ACLA panel: The Mediterranean Cemetery: Clandestine Crossings, Migrants, and Refugees
Hakim Abderrezak and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
The Mediterranean is commonly referred to as a crossroad—a stage for exchanges and passages of all sorts, including human. Yet the refugee crisis has shown another reality: under the surface, thousands of refugees are populating a cemetery. Shifting the world’s attention from Middle Eastern regional conflicts to one of their most visible consequences, the refugee crisis has put the Mediterranean cemetery on the world’s radar. The Levant has indeed witnessed the departure of thousands of migrants setting off to sea to escape from wars and social unrest in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Footage of this mass exodus has also featured departures from North African countries like Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, as well as sub-Saharan Africa.
However, tragedies did not begin with the refugee crisis. Clandestine crossings constitute multifaceted processes reflecting complex Mediterranean histories, economies, geopolitics, and societies. For decades, migrants leaving Moroccan shores have died on their way to Spain aboard rowboats called pateras. In addition, although clandestine Mediterranean passages have often been conceived as south-to-north movements, earlier waves of European “pateristas” also undertook the perilous journey to North Africa to flee Franco’s regime. While refugees have been associated with wars and oppression and migrants with economic and material mobility, clandestine crossings also take place in countries at peace, and, as Boualem Sansal has indicated, they are not always undertaken for economic and material reasons. It is hogra, or state-sanctioned humiliation, which led Mohammed Bouazizi to set himself on fire and set the Arab Spring in motion. The desperate act of setting out to sea, or to “burn the Sea,” as we call it, is revealing of a complicated geopolitical reality, while increasingly stringent anti-immigration policies have rendered the Mediterranean even more intricate and certainly more tragic.
In this seminar, we will explore the pull and push factors that account for unauthorized human migrancy around the Mediterranean, including both “economic” migrants and refugees. We will focus particularly on failed crossings resulting in death. This will lead us to reflect on the place, nature, function, and symbolic resonance of the maritime cemetery in literary and artistic productions from various Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean languages and contexts.
Topics might include:
- The materiality and spatiality of death
- The social landscapes and meaning-making processes that the Mediterranean cemetery fosters
- The creation of collective/public memory among audiences
- State territoriality and border politics
- Biopolitics and biosecurity
- New understandings of national and linguistic borders
- Heterotopia, in-betweenness, nomadism
- Migrant death and war
- Narratives of disaster and catastrophe
- Survival, bare life, precarity
- Liturgical models of commemoration
- Post-traumatic expression, grief, mourning
Submissions should be sent via the convention’s website (https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper) before September 21.