[LINK] "Slavery’s afterlife in the Euro-Mediterranean basin"

[rfmcdonald]

Tryon P. Woods and P. Khalil Saucier look, at Open Democracy, on the legacies of slavery and racism on migration in the Mediterranean basis.

The tragic weekend of April 18-19, 2015, in which over 700 so-called African ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees’ perished less than 130 miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa, with another 400 Africans stranded in the Mediterranean desperately awaiting rescue, repeated with violent clarity the terms of black death and suffering which continue to underwrite the modern world and the European project in particular. Lampedusa, as one of the southernmost outposts of ‘Fortress Europe,’ has buried scores and scores of Africans in recent years—this most recent spectacle will probably be eclipsed by the next one by the time this essay goes to print—as part of Europe’s ongoing confrontation with the world it created through African enslavement and colonial subjection for over five centuries.

Our intervention into the debate on Europe’s border policies addresses from the vantage of black political praxis the historical specter of slavery haunting current events. Calls for action on the Mediterranean crisis frequently mobilize the discourse of slavery in various ways, but never in the way most pertinent to our contemporary situation. The most ethical assessment of the Mediterranean crisis is not in the terms of what Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and many others call the ‘new’ or ‘modern-day’ slave trade, but rather in terms of racial slavery’s constitutive and consolidating role in the formation and functioning of Europe and modern society itself. The Mediterranean Basin has been an ongoing crisis for black people for the better part of the past and present millenniums. At issue, then, is a more accurate understanding of what slavery was in order to grasp what it is today. We suggest, following the leading edge of black thought, that today’s scene in the Mediterranean reveals slavery’s afterlife.

One mark of slavery’s afterlife is the manner in which black suffering and death in the Mediterranean sustains and resuscitates European democratic society. Case in point is ‘The Charter of Lampedusa,’ a document produced by activists in response to the fatal shipwreck of October 2013. The ‘Charter’ deploys accessible black bodies in order to illustrate the tension between good and bad Europeanness in much the same way that antiracist protests throughout Europe have affixed images of dead black bodies adrift to their placards of choice. Thus, rather than the problem of antiblackness, the ‘Charter’ formulates the issue at hand as an excess of Europeanness and militarism, as the barbarity of EU border controls. It becomes a means of elaborating a positive European identity, an antiracist cosmopolitan identity ostensibly attuned to all human suffering, but in reality primarily concerned to save Europe from itself, for Europeans. In this instance, black struggle becomes a medium for psychic transformation: in death, the Lampedusa victims enable Europeans to re-emerge as civilized, which is to say enlightened, subjects.

One recent Italian commentator compared the public stripping and high-pressure hose washing of African detainees on Lampedusa to the Italian immigrant experience on Ellis Island at the turn of the twentieth century: “although not nearly as demeaning as what the refugees in Lampedusa undergo on a regular basis, we were humiliated by, and decried, the primitive physical examinations intended to discover which infectious diseases we were carrying. Only, at the time, it was easier to be outraged as we were the victims.” This effort to identify with the captive African turns in on itself because rather than feel what it means to be left to drown within sight of the European coast, over and over again, the Italian commentator instead begins to feel for himself, or for his national kin. The analogy falters across the abyss of slavery, for that is where black people were permanently imprisoned while Italians were momentarily detained at Ellis Island. In short, the antiracist is the policeman: in the attempt to counteract the indifference of European society to the immigrant’s suffering, the putative white body of the EU assumes the position of the captive black body in order to make the suffering in the Euro-Mediterranean Sea visible, legible, and coherent.

More there.