Transidioma afloat: Communication, power, and migration in the Mediterranean Sea

ABSTRACT

One consequence of European unification has been the transformation of the Mediterranean Sea into a defensive moat to stop the flow of unwanted migrants. In this techno-political moat, the communication networks of ‘Fortress Europe’ have established, through monitoring and interception technologies (and their corresponding speech acts), a buffer zone surrounding European Union (EU) territorial waters. In this buffer zone, the EU and its member states impose on refugees and migrants a survival test that stops all but the fittest from entering – a test that often results in serious and irreversible human rights violations. This paper examines the Mediterranean as a transidiomatic environment: a multilingual space shaped by the communicative practices of groups of people, either territorially defined or deterritorialized, who interact using an array of both face-to-face and long-distance media. These interactions are activated by two sets of opposing players: those involved in border reinforcement and those engaged in border crossing. Transidiomatic practices, in the form of either order-words or passwords, provide an effective angle for the analysis of the intense conflicts and struggles that today fill the Mediterranean borderscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Transidioma
• migration
• Mediterranean
• communication
• power

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented to the 2014 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, November 2014. I particularly thank the panel organizers (Naor Ben-Yehoyada and Paul Silverstein) and discussants for their questions and comments. I would also like to thank attorney Leonardo Marino for providing me the courtroom materials of the case against the Tunisian fishermen, and the Faculty Development Fund of my university for a research grant to conduct fieldwork in Sicily. Finally I want to thank Dawn Cunningham and the editors of this volume for their advice in the development of the final version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Migrants leave during the scirocco, a wind from the southeast, because if something goes wrong with a boat, it will drift to the North where they have a chance to be rescued and taken into European territory. The other prevalent wind of the area, maestrale, a wind from the North, is a death sentence for a small inflatable dinghy.

2 All excerpts are taken from the courtroom transcripts during the trial Bayoudh più sei (Tribunale di Agrigento, Proc. Pen. N. 875/07 R.G. TRIB. N. 3294/07 R.G.N.R.) and from its appeal (Corte di Appello del Tribunale di Palermo, sentenza N. 2932/2011 Sett.).

3 Scholarly understanding of diversity is undergoing a paradigmatic shift. The concept of superdiversity reflects new preoccupations for both scholars and policy-makers and as such deserves our attention. Yet, because of its development in a European context, it suffers from an undeniable Eurocentric perspective and, ironically, lacks historical perspective. Finally, scholars who use it to replace ‘multilingualism,’ especially in policy debates, may have inadvertently opted for a neoliberal slant echoing the euphoric representation of a contemporary world of new media, big data, and ‘supersizes’ (Reyes 2014). Nevertheless, the phenomena that the term ‘superdiversity’ seeks to address are real and deserve our attention, particularly if we extend this concept’s reach to the analysis of the communicative mutations resulting not only from complex migration flows but also from the digital turn in the field of communication technologies.

4 In 2008 a broad coalition of humanitarian organizations has expressed its concern that much of the rescue work by Frontex was in fact incidental to a deterrence campaign so broad and, at times, so undiscriminating, that asylum-seekers are being blocked from claiming protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention (HRW, policy reports).

5 It’s worth noting that the etymology of both actions is related to the universe of speech: interpellare: [from the Latin interpellare, inter- located between, and pellare, to move to say] to summon, to interrupt by asking questions, to interrogate; and interdire: [from the Latin interdicere, inter- located between, and dicere, to say: to get in the middle with your word] to order, to forbid in an authoritarian manner.

6 This section owes a great deal to the works of Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzali. In 2011, they co-founded WatchTheMed and since then have been working on Forensic Oceanography, a project that critically investigates the militarized border regime and the politics of migration in the Mediterranean Sea. In 2016 they were awarded an ESRC award for their ‘Precarious Trajectories’ project and collaborated with Verso’s Near Futures Online project (http://nearfuturesonline.org/).

7 This accusation was unwarranted. Analysis done on the correlation between flows and SAR operations suggests that SAR NGOs were not the main driver of increasing arrivals over 2016 (cf. blamingtherescuers.org). This research demonstrated that the increasing crossings registered along the Central Mediterranean route in 2016 were consistent with the increase in crossings along the route by African migrants between 2014 and 2015, a period in which the presence of SAR NGOs was still limited. Nevertheless, blaming SAR NGOs became the easiest way to divert public attention from Italian and European authorities’ own responsibilities and failures.