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MEDITERRANEAN PERSPECTIVES
Mediterranean ARTivism
Art, Activism, and Migration
in Europe
Elvira Pulitano
Mediterranean Perspectives
Series Editors
Brian Catlos
University of Colorado - Boulder
Boulder, CO, USA
Sharon Kinoshita
University of California Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA, USA
As a region whose history of connectivity can be documented over at least
two and a half millennia, the Mediterranean has in recent years become
the focus of innovative scholarship in a number of disciplines. In shifting
focus away from histories of the origins and developments of phenomena
predefined by national or religious borders, Mediterranean Studies opens
vistas onto histories of contact, circulation and exchange in all their com-
plexity while encouraging the reconceptualization of inter- and intra-
disciplinary scholarship, making it one of the most exciting and dynamic
fields in the humanities. Mediterranean Perspectives interprets the
Mediterranean in the widest sense: the sea and the lands around it, as well
as the European, Asian and African hinterlands connected to it by net-
works of culture, trade, politics, and religion. This series publishes mono-
graphs and edited collections that explore these new fields, from the span
of Late Antiquity through Early Modernity to the contemporary.
More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15161
Elvira Pulitano
Mediterranean
ARTivism
Art, Activism, and Migration in Europe
Elvira Pulitano
San Luis Obispo, CA, USA
ISSN 2731-5592 ISSN 2731-5606 (electronic)

Mediterranean Perspectives
ISBN 978-3-031-05991-9 ISBN 978-3-031-05992-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05992-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover image: japatino
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To the memory of the people who, throughout these years, have lost
their lives while crossing the Mediterranean Sea in search of freedom and a
dignified life away from wars, military dictatorships, political instability,
famine, and difficult living conditions.
To the survivors of these dangerous journeys, as they are bravely

rebuilding their lives and a new home in Europe. May they continue
to find the courage to tell their stories for the next generations and for all of
us living in such ferocious times.
To the power of art to tear down walls and erase borders and to a
ll the people who passionately and courageously fight for people’s right to
move and against all forms of discrimination.
Acknowledgments
This book officially began in the fall of 2017 when I was granted a one-
year sabbatical from my teaching institution, California Polytechnic State
University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo. This was complemented by a
Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Grant (RSCA), also funded by Cal
Poly. Yet my thinking around issues of migration in the Mediterranean has
a longer history, one inevitably linked to my own history of migration to
the United States. It was during my transatlantic journeys between Sicily,
my native place, and California, my current home, that I began to think
about mobility, freedom of movement, and the intricate history of
Mediterranean crossings, often wondering what has happened to the
country I left more than 20 years ago. Writing this book has been a sort of
homecoming, though a bittersweet one, and I am indebted to so many
people for taking me on such an incredible journey.
I would like to thank the people of Lampedusa for the way in which
they have shown resilience and extraordinary courage in the face of chal-
lenges too big for their small island to take on. I found warmth, welcome,
and generosity among the people I interacted with during my visits to the
island in the late summer of 2017 and 2018 and felt embraced by a land-
scape of extraordinary beauty and rich history. I owe a note of thanks to
Paola and Melo for offering hospitality, books, excellent conversations,
and good humor in their beautiful, colorful house overlooking an incred-
ible blue sea. I am grateful to Giacomo Sferlazzo, of the Askavusa collec-
tive, for his grace, wisdom, and generosity during the conversations we
had at Porto M. I have been inspired by his passion and determination to
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
fight for his small island and against any form of injustice. And I have been
humbled by his eclectic artistic talent. Thanks to Jacob Brossmann for
generously allowing me access to his beautiful film Lampedusa d’inverno
(Lampedusa in Winter) and for the most interesting conversations about
art, migration, and the ethics of representation. I also thank Nino Taranto
for working relentlessly to preserve the “island memory” at the Archivio
storico di Lampedusa, one of the first places I visited during my first stay on
the island.
I am grateful to Clelia Bartoli, for her knowledge, passion, and consis-
tent support throughout this project. Thanks to Clelia I met the staff
members of Moltivolti and Giocherenda, the two Palermo-based organiza-
tions I discuss in the final chapter, and was introduced to realities that
make me hope for a future of creative collaboration and interdependence
in the Mediterranean and Europe. I especially thank Amadou Diallo,
Djawara Bandiougou, Johnny Zinna, Claudio Arestivo, Roberta Lo
Bianco, Tommaso Mazzara, and Melania Memory Mutanuka for being so
generous with their time during our virtual TransAtlantic classroom
exchanges. I would also like to thank Alessandra Di Maio for kindly invit-
ing me to attend (albeit as an auditor) the conference “ReSignifications:
The Black Mediterranean,” held in Palermo in June 2018, an interna-
tional gathering of scholars and artists that made me look at one of my
beloved Italian cities with fresh new eyes.
Projects like these are never produced in solitude, and I am grateful to
all the scholars whose works have inspired my ideas during the writing of
the various chapters that comprise it. I specifically thank Alessandro
Triulzi, Gianluca Gatta, Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Christina Sharpe,
Nicholas De Genova, Davide Enia, Alessandro Leogrande, Ian Chambers,
Gabriele del Grande, Paola Zaccaria, Walter Mignolo, Simona Wright,
Federica Mazzara, and Gabriele Proglio among many, many others.
Heartfelt thanks to all the artists and activists whose work has inspired
my conversation on “Mediterranean ARTivism”: Dagmawi Yimer, Andrea
Segre, Zakaria Mohamed Ali, Gianfranco Rosi, Massimo Sansavini,
Mimmo Paladino, Giacomo Sferlazzo, Geoff Pingree, and Rian Brown. I
owe a special note of gratitude to Dagmawi Yimer and Massimo Sansavini
for granting me access to their work and for taking the time to answer,
through a few e-mail exchanges, all my questions. And, of course, I am
most grateful to the work of the late Toni Morrison, who continues to
remind me that art is indeed all we have when everything else falls apart. I
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
also wish to thank Edwidge Danticat whose beautiful writing continues to

inspire me in ways she cannot even imagine.
In California, I owe a note of thanks to my colleagues, in the Ethnic
Studies department, for their ongoing support and encouragement as I
continue to pursue such cross-cultural, and transatlantic, research agenda.
To my student assistants, Elizabeth Trujillo and Keagan Scott, I offer
many thanks for the incredible conversations we held about the subject of
this book, and for their valuable assistance with bibliographical research
and pictures layout. I would also like to thank my brilliant students in the
Ethnic Studies upper-division course, ES 470: Crossing Borders. Migration,
Human Rights, and Imagined Communities, which I taught in Spring
2019. I thank them for their desire to bring the conversation surrounding
contemporary migration beyond the borders of the United States, and to
Europe and the Mediterranean in particular. To them and to future gen-
erations of students, I hope this book will offer a more nuanced under-
standing of migrations and border crossings. I also thank the World
Languages and Cultures department (WLC) at Cal Poly for allowing me
to teach the WLC 310: Cultures of Italy course over the past few years, a
course in which some of the ideas I discuss in these chapters first originated.
Last but not least, I want to thank my families, in Sicily and California,
for their wholehearted support, trust, and respect for my determination
and passion for what I do. My deep gratitude and love to sweet Zubin and
Raj, for teaching me that a world without borders is indeed possible. I also
want to thank my beautiful niece, Ginevra, in Sicily, who arrived unexpect-
edly when I was about to complete this project. I hope that she can grow
up in a Europe, should she choose to do so, where the dignity and respect
for human rights are truly guaranteed to all.
Last but not least, I owe much gratitude to my loving husband, Jaywant
Philip Parmar, a fantastic traveling companion throughout Lampedusa
and beyond, a talented photographer, a most curious mind, and a kind
soul. Thanks for listening to my often scattered and disconnected ideas.
Thanks for your encouragement and support all these years. For this and
more, grazie infinite.
To the victims and survivors of the Mediterranean crossings goes my
most heartfelt homage and humbling acknowledgment. This book is dedi-
cated to them all.
Praise for Mediterranean ARTivism
“Based on first-hand field research in the central Mediterranean, Pulitano’s vol-

ume subverts current discourse of migration in Europe by emphasizing the Black
Mediterranean experience and its porous entanglements with art, activism, and
belonging. A blueprint for co-habitation and solidarity in war-ravaged Europe.”
—Alessandro Triulzi, Professor of African Studies at the
Università di Napoli L’Orientale, Italy
“There are those who try to fix problems in the frame that generated them and
predictably fail. And there are others who understand that reinventing the frame
creatively and by art is an effective political action indeed. Elvira Pulitano’s book
provides an accurate, rich and long-awaited account of ARTivism related to
Euromediterranean migration, questioning geopolitical assets and challenging dis-
ciplinary boundaries.”
—Clelia Bartoli, Professor of Politics of Migration and
Human Rights, University of Palermo, Italy
Contents
Entanglements: Some Reflections on Migrant Journeys 1

Fault Lines: The Mediterranean’s “Burning” and the Human
Rights Debate 23
Island(s): Lampedusa as a “Hotspot” of EU Border Policies 43
Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments 75
Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memories103

Eyes, Sounds, Voices: Cinematic Representations of the
Lampedusa Borderscape135

Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts of
Resistance163

Watery Confluences: Toward a (Trans)MediterrAtlantic
Discourse—Critical Reflections on The Foreigner’s
Home (2018)201
xiii
xiv Contents
“La mia terra è dove poggio i miei piedi (My Land

Is Where I Lay My Feet”): ARTivism and Social Enterprise in
Palermo, Sicily221
Index229
List of Figures
Island(s): Lampedusa as a “Hotspot” of EU Border Policies

Fig. 1 E. Pulitano, Santuario Madonna di Porto Salvo, Lampedusa 44
Fig. 2 E. Pulitano, Statue of Madonna di Porto Salvo, Lampedusa 45
Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments

Fig. 1 E. Pulitano, Porta d’Europa, Lampedusa 76
Fig. 2 E. Pulitano, Porta d’Europa-dedication, Lampedusa 78
Fig. 5 E. Pulitano, Porta d’Europa-vandalized plaque, Lampedusa 83
Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memories

Fig. 1 E. Pulitano, Abandoned Boats, Lampedusa 105
Fig. 4 The Lampedusa Cross. (© The Trustees of the British Museum.
Reproduced with permission from the artist) 112
Fig. 5 Massimo Sansavini, Touroperator, “Lampedusa, settembre
2015.” (Reproduced with permission from the artist) 116
Fig. 6 Massimo Sansavini, Touroperator, “3 ottobre 2013.”
(Reproduced with permission from the artist) 117
Fig. 7 Massimo Sansavini, Touroperator. (Reproduced with permission
from the artist) 118
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 9 Massimo Sansavini, Touroperator, “Stella Maris.” (Reproduced

with permission from the artist) 121
Fig. 11 E. Pulitano, Cemetery, Lampedusa 125
Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts

of Resistance
Fig. 1 E. Pulitano, Porto M, entrance, Lampedusa 166
Fig. 2 E. Pulitano, Porto M, entrance, Lampedusa 167
Fig. 3 E. Pulitano, Porto M, Lampedusa 173
Fig. 4 Giacomo Sferlazzo, “Nostra signora delle coperte isotermiche,”
Porto M, Lampedusa. (Reproduced with permission from the
artist)174
Fig. 7 Giacomo Sferlazzo, “Totem 2010,” Porto M, Lampedusa.
(Reproduced with permission from the artist) 179
Watery Confluences: Toward a (Trans)MediterrAtlantic

