Search results for " Black Mediterranean"
showing 8 items of 8 documents
Postfazione a E. C. Osondu, Quando il cielo vuole spuntano le stelle
2020
The Postface to E. C. Osondu's most recent novel offers a commentary on this Bildungsroman, whose protagonist is a young man from an unknown African country who leaves home behind to reach Europe hoping in a better world. Although narrated in a lyrical tone, the protagonist's epic journey resonates with the actual stories of the uncountable young African men who in the past years have crossed the Black Mediterranean.
"Lampedusa und das 'Schwarze Mittelmeer'. Die Migrationsrouten im Jahrtausend der Globalisierung"
2013
On frontiers in the global millennium. The role played by the minor island of Lampedusa as a bridge and border between Africa and Europe.
Framing Migrant Memories: Lampedusa's Fragmented Archives
2022
The small island of Lampedusa, a key destination of the Central Mediterranean Route connecting Africa to Italy, offers a special observatory on the contemporary trans-Mediterranean odyssey of migrants, although often transformed into a “border spectacle.” Upon landing, migrants are stripped of their belongings, as these are impounded by the authorities. Such an act of dispossession is intended to deprive them of their histories, family ties and cultural identity. Photographer Mario Badagliacca has portrayed a selection of these lost and retrieved items in his work Fragments (2013). Each object reveals expectations, fears, desires, endurance, but cannot tell a full story. They are fragments …
Ghosts from the Abyss. The imagination of new worlds in the sea-narratives of Afrofuturism
2022
This contribution aims to investigate a different ghostscape, shaped by the turbulent materiality of the sea: the abyss. A space of trauma and simultaneously of becoming, it is populated by spectral objects, traces, fragments, and, above all, ghosts. Looking into the abyss through the turbulent materiality of the sea (where the turbulence recalls Haraway’s trouble and the materiality a livingness of the world in which “matter comes to matter”), sea-related ghosts from the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean emerge as absences-presences that matter. The emersion of sea-related new worlds is one of the main topics of Afrofuturism narratives: from the Drexciya world to the Novella The De…
Il mare colore del sangue
2018
In their artwork "Calendoola: SURUS", visual artists Simone Trabucchi and Simone Bertuzzi AKA Invernomuto, in their characteristically visionary language combine sensory experiences and political urgency, offering a reflection on a potentially dystopian society incapable of coming to terms with its own history of colonial, imperial, neocolonial, and global domination. In their 2018 installation at the MAXXI Musuem in Rome, men bleed, turtles lie on their backs, and elephants look on, wise and inexorable. Meanwhile the sea is burning and has turned blood-red. It is the blood of the sons who cross it from opposite sides of the Mediterranean, some succeeding, others succumbing to its abysses. …
The Mediterranean, or Where Africa Does (Not) Meet Italy: Andrea Segre's A Sud di Lampedusa (2006)
2013
The essay studies the crossing (or "burning") of the hundred thousand Africans who have traversed the Mediterranean in the past decades to look for better life conditions in Europe, through an analysis of Andrea Segre's documentaries, in particular South of Lampedusa (2006).
The Black Mediterranean: A View from Sicily
2021
While Italy has recently experienced nationalist drives, Sicily and in particular the City of Palermo, one of the major ports of refuge for countless migrants arriving in Europe from the African shores, has distinguished itself as an experimental site where to rethink and challenge notions of residence, mobility, citizenship and belonging. Through a series of cultural initiatives, Palermo has become a hub for frontline artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists who have gathered to explore the historically and contemporary ways in which black voices have been silenced and black bodies have been ambiguously imagined in Western-dominated global culture. Investigating these questions is fu…
Bridge over Troubled Water: Italy and the Black Mediterranean
2022
Since ancient times, Italy has served as a bridge between Africa and Europe, facilitating exchanges of goods, crops, legends, human beings, and deities. In recent decades, this role has come back to everyone’s attention because of the flows that have turned the Mediterranean into one of the main crossroads on the global migratory chessboard. Several young Africans have embarked the Mediterranean Passage. Some have arrived to the opposite shore, whereas some have not. The survivors have reshaped the history of the African Diaspora. The history of the Black Mediterranean resonates with that of the Black Atlantic. Moreover, the considerable presence of an African Italian community inevitably l…