Arab Uprisings, Migrations, and the Mediterranean Question
March 12, 2014
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
The construction of the Mediterranean Sea as a borderland, sanctioning a polarization across shores, has been a persistent European endeavor. Through cartographic distortion, culturalist essentialism, developmental policies, humanitarian rhetoric, and migration control apparatuses, the Euro-Mediterranean appropriation of the Middle Sea is one of the enduring legacies of colonial domination in the region. This presentation looks at how the Arab Uprisings have destabilized this charting of the region and its unfolding restructuring. The analysis draws on the notion of mobility, working at the intersection of two mobilities that have been reconfiguring the Mediterranean stage in the aftermath of the Uprisings. First, the mobility of politics, i.e. the contested politics migrants set in motion traveling across the Mediterranean. Second, the paper traces policy mobility initiatives undertaken by the European Union to govern the unfolding change in the region under fuzzy banners such as "military and humanitarian" interventions.
Glenda Garelli is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois-Chicago, working on a spatial inquiry of migration across the Mediterranean. With Federica Sossi and Martina Tazzioli she edited Spaces in Migration: Postcards of a Revolution (London: Pavement Books). Her work has appeared in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and in the book edited by Tom Simpson 'Noise in the Waters' by Marco Martinelli (New York: Bordighera Press).
Date posted
Jun 8, 2020
Date updated
Jun 8, 2020