Discourse—Critical Reflections on The Foreigner’s Home
(2018)
Fig. 1 The Foreigner’s Home, Promotional Photo. (Reproduced with
permission)204
Fig. 2 Toni Morrison. Still from The Foreigner’s Home. (Reproduced
with permission) 205
Fig. 3 D’ de Kabal. Still from The Foreigner’s Home. (Reproduced with
permission)206
Fig. 4 The Raft of the Medusa, Louvre. Still from The Foreigner’s
Home. (Reproduced with permission) 206
Fig. 5 Edwidge Danticat and Toni Morrison. Still from The Foreigner’s
Home. (Reproduced with permission) 209
“La mia terra è dove poggio i miei piedi (My Land Is Where I Lay
My Feet”): ARTivism and Social Enterprise in Palermo,
Sicily
Fig. 1 Moltivolti, Palermo. Map, “La mia terra è dove poggio i miei
piedi.” (Reproduced with Permission) 222
Entanglements: Some Reflections
on Migrant Journeys
Perché, mi chiedo, il viaggio è garantito a chi viaggia da Nord

e non a chi viaggia da sud? Perché il sud deve viaggiare senza tutele,
mettendo la sua vita in mano a scafisti, predoni, agenize di controllo
senza scrupoli? Perché per il Sud quello che è un diritto non viene
garantito? (“Why, I wonder, is the journey guaranteed to those who
travel a North-South direction and not vice versa? Why is the South
forced to travel without any protections, placing its life in the hands of
ruthless smugglers, traffickers, and control agencies? Why is it that
rights in the South are not guaranteed?” Igiaba Scego,
Roma negata, pp. 44–5; my translation)
—Igiaba Scego, Roma negata
Mediterraneo, migrazioni, migranti, sans papier, clandestini. Mediterranean,

migrations, migrants, undocumented, clandestine are words that have
become part of the daily life of media consumers and citizenry in contem-
porary Europe and in Italy in particular. Migrants and migrations are obses-
sively presented as a new phenomenon rather than an inevitable outcome
of neoliberal globalism and deep historic colonial legacies. More impor-
tantly, the movement of bodies from the global South to the global North
has shaped our imaginary with such negative connotation that it is impos-
sible to imagine that the freedom of movement is indeed a fundamental
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
E. Pulitano, Mediterranean ARTivism, Mediterranean Perspectives,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05992-6_1
2 E. PULITANO
human right long recognized by the international community.1 The stories

of migrants and asylum seekers, a distinction too often blurred in the anti-
immigrant rhetoric prevalent in Italian media discourse these days, tell of
“states of exception” (Agamben 2003) where basic rights are denied and
the very concept of human solidarity seems to be forgotten. Hence an
increasing tendency to conflate migrants with criminals and to criminalize
not only migration per se but also the right to request asylum. Italian writer
and journalist Igiaba Scego refers to the concept of “toxic narrative,” as
promoted by the Wu Ming collective,2 to remind us of the power of lan-
guage in forging enduring narratives and discourses. Quoting directly from
the Wu Ming foundation page, Scego states: “To become ‘toxic narrative’,
a story must be told always from the same point of view, in the same mode,
and by using the same words, always omitting the same details, thus remov-
ing the same elements of context and complexity” (Roma negata, 128; my
translation). Born in Italy, to Somali parents forced to emigrate following
Siad Barre’s 1969 coup d’ètat, Scego, a writer and master storyteller, is
a most prominent voice, among multiple generations of Black writers, in
rethinking the boundaries of contemporary Italy and exploring the complex
and entangled legacies that bind Africa to Europe. In Scego’s story, in her
passionate attempt to counteract the “toxic narratives” of contemporary
migrations to Italy with stories of human dignity, I trace the beginning of
the narrative I am about to tell.
Mediterranean ARTivism: Art, Activism, and Migration in Europe is an
interdisciplinary study aimed at reimagining the commonly held tropes
surrounding contemporary migrations in the Mediterranean. Drawing
from the discourses of visual arts, citizenship studies, film and media stud-
ies, cultural studies, postcolonial, border, and decolonial studies, and
1
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: 1. “Everyone
has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. 2.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”
The right to freedom of movement is recognized, among others, in the Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (Art. 12), The Convention on the Rights of the Child (Art. 10), and the
International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Worker and
Members of their Families (Art. 5, 8, and 39).
2
The Wu Ming Collective is a pseudonym for a group of Italian writers formed in Bologna
in 2000. Rooted in Bologna’s radical counterculture, they have authored collaboratively
meta-historical novels such as Q, ‘54, Matuana, and Altai. The name “Wu Ming,” from
Mandarin “anonymous,” is often used among Chinese dissidents. More recently, their vari-
ous projects have resulted in the Wu Ming Foundation.
ENTANGLEMENTS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON MIGRANT JOURNEYS 3
centering the debates within a human rights framework, the book inter-
rogates how works of cultural production can offer a more complex
understanding to human mobility in the Mediterranean beyond represen-
tation of mere “illegality,” and victimhood. Adding to the recent prolifera-
tion of studies that have drawn attention to the role of artistic practice in
migration studies in the social sciences, the book focuses on human stories
of endurance and survival aimed at enhancing knowledge and social justice
beyond (and notwithstanding) militarized borders and overall failed EU
policies. ARTivism (a neologism combining ART + activism) is the under-
lying approach in the artistic practices the book discusses, most of them
inspired by and centered around the Lampedusa borderscape, a tiny island
at the center of the Mediterranean that has become synonymous, albeit
not without controversy, with illegalized migrations and border crossings.3
Yet, my selection moves beyond Lampedusa and the physicality of
European borders to include the Archive of Migrant Memories (AMM), a
multimedia collaborative project centered around the shared experience of
migrants’ storytelling, ARTivist practices and social enterprise in Palermo,
Sicily, and the 2006 Louvre exhibit, titled The Foreigner’s Home, curated
by Toni Morrison and turned into a poetic documentary film of the same
title in 2018. Migrations in this study are rerouted along a Mediterranean-
transatlantic map, a map envisioned by the scholars-activists of the
Un/Walling the Mediterranean project as “(Trans) MediterrAtlantic”
(Zaccaria, “Manifesto,” Un/walling). A (Trans) MediterrAtlantic
approach invites readers to connect the legacy of the transatlantic slave
trade and Europe’s colonial history to the present in order to disentangle
some of the multifaceted narrative threads surrounding contemporary
Mediterranean migrations. In the age of what critic Ian Chambers calls
“migrating modernities” (Chambers and Curti 2008), my comparative
reading of cultural production across borders intends to contribute to the
dissemination of a “fluid archive” (Chambers 2014), affirming counter-
stories or resistance and survival vis-à-vis dominant, toxic narratives of
migration and border crossing circulating in the contemporary
Mediterranean. In reminding us the importance of the Mediterranean in
“re-routing histories,” Chambers evokes Shakespeare’s The Tempest and
3
My use of the term borderscape in this study is inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of
the disjunctures and flows of global capitalism in his Modernity at Large (1996). A popular
trend in contemporary migration studies, the term borderscape has become synonymous with
resistance to an unambiguous understanding of national territories and sovereignty.
4 E. PULITANO
the challenge it poses to the logos of the Mediterranean “homeward

bound” dominated by Ulysses (Chambers 2014, 15). “In the ‘tempest’ of
the modern world,” Chambers writes, “Caliban returns as the illegal
immigrant, and Prospero’s island, midway between Naples and Tunis in
the 16th-century drama, today becomes the island of Lampedusa”
(Chambers 2014, 15). The Mediterranean as space of alterity in the over-
arching narrative of Western modernity is today a highly contested discur-
sive space containing multiple voices and geographies whose presence
signal a return to disturb and interrupt the monolithic framework of its
rationalistic structure. Within this context, the book puts in conversation
the discourse on the contemporary Mediterranean with theories of deco-
loniality, as they have been articulated in Latin America, by affirming proj-
ects of political-epistemic resistance aimed at imagining an otherwise
world in which a truly cosmopolitan world order “delinked” from the
matrix of Western modernity (Mignolo, “Delinking”) is not only possible
but ideal.
I am aware of the complexity and ambiguity surrounding terminology
with the regard to the topic of contemporary migrations. At the most
basic level, it’s not just a matter of mere terms and/or specific concepts,
but a more fundamental conceptual and epistemological understanding of
the ramifications of human mobility. My decision to use the term illegal-
ized over “irregular,” a seemingly less derogative term than “clandestine”
(the European equivalent of “illegal” in the United States), betrays my
conviction, deeply influenced by Nicholas De Genova, that the purported
“illegality” of human beings on the move is the product of “a larger socio-
political (and legal) process of inclusion through exclusion” (“Spectacles”
1184). It also speaks to my skepticism about the most appropriate termi-
nology that can actually encompass the intricate network of forces and
root causes governing mobility today. If, as Elie Wiesel famously stated,
“no human being is illegal,”4 then we might seriously consider the conse-
quences of attaching such labels to individuals who are simply exercising
their right to move by claiming a space within Europe.
4
Wiesel explained the dangers of using the term illegal immigrant during an interview with
NPR Latino USA anchor María Hinojosa. See Moreno. Wiesel’s expression has become a
theoretical manifesto for advocates of immigrant rights in the United States and inspired
Mike Davis’ and Justin Akers Chacón’s landmark critical study on racism and state violence
on the US-Mexico border, No One Is Illegal (2006).
The use of the term irregular vis-à-vis “illegal” has been suggested by the
International Organization for Migration (IOM) following the recommen-
dations of the UN General Assembly in 1975, according to which only an
act can be illegal, not a person. This same term has increasingly replaced the
usage of “clandestine” in EU countries such as Italy and France, even
though the Italian clandestini still circulates in contemporary Italy, often
associated with images of desperate, nameless bodies disembarking at vari-
ous Southern ports. Dating back to the 1930s, the term “clandestine”
became popular in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, preferred in some coun-
tries and not in others. Whereas, in popular usage, the term often refers to
some kind of illicit and subversive act, few are willing to recognize that the
nature of “clandestinity/illegality” often depends on law-enforcement prac-
tices. As stated by Franck Duvell, “clandestine migration is not an indepen-
dent phenomenon; it exists only because it is socially, politically, and legally
constructed” (“Clandestine” 480). Even though receiving countries, in
order to justify increasing anti-immigrant policies, tend to emphasize the
distinction between refugees (read: legitimate) and economic migrants
(read: dubious), which often translates in a distinction between involuntary
and voluntary migration, I have argued elsewhere, and will reiterate
throughout this study, that such distinctions are increasingly untenable in
the global migratory landscape. The inextricable link between a country’s
political instability with the economic conditions deeply trouble such cate-
gories (Pulitano, “In Liberty’s Shadow”). Regardless, what we are witness-
ing in parts of Europe and Italy in particular these days, as a result of a surge
of nationalist and populist-leaning parties, has also been a blatant attack on
the right of asylum as recognized in the 1951 UN Convention and its 1967
Protocol. On the level of public discourse in the era of social media, once a
term such as “clandestine” develops a certain political power, it proliferates
negative meanings that continue to perpetuate social exclusion. Scego
writes: “There is a difference between asking someone, ‘do you think we
should reject women and children requesting asylum in our country and
send them back to their motherland? and “do you think we should reject
clandestine?” (La mia casa 198). The answer, of course, depends exactly on
the kind of words we use in formulating the question. “The word ‘clandes-
tine,’ Scego further states, “erases the human behind the persons” (La mia
casa 198). Similarly, Valeria Luiselli, writing about undocumented minors
crossing the US-Mexico border, reminds us of the violence that language
can hold and how it can contribute to the way in which these children are
viewed (Tell Me 8–9).
6 E. PULITANO
It is only by deconstructing charged terminology and analyzing the

entangled predicaments that force people to cross borders that we can
hope to influence the contested debate surrounding migration, thus ques-
tioning the very premises that regulate transnational mobility and affirm-
ing the dignity and fundamental human rights of all migrants. Building on
the above-quoted writers, I argue that we should be wary of all terminol-
ogy, even when officialized in international human rights circles, that ulti-
mately responds to governmental discourses aimed at perpetuating
hierarchies of mobility clearly deciding between those who have the free-
dom to move and those to whom such freedom should be denied. Nicholas
De Genova has eloquently addressed the need to do research on
“‘illegality’qua sociopolitical condition in contradistinction to research on
undocumented migrants qua ‘illegal aliens’” (“Migrant ‘Illegality’” 423).
More pointedly he has drawn attention to the fact that even to designate
what fundamentally is “human mobility” as “migration” presupposes the
existence of natural borders that some people cross (or transgress), there-
fore reproducing the marked difference between “the presumably proper
subjects of a state’s authority and those mobile human beings variously
branded as ‘aliens,’ ‘foreigners,’ and indeed ‘migrants’” (“The Borders of
Europe” 6), who intrude on such space.
Some of the selected artwork and cultural practices I discuss in this
book have already received critical attention among scholars in Europe. In
Migrations, Arts and Postcoloniality in the Mediterranean (2018), Celeste
Iannicello examines how contemporary art practices and museum projects
linked to migration articulate “a transcultural memory of the Mediterranean
region” (1) in opposition to nationalistic maps and institutions of knowl-
edge deeply rooted in the legacy of Western colonialism. She discusses,
among others, the temporary exhibit Porto M in Lampedusa, also the
focus of my analysis in the chapter “Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives:
ARTivist Acts of Resistance,” as “a post-museum space” (32) beyond the
exhibitionary framework of colonial museums. In such space, she writes,
“the ‘First World’ is called to interrogate itself rather than the ‘other’”
(33) and what might otherwise appear dead matter (the migrants’ objects
rescued from the abandoned boats) becomes living material in the postco-
lonial archive of contemporary migrations. Federica Mazzara’s Reframing
Migrations: Lampedusa, Border Spectacle, and Aesthetics of Subversion
(2019) addresses the intertwining of aesthetics and politics previously
explored, among others, by French philosopher Jacques Rancière to argue
that art forms have increasingly become a platform for subverting the
discourse of migration in contemporary Europe. Mazzara’s focus on

