Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean

"This collection of essays presents a study of migration cultures in the contemporary Mediterranean with a particular focus on Italy as a point of migratory convergence and pressure. The essays explore different experiences of, and responses to, sea crossings, borders and checkpoints, cultural proximity and distance, race, ethnicity, and memory, along with creative responses to the same. In dialogic and complementary interaction, the essays explore violence centring on race as the major determining factor. The book further submits that the interrogation of racialised categories represents different kinds of critical response and resistance, which involves both political struggle and day-to-day survival and coexistence. Following the praxis of cultural and postcolonial studies, the essays focus on the present but draw indispensable insight from past connections and heritage and offer prognoses for the future. The ambitious aim of this collection is to help identify some useful lines of thought and actions which could lead us to think outside intricacy, isolation, and defensiveness, which characterise most of the public official reactions to migration today"--