization and if the empire of camps is not, after all, a new form of political and economical oppression devised by the West to control the Rest after the end of the cold war, after the end of the oppressive confinement of the Rest of the world both in the Western and in the Eastern hemispheres.33
The Mediterranean, represented as a space of circulation and exchange whenever we Europeans want to sell goods to Africa and the Middle East or import low-cost labor from those areas, has various walls and nontrespassing borders built by the laws each European state has created in the name of sovereignty, thus de facto emptying of sense and blocking the international agreement on human rights ratified by the European Court.34
So, those who are in internal exile in one’s own country, the “foreigners within,” those who are called the minority and have no voice in a populist political climate proclaiming each day the governance of the majority are haunted by the question: which are the spaces left to spread awareness among those who are not complete outsiders, those crippled by the reduction in free information and alternative education? What can we, as scholars, teachers, activists, trade unionists, temporary communities of dissidents do to open our/their eyes to see what mainstream media and politics want to hide?
How can social coalitions be more influential and press public TV offer another kind of information? How can we help young generations to be aware, to be sensitive, to be able to deconstruct, to be hospitable and not racist and violent and walled inside themselves?
In recent years, at the first meeting with my classes, I have devised a scheme of starting with a reading of poems and excerpts from texts dealing with borders, with interludes of contaminated music and video, both from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, which transform the theorization of borderization into art. We watch movie clips, review artworks born out of the awareness of borderization and discuss how they express the individual and communal agency to resist assimilation drives, mainly through the deconstruction of the border positionality which was until a few decades ago considered negative, destructive, barring—the border being a synonym for marginality and containment of difference. Nowadays, mainly thanks to cultural artifacts, border crossing has instead become a transnational style, a worldwide conscious choice that bridges the gap between Atlantic populations and the Mediterranean in their shared refusal of mainstream policy and culture in the name of a more complex, more intertwined, transcultural vision of the world which, nonetheless, does not renounce the local, memory, heritage.
The borderization of the world entails a representation of the world as an endless border zone where the borders are, by choice, unstable, if not erased; where languages are not national and pure, but culturally complex,35 intercultural, plurilinguistic; where cultures are the patrimony of humankind until there is no such a thing as a Western pattern of culture presenting itself as desirable and modern, pretending to homogenize and integrate differences in the name of a wor(l)d order that swallows up a “dis-ordered” multiplicity of cultures, tongues, bodies, genres and genders.
As Benedetto Vecchi writes in “Le mappe in gioco,”36 territory is an invention; it exists only if there is a map that represents it with a seemingly unchanging morphology, whereas all of us know that the natural morphology is ever-changing because of natural events and human intervention.
But, above all, the borders between territories called nation-states, as I learned through cultural feminist border studies such as Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, are an invention, an oppression, an imposition, an act of violation and brutality.
As Etienne Balibar underlined in a lecture on At the Borders of Europe, “the question of sovereignty is historically bound up with the questions of borders, as much political and ‘spiritual’ from the classic age to the crisis of imperialism in the mid-twentieth century, and which we have inherited after the dissolution of the ‘blocs.’”37
The mapping of the world, of the cosmos, of “the hemispheres, ecospheres, atmospheres”—as spoken-word artist Ursula Ruckers sings/celebrates in Libations (2006)—through the drawing of lines brings traces of eurocentric Western cultures and powers. And yet, Libations teaches us, throughout history the oppressed, enslaved, colonized populations resisted and resist, and the children of the resistors and the children of anti-slavery European and American activists and the new generation of anti-oppression, anti-walling, anti-refoulement celebrate forerunners:
Them that fought for our freedom, promoted peace,
Resisted, challenged our ideas, about words,
Sounds, images, movement, movement, made us
Sing, wanna make love, rebel, rebel, ancestors,
Forbearers, both forgotten and remembered,
Keep your memory, power, spirit reverberating
Out into the hemispheres, ecospheres,
Atmospheres, quell our fears, keep us moving
This view takes us into the dimension of artivism,38 which at the same time discloses and disrupts the lines-walls that have
marked,
spotted,
scratched,
etched,
scraped,
wounded,
rajado,
stripped,
graffiato,
inscribed,
engraved
territories/lives/bodies/cultural communities. Those lines/wounds are the hidden face of slavery and oppression, they are the cultural and physical wounds that gave rise to Toni Morrison’s metaphor of Sethe’s wounded back as the chart of slavery marks in Beloved: the cherry tree engraved on the slave’s back is the brand of racist and sexist violence inscribed on the body of the violated black woman, and yet, in making of it an artistic motif, Morrison has passed on to us both the memory of it and the disdain and indignation which gives life to the “never again” resistance.39 It is because of the cherry tree inscription that we can nowadays perceive the lines-fences-wounds on every wetback’s back arriving in Texas through the river passage; on every “harraga”40 undertaking a double burning: first the crossing of the Sahara, then the crossing of the Mediterranean by means of worn-out dinghies.