Lampedusa, “a specific borderscape serving as a paradigmatic site”
(Reframing 18) of Euro-Mediterranean migrations is her starting point
for a discussion of a “counter-map of resistance” redrawn through the
language of art. In stark contrast to government discourses, visual lan-
guage, Mazzara argues, offers potentialities for making “the invisible and
unsayable, visible and sayable” (Reframing 112). Her analysis, aimed at
framing what she terms an “aesthetics of subversion” (Reframing 10), tack-
les a wide range of media, including film documentaries, three-dimensional
objects, photography, and video installations and engages artists as diverse
as, among others, Isaac Julien, Tamara Kametani, Mary Ramsay, Aida
Silvestri, and Giamomo Sferlazzo. In Gabriele Proglio’s and Laura
Odasso’s edited collection, Border Lampedusa: Subjectivity, Visibility, and
Memory in Stories of Sea and Land (2018), the contributors discuss various
practices of cultural production in an attempt to highlight the subjectivity
of Lampedusa border experience and “present the different meanings
assigned to the island by migrants, the local population, seafarers, and
associative actors” (4–5). From their analysis emerges a picture of
Lampedusa not only as an Italian and European border, but a border that
makes us reflect on other border spaces in the contemporary transnational
and transcontinental migration phenomenon. The Black Mediterranean
(2021), Proglio’s most recent co-edited interdisciplinary collection, aims
at rethinking the so-called current European migrant crisis from a “black
Mediterranean perspective,” from a racialized, diasporic space that links
Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Such a space, the editors argue,
should be the starting point for asking questions about the racialized pro-
duction of borders, bodies, and citizenship in contemporary Europe and
for an overall rethinking of the borders of Europe and Europe’s plural
identities.5
Mediterranean ARTivism: Art, Activism, and Migration in Europe
expands some of the arguments presented in these recently published
studies by placing the discourse surrounding contemporary Mediterranean
crossings within a wider African diaspora framework, a transcontinental
physical and theoretical space linking Africa and Europe to the Americas.
5
See also the Spring 2020 issue of the PARSE Journal of Migration dedicated to the
encounter between artists and migration scholars and to the “crisis of representation” that
both groups address when exploring the relationship between art and migration. https://
parsejournal.com/research-theme/art-migration/
8 E. PULITANO
The book intends to be a critique, a tribute, and a memorial: a critique of

European legislation on migrants and refugees often resulting in tempo-
rary solutions, including those enacted by the individual EU member
states, rather than comprehensive and cohesive immigration policies; a
tribute to the endurance of the human spirit and to the oldest human
impulse of solidarity and brotherhood; and a memorial to the thousands
of lives lost at sea and to the dignity and respect for the living.
It might be argued that the migrants crossing the Mediterranean today
do not need one additional academic voice to speak on their behalf. Even
less, they need an “outsider” championing their cause from the privileged
position of a US-based professorship. I recognize that my “strategic loca-
tion,” to borrow Edward Said’s critical term (Orientalism 20) is complex
and ambivalent to say the least; hopefully my intentions are less ambigu-
ous. My project does not purport “to give voice” to migrants and refu-
gees. They already have a voice. Yet, I am strongly persuaded that their
stories of perilous and often fatal journeys across the Mediterranean, along
with their stories of resistance and survival, need to reach audiences both
within and beyond the boundaries of the EU. Migrants and asylum seek-
ers need audiences to listen/view their stories of suffering, survival, and
resistance, as told through the various forms of cultural production this
book presents; they need readers/viewers to consider alternative narra-
tives beyond the rhetoric of illegality in order to understand the reasons
that force people to migrate; and they need readers/viewers to see how
language and art can build bridges and connect people, reminding us of
the quintessential human responsibility we all share on this earth. If there
is violence in language, there is also justice and healing. Luiselli states:
“And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—
is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they
come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is
happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become
unacceptable” (Tell me 30).
I was born in Italy, in Sicily to be precise, and have lived in the United
States for over twenty years. I arrived in the United States on a Fulbright
scholarship to pursue my graduate education; I ended up staying to pursue
an academic career. Today I am a professor in one of the California State
Universities, teaching courses on Indigenous and Africana Studies along
with Critical Race Theory and conducting research on issues of migration
and border crossing. A migrant myself, I am also a cervello in fuga,6 as

educated youth who continue to leave Italy in search of better opportuni-
ties are often referred to by the Italian media. The question Scego asks in
the above-quoted epigraph is a question I have frequently pondered about
through these years of living away from my native country. Why am I, as a
result of place of birth and nationality, allowed to travel to pursue my
dreams and career goals, whereas citizens of other countries are denied
such dreams and aspirations? Is this the reason why contemporary stories
of migration, travel, and transculturation continue to intrigue me? Or is it
that I want to understand why not all migrations are the same and not all
journeys end up like mine? Of course, I have been horrified by the recent
EU policies on migration, which are not much different from the recent
and current policies carried out in the United States. To migrate, in the
modern era, has become a crime and countries in the so-called first world
have decided that not everyone has the right to migrate. Against govern-
ment discourses that continue to present mobility as border transgression
and “illegality,” the voice of artists and cultural producers, migrants and
non, in Europe as in the United States, plays a key role in counter-telling
such toxic narrative and restore hope for a more just and humane future
where interaction and cohabitation are the norm and not the exception. I
strongly believe in the power of stories to affect change. The more
migrants’ stories are disseminated, the more potentialities we have to lis-
ten to alternative narratives and learn to see our fellow humans not as
menacing others but as beings with the same rights and dignity that, we
hold, should be inalienable human rights for all. Yet, the question of who
tells the stories when engaging migration studies is crucial. Both creative
artists and researchers have recently signaled “a crisis of representation”
(Bijörgvinson et al. 2020) when addressing migration and borders that
inevitably leads to a significant rethinking of self and other, center and
margin, colonialism and complicity in the same Euro-centric discursive
system from which most of these critical representations originate. As a
“migrant/exile/in-between researcher” (El Qadim 11), I too struggle
with such ethical dilemmas.
6
An Italian expression translating as “brain drain.” Various studies indicate that Italian
emigration today has reached post-WWII levels. As of January 1, 2018, Italians resident
abroad enlisted in the Registry of Italians Residing Abroad (AIRE) were 5.114.469 or 8.5%
out of a population of 60.5 million living in the country. A 2018 documentary, Italia addio,
non torneró (Goodbye Italy, I am not Coming Back), produced by Fondazione Paolo Cresci,
reported that in 2017, 285,000 young Italians left Italy to start a new life abroad.
10 E. PULITANO
I am not an anthropologist or an ethnographer by training and this

book is not a collaborative project between a researcher and “a vulnerable
group” (El Qadim 8). I knew when I travelled to Lampedusa that I would
not be interviewing the migrants temporarily held in the “hotspot” (aka
detention center) which was then and remains still, at the time of this writ-
ing, inaccessible to the public. I travelled to Lampedusa to engage with
the island landscape and to see with my own eyes the site that in the last
thirty years has become the quintessential embodiment of illegalized
migrations in Europe, a constructed reality increasingly referred to as
“borderscape.” How could such a tiny island in the middle of the
Mediterranean, I wondered, become at the same time the theater of
Europe’s southern border and the repository of so many stories I had been
reading prior to my visit? More important, how was I to traverse the vari-
ous discourses and disciplines in my analysis of cultural artifacts such as
monuments, photos, films and documentaries, digital archives, and uncon-
ventional museums at the same time as I was also following anthropologi-
cal models of ethnographic fieldwork?
I first went to Lampedusa in the summer of 2017 and returned in the
summer of 2018. I photographed key landscapes and cultural sites, con-
versed with its inhabitants, and interviewed some of the local activists who
have been fighting on behalf of immigrant rights and against the policies
that continue to produce illegalized migrations. I was a tourist, an aca-
demic with a research agenda, and a transculturated immigrant returning
almost home, not all comfortable positions to be in at times. The more I
spent time on the island gathering “research” material for my critical
investigation, the more I realized that the approach of traditional literary
scholarship I had used in previous scholarly projects might not assist me in
conceptualizing the arguments for this study. The island landscape had
somehow to become a strong presence in my narrative before I set to
explore theories of borders and borderscapes.
Calling for alternative methodologies in thinking the modern
Mediterranean, Chambers encourages scholars to “set loose from our
habitual anchorage in disciplinary protocols and their guarantee of a con-
clusive homecoming” (“A Fluid” 20). Not only does this book follow a
“loose” structure with most chapters demarcated by the island geography
and the conceptual maps inspired by it; it also defies any kind of conclusive
“homecoming,” rightly so upon considering the ever-changing nature of
contemporary migrations. Even though I did not find an official museum
of Mediterranean migrations in Lampedusa, the idea of which I address in
my discussion of Porto M, later on in the book, the island opened up an

archive of unexpected sites that stand as powerful witnesses to the para-
doxical policies responsible for the victims of Mediterranean crossings. A
trans-historic location, the Lampedusa landscape, with its abandoned
unseaworthy boats that carried the bodies of thousands of migrants cross-
ing the sea via the Libyan route, and the surrounding blue Mediterranean
in which many of those same bodies found a final resting place, embodied
for me an example of what Rob Nixon has termed a “transnational ethics
of place” (239), a place in which memories of colonial and postcolonial
violence resurface on the land(sea)scape of the present.7 Today Lampedusa’s
archive is an important source to the survivors of Mediterranean crossings
with community-building projects and forms of collaborative cultural
resistance that show the porosity of borders and the creative agency that
migrant subjects, often represented as passive victims of an inevitable des-
tiny can, instead, exercise.
Within the (Trans)MediterrAtlantic framework I engage in this study, I
have been influenced by Caribbean theory and Caribbean literary dis-
course, most notably, by authors such as Edouard Glissant, Derek Walcott,
Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Edwidge Danticat. At the
same time, contemporary Italian writers of African origins, such as Igiaba
Scego, Ubah Christina Ali Farah, and Amara Lakhous, among others,
even though not the direct subject of my investigation, have provided the
context for interpreting the various works of cultural production and
ARTivist practices I discuss in the chapters that follow. In Roma Negata:
percorsi postcoloniali nella cittá (2014), a sort of postcolonial tourist guide
of Italy’s capital, realized with the collaboration of photo-reporter Rino
Bianchi, Scego explores the subject of Italy’s silence toward its colonial
past by walking through Rome and mapping the locations that speak
loudly of this forgotten history. I found some of Italy’s colonial history,
duly erased from my Italian school education, while walking in Lampedusa.
Among the hundreds of migrants who continue to disembark on the
island from the African shores are Eritreans, Somali, Libyans, and
Ethiopians, citizens of the former Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa.
7
I am indebted to Shalini Puri for introducing me to Nixon’s discussion on postcolonial-
ism and place. Puri’s methodological approach in The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean
Present (2014) strongly inspired my reflections on place, memory, and history while visiting
Lampedusa. More important, her study suggested to me the “porosity” of literary criticism
when writing about what she calls the “placed every day” (24).
12 E. PULITANO
They leave traces of their passages both on the landscape and at sea. Such
traces, while speaking of the past and the oblivion of the present, are force-
fully opening the doors to a future of hope and justice.
All the Stories Converge in Lampedusa…

