Thursday 06.09.2018, 15:30, Radboud University, Nijmegen
The Mediterranean Threshold
Prof. Timothy Raeymaekers, Dept. of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract
Timothy Raeymaekers’ presentation tries to fill a gap in the critical geography of territorial borders. Taking the current ‘crisis of migration’ in the Mediterranean as a case study, I ask myself what territorial effects this crisis is producing and how it challenges our conception of political subjectivity. The work I present here builds on five years of ethnographic and geographic research in so-called ‘migrant occupations’ across the Italian peninsula (e.g. Raeymaekers 2014, 2018 and 2019 forthcoming). Altogether Prof. Raeymaekers addresses two intersecting questions, which can be summarised like this: if we accept that the Mediterranean is increasingly becoming a ‘middle passage’ (after Gilroy 1983, 2015), then what kind of transformation shall we think this passage is producing, not just in terms of the technology of border and migration control, but also of citizen subjectivity? This question requires a reflection on two fronts. On the one hand, we observe how a rapidly transforming border regime across the Mediterranean is producing a progressive delocalisation of state boundaries – a process that results both in a form of extraterritoriality and of micro-territoriality. On the other hand, he argues, the way the actual management of migration and asylum is systematically being outsourced and privatised across this bordered territory produces an expanding, liquid threshold, which becomes central in the alignment, coordination and translation of contemporary migrant rights. The metaphor of the threshold serves to further explain and disentangle the way the rights of Europe’s non-citizens are currently mediated on the boundary of often conflicting political institutions. he concludes this presentation with a few more general reflections on the relation between territory, authority and political rights.
References
Butler, J. (2010) Frames of war: when is life grievable? London: Verso.
Gilroy, P. (1983) The black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness, Harvard University Press
— (2015) Offshore humanism, Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture, Exeter.
Mbembe, A. (200) At the edge of the world: boundaries, territoriality, and sovereignty in Africa, in: Public Culture 12(1), pp. 259–284.
Raeymaekers, T. (2014) Europe’s bleeding border and the Mediterranean as a relational space, in: ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 13(2), pp. 163-172 (special issue).
— (forthcoming 2018) The laws of impermanence: displacement, sovereignty, subjectivity, in: Mitchell, K., Jones, R. and Fluri, J., eds., Handbook on critical geographies of migration, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Press.
— (forthcoming 2019) Liquid thresholds: migrant territorializations and the Mediterranean crisis, in: Giglioli, I., Hawthorne, C. and Tiberio, A., Rethinking ‘Europe’ through its borderlands’, Cultural Geography.