Before the creation of maps, borders, and walls, native peoples and tribes protected their own culture, their traditions, their customs, honoring their ancestors; the conquerors of the past, and we, the neo-colonial oppressors, want to protect not simply our property, but also to expand economical and political power beyond national borders. One of the predominant Euro-American policies today is to extend national borders without officially renaming and remapping territories in foreign continents—think of Russian and American expansionism; think of transnational corporations occupying territories, stealing oil and minerals, and polluting lands overseas, such as Nigeria, or the Mexican Gulf.
For all these reasons, after a brainstorming of images and words about “confine/confino” in class, I encourage students to set up a complex map of the crossings and disruptions of borders, trespassing and confinement, rejection and hospitality. Through empathy with the individuals and multitudes on the move, it is possible to not only redraw the semantic fields of “border” and “confinement,” but to understand, almost feel in our bodies and psyches how, due to the denial of admittance to the promised land, the migrant has no other choice, since his material and imaginative desire to gain access is very strong, than to trespass boundaries, limits, thus becoming an outlaw. If s/he succeeds in entering and has right to seek asylum, the arrivant tries to do, but s/he has to wait for a long time, and this entails being detained in CIE .
In the eyes and consciousness of young people not yet educated in deconstructing ideology, feeling empathy and thinking freely, the circulation of migrants seeking work and freedom threatens just “that barrier designed to check the traffic of self-exiled, delocalized41 bodies that are feared as bringers of turbulence, which is semantically conveyed through the flood and invasion myths;42 it is often forgotten that this invasion or flood is, after all, a response, a counter-wave to the invasion of the migrants’ space by European colonialists who occupied those spaces as if they were the masters and treated the natives as slaves.”43 This feeling of turbulence induced by the mythology of “invasion” is injected, almost advertized by dominant racist classist policies and brings about reactions aimed at exclusion: confinement, expulsion, repatriation, or new forms of apartheid. Unavoidably, the act of drawing the line of exclusion, which very often entails and implies the underscoring of the “wrong color” line, creates barriers, divides, walls.
4. Unwalling up the Mediterranean: Utopian Routes and Material Losses
In the last part of my argument, the focus is on the Mediterranean. Across the Mediterranean waters, colonizers journeyed toward the Atlantic shore and accomplished cultural and physical genocides; through the Mediterranean, Arab conquerors assaulted Southern Italian and Spanish shores; a few centuries later, through the Mediterranean Spanish, Portuguese, English and French colonizers sailed South and South-East to occupy vast territories which we inappropriately still today call Arabic.44 Through the Mediterranean sea many ex-colonizers returned home after the colonies achieved independence; through the Mediterranean sea many ex-colonized are coming to European ex-empires, in flight from new forms of tyrannies passed off as a return to cultural roots; through the Mediterranean Sea, the new slaves of the global economy and of the craziness of the free economy try to take shelter in Southern Europe.