Then and Now
A small island of 7.8 square miles, Lampedusa, over the years, has come to
the attention of international media as a result of the thousands of migrants
who have drowned (and continue to drown) in its waters during the peril-
ous sea crossings from Africa to Europe. Situated at around 70 nautical
miles from Tunisia—between Libya and the Italian mainland—Lampedusa,
politically part of Italy but geologically linked to the African continent, sits
astride Europe’s busiest sea migration route.8 A major tourist destination,
the island in 2013 made the list of Trip Advisor when one of its most
popular beaches, Rabbit Island, was declared the “best beach in the
world.” Adored by travelers for its “crystal clear” waters, “soft sands,” and
“aquamarine colors” (Strutner 17). Rabbit Island, with its population of
loggerhead turtles and other wildlife roaming its grottoes, is part of
Lampedusa’s natural reserve in defense of which the former mayor and
director of Legambiente (an Italian non-profit environmental organiza-
tion), Giusy Nicolini, has conducted a passionate struggle.
Yet, there is another site of Lampedusa that most tourists do not know
or prefer not to see all the more so since access to such a place is strictly
forbidden by authorities. It is the island’s EU-designated “Hotspot for
exceptional migratory flows,” simply known as Hotspot, formerly identi-
fied as a “Centre for Identification and Expulsion” (CIE). In 2011,
Lampedusa made international headlines when, between February and
March, about six thousand Tunisian migrants disembarked on the island—
an island with a population of 6,500—as a result of the chaos unleashed by
the fall of Ben Ali’s dictatorship. According to Ms. Nicolini, the entire
island, in those months, “became an immense refugee camp” (Lampedusa
80). The situation exploded when the structure originally built to accom-
modate 800 people was set on fire and violent riots between the police,
the migrants, and the local inhabitants ensued. The then Lampedusa
8
Part of the Sicilian province of Agrigento, the municipality of Lampedusa also includes
the smaller island of Linosa (approx. 400 people) and Lampione, which is uninhabited.
Together, they form part of the Pelagie islands (from the Greek Pélagos, open sea).
mayor Bernardino de Rubeis demanded the Berlusconi government to

intervene immediately and three navy ships were sent to transfer migrants
to various camps in Sicily and in the mainland. In those days, Nicolini
comments, we realized “how politics can become inhumane even in the
most democratic systems. And how the exercise of power can become
brutal and pitiless even towards ourselves” (Lampedusa 81).9 Nicolini, a
leaning-left mayor who, during her tenure (2012–2017), fought vigor-
ously on behalf of migrants and openly condemned EU policies of indif-
ference to suffering and death in the Mediterranean, also embraced the
humanitarian image of the island symbol of welcome and tolerance that
the media contributed to create.10 As noted by Mazzara, Nicolini’s policies
have become part of a well-established narrative that continue to portray
migration as a “crisis” and that sees in the humanitarian response coordi-
nated at EU level one of the most effective solutions (Reframing
Migration 82).11
Activism and community-building projects is something I also found in
Lampedusa, albeit in forms different from what Nicolini might have tried
to promote, during my brief visits on the island in 2017 and 2018. The
locally based collectives Askavusa, who curated the exhibit Porto M, and
the Lampedusa Solidarity Forum, a group of volunteers who welcome
migrants disembarking at the pier, often functioning as mediators between
them and the local residents, continue to carry out various activities with
9
In conversation with journalist Marta Bellingreri, Nicolini highlights the sense of frustra-
tion that she felt, as a Lampedusa-born citizen and an activist, in those critical months of
2001 as a result of the fact that only the Ministry of the Interior, rather than the local
regional governments, can legislate over matters of immigration. She considered completely
irresponsible the acts of then Minister Roberto Maroni (a member of the Northern League
party) who allowed the emergency situation in Lampedusa to last as long as two months
(Lampedusa 80). The unlawful detention of Tunisian migrants in degrading conditions on
the island’s reception center has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights
as a blatant violation of key articles of the European Convention of Human Rights. See
Khlaifia and Others v Italy (application no. 16483/12).
10
See her open letter to the EU (Open Letter). In 2017, Nicolini, together with SOS
Méditerranée, received the UNESCO Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize, which she dedi-
cated to all the migrants who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean. Despite such inter-
national acclaim, Nicolini remains a rather controversial figure in Lampedusa. In 2017, the
island’s residents, frustrated by the scarce attention that her administration paid to their
everyday problems, voted against her reelection.
11
The political and politicized debates surrounding the humanitarian discourse in the
Mediterranean go beyond the scope of this study. Yet, they remain an important aspect of
Lampedusa’s borderscape and will be briefly addressed in the chapter “Island(s).”
14 E. PULITANO
the ideas to create dialogues and foster solidarity. These same organiza-
tions, however, are also very critical of the “crisis” narrative and overall
spectacularization of Lampedusa as Europe’s southern border. Askavusa
in particular, as I am going to discuss later on in the book, appears as the
most radical voice in its strong condemnation of the neo-global economic
system that produces de facto illegalized migrations. I learned, during my
brief visits in Lampedusa, that activism takes many forms, that not all
Lampedusani embrace a tradition of welcome, and that the image of the
island that outsiders are usually fed by the media is completely different
from the everyday reality for most of the local residents.
The spirit of activism is part of this book’s central themes, and I discuss
various examples of collaborative projects between migrants and locals in
Lampedusa and beyond. Whether in the form of co-produced and co-
directed documentaries, sites of memory, digital archives, exhibits,
museum spaces, or restaurants linked to social enterprise, this book traces
the development of a transnational activist consciousness aimed at remap-
ping the Mediterranean beyond Eurocentrism, in what Gianluca Solera
has termed “a new frontier of transnational citizenship and shared devel-
opment” (Citizen Activism 127). Within this vision, Lampedusa, with its
unique history of cultural encounters, cross-pollination of ideas, and
incessant journeys, might indeed become a model toward which to gravi-
tate in the near future.
Following this opening chapter, “Faultlines: The Mediterranean
‘Burning’ and the Human Rights Debate,” discusses the tension between
migration as a fundamental human right guaranteed by various interna-
tional human rights instruments and the EU’s increasing policies of mili-
tarization and externalization of its Southern border(s). Such policies
result in an overall criminalization of the migration phenomenon that
does not take into account the pressures forcing people on the move,
whether the result of wars and/or political persecutions or the devastating
consequences of neoliberal capitalism. By continuing to differentiate
between economic migrants, who allegedly leave their countries volun-
tarily, and asylum seekers, who have no other choice, EU policies deny
people the right to move and contribute to exacerbate the differences
between EU citizens with the right to exercise freedom of movement and
so-called non-EU clandestini/illegal, abject bodies that need to be con-
tained and ultimately rejected by the body of EU nation-states.
“Island(s): Lampedusa as a ‘Hotspot’ of EU Border Policies,” discusses
the island of Lampedusa as a socially constructed (border) space, a
“hotspot for migration” designated by the EU to regulate the contempo-

rary externalization of migration control. The detention center on the
island, strongly opposed by the local inhabitants, serves as a quintessential
symbol of containment and control at the same time as it points out the
symbiotic relation between “migration, labor, and the new technologies of
control and production” (Rinelli, African Migrants 92), all key ingredi-
ents in the construction of the Lampedusa borderscape. I end the chapter
with a discussion and analysis of Come un uomo sulla terra (Like a Man on
the Earth) (2008), a documentary directed by Andrea Segre, Dagmawi
Yimer, and Riccardo Biadene. Released in 2008, Come un uomo sulla terra
broke the silence on the dramatic repercussions of the Italy-Libya agree-
ments for contrasting “illegal” immigration through first-version accounts
of the survivors of African migration in Italy. Drawing from theories on
border thinking articulated among others by Walter Mignolo, I situate my
discussion and analysis of the documentary within the discursive context
of counter-narratives of resistance that not only create the conditions for
border thinking but engage in the very act of performing it.
“Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments” discusses
the monument Porta d’Europa (Gateway to Europe) commissioned to the
Italian artist Mimmo Paladino and erected on the southeastern side of
Lampedusa in June 2008. Dedicated “to the migrants deceased and dis-
persed at sea,” the monument also serves as a powerful testimony for the
living and creates a space of public mourning through which the politics
surrounding contemporary Mediterranean migrations can be addressed
and contested. Although not a state memorial, Paladino’s Porta d’Europa
has become a symbol of what might be termed an “official” kind of mem-
ory, one that triggers state visits and solemn ceremonies staged within the
contemporary scene of European policies on the Mediterranean. Yet, I
argue that in the contemporary discourse on Mediterranean migrations,
we should also consider alternative forms of remembrance, living memo-
ries surfacing from the site of death itself, the Mediterranean sea. The
short film ASMAT-Names (2014), by Ethiopian-born filmmaker Dagmawi
Yimer, honors the memory of those 368 migrants, most of Eritrean
nationality, who, on October 3, 2013, died less than a mile from the coast
of Lampedusa after their boat capsized and as a result of delays in rescue
operations. Yimer decides to honor the memory of this tragic episode by
reciting one by one the names of all the 368 victims in a sort of mourning
ritual, one that challenges viewers to engage in a different search for
16 E. PULITANO
memory: within ourselves, as we contemplate the traces of the

Mediterranean tragedies all around us and reflect upon our role in this
haunting (His)story.
“Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memory,” discusses the politics
behind the shipwrecked boats of the clandestini, abandoned on the
Lampedusa landscape, waiting to be removed for demolition because con-
sidered corpus delicti by Italian law. To the people of Lampedusa, the
abandoned boats resemble real cemeteries (they are in fact known as “boat
cemeteries”), a symbolism all the more significant upon considering the
fact that the Mediterranean itself has been referred to as an “open grave-
yard.” I discuss the complex ethical question of making art from the drift-
wood extracted from such boats and the overall debate surrounding art
and representation in the age of migrations. I end the chapter with some
personal reflections on my on-site visit to the cemetery of Lampedusa,
which hosts many anonymous graves containing the bodies of migrants
who died at sea. I frame my reflections within a critical analysis of the ini-
tiatives of the Lampedusa Solidarity Forum, a local activist group, who
over the past few years has taken up the task to name the graves and recon-
struct as much as possible the stories behind these lost lives, a gesture of
civic resistance and collective memorialization.
“Eyes, Sounds, Voices: Cinematic Representations of the Lampedusa
Borderscape” continues the conversation on Europe’s southern border
through the eyes, sounds, and voices captured by the multiple actors pop-
ulating Lampedusa’s borderscape. I discuss three films that foreground
encounters and boundary crossings at the same time as they open up to a
multiplicity of visions and imaginaries aimed at rethinking individual and
collective agency: Gianfranco Rosi’s internationally acclaimed
Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) (2016), which won the 66th Golden Bear at the
2016 Berlin Film Festival; Dagmawi Yimer’s Soltanto il mare (Nothing but
the Sea) (2011), winner of the Migrants and Travelers award at the Festival
of African Cinema in Verona; and Zakaria Mohammed Ali’s To Whom It
May Concern (A chi possa interessare) (2012). Ali’s and Ymer’s films in
particular offer powerful aesthetic interventions in the contemporary dis-
course surrounding illegalized migrations in the Mediterranean. Whereas
institutional forces and humanitarian organizations deny refugees the abil-
ity to construct themselves as subjects through narrative, turning them
into “speechless emissaries,” as anthropologist Lisa Malkki argued two
decades ago (“Speechless” 378), films such as To Whom It May Concern
and Nothing but the Sea now empower refugees such as Ali and Yimer to
regain their stories and counteract the process of dehistoricization to

which they are often subject. By (re)claiming their space within the trans-
national network of contemporary migrations and discourses, refugees
affirm the articulations of local and global forces that bind people, histo-
ries, and landscapes and upon which shared values of human dignity,
respect, and tolerance can be promoted.
“Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts of Resistance”
discusses two distinct examples of collection and memory preservation
inspired by the migrant struggles in the Mediterranean: Porto M, an anti-
institutional and unconventional “museum” created in Lampedusa by the
local collective Askavusa; and Archive of Migrant Memories (AMM), the
on-line multimedia project maintained by a team of researchers, field-
workers, authors, and volunteers based in Rome. Together, they consti-
tute important examples of what I call ARTivist practices in the sense in
which these have been actualized within the contemporary Chicanx artis-
tic community in the hybridized, transcultural space of the
US-Mexico border.
In “Watery Confluences: Toward a (Trans)MediterrAtlantic Discourse.
Critical Reflections on The Foreigner’s Home,” I draw on theories of
“TransMediterrAtlantic” discourse as developed by a group of scholars
operating from the European South, the researchers/activists of the UN/
Walling the Mediterranean project, to draw connections between contem-
porary Mediterranean crossings and historic trans-Atlantic journeys, jour-
neys that have turned the Mediterranean into a strategic corridor of
deterritorialization and dehumanization of bodies. I analyze The Foreigner’s
Home (2018), the documentary directed by Geoff Pingree and Rian
Brown featuring the 2006 exhibition of the same title Tony Morrison
guest-curated at the Louvre museum. The film highlights the exhibit’s
powerful statement to universal questions surrounding the discourse on
contemporary migrations: Who is the foreigner? Where is home? What is
the role of the artist?
Whether reflecting on Europe’s treatment of refugees in our contem-
porary era or analyzing African American history of displacement and (un)
belonging in the United States, the foreigner’s motif has always placed a
central role in Morrison’s oeuvre. The Louvre’s exhibit and the poetic
documentary that it inspired cut across the main arguments I advance in
this book and will make a powerful contribution to future academic
debates on “TransMediterrAtantic” scholarship.
18 E. PULITANO
The book ends with a short chapter, “‘La mia terra é dove poggio i miei
piedi (My land is where I lay My Feet):’ ARTivism and Social Enterprise
in Palermo, Sicily,” in which I discuss two examples of ARTivist practices
emerging from the collaborative efforts of migrants, asylum seekers, and
Palermo’s local residents that offer new models of citizenship and belong-
ing and open up new horizons of cohabitation and solidarity in a Europe
without borders.
The most challenging part in writing a book about contemporary
Mediterranean crossings is the absence of the voice of the main protago-
nists of the story. In most cases, migrants are often in the background,
spoken about, their stories reaching us in translation (think about the hun-
dreds of men, women, and children locked up in detention centers) or not
reaching us at all. Their lives tragically lost in the fatal journeys across by
land and sea, they are no longer in the condition to tell. Such is undoubt-
edly the case for the stories narrated in some of the documentary films I
discuss in this book, works in which memory becomes both voice and
resistance. In other cases, artwork and monuments, museums and/or her-
itage spaces created by non-migrants, and films directed to “raise aware-
ness” must inevitably grabble with such ideological predicaments, no
matter the humanitarian intent behind it. Writing specifically about
Lampedusa, Italian journalist Davide Enia brilliantly captures my dilemma
about the failure of words to understand the plight of the thousands of
men, women, and children forced to embark on such perilous sea jour-
neys, risking their lives to reach the other shore while following a dream
called Europe. He writes:
Someday an epic tale of Lampedusa will be born. Hundreds of thousands of

