Abstract
The focus of this paper is the materiality and mobility of migrants’ boats and belongings that are placed in the ‘graveyards of boats’ at the Island of Lampedusa, which is off the coast of Italy in the Mediterranean. Lampedusa is known as a small tourist site, but is also famous for the arrival of migrants. The materials in the ‘graveyards of boats’, together with other heterogeneous people and things, constituted mobile spaces in which mobility of migrants from the southern to the northern shore of the Mediterranean was made possible. As soon as the things were separated from the migrants’ bodies ‘saved’ at Lampedusa or in the Mediterranean, the formers started to make their own mobile spaces without living migrants. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to consider how materiality and mobility of migrant’s boats and belongings can influence subjectivities amongst the residents of the island and European citizens.
On the one hand, hegemonic sovereign subjectivities can be found at the level of constituted powers, which objectify the materials into institutional museumization and humanitarian ‘border spectacles’. As a result, they objectify (living) migrants as victims who should be rescued by European sovereign subjects. Their mobility comes to be considered as an object of control. Furthermore, these border spectacles determine the subjective position of the local people of Lampedusa in an orientalistic way: Lampedusian people are ‘merciful’, ‘hospitable’ and ‘humanistic’.
On the other hand, the possibility of de-sovereign and potential political subjectivities at the level of the local people are demonstrated. The local people are involved in flows of materiality and mobility of the materials and staying immanently inside of their flows, continue to search for alternative relations with the materials as well as migrants, even if exhibiting them in a space. Such people do not fetishize the materials themselves. Rather these subjectivities radically question social and historical relations behind the materials. Such relations are symbolized by European colonial and postcolonial violence.
Consequently, from the latter subjectivities, a political process in the middle of the tourist island is indicated; this is open to migrants’ autonomous mobility, namely, making use of further mobile spaces potentially moving beyond border spectacles and the postcolonial border regime of Europe.