The Mediterranean, at the same time wall and passageway, frontier and bridge, is the very first foreign space that the thousands of men and women who attempt to enter the gates of Southern Europe from Africa must cross in contemporary times. It surely brings about feelings of fear and awe in those arriving through the desert, but its liquidity, its borderlessness can also inspire sensations of freedom, although I doubt that the newly arrived to a port to cross the sea, before leaving knows much about the walls of containment and exclusion Fortress Europe is building right in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
Thus, let’s dwell on the first Mediterranean paradox: the wall, in this case, is made of water, a fluid element that the laws promoting inequality are trying to “condense” into a barrier/rejection wall. That’s why in our research project “Walling up the Mediterranean? Artivism and Translation as Transnational Politics and Poetics of Resistance to Italian Rejection Policies, European (En)closure into Fortress and American and Israeli Building of Walls,” we are trying to investigate differences and similarities between the Mediterranean barriers and the liquid boundary created between the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo river dividing Mexico and the United States.
But there is a second paradox in our waters: the island paradox. How can it be that an island, the most opened up of geographical places, lapped on every side by the fluidity of waters, turns out to be a place of internment? This has happened on the island of Lampedusa and recently on the island of Procida: these islands have been again and again transformed into detention places.
At the same time, our focus is on the shame: the outsourcing of detention camps to Libya, which in the past was an Italian colony, and now is building shared walls running from the ex-colonizers’ shores on the Mediterranean, through liquid routes, right into the desert.
This research whose intersecting roads we are now walking in Puglia, in Texas, and in Israeli/ Palestinian territories, has the ambition of contributing to the creation of a politics and a poetics of hospitality. How? Through the building of a triangulation in which the three observing points are keen on conversing, detecting all the un-quoted, un-shown, un-watched in one’s own area: the underground reportage, journalistic investigation, and creative works flowing along the online map, along art associations and activist coalitions.45
It is our intention to deconstruct, through the triangular conversation, each key word in our project and see how to disjoint each word/action from the neo-colonial, neo-imperial, and oppressive hardened meanings that liberalistic powers have grafted even into words that apparently bring freedom such as: Mediterranean; liquidity; art/activism/artivism; translation, transnational(ism).
Drawing on both the historical and the contemporary international relationships, our research aims to investigate:
Within this framework, we will take into account the writings and arts of migration, diaspora, post-colonization and decolonization in order to investigate whether and to what extent the border creolized writings and arts can stand nowadays as alternative political agendas and can enhance knowledge, social justice and cohabitation beyond/notwithstanding walls and borders.
The research will also pay particular attention to translation as a means of discovery and encounter among peoples and cultures; translation as a practice of transition, transfer and transformation of discourses-worlds, as a cooperative tool toward hospitality and “convivencia”—as a way to “build and cross bridges.”47 But, at the same time, we will investigate the power relations between hegemonic languages and the translated tongues, and the role of the interpreter. We want to test whether processes of transnational bridging and transnationalization performed by translation practice can act as a counter-discourse resisting the practices of building boundaries—real and legal walls.
Indeed, translation will stand out as a shared political and cultural pathway to retrace and rethink the borderlands and the walls between/within our own territories, and more precisely:
To carry on this action, to investigate the effects that the physical, geographical and cultural walls separating people and countries have on art and literature in those countries where the research will be carried out, we need to focus on the mental walls behind the definition of race, sex, culture, and class; we need to deconstruct the seawall (in Italian: “mare-muro”; Spanish: mar-muro; Hebrew: Yam-Kir; Arabic: Bah’r-Haiit/ Xaiit) concept as well as the idea of border/confinement and to formulate new practices, working out a new vision of the Mediterranean Sea as a genuine liquid crossing border-bridge-free-port so as to foster new reception procedures.