peoples have transited through the island. Right now, what’s still missing is
a tile in the mosaic of this present day, and it is precisely the story of those
who migrate. Our words are incapable of fully capturing their truth. We can
name the border, the moment of the encounter, display the bodies of the
living and the dead in our documentaries. Our words can tell of hands that
provide care and hands that raised barbed wire fences. But it will be they
themselves who tell the story of the migration, those who set out and, pay-
ing an unimaginable price, have landed on these shores. It will take many
years. It’s just a matter of time.…It will be they who use the exact words to
describe what it means to set foot on dry land, after escaping from war and
poverty, pursing the dream of a better life. And it will be they who explain
to us, what Europe has become and to show us, as in a mirror, who we have
become. (Notes on a Shipwreck 167–8; Kindle edition)
Filmmakers such as Yimer, Ali, and the protagonists of the stories I discuss
in my analysis of the Archive of Migrant Memories are already contribut-
ing, in their own words, to fill in the tile in the bigger mosaic that is being
woven in the Mediterranean. Other forms of cultural production and
ARTivist practices that I discuss in this book continue to add tassels to the
discursive mosaic on migrations and border crossings in the Mediterranean.
All the projects must have limits and this book is not an exception.
Mediterranean ARTivism does not and could not engage all the works of
cultural production inspired by the island of Lampedusa; neither could it
address all the artistic works created by the debates around contemporary
Mediterranean migrations. Lack of space prevented me from discussing
important documentaries and films such as A Sud di Lampedusa (South of
Lampedusa) (2006), by Andrea Segre; Io sto con la sposa (On the Bright
Side) (2014), by Gabriele del Grande; Lampedusa d’inverno (Lampedusa
in Winter) (2015), by Jacob Brossman; and books such as La Frontiera
(The Border) (2015), by Alessandro Leogrande, and the above-quoted
Appunti per un naufragio (Notes on a Shipwreck) (2017), by Davide Enia.
It is my hope that Mediterranean ARTivism contributes to the ongoing
conversation on the potentialities of art and artistic practices to provide
counter-narratives to dominant discourse and forms of representation of
migration and border crossing in Europe. Art and cultural production can
show us what exactly Europe has become and how it can change. For that
to happen, we must first learn how to listen.
Works Cited
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Bijörgvinson, Erling et al. “Art and Migration: Editorial Introduction.” PARSE
Journal 10 (Spring 2020): 1–13. Special Issue on migration.
Chambers, Ian. “A Fluid Archive,” 2014. 11–21. https://mediterraneoblue-
shome.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/a-fluid-archive-3.pdf
——— and Lidia Curti. “Migrating Modernities in the Mediterranean.”
Postcolonial Studies 11.4 (2008): 387–99.
De Genova, Nicholas. “The Borders of ‘Europe’ and the European Question.”
The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. Ed.
Nicholas De Genova. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017. 1–35.
——— and Martina Tazzioli. “Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of ‘the Crisis’ in
and of ‘Europe.’” New Keywords Collective. Near Futures Online, 2016.
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europe/. Accessed 1 June 2021.
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———. “The ‘Migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?”
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———. “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: the Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of
Inclusion.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36.7 (2013): 1180–1198.
Düvell, Franck. “Clandestine Migration in Europe.” Social Science Information
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El Qadim, Nora. “From ‘Border Spectacle’ to ‘Border Voyeurism’: Questions on
Fostering Ethical Engagement with Migration.” PARSE Journal 10 (2020).
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spectacle-to-border-voyeurism-questions-on-fostering-ethical-engagement-
with-migration/. Accessed 10 June 2021.
Enia, Davide. Notes on a Shipwreck. A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope. Trans.
Antony Shugaar. Penguin, 2017. Kindle edition. Appunti per un viaggio.
Palermo, Sellerio 2017.
Iannicello, Celeste. Migrations, Arts, and Postcoloniality in the Mediterranean.
London and New York: Routledge, 2018.
Malkki, Liisa. “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and
Dehistorization.” Cultural Anthropology 11.3 (1996): 377–404.
“Manifesto.” Un/walling the Mediterranean/S/murare il Mediterraneno. Pratiche
locali, nazionali e transfrontaliere di artivismo transculturale, per una politica e
poetica dell’ospitalitá e mobilitá. Universitá degli studi di Bari “Aldo Moro,”
2009. https://smuraremediterraneo.wordpress.com/about/. Accessed 1
August 2021.
Mazzara, Federica. Reframing Migration: Lampedusa, Border Spectacle, and
Aesthetics of Subversion. New York: Peter Lang, 2019.
Mignolo, Walter. (2007) “DELINKING.” Cultural Studies, 21:2 (2007): 449–514.
Moreno, Carolina, “Latina Journalist Breaks Down Why Saying ‘Illegals’ is Wrong
on So Many Levels. Latino Voices 31 October, 2016. https://www.huffpost.
com/entry/latina-journalist-breaks-down-why-saying-illegals-is-wrong-on-so-
many-levels_n_5817347de4b0990edc32026e. Accessed 1 August 2021
Luiselli, Valeria. Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Minneapolis:
Coffee House P, 2017.
Nicolini, Giusy. “Open Letter from the Mayor of Lampedusa to the European
Union,” 15 November 2012. http://migrantsicily.blogspot.it/2012/12/
open-letter-from-mayor-of-lampedusa-to.html. Accessed 1 August 2021.
——— and Marta Bellingheri. Lampedusa: Conversazioni su isole, politica,
migranti. Torino: Edizioni Gruppo Abele Onlus, 2013.
Proglio, Gabriele and Laura Odasso (eds). Border Lampedusa: Subjectivity,
Visibility, and Stories of Sea and Land. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
——— et al. The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan. 2020.
Pulitano, Elvira. “In Liberty’s Shadow: The Discourse of Refugees and Asylum
Seekers in Critical Race Theory and Immigration Law/Politics. Identities:
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1070289X.2012.763168.
Puri, Shalini, The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent
Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Scego, Igiaba. La mia casa è dove sono. Torino: Loescher, 2012.
———. and Rino Bianchi. Roma negata: Percorsi postcolonilai nella citta. Roma:
Ediesse, 2014.
Solera, Gianluca. Citizen Activism and Mediterranean Identity: Beyond
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wu-ming-foundation/. Accessed 10 July 2021
Fault Lines: The Mediterranean’s “Burning”
and the Human Rights Debate
Fault: a break in the earth’s surface

—Cambridge Dictionary
Fault line: a problem that may not be obvious

and could cause something to fail
—Cambridge Dictionary
Fault: Default, failing, neglect

—OED
Europe was conceived on the Mediterranean

—Predrag Matvejević (Breviario Mediterrano, Kindle edition, 14.)
Migration and border crossing have characterized the history of

Mediterranean civilizations since antiquity. The movement of people
across geographies, ethnicities, languages, religions, and national forma-
tions has resulted in an “intricate site of encounters and currents”
(Chambers, Mediterranean, 32) that far from instituting rigid borders has
instead, over the centuries, created a mosaic of endless overlapping and
historical cross-pollination, an open sea in perpetual transit. Whereas the
Romans, following the Punic wars with Carthage, called the Mediterranean
mare nostrum (our sea), a geopolitical concept linked to a vision of empire
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2022
E. Pulitano, Mediterranean ARTivism, Mediterranean Perspectives,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05992-6_2
24 E. PULITANO
and dominance, notable commentators have pointed out that its borders
have not been easily defined in space or time. 1 In Breviario mediterraneo
(1991), Bosnian Croat writer Predrag Matvejević argues that, despite
repeated attempts to put together the “Mediterranean mosaic” to the
point of exaggerating similarities and convergences, the Mediterranean
displays a tendency toward dissonance. He writes: “We betray [the
Mediterranean] by approaching it only from Eurocentric points of views…
The Mediterranean has never been only Europe—it has long been much
more, at the same time as, perhaps for some time now, it has become
less—but both cannot exist one without the other” (Breviario, chapt.1,
Loc. 143).2
Full of dissonance has also been the discourse on the Mediterranean.
Even an authoritative voice such as Fernand Braudel recognized in the
Mediterranean polyphony a tendency for some voices to “drown others”
(The Mediterranean 1238) and the inherent difficulty to reach “a harmo-
nized setting for solo and chorus” (The Mediterranean 1238). Beyond the
popularized motifs of sun, sea, and beaches, along with the stunning col-
ors and strong smells beautifully captured, throughout the centuries, in
poems and paintings, Mediterranean oratory, Matvejević continues, “has
served democracy and demagogy, freedom and tyranny. Its effects have
taken over the forum and the temple, law and sermon.… The Mediterranean
and the discourse on the Mediterranean are inseparable” (Breviario, chapt.
1, Loc. 161). The old story of the insurgent voices speaking up to tyranny
along the Mediterranean shores continues to repeat itself in the aftermath
of the Arab Spring and in the spatial upheavals that have “fractured” the
Arab world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.3 A powerful meta-
phor is at the center of this story and it is also the starting point of
this book.
1
The concept of mare nostrum would be used, in the 1920s to the early 1940s, to define
Mussolini’s dream of Italian imperialism in Africa, thus establishing a continuum between
modern Italian imperialism and the achievements of the Roman empire. For a recent discus-
sion on such historical continuities, see Agbamu.
2
All the quotations from Matvejević’s book are from the Italian Kindle edition and the
translation into English is mine.
3
See The New York Times Magazine coverage on the unraveling of the Middle East and
the ensuing refugee “crisis.” Written by Pulitzer Prize grantees Scott Anderson, Paolo
Pellegrin, and Ben Solomon, the report provoked significant responses both in the United
States and the Middle East. See Anderson & Pellegrin; see also Reilly. For a critical study
examining the political and spatial consequences of the uprisings, see Tazzioli. I explore the
ramifications of the concept of “crisis” later on in this chapter.
FAULT LINES: THE MEDITERRANEAN’S “BURNING” AND THE HUMAN… 25
“The Burning”
As aptly illustrated by Alessandra Di Maio, in colloquial North African
speech, the metaphor of “burning” is used by migrants who, since the
early 1980s have traversed the Mediterranean with the hope to reach the
European shores in search of better life conditions for themselves and their
families. Beyond the literal, the Arabic verb haraqa (to burn) is used in
Mediterranean Africa to signify some kind of transgression. She explains
how “in Arabic, to burn a norm, a law, or even a red light (one says hargt
l-feu rouge), one is in fact breaking rules, trespassing against norms,
infringing laws” (“The Mediterranean” 43). Di Maio elaborates on the
work of anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo who, in her study of the l-harg
phenomenon among the youth of Marocco (the harraga are those who
cross the sea, those who burn it), contextualizes the complexity of such
transgressive act of crossing within “an Islamic escatological point of view”
(“The Mediterranean” 43). In the metaphor and discourse of l-harg,
Pandolfo explains, there is always a reference to “the figure of ‘a burned
life,’ a life without name, and without legitimacy; a life of enclosure in
physical, genealogical and cultural spaces perceived as uninhabitable; and
the search for a horizon in the practice of self-creation and experimenta-
tion drawing on an imaginary of the elsewhere and of exile” (“ ‘The
Burning’” 333). From the stories of the Moroccan youth interviewed by
Pandolfo, it emerges that migration as “an antidote to despair” (“‘The
Burning’” 348) carries within it, in spite of the risk of death, the possibility
of redemption and regeneration in the deterritorialized space of the else-
where that is in fact the sea, as the “burning” occurs in the Mediterranean.
Yet, for all the symbolic references to myths and legends of rebirth that
have flourished on the Mediterranean land(sea)scapes—from the Phoenix
motif to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to name just a few—whose echoes con-
tinue to resonate in the contemporary crossings, death, Di Maio notes, “is
not always only symbolic in this ‘burning’ process” (“The Mediterranean”
44). Too many casualties have occurred and continue to occur along
these routes.
Drawing from Paul Girloy, Di Maio first coined the term “Mediterraneo
nero” (“Black Mediterranean”) to define the transnational liquid space of
globalization, marked by the crossing of millions of migrants in the past
three decades. “Black,” she writes, “is the color of the Mediterranean
when Africa and Europe meet in its waters” (“Mediterraneo nero” 145;
my translation). Whereas Gilroy established the centrality of Africa and the
26 E. PULITANO
transatlantic slave trade to the creation of modern capitalism, Di Maio

links the contemporary crossing of black bodies in the Mediterranean to
the transnational neoliberal economic system that continues to subjugate
African countries and deny basic internationally recognized human rights
to those Africans willing to risk their lives in order to “burn” the sea. I
borrow Di Maio’s metaphor of “the burning” in this book to characterize
the migratory journeys enacted across the Mediterranean by thousands of
subjects who, as a result of the lack of other legal possibilities to immigrate
to the European Union, revert to burning the sea in order to practice their
right to mobility across national boundaries. “The Mediterranean’s burn-
ing” (or “the Mediterranean is burning”) refers, then, to the ongoing
journeys across the sea that in the past thirty years have significantly rede-
fined Europe’s map and called into question notions of citizenship and
belonging. Beyond the physical journeys, I also use the “burning” meta-
phor to indicate both transgression and death.
The Human Rights Question

