Mediterranean ARTivism: Art, Activism, and Migration in Europe

Description

This book is an interdisciplinary study aimed at re-imagining and re-routing contemporary migrations in the Mediterranean. Drawing from visual arts, citizenship studies, film, media and cultural studies, along with postcolonial, border, and decolonial discourses, and examining the issues from within a human rights framework, the book investigates how works of cultural production can offer a more complex and humane understanding of mobility in the Mediterranean beyond representations of illegality and/or crisis. Elvira Pulitano centers the discourse of cultural production around the island of Lampedusa but expands the island geography to include a digital multi-media project, a social enterprise in Palermo, Sicily, and overall reflections on race, identity, and belonging inspired by Toni Morrison’s guest-curated Louvre exhibit The Foreigner’s Home. Responding to recent calls for alternative methodologies in thinking the modern Mediterranean, Pulitano disseminates a fluid archive of contemporary migrations reverberating with ancestral sounds and voices from the African diaspora along a Mediterranean-TransAtlantic map. Adding to the recent proliferation of social science scholarship that has drawn attention to the role of artistic practice in migration studies, the book features human stories of endurance and survival aimed at enhancing knowledge and social justice beyond (and notwithstanding) militarized borders and failed EU policies.  Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Entanglements: Some Reflections on Migrant Journeys All the Stories Converge in Lampedusa… Then and Now Works Cited Fault Lines: The Mediterranean’s “Burning” and the Human Rights Debate “The Burning” The Human Rights Question Fault Lines Crisis Externalization of Migration Control Crimmigration Race and Colonialism Question of Europe/Question of Migration Works Cited Island(s): Lampedusa as a “Hotspot” of EU Border Policies Come un uomo sulla terra Works Cited Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments ASMAT-NAMES (2013) Works Cited Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memories Making Art Out of Debris: “The Lampedusa Cross” and Touroperator “For a Stranger Strangers Do Not Mourn”: Lampedusa’s Cemetery Works Cited Eyes, Sounds, Voices: Cinematic Representations of the Lampedusa Borderscape Soltanto il Mare (2011) To Whom It May Concern (2013) Works Cited Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts of Resistance Porto M in Lampedusa The Archive of Migrant Memories (AMM) Works Cited Watery Confluences: Toward a (Trans)MediterrAtlantic Discourse—Critical Reflections on The Foreigner’s Home (2018) Works Cited “La mia terra è dove poggio i miei piedi (My Land Is Where I Lay My Feet”): ARTivism and Social Enterprise in Palermo, Sicily Works Cited Index