The northbound and westernbound migrations from Africa and Middle Eastern countries to Europe brings to the forefront of those who have welcoming hearts and open eyes a complex migrancy scenario: if the polyphonic and plural dimensions of Mediterranean cultures start to be acknowledged as the locus of an ongoing struggle and at the same time of inter-touchment between cultural modes and material lives, other readings and strategies, outside the old paradigms, can be invented. Through a paratactic analysis of the Northern perspective of policy-making and surveillance practices (and its effectiveness), and the Southern and South-Eastern perspectives and motivations of those who try the crossing, those who have welcoming hearts and open eyes feel that the challenge could lie in providing an alternative to the dichotomic resolutions, to the either/or prevailing thinking in migration policies.
Sustained by the chicano theorization of border crossing, the attempt of our research project “Unwalling up the Mediterranean” is to test whether politics, poetics and translation can converse in order to produce new visions and policies.50 Thus, we think that in order to un/wall Mediterranean and neocolonial walls, we need to take into account the creative discourses and practices of the African Mediterranean and the art production by first-generation immigrants as well as the “bastard” artistic popular expressivity, be it textual or visual, around the Mediterranean rim.
The theoretical hypothesis, which our research group in Bari shares with Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Nabiha Jerad, who are working on “Burning through water,” is that the African Mediterranean discourses challenge the categories of post-colonial concepts such as center and periphery, as well as the dichotomy that opposes the subaltern South to the hegemonic West. We argue that the voices of the harraga, of the crossers, of the detained in the camps, of the brave who attempt the crossing several times, express a new modernity and a new cosmopolitanism,51 a new supranational positionality52 that we feel is no longer classifiable as “Western” in that it disrupts the centralizing discourse of the nation-state. “It is on the contrary the affirmation of a new identity born in the projectuality of the crossing of the Mediterranean, born at the margins and borders of the nation-state and not within it.”53
I think that it is possible to build bridges, or at least weave stitches, between the chicano fronterizo discourse-vision and Mediterranean new constructions, where the crossing itself is the shared space/category/figuration through which 1) “[African] candidates to the North produce references for a new identity, a new temporality, and a new spatiality”;54 2) chicano candidates to the United States can forge the supranational pan-latino category of “la raza”; 3) Middle-Eastern candidates to Europe dream of being able to conjugate the language and flavors of the origin with the envisioned, looked for commodities of the North-West (think of the movie Soul Kitchen, 2009, by Turkish director Fatih Akin). For all of them, it is the challenge of crossing that produces new self-representations. On the other hand, the sea crossing is reminiscent of the Atlantic Middle Passage, makes us remember the deaths in the Atlantic restaged on the screen of modern(ist) Western scene by Gilroy’s essay and by memories/dreams-nightmares of bodies floating in the sea in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.55 History is right now giving us back an image of neverending Western colonial practices: the Middle Passage sailing from African shores and northbound, sadly features again the old forms of enslavement carried on by cargoes and boats leaving Mediterranean shores and going toward Africa and then heading, with their shameful merchandise, toward the Americas. As Sandro Mezzadra explains, in La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale, the texture of our times takes the form of an interlacement of old and brand new forms of exploitation.
And yet, notwithstanding the vicious circle of oppression, we must be aware that those crossing in our times are subjectivities that, although bearing the inscriptions of many layers and many wounds, are open to change, look at the sea passage as the threshold of new opportunities, are willing to experience new forms of commonality, new forms of convivencia à venir. This desire is the meeting ground between the newcomers and us, the “foreigners within,” the Southern Italian people scored with multiple incisions,
we
marked by the B brown letter,
the Bastard icon,
the “terroni”—because we worked the land, la terra, and because we were a bit darker than the Northern species,
Browny because of the sun and because of mestizaje with the Arabs (“chill o fatt è gnure gnure, gnure gnure comm’ a che,” sings a post-World War II Neapolitan song),
we
repeatedly violated by conquests,
we—the Body of conquest,
the Mediterranean Bastards,
the Mexicans of Italy
we—who (should) feel unease and disgust and shame towards the refoulement laws.
Notes
1. Perhaps it is because of that dominion that we have the proverb: “Se Parigi avesse il mare sarebbe una piccola Bari” (If Paris had the sea, it would be a little Bari).
2. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
3. A few names to historicize: Liana Borghi, Giovanna Covi, Roberta Mazzanti, Carla Locatelli, Marina Camboni, Lidia Curti, Ernestina Pellegrini, Clotilde Barbarulli, Patrizia Calefato, Rita Calabrese, Annamaria Crispino and her review Legendaria, Silvana Carotenuto, Alessandra Ricci, Itala Vivan, Edda Melon, Patrizia Calefato, and many more. Together with Patrizia Calefato, I introduced in the University of Bari Cultural, Gender and Visual Studies.
4. For whom some years later SIL organized, based on an idea of our smart colleague Liana Borghi, a national summer school in Prato, near Florence called “Raccontarsi. Gender and Interculture.”
5. According to Sandro Mezzadra—I think he is speaking of the Italian case—the meaning of “exile” changes with the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: from political refugee, stateless person (until the Italian 1848 revolutionary insurrections guided by exiles), the exile starts being perceived as akin to a migrant, because s/he is very often poor, a foreigner and the embodiment of possible turbulence, and thus it is better to exclude him/her from citizenship. Sandro Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2001), 50.
6. Preface to Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco; Aunt Lute, 1987). “Intracultural means within the Chicano culture and Mexican culture. Intercultural is about how we are related to other cultures like black culture, Native American cultures, white culture, and international cultures in general. I am operating on both perspectives as I am trying to write for different audiences. . . .” Karin Ikas, interview with Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands/La frontera, by Gloria Anzaldúa, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007), 233.
7. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 58.
8. Ibid., 59.
9. A port city in Northwestern Libya, only thirty-seven miles from the Tunisian border (translator’s note).
10. A Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation signed by Berlusconi and Gheddafi in Bengasi, August 30, 2008, which guaranteed more oil, a smaller number of stowaways, no rights for the illegal immigrants, or asylum seekers. It is an ambitious document that highlights the special and privileged relationship that the two countries intend to develop, without forgetting the role that they are willing to achieve within the EU and the African Union. The treaty has given rise to great perplexities related to human rights, considering the conditions in which rejected migrants are left at the mercy of the desert. Libya is not part of the 1951 Convention on Refugees, although it has ratified regional and universal documents for the safeguard of human rights. (My note to Vittorio’s text).
11. Tino Vittorio, “Lampedusa, immigrazione e guerra di fede” SiciliaInformazioni.com, September 18, 2009, accessed March 27, 2010, http://www.siciliainformazioni.com/giornale/cronacaregionale/64607/lampedusa-immigrazione-guerra-fede.htm.
12. Fabrizio Gatti, “Morire nel deserto,” L’Espresso, January 14, 2010, accessed April 20, 2010, http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio/morire-nel-deserto/2119367//0. Other reportages or documentaries on this matter are accessible on Gabriele Del Grande’s blog, “Fortress Europe, http://fortresseurope.blogspot.com, including “I disperati del Sahara”; “Capitani coraggiosi. Parlano i pescatori di Mazara”; “Lampedusa: salvarono naufraghi, oggi rischiano il carcere”; “Agrigento: capitan vergogna davanti ai suoi giudici”; “Come un uomo sulla terra.”
13. Jacques Rancière, “Jacques Rancière and indisciplinarity,” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 1 (Summer 2008), accessed April 15, 2010, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html, 8.
14. Giorgio Agamben, “We refugees,” Symposium 49, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 114–19, accessed October 12, 2006, www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-we-refugees.html. Agamben is quoting Hannah Arendt.
15. Rancière, “Jacques Rancière,” 4.
16. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, “Mentre cerchi la pace non provi paura,” Preface to Sogni di sabbia. Storie di migranti, by CISP (Comitato Internazionale per lo Sviluppo dei Popoli) (Rome: Infinito edizioni, 2009), 10. My translation.
17. Agamben, 1.
18. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” (1943), in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Mark Robinson (Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994),110.
19. Agamben, 3.
20. Ibid., 4.
21. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 2004), 134.