“The Missing Migrants Project,” the International Organization for
Migration’s (IOM) database that tracks the death of migrants, including
refugees and asylum seekers worldwide, reports that the Mediterranean
alone “has claimed the lives of at least 19,164 migrants since 2014,” the
year when the project started (IOM: Mediterranean Arrivals). As stated on
its website, IOM calls on all the world’s governments to address what it
describes as “an epidemic of crime and abuse”(Missing Migrants-About).4
International law experts contend that the countless number of deaths and
disappearances in the Mediterranean constitute a crime against humanity
and have been seeking to hold the EU responsible for creating “the
world’s deadliest migratory route.”5 The discourse of human rights
4
See also IOM’s multi-volume series, Fatal Journeys, a project tracking dead and missing
migrants, including children, and a valuable source to understand the challenge in collecting
data on migrants’ deaths. For a comprehensive database documenting the deaths of migrants
and refugees attempting to cross into Europe, see “The Migrants’ Files,” which was discon-
tinued in June 2016.
5
In June 2019, a group of international lawyers submitted a legal document to the
International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Italy, France, and Germany of being responsi-
ble for the death of thousands of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean between 2014
and 2019. Specifically, the document states, EU policies during these years are responsible
for “(i) the deaths by drowning of thousands of migrants, (ii) the refoulement of tens of
intersects the debates on contemporary global migrations in complex and

manifold ways. At stake are questions about state sovereignty, borders,
citizenship, and belonging vis-à-vis the effectives of the protections guar-
anteed in international human rights law. If we agree with Matvejević in
recognizing the deep and intricate roots that connect the Mediterranean
with the great civilizations of antiquity, all of which have contributed to
the formation of Europe’s founding principles, then a human rights dis-
course drawing from key documents elaborated in the twentieth century
might assist us in clarifying some of the gray areas of such heated debates.
Are Human Rights for Migrants? ask Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and
Tobias Kelly in a study focusing on the situation of irregular migrants in
Europe and the United States. Even though we might think that human
rights do seemingly offer universal protection and that the language used
in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),
which states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and
rights,” includes unquestionably every human being, reality presents a
rather different, complex scenario. When it comes to extending human
rights protection to non-citizens, state sovereignty and national law clash
with international legal principles. All the more controversial, the right to
migrate, as stated in Article 13 (2) of the UDHR,6 has been interpreted as
applicable to the state of one’s nationality, therefore reaffirming the prin-
ciple that individual states, upholding their sovereignty, have the power to
decide whether to admit non-citizens or allow them to remain within the
borders or their territory. For Seyla Benhabib, “there is not only a tension,
but often an outright contradiction, between human rights declarations
and states’ sovereign claims to control their borders as well as to monitor
the quality and quantity of admittees” (The Rights 2).
The UDHR is a declaration, not a treaty. As such, it is not binding on
states that are party to it. In tracing the history of such foundational
human rights document, Stephanie Grant explains how important it was,
in the post-1948 years, to follow up with treaties that would become
legally binding on states (“The Recognition” 28). She mentions the two
important Covenants adopted in the 1960s and 1970s addressing the
thousands of migrants attempting to flee Libya, and (iii) complicity in the subsequent crimes
of deportation, murder, imprisonment, enslavement, torture, rape, persecution and other
inhuman acts, taking place in Libyan detention camps and torture houses” (ICC Submission).
6
“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his
country” (UDHR).
28 E. PULITANO
civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights—also known as the

International Bill of Rights7—and various other treaties that over the years
have extended protection to children, women, people with disabilities,
and victims of enforced disappearance (“The Recognition” 29). Yet, when
it comes to migrants, such seemingly “triumphal march forward towards
clear, universal, and enforceable rights” (“The Recognition” 30) has not
made much progress. In the two decades that followed the adoption of
the UDHR, the issue of migrant rights mostly disappeared from the UN
agenda, based on the argument that, first, vulnerable groups were already
protected by the refugees and stateless conventions and, second, labor
migration was the responsibility of the International Labour Organization
(ILO) rather than the UN human rights system (“The Recognition”
32–33). Yet, even an important treaty such as the International Convention
on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of
Their Families (CMW), adopted in 1990, has received scarce attention
among the international community with the result that relatively few
states have been willing to ratify it.8 There is no question that some of the
provisions in this Convention—such as requiring states to promote
“sound, equitable, humane, and lawful conditions in connection with
international migration of workers and members of their families” (CMW,
Part VI, Article 64) and urging them to “collaborate with a view to pre-
venting and eliminating illegal or clandestine movements and employment
of migrant workers in an irregular situation” (CMW, Part VI, Art. 68)—
must have sounded the alarm among migrant-receiving states, hence an
increasing reluctance to move toward ratification, including among mem-
bers of the EU. 9
As the number of global migrations have significantly escalated since
the 1990s as a result of complex, interconnected forces such as poverty,
7
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its two Optional Protocols
(ICCPR).
8
As of December 2019, the CMW has been ratified only by 55 out of the 193 UN member
states, most of which are predominantly countries of migration in the global south. Coming
into force as late as 2003, the Convention has not been ratified by any of the EU countries
or the United States.
9
For a detailed discussion of additional obstacles to the ratification of CMW, see De
Guchteneire and Pécoud. Interestingly enough, these authors argue, the indifference toward
the CMW “stands in sharp contrast to other core human rights instruments, which have been
very widely ratified” (“Introduction” 1).
famine, persecution, and overall economic disparities between poor and

rich countries, it has become evident that the earlier distinction in terms of
human rights protection between refugees and stateless persons on the
one hand and economic migrants on the other can no longer hold. Yet,
the application (or lack thereof) of international human rights law for
migrants attempting to enter the borders of the EU remains an urgent
matter, notwithstanding the increasing number of monitoring mecha-
nisms created by the Human Rights Commission and for the sole purpose
to report on migrant rights’ violations. One of the criticisms often levelled
at international human rights law in its protection of migrants is that it is
“dispersive and fragmentary” and that a more “integrated protection”
regime is needed to effectively force states to extend human rights protec-
tion to migrants (Grant, “The Recognition” 46–7). Other scholars have
recognized the limitations of human rights as rights quintessentially
defined in individualistic terms linked to an idea of democracy also
grounded on individualistic principles (Garelli et al., “Mediterranean
Struggles” 14).10 A more critical approach suggests that we should reframe
human rights and human rights discourse by challenging the neutrality of
the Westphalian territorial construct and create a space in which we can
imagine the application of the ideals of freedom and equality for all. As
Galina Cornelisse states, “the human rights of migrants might serve as
important legal tools and valuable discursive principles which can help us
to understand and discuss justice in a manner where the principles at stake
are not defined with reference to accidental lines drawn on the surface of
the earth, but instead with regard to people’s real lived experiences” (“A
New Articulation” 119). Imagining migrant rights beyond the nation
state narrative that continues to see international migration as a threat,
bodies in excess that need to be contained and controlled, is one of the
arguments of this book in light of the geo-political space it investigates:
the Mediterranean as a historically transit region of migrations and
confluences.
Building on the language of the UDHR, the European Convention on
Human Rights (ECHR), formally known as the Convention for the
Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, drafted in 1950
and entered into force in 1953, guarantees, among others, the right to life
10
The increasing recognition of the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples and minorities
has been at the center of recent debates on the necessity to turn toward a “multi-cultural
relativism” in human rights law. See Lenzerini.
30 E. PULITANO
(Art. 2) and the right to liberty and security (Art. 5). The right to freedom
of movement is guaranteed under Art. 2 Protocol No. 4, which states that
“everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own” (ECHR).
Protocol No.12, signed in 2000 and entered into force in 2005, provides
for a general prohibition of discrimination removing the limitations set
forth in the original ECHR. As stated in Art. 1, “the enjoyment of any
right set forth by law shall be secured without discrimination on any
ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other
opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority,
property, birth or other status” (ECHR). The European Social Charter
(ESC), adopted in 1961, and its revised version, adopted in 1996, places
special emphasis “on the protection of vulnerable persons such as elderly
people, children, people with disabilities and migrants” who have the right
to enjoy “without discrimination” the rights laid out in the ECHR. Even
though neither the ECHR nor the ESC specifically guarantee the right of
non-EU nationals to enter and remain on another territory of a member
state, it is frequently noted that “in exercising control of their borders,
member states must act in conformity with ECHR standards” (Ktistakis
17) and that states have an obligation, under international law, to protect
the human rights of all persons within their jurisdiction, regardless of
nationality.
In light of the story that this book is going present, it becomes impera-
tive to ask what exactly has happened to Europe’s human rights architec-
ture that has helped build the pillars of the European pact. More important,
we should wonder, as Vicky Squire does in a recent study discussing “bor-
der deaths” in the so-called migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, whether
we are assisting a fundamental disintegration of the tradition of humanism
and overall decline of the notion of (human) dignity in the history of
modern Europe (Europe’s, Kindle Edition, 2). Addressing specifically the
extraordinary numbers of deaths that occurred in the Mediterranean dur-
ing 2015–2016, Squire discusses the normalization of death and vulnera-
bility as a result of “EU practices governing migration” (Europe’s, Kindle
Edition, 2) and a decline in the fundamental principles of European
humanism, that same humanism responsible for Europe’s colonial project.
The tension, these past few years, among the various EU member states
over the relocation of asylum seekers along with the increasing challenges
posed by the Visegrád countries to the solidarity approach advanced as
part of the European Agenda on Migration, betrays, Squire contends, an
overt contestation over state sovereignty. More significant, it reveals an
ongoing tension between “the self-determination of a state and a state’s

obligation to others as part of a political and legal union of states”
(Europe’s, Kindle Edition, 25).11
Within such embattled political scenario, it appears that a humane-
centered alternative agenda, vis-à-vis a state-centered one, should be the
approach toward reframing the debates on migration, development, and
human rights in the twenty-first century.
Fault Lines
As described in geology,
A fault is a fracture or zone of fractures between two blocks of rock. Faults allow
the blocks to move relative to each other. This movement may occur rapidly, in
the form of an earthquake—or may occur slowly, in the form of creep. Faults
may range in length from a few millimeters to thousands of kilometers. Most
faults produce repeated displacements over geologic time. During an earth-
quake, the rock on one side of the fault suddenly slips with respect to the other.
The fault surface can be horizontal or vertical or some arbitrary angle in
between. (What is a Fault?, USGS)
Geological terminology offers a fitting framework to unpack some of the

