Drawing on a cluster of multi-disciplinary approaches, but prioritizing critical cultural studies and border studies perspectives, I intend to explore the complexities inherent to the challenge of representing the ‘borderization’ of the Mediterranean, and the increasing criminalization of migrants by institutions and the media that alternatively exploit images of the migrant body in order to serve both compassionate, self-gratulatory agendas and populistic discourses of infection and invasion. Building on recent scholarship, such as, among others, Balibar (2009; 2015), Mezzadra et al. (2015), van Houtum (2010), and Mazzara (2015), I shall first address how migrants and the once (stereotypically) idyllic island of Lampedusa have been discursively re-constructed, across the European public sphere, as subjects and spaces of abjection, waste, and, depending on the occasion, empathetic scopic consumption. I shall then focus on the short play Lampedusa (2015), by the British political activist and playwright Anders Lustgarten. Inspired by the relentless death toll at sea, and by the appalling shipwreck of 3 October 2013 which, resounding across international headlines, inaugurated the discourse of “the Mediterranean-as-cemetery”, the play aims to revive the memory of the thousands who were left to drown, and takes overtly issue with Europe’s collective responsibility for the enduring tragedy of contemporary migration.
The Border Spectacle and the Dramaturgy of Hope in Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa / L.A. DE MICHELIS. - In: POSTCOLONIAL TEXT. - ISSN 1705-9100. - 12:3-4(2017 Dec), pp. 1-17.
The Border Spectacle and the Dramaturgy of Hope in Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa
L.A. DE MICHELIS
2017
Abstract
Drawing on a cluster of multi-disciplinary approaches, but prioritizing critical cultural studies and border studies perspectives, I intend to explore the complexities inherent to the challenge of representing the ‘borderization’ of the Mediterranean, and the increasing criminalization of migrants by institutions and the media that alternatively exploit images of the migrant body in order to serve both compassionate, self-gratulatory agendas and populistic discourses of infection and invasion. Building on recent scholarship, such as, among others, Balibar (2009; 2015), Mezzadra et al. (2015), van Houtum (2010), and Mazzara (2015), I shall first address how migrants and the once (stereotypically) idyllic island of Lampedusa have been discursively re-constructed, across the European public sphere, as subjects and spaces of abjection, waste, and, depending on the occasion, empathetic scopic consumption. I shall then focus on the short play Lampedusa (2015), by the British political activist and playwright Anders Lustgarten. Inspired by the relentless death toll at sea, and by the appalling shipwreck of 3 October 2013 which, resounding across international headlines, inaugurated the discourse of “the Mediterranean-as-cemetery”, the play aims to revive the memory of the thousands who were left to drown, and takes overtly issue with Europe’s collective responsibility for the enduring tragedy of contemporary migration.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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