22. Judith Butler and Gayatri C. Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? (New York: Seagull Books, 2007), 9–10.
23. Sandro Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale. Verona: Ombre corte, 2008); Paola Zaccaria, La lingua che ospita. Poetica, politica, traduzioni (Roma: Meltemi, 2004); and Paola Zaccaria, “Basi mobili e implosione della medesimezza nell’altrove,” in Forme della diversità. Genere, precarietà e intercultura, ed. Liana Borghi and Clotilde Barbarulli (Cagliari: CUEC, 2006), 263–73.
24. Jacques Rancière, La mèsentante. Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilèe, 2005).
25. My father’s generation in Southern Apulia used the expression “senza arte né parte” (with no art and no part) to mean people without working skills and without possessions, without a place. Contemporary commonplace imagination thinks of the newcomer as a subject with no art and no part(y)/participation/place. In both cases it hints at social positionality.
26. Rancière, La mèsentante, 53.
27. Rancière, “Jacques Rancière,” 3.
28. See Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1978), and Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
29. Its tasks: to maintain law and order on in Italian territory and to defend the national interests. Being made of volunteers, its function and foundation worryingly remind us of contemporary “ronde” created by the Lega Nord.
30. Another parallelism: the Northern League supporters wear a uniform—the green shirts instead of the black shirts today often worn by the Italian Prime Minister, Berlusconi.
31. Before the early 1930s, the defense of the borders was in the hands of Guardia di Finanza, Carabinieri, and Milizia Confinaria. In 1934, another branch was entrusted with the border defense: the Guardia alla Frontiera. On this, see the online article: Paolo Deotto, “La protesi militare di Mussolini,” accessed April 1, 2010, http://www.storiain.net/arret/num59/artic3.htm. For more detailed approaches: Lazzero Ricciotti, Il Partito Nazionale Fascista (Milano: Rizzoli, 1985); Renzo De Felice, Intervista sul fascismo, ed. Michael A. Ledeen (Bari: Laterza, 1975); Lucio Ceva, Storia delle Forze Armate in Italia (Turin: Utet, 1999).
32. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Guardare la guerra. Immagini del potere globale (Roma: Meltemi, 2004), 168.
33. Paola Zaccaria, “Borders and confinement between the desert and the Mediterranean Sea,” in Working and Writing for Tomorrow, ed. Annalisa Oboe, Claudia Gualtieri, and Roger Bromley (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communication Press, 2008), 112.
34. I owe the awareness of the contradiction between sovereignty and human rights agreement to Marinella Giannelli’s seminar on “Mare Nostrum,” held on March 31, 2010 at the University of Bari for the research project “Contro ogni muro: Unwalling the Mediterranean.”
35. See web review, YALLA Italia. Il mensile delle seconde generazioni, accessed February 10, 2010 (http://www.yallaitalia.it/). The word “Yalla,” meaning “hurry up,” is the title of the blog written by second-generation, or “new,” Italians.
36. Benedetto Vecchi, “Le mappe in gioco,” Il manifesto, February 2, 2010. Vecchi is reviewing Franco Farinelli, La crisi della ragione cartografica (Torino: Einaudi, 2009).
37. Etienne Balibar, “At the borders of Europe,” lecture delivered October 4, 1999 at Aristotele University of Thessaloniki, accessed October 4, 2006, http://www.makeworlds.org/node/80. French text published in Transeuropéennes 17 (1999–2000): 9–17.
38. For this term, see Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre, “Chicana/o Artivism: Judy Baca’s Digital Work with Youth of Color,” in Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, ed. Anna Everett, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), 81–108.
39. Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Picador, 1987).
40. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Nabiha Jerad are analyzing emigration from the Southern perspective of those who attempt the crossing, and they are concerned with the “harraga” (the burners, those who burn the Mediterranean), that is “young candidates who are preparing themselves or have already been part of the illegal migrations from Tunisia and Senegal across the Mediterranean Sea.” (From the abstract “Burning through Water: African Mediterranean Discourses and the Crossing of the Mediterranean,” presented by Lombardi-Diop and Jerad for a panel planned with me for the 2011 EACLALS Conference in Istanbul.)