complexities surrounding the discourse of contemporary migratory pat-
terns in Europe. This study centers around the Mediterranean, a liquid
transnational space that has become the epicenter of “fractures” and “dis-
placements” of thousands of people trying to exercise their human right
of movement. In this transnational space, the tiny island of Lampedusa has
become synonymous with the faults created by these ongoing movements
and slippages. But geology alone does not exhaust the critical approach in
this study. As the dictionary definitions I have I quoted in the epigraphs
above indicate, at the root of the concept of fault line there is “failing”
and “neglect” and, more important, perhaps, a question of responsibility
in avoiding to recognize “a problem” in all its magnitude and complexity.
11
Squire refers to the increasing number of walls and barbed wire fences erected at the
borders of countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Macedonia as an exemplary
expression of “a crisis of sovereignty” in the EU. Such a crisis, she argues, needs to be
inscribed within a larger Mediterranean context, upon considering the longer history of
border fences in the Spanish enclaves of Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, and Calais (Europe’s
24–25, Kindle edition).
32 E. PULITANO
Mobility and migration are certainly not new phenomena. What is

undoubtedly new are the tactics of control exercised by state sovereignty
in their various manifestations of power in the attempt to limit people’s
freedom to move. The critical concept of “the autonomy of migration”
has been elaborated by scholars in migration studies to articulate the
dynamics between the creative and diverse force of migrant mobilities and
the apparatus of control erected to contain such flows.12 By following such
approach, the gaze on migration shifts from crisis and control to migra-
tion as a right with individuals freely exercising mobility. As De Genova
states, “these two key figures—the autonomy of migration and the tactics
of bordering—are central to and mutually constitutive of the agonistic, if
not antagonistic, drama that repeatedly manifests itself as the pervasive
crisis of what is finally an effectively global border regime” (The Borders of
Europe 6).
Borrowing from the structure of De Genova’s “New Keywords Collective”
project, a collaborative research of collective writing on various critical
terms widely used in political theory and migration studies, I would like, in
the next section, to tease out a few keywords that illustrate the nature of
the fault lines in the Mediterranean discourse surrounding contemporary
migrations. My selection is not intended to be exhaustive in accounting for
the pull and push factors that force people to move through porous bor-
ders. It aims, instead, at fleshing out some of the themes I am going to
analyze throughout the rest of the book. I argue that any discourse sur-
rounding migrations and border crossing in Europe needs to engage criti-
cally the taken-for-granted meaning of specific discursive categories in
order to disentangle the complex articulations of mobility and migrations.
Crisis
In the common European imaginary, the concept of crisis is solidly fixated
in state policies and discourses, including those circulating in Italy. Migrant
crisis, often conflated with refugee crisis, continue to reiterate the misun-
derstanding around the various denominations used by the state to label
people on the move. Following the 2013 and 2015 tragic shipwrecks
occurring in the Mediterranean, which I address in the chapter “Boats and
Cemeteries,” the representation of migrants and refugee’s death at sea was
12
See among others, Mezzadra and Neilson (2003), Bojadzijev and Karakayali (2010), De
Genova (2010), Casas-Cortes et al. (2015), and Papadopulous et al. (2008).
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Léon Bloy :
Essai de critique équitable
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Title: Léon Bloy : Essai de critique équitable
Author: Adolphe Retté
Release date: March 23, 2024 [eBook #73235]
Language: French
Original publication: Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1923
Credits: Laurent Vogel (This book was produced from scanned

images of public domain material from the Google
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LÉON BLOY :

ESSAI DE CRITIQUE ÉQUITABLE ***
ADOLPHE RETTÉ
Léon Bloy
Essai de critique équitable
PARIS
LIBRAIRIE BLOUD & GAY
3, rue Garancière
1923
Tous droits réservés
DU MÊME AUTEUR
Du Diable à Dieu. — Récit d’une conversion.

Le Règne de la Bête. — Roman.
Un séjour à Lourdes. — Journal d’un pèlerinage à pied ;
impressions d’un brancardier.
Sous l’Étoile du Matin. — La première étape après la conversion.
Dans la lumière d’Ars. — Récit d’un pèlerinage.
Au pays des lys noirs. — Souvenirs politiques et littéraires.
Quand l’Esprit souffle. — Récits de conversions.
Ceux qui saignent. — Notes de guerre.
Sainte Marguerite-Marie. — Vie de la révélatrice du Sacré-Cœur,
d’après les documents originaux.
Lettres à un Indifférent, apologétique réaliste.
Le Soleil intérieur. — Saint Joseph de Cupertino ; Catherine de
Cardonne ; Une Carmélite sous la Terreur ; La Charité du malade.
Louise Ripas, une privilégiée de la Sainte Vierge, préface de S. G.
Mgr Landrieux, évêque de Dijon.
Notes sur la psychologie de la conversion. — Brochure.
Les Miracles de Lourdes. — Brochure.
LÉON BLOY
PREMIÈRE PARTIE
Un homme tout en contradictions. Un orgueil formidable, une

humilité touchante. Parfois aux confins du désespoir, parfois
rayonnant d’espérance céleste. Bon par intervalles, avec un sourire
d’enfant. Haineux à certaines heures, et crachant du fiel sur
quiconque lui avait déplu. Le plus tendre des amis ; le plus inique
des ennemis. Vivant presque toujours dans le paroxysme et
l’hyperbole.
Sa sensibilité fut telle que le contact de son siècle lui produisait le
même effet que du poivre de Cayenne répandu à profusion sur la
chair sanguinolente d’un écorché vif. Et, à travers tant de disparates,
il demeurait passionnément épris de Jésus-Christ, parce que Notre-
Seigneur fut, sur la terre, le Pauvre absolu.
Lui-même, Bloy, se voulait, se disait, prétendait qu’on le définît
un homme d’Absolu. C’est un peu comme s’il avait déclaré : « Je
suis le Fils de Dieu ! » Mais ses contemporains se chargèrent de lui
apprendre qu’il ne l’était pas. Alors, semblable à un Croisé de saint
Louis, il dégainait cette épée : son verbe acéré, pour tailler en pièces
les Bourgeois comme s’ils eussent été de vils Sarrasins. Eux
fuyaient et, une fois à l’abri de ses coups, lui criaient d’un ton
goguenard : « Rien n’est absolu ! »
Il le constate, avec quelle amertume ! Il écrit : « La plupart des
hommes de ma génération ont entendu cela toute leur enfance.
Chaque fois qu’ivres de dégoût nous cherchâmes un tremplin pour
nous évader en bondissant et en vomissant, le Bourgeois nous
apparut armé de ce foudre. Nécessairement alors, il nous fallait
réintégrer le profitable Relatif et la sage Ordure » (Exégèse des lieux
communs, première série) [1] .
[1] La plupart des livres de Léon Bloy, sauf trois ou
quatre, ont été édités ou réédités à la librairie du Mercure
de France.
Il les réintégrait. Mais le fait d’être le forçat à perpétuité du Relatif

ne cessa de lui infliger de fatidiques tortures. Ce lui fut une géhenne
continuelle où ses souffrances lui arrachaient tour à tour des
imprécations et des sanglots, des rires farouches et des prières
résignées d’une poignante beauté. Comme Baudelaire, il devait
s’écrier :
Certes je sortirai, quant à moi, satisfait

D’un monde où l’action n’est pas la sœur du rêve…
Vaine plainte : la mort bienfaisante ne vint le délivrer que très

tard. Il vécut soixante-dix ans pour invectiver la bassesse et le
matérialisme suffoquant de son siècle et pour s’appliquer la loi de
souffrance rédemptrice. Malgré tant d’impatiences, de révoltes
convulsives, de rancunes trop humaines, il eut l’intuition que, seule,
cette loi donne un sens surnaturel à notre vie transitoire sur la terre.
Il comprit que Notre-Seigneur aide à porter leur croix ceux qui,
Cyrénéens persévérants, l’aident à porter la sienne dans la Voie
douloureuse.
Voilà, comme on le développera plus loin, la clé mystérieuse de
son œuvre.
On étudiera, d’abord, ci-dessous, l’écrivain tel qu’il se comporta
parmi la gent de lettres. On résumera la portée de quelques-uns de
ses livres ; on définira les qualités de son style.
Ensuite on tentera d’expliquer le christianisme de Bloy et de
démontrer que, tout pesé, il fut un bon serviteur de l’Église.
I
A plusieurs reprises, Léon Bloy a déclaré qu’il n’était pas un

critique, — qu’il n’entendait même rien à la critique. Il ne faut donc lui
demander ni impartialité ni analyses objectives, d’après une doctrine
d’art préconçue, des volumes qui lui tombaient sous les yeux. Les
neuf dixièmes des écrivains contemporains, il les jugeait fangeux,
grotesques ou imbéciles, et il le disait sans périphrases. Les équarrir
avec brutalité, ce fut une sorte de mission qu’il se donna. Dans
l’introduction de Belluaires et Porchers il proclame hautement son
dessein :
« Pénétré de mon rôle, dit-il, et profondément convaincu que
c’est la France intellectuelle qu’on porte en terre, je marche un peu
en avant des chevaux caparaçonnés et je pousse, tous les vingt pas,
de vastes et consciencieuses clameurs — pour un salaire nul. »
Il faut d’ailleurs reconnaître que quelques-unes des exécutions
auxquelles il procéda sont très justifiées — par exemple celle
d’Émile Zola dans le pamphlet excellent qui s’intitule : Je m’accuse,
et où la phrase sonore, nette et incisive exprime une pensée
toujours haute.
Prenant à partie ce roman d’une niaiserie compacte : Fécondité,
il dénonce, avec une clairvoyance implacable, le néant d’un prêche
matérialiste et humanitaire, sentimental et libidineux, préconisant,
dans le langage d’un palefrenier de haras qui se grimerait en
prophète, le « Croissez et multipliez » de la Genèse, Dieu mis, au
préalable, soigneusement à l’écart.
Bloy, par des citations bien choisies, montre l’impropriété, la
lourdeur, l’incorrection du style, l’ennui boueux qui suinte de tous les
chapitres et surtout l’ignorance à prétentions scientifiques du
médiocre qui rédigea ce livre.
Zola est aujourd’hui bien oublié et il ne subsistera sans doute pas
grand’chose de son œuvre. Mais au temps où Bloy l’écorchait vif,
avec les raffinements d’un tortionnaire expérimenté, celui que Léon
Daudet nomme « le Grand Fécal » marchait escorté d’une multitude
adorante qui encensait, d’un cœur pieux, les produits de son
dévoiement. L’amas putride de ses volumes usurpait une place
considérable dans la littérature. Je m’accuse porta une pioche rougie
au feu dans le tas énorme et en restitua les fragments au dépotoir.
Personne ne lira plus jamais Fécondité. Je m’accuse restera.
Cependant, Bloy ne fut pas toujours aussi bien inspiré. Cette part
considérable d’acrimonie qui lui gâtait le caractère lui faisait dénier
furieusement toute valeur à des écrivains dont l’œuvre ne mérite pas
un dédain aussi intégral. Que M. Maurice Barrès — première
manière — instaurant ce culte du Moi par où l’âme s’épuise en
titillations solitaires et en effusions stériles, lui fasse horreur, on le
comprend et l’on n’est pas loin de partager son antipathie. De
même, tout chrétien fervent blâme avec lui l’auteur d’Un homme libre
et du Jardin de Bérénice d’avoir appliqué les méthodes de formation
spirituelle dues à des saints, et ayant pour but de développer en
nous l’amour de Dieu, aux vicissitudes d’un égotisme maladif. Petite
Secousse n’a pas le droit de dérober les cierges de l’autel pour en
faire des instruments de débauche. Bloy avait donc quelque raison
de s’indigner lorsqu’il s’écria dans Belluaires et Porchers :
Barrès n’a pu s’empêcher d’écrire des mots qui seraient

bien effrayants si l’on ne se disait pas qu’on est en présence
d’un de ces petits vétérinaires attitrés qui entretiennent par
des lavements bénins l’égalité d’âme du Psychologue. Hélas !
oui, il a écrit : « Mon royaume n’est pas de ce monde »,
parodiant le texte terrible à la façon d’un malpropre fagotin
égaré dans une église et contrefaisant les gestes saints du
consécrateur. « J’eus le souvenir, dit-il, de saint Thomas
d’Aquin disant à l’autel de Jésus : — Seigneur, ai-je bien parlé
de vous ? Et devant Moi-même qui ai méthodiquement adoré
mon corps et mon esprit, je m’interrogeai : Me suis-je cultivé
selon qu’il convenait ?… »
On espère que M. Barrès regrette, à cette heure, ces

