Mediterranean ARTivism

This book is an interdisciplinary study aimed at re-imagining and re-routing contemporary migrations in the Mediterranean. Drawing from visual arts, citizenship studies, film, media and cultural studies, along with postcolonial, border, and decolonial discourses, and examining the issues from within a human rights framework, the book investigates how works of cultural production can offer a more complex and humane understanding of mobility in the Mediterranean beyond representations of illegality and/or crisis . Elvira Pulitano centers the discourse of cultural production around the island of Lampedusa but expands the island geography to include a digital multi-media project, a social enterprise in Palermo, Sicily, and overall reflections on race, identity, and belonging inspired by Toni Morrison's guest-curated Louvre exhibit The Foreigner's Home. Responding to recent calls for alternative methodologies in thinking the modern Mediterranean, Pulitano disseminates afluid archive of contemporary migrations reverberating with ancestral sounds and voices from the African diaspora along a Mediterranean-TransAtlantic map. Adding to the recent proliferation of social science scholarship that has drawn attention to the role of artistic practice in migration studies, the book features human stories of endurance and survival aimed at enhancing knowledge and social justice beyond (and notwithstanding) militarized borders and failed EU policies.

Frames the overall crisis narrative of contemporary illegalized migrations in Europe within a human rights debate Critiques European legislation on migrants and refugees which often results in temporary solutions Serves as a tribute to the endurance of the human spirit and to the oldest human impulse of solidarity and brotherhood

Autorentext

Elvira Pulitano is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo where she teaches courses in Indigenous and Caribbean Studies, Critical Race Theory, Migration, and Human Rights. She is the author of Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean: Diasporic Literature and the Human Experience (2016) and editor of Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration (2012). A Fulbright scholar from Italy, she received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico, specializing in Native American and postcolonial studies. She previously held teaching positions at the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland.

Inhalt

Entanglements: Some Reflections on Migrant Journeys.- Fault-Lines: The Mediterranean's Burning and the Human Rights Debate.- Island(s): Lampedusa as a Hotspot of EU Border Policies.- Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments.- Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memories.- Eyes, Sounds, Voices: Cinematic Representations of the Lampedusa Borderscape.- Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts of Resistance.- Watery Confluences: Toward a (Trans)MediterrAtlantic DiscourseCritical Reflections on The Foreigner's Home (2018).- La mia terra è dove poggio i miei piedi ( My Land Is Where I Lay My Feet ) : ARTivism and Social Enterprise in Palermo, Sicily.