41. Sandro Mezzadra suggests a distinction between the individual escape that he defines as the subjective dimension of migratory processes (Diritto, 8), and the flight as perceived by those who see the migrants’ arrival, which brings about metaphors such as invasion, flood, etc. Besides, founding his observations on Moulier Boutang’s studies (Yan Moulier Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat économie historique du salariat bridé [Paris: PUF, 1998]), Mezzadra considers the migrant’s flight as the contemporary re-interpretation of past behaviors enacted by individuals and groups in order “to escape from despotism, the plantation system, the factory exploitation, etc.” (Diritto, 9, my translation).
42. Saskia Sassen, in her book on immigration in Europe (1999), shows how the invasion myth is a bogeyman invented by European states to frighten residents. History teaches us, Sassen explains, that migrants and the countryless are the result of centuries of imperialism, colonialism and European wars that have brought about the birth of nation-states. Saskia Sassen, Migranti, coloni, rifugiati. Dall’emigrazione di massa alla Fortezza Europa, trans. Maria Gregorio (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999). Originally published as Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1999).
43. Zaccaria, “Borders,” 112–13.
44. The term “Arab” is not a proper ethnic definition, but refers to the people of the Arab region, and defines those who speak the Arabic language. But very often it is inappropriately used as a synonym for Muslim (those who profess the Islamic religion) or Islamic, that today has come, again inappropriately, to be synonymous with fundamentalism. The Arabs, in the Southern Italian area, were and are also called the “Saracens,” a term probably coming from the Arab word “shiarkiin,” meaning those coming from the East. But the Arabs never called themselves Saracens. Dizionario Etimologico Online, “Saracino, Saraceno,” accessed March 17, 2010, http://www.etimo.it/?cmd=id&id=15331&md=047551da019f4163b78a0af80d9064ce.
45. The No Border Wall Coalition (http://notexasborderwall.blogspot.com/ and http://www.notexasborderwall.com/) in Texas; the Meadowlark Center, Kansas; Palestinian and Israeli organizations opposing the wall and conflict, such as Parents Circle—Bereaved Palestinian and Israeli Parents for Peace; ICEO–International Committee on Education under Occupation; etc.
46. A few movies on the subject: The Wall, by J. Bottcher, 1990; Etz Limon (Lemon tree, 2008) and The Syrian bride, by Eran Riklis, 2004; the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, by Ari Folman, 2008.
47. See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/LaFrontera, and Gloria Anzaldúa, “(Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–5.
48. Here, the “respondents” are Professors Nurit Peled and Sami Adwan, scholars and activists, and a young Italian activist-theatre director, at the moment a volunteer in the NGO “AIC- Alternative Information Center” near Bethlehem, Palestine.
49. Here, the “native informants” and respondents are Chicana poet Emmy Perez, the Chicana writer and scholar Norma Cantù, the Association of Borderlands Studies, the Coalition for Women and Families, the University of Texas El Paso (Professor Irasema Coronado) and Meadowlark Center, Kansas (poet and activist Kamala Platt).
50. On this, see my book La lingua che ospita.
51. Lombardi-Diop and Jerad.
52. Paola Zaccaria, “Unwalling the Mediterranean Up: Utopian Routes and Material Losses,” paper proposal for a panel, organized with Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Nabiha Jerad, titled “Walls and the African Mediterranean,” accepted by the 2011 triennial conference of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Bogazici [Bosphorus] University, Istanbul, April 26–30, 2011.
53. Lombardi-Diop and Jerad.
54. Lombardi-Diop and Jerad.
55. “They are not crouching now we are they are floating on the water . . . she goes in the water . . . I am in the water and she is coming . . . I see me swim away . . . I come out of blue water . . .” (Beloved’s monologue, from Morrison, 212–13).
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