The Mediterranean of the refugees: For a reading of colonial implications in spatial imagination

Abstract

In my paper I am interested in both a semiotic analysis that captures the contemporary discourse on the Mediterranean and a study that connects it to the analysis of the meanings attached to the transit and presence of migrants and refugees in Europe and the Mediterranean, and to the historical reasons, power relations, colonial archives and memories that constitute what Sandro Mezzadra calls the “postcolonial condition” (Mezzadra, 2008). I title it the Mediterranean of the refugees with the purpose of stressing the multilayered semantic structure of the imaginary related to the refugee in/and the Mediterranean, as the result of a complex (and problematic) overlappings of meanings, figures, practices, and texts, sedimented through history and providing the material for specific discourses on the Mediterranean, Europe and its s/he Other(s). Semiotics, history, cultural studies, feminist and postcolonial perspectives and critical race studies help me to redefine the Mediterranean in a symbolic frame reproducing those meanings, figures, practices that convey memories and violence, protest, resistance and conflict.