hello listers,
as part of this month's discussion, we wanted to introduce the work of
practitioners who are working with notions of migration.
Heidrun Friese has been conducting anthropological studies with people in
Lampedusa for almost 10 years. As well as writing about these issues, she
has been using photography to document migrant experiences and in 2013 she
created an ibook of images of "Objects Left Behind" by migrants approaching
Lampedusa:
https://itunes.apple.com/de/book/objects-left-behind/id616733600?l=en&mt=11
We have the pleasure of presenting excerpts from her essay “Border
Economies: Lampedusa and The Nascent Migration Industry” (2012, updated
2015)
There will be 5 installments - here's Part I.
For those who are keen, the full text is here:
http://www.shimajournal.org/issues/v6n2/h.%20Freise%20Border%20Economies%20v6n2%2066-84.pdf
Happy reading -
Cecilia
Heidrun Friese “Border Economies: Lampedusa and The Nascent Migration
Industry” (2012, updated 2015)
*PART 1*
Dans les civilisations sans bateaux les rêves se tarissent- Michel Foucault
Situated between Tunisia and Sicily, the tiny island of Lampedusa has
become a prominent symbol for Mediterranean borderlands, EU-migration
policies and cross-border governance. <#15191886734f6188__edn1>Whereas the
right to mobility is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
undocumented people encounter – not least with the introduction of the
Schengen-treaty and the visa system in 1986 – legal systems and border
regimes that set up a variety of limits to their freedom of movement and
capacity to stay.
Undocumented mobility and the “border regime” involve a multitude of local
and (supra)national actors, whose practices relate to each other without
being ordered by a central logic or rationality. The idea of a “migration
regime” helps to stress the interdependence of observation and action.”
The border regime also articulates shifting relations between the global
and the local, centre and periphery, leading to incessant processes and
mobile textures of de/re-localisation, de-bordering and re-bordering which
blur the internal and the external, as well as the formal and the informal
economic sector. The *harraga* (as those who “burn their papers” are called
in the Maghreb), their friends, families and networks, self-made
entrepreneurs who arrange the voyages on one hand, and actors who organise
the reception of boat people on a day-to-day-basis on the other: members of
the Coastal Guard and security forces, the employees of “reception
centres”, the local municipality and political forces.
Images of “flow”, “invasion”, “crisis”, “invasion” or “emergency” are an
integral part of such an industry as the media gaze produces and
disseminates dominant views of undocumented mobility. This dominant gaze
situates the mobile subject both as a victim and as a threat to national
security and systems of welfare, and is part of a powerful social
*imaginaire* of catastrophes and thus, legitimises political discourse and
action, a process outlined by Agamben, where the emergency - the exception
- becomes the rule.
So far, shifting fields of sovereignty, the multiplicity of power
relations, technologies, programmes and strategies of liberal and
neo-liberal governance have been critically scrutinised. Likewise,
practices of hospitality, as well as the quest for cosmopolitan concepts
and the need of new forms of citizenship have been acknowledged. However,
economical aspects of border-regimes and especially the political economies
and the nascent migration industry, in other words, the relations between
local and translocal/transnational informal and formal economies, have
largely escaped attention so far. <#15191886734f6188__edn3>The “production
of illegality” contributes not only to brute exploitation of “illegalised”
manpower, moreover, it enhances the security sector as an “emergent market”
providing technically sophisticated devices for the detection of
undocumented border crossers, such as documented by William Walters.
At the same time, such border regimes foster the production of
subjectivities, of cross-border actors and their strategies to circumvent –
or to actively use – established procedures and routines for individual
projects of mobility. Borders are both a means of exclusion, division *and*
at the same time, porous zones of contact, border commuters and in/formal
commerce (be it “legal” or “illegal”) provide a livelihood for inhabitants
of these regions.
Cecilia Wee
Tutor, Sound Design
Royal College of Art
School of Communication
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
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