assimilations sacrilèges.
Mais, pour être équitable, Bloy, par la suite, aurait dû reconnaître
l’heureuse évolution du chantre faisandé de Bougie Rose. A partir
des Déracinés, M. Barrès cesse d’être un Narcisse de décadence. Il
rentre dans le Vrai ; il s’attache fortement à la tradition nationale ; il
publie, après des livres d’un style vigoureux et qui sont des
merveilles d’observation et des documents d’histoire de premier
ordre comme Leurs Figures, des études où la Fille aînée de l’Église :
la France foncièrement catholique, est placée dans la lumière qui
convient.
Mais cela, Bloy, irréductible et aveugle en ses préventions, ne
pouvait pas s’en rendre compte. Lorsqu’il avait pris en grippe un
écrivain, il le considérait désormais comme un réprouvé, indigne du
Purgatoire, et, s’arrogeant le rôle de Justicier, il n’arrêtait pas de le
pourchasser et de le lapider avec des silex et des épluchures.
C’est ainsi que, depuis ses débuts dans les lettres jusqu’à sa
mort, il témoigna à M. Paul Bourget une haine tenace qui s’attaquait
à l’homme privé aussi bien qu’à son œuvre. — Évidemment, les
livres de M. Bourget sont d’une valeur fort inégale. Partout, même
dans les mieux venus, le style est massif, incorrect, s’encombre de
truismes dignes d’être cloués au pilori dans l’Exégèse des lieux
communs. Un snobisme extraordinaire oblige parfois l’auteur de
Cosmopolis de vanter, comme des âmes fines, les plus
incontestables rastaquouères, de s’extasier sur les élégances
d’hommes de clubs à cervelle de pingouin, d’attacher des ailes
d’ange aux épaules de diverses perruches blasonnées et
langoureuses, appartenant à ce qu’on est convenu d’appeler « le
grand monde ». Le culte qu’il rend à la richesse semble déceler une
hérédité de paysan auvergnat que les billets de banque hypnotisent.
Et puis, il a d’autres vénérations d’une cocasserie transcendante,
par exemple celle qu’il professe pour la médecine, art très
conjectural, et pour certaines « illustrations » médicales, baudruches
que l’ironie d’un nouveau Molière devrait bien dégonfler.
Néanmoins, avec tant de défauts, M. Bourget possède des
qualités d’analyste qui ne permettent pas de le classer parmi les
fantoches. S’il a bâclé parfois des romans-feuilletons, sans
observation ni art, tels que Némésis, il laissera quelques livres aussi
perspicaces que véridiques parce que, malgré tout, il a le sens
social.
Le Disciple marque une date de l’histoire littéraire : à l’époque où
le déterminisme matérialiste empoisonnait trop d’intelligences et
dirigeait vers un mur d’impasse les tenants attardés de Taine, ce
livre commença une réaction salutaire qui, depuis, n’a fait que
progresser. Le retour très sincère — quoi qu’en prétende Bloy — de
M. Bourget au catholicisme s’affirma de plus en plus. Comme il
arrive toujours lorsqu’un esprit rend les armes aux certitudes
promulguées par l’Église, son œuvre y gagna en clairvoyance et en
profondeur. Réalisation qui lui eût été bien impossible quelques
années plus tôt, il sut décrire, dans Un Divorce, les opérations si
délicates à retracer de la Grâce en une âme que la privation de Dieu
met au supplice. Il montra nettement que lorsque la loi divine du
mariage indissoluble est transgressée, le désordre qui en résulte
ruine la famille et, dès ce monde, frappe le coupable par les
conséquences inéluctables de son péché.
L’Étape, peinture vigoureuse, pleine d’exactitude, de l’anarchie
des esprits et des mœurs à la fin du XIXe siècle, fait penser à Balzac.
Et, ce qui n’est pas toujours le cas chez M. Bourget, les
personnages de ce roman vivent d’une vie intense.
Enfin, pendant la guerre, il a donné le Sens de la Mort, livre
pensif, d’une haute portée chrétienne. La désespérance finale d’une
âme qui, par orgueil, rejeta la foi religieuse et sombra dans le
suicide, y est évoquée avec un relief saisissant. C’est d’une
psychologie remarquable.
Qui eût constaté ces évidences devant Bloy l’aurait fait rugir.
Mettre en doute la sûreté de son jugement en matière de littérature,
c’était, estimait-il, outrager l’Absolu, profaner une encyclique ou se
délivrer un brevet de crétinisme.
On peut ne voir là qu’un manque d’équilibre chez un extrême
sensitif en qui se boursouflait parfois une vanité enfantine. Mais où
Bloy mérite tous les reproches, c’est quand il s’acharne à décrier un
de ses frères en Dieu au point d’accueillir contre lui les plus ineptes
légendes ; quand, mû par une misérable rancune, provenant peut-
être de griefs imaginaires, il ne se laisse même pas désarmer par la
mort sanctifiée de sa victime. On veut parler de son attitude vis-à-vis
d’Huysmans.
Sans insister sur ce sujet pénible, il importe de donner un
exemple de la façon dont Bloy saisit, avec empressement, tout
prétexte de salir le caractère de l’homme qu’il hait par-dessus toutes
choses. En 1912, c’est-à-dire cinq ans après la mort d’Huysmans, M.
André du Fresnois publia un opuscule intitulé : Une étape de la
conversion d’Huysmans, où se lisaient des fragments de lettres
susceptibles, semble-t-il, de desservir la mémoire de l’auteur d’En
Route. Bloy en cite, avec des clameurs d’allégresse, ce passage :
« Je me contamine dans mon bureau et trouve le temps long.
Quelques pratiques tantôt religieuses, tantôt obscènes me
remontent un peu, mais c’est de durée si courte !… » Et Bloy de
commenter :
Voilà donc la recrue précieuse que nos catholiques ont

tant admirée ! Ayant connu Huysmans beaucoup mieux et
beaucoup plus que personne, ayant d’ailleurs souffert par lui
et pour lui, je sais et j’affirme que sa conversion fut
parfaitement sincère ; mais il devint catholique avec la très
pauvre âme et la miséreuse intelligence qu’il avait, gardant
comme un trésor l’épouvantable don de salir tout ce qu’il
touchait. (Le Pèlerin de l’Absolu, p. 265-266.)
Si Bloy avait réfléchi, il se serait rappelé, à propos de cette lettre,

la première partie d’En Route. Huysmans y confesse, avec une
franchise touchante, les alternatives de débauches et de piété qui
marquèrent le début de sa marche vers Dieu (voir notamment les
chapitres V et VI). S’il avait eu pour un liard de psychologie, Bloy
aurait compris que toute conversion, à son début, implique des luttes
terribles entre les habitudes vicieuses du néophyte qui ne veulent
pas se laisser dompter, et l’âme nouvelle qui commence à naître en
lui. Parfois, celle-ci est d’abord vaincue ; mais la prière et la Grâce lui
donnent peu à peu des forces pour se dégager de la pourriture
antérieure. C’est à coup sûr à cette période que se rapporte la lettre
citée par M. du Fresnois.
Mais Bloy, tout à son impulsion malveillante, était fort incapable
de le reconnaître. Présenter Huysmans sous un jour odieux, tel fut
son objectif perpétuel. Rien, pas même la charité chrétienne, ne l’en
put détourner… On objectera que Huysmans l’avait jadis offensé.
Soit. Mais encore n’est-il pas singulier que Bloy se soit si peu
expliqué sur la nature de « l’horrible injustice » que Huysmans lui
aurait faite ? Compulsez toute son œuvre, vous y verrez son grief
sans cesse allégué ; mais quant au grief en soi, à peine un mot.
Pourquoi cette réserve [2] ?
[2] J’ai reçu, à ce sujet, les explications d’une
personne bien informée. Je les publierai si la question
est, quelque jour, débattue en public.
Au surplus, si Bloy avait été le chrétien absolu qu’il se vantait

d’être, il se serait souvenu d’un certain article du Pater récité par lui,
tous les jours, avant la communion : Dimitte nobis debita nostra
SICUT ET NOS dimittimus debitoribus nostris, et il aurait pardonné.
Or, il est affligeant, mais nécessaire, de le souligner, jamais il ne
sut pardonner à ceux qui, s’imaginait-il, l’avaient lésé dans ses
intérêts ou dans son orgueil. Voyez, entre autres, les accusations
qu’il porte contre Deschamps, directeur de la Plume, dans le
Mendiant ingrat. Elles sont totalement injustifiées ; celui qui écrit ces
lignes assistait à la scène de rupture et il certifie que Bloy s’en forge
tous les détails. Néanmoins, Bloy, de ce jour, n’arrêta pas de
diffamer Deschamps. Il recueillait, avec avidité, tous les ragots qui
empuantissent ces loges de concierge, les cénacles littéraires, et les
propageait sans contrôle ni remords. Bien plus, à la mort de
Deschamps, il notait dans Mon Journal : « On m’écrit que Léon
Deschamps, impresario de la Plume, a été enterré samedi matin 30
décembre. Même sort que Rodolphe Salis. On crève au moment où
l’on pense avoir fait fortune !… »
Or, tout le monde sait que Deschamps mourut complètement
ruiné, tué par les soucis d’argent.
Tel fut Bloy en tant qu’informateur des incidents de la vie
littéraire. Qu’on soit donc assuré qu’à cet égard il ne mérite nulle
créance.
On ne veut pas dire qu’il mentait de propos délibéré. Non, mais
son imagination déformatrice faussait automatiquement les faits et
ensuite les lui représentait comme les indices de l’infamie ou des
intentions hostiles d’autrui. Il y avait un peu de manie de la
persécution dans cet état d’esprit.
S’il ne faisait nul cas de la plupart des littérateurs contemporains,
par contre il avait des admirations violentes et les exprimait avec une
superbe grandiloquence. Il vénérait Balzac ; il aimait Barbey
d’Aurevilly, Hello, Verlaine dont il loua le génie dans ce petit volume
fort perspicace et tout imprégné de dilection fraternelle : Un Brelan
d’excommuniés. Il goûtait Benson, Joergensen, Émile Baumann. Il
écrivit pour les Derniers Refuges de Mlle Jeanne Termier, le seul
poète mystique qui ait paru depuis la mort de Verlaine, une fort belle
préface. Pour d’Aurevilly, non seulement il comprit son art à
merveille, mais encore il le vengea des attaques niaises d’un sot du
nom de Grelé. De Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, il sculpta un solide
médaillon tout en faisant des réserves judicieuses sur l’hégélianisme
qui embrume çà et là la pensée de l’admirable auteur de l’Ève future.
Il est vrai que, parfois, et pour des causes souvent puériles,
l’estime qu’il accordait à ses préférés subissait de brusques éclipses.
S’il apprécia intégralement ce chef-d’œuvre du génial Benson : le
Maître de la Terre, il comprit mal et méconnut la Mystique profonde
qui régit l’affabulation de Franck Guiseley et celle des
Conventionalistes. Joergensen, dont il avait, d’un trait sûr, défini les
premières œuvres, fut soudain voué aux gémonies pour avoir oublié
de citer Je m’accuse dans un article sur la mort de Zola (voir Quatre
ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne). L’auteur excellent de Saint
François d’Assise et des Pèlerinages franciscains, qui fut pour Bloy
un ami toujours dévoué, ne méritait pas cette avanie.
Cette susceptibilité révèle l’importance énorme qu’il attachait à
ses moindres écrits. Littéralement, il se croyait incapable
d’accoucher d’un livre qui ne fût pas un chef-d’œuvre. Il n’y a qu’à
feuilleter ses autobiographies au jour le jour pour le constater. Que le
monde entier ne reconnût point son génie, ce lui causait un
douloureux étonnement. De là, des récriminations quelque peu
enfantines.
Elles sont d’autant moins justifiées que, dès ses
commencements, il eut un groupe d’admirateurs qui ne cessa de
s’accroître et qui ne lui ménageait pas les éloges. Mais rien ne
pouvait le satisfaire. Bien qu’il proclamât son mépris total pour la
publicité des journaux à grand tirage, il ne laissait pas de savourer
l’aubaine lorsque quelqu’un de ceux qui eurent pouvoir d’y conférer
de la notoriété signalait l’un de ses volumes.
« Cette fois, pensait-il, c’est la gloire et les mufles vont s’incliner
devant moi… » Or, rien de tel ne se produisait. Quand Mirbeau —
qui fut un brave impulsif, possédant un certain esprit de justice,
quoiqu’il blasphémât comme cent mille diables — consacra un
article chaleureux à la Femme pauvre, Bloy espéra un succès. Le
succès de grand public ne vint pas. Mais Bloy, qui ne put jamais
comprendre que son art était d’une qualité trop élevée pour
conquérir la multitude, attribua ce déboire au fait que l’article avait
paru le matin du Grand Prix, « jour où, écrit-il, personne ne lit rien ».
Non, ni le Grand Prix, ni toute autre circonstance adventice
n’avaient rien à voir avec ce manque de retentissement. Les causes
de l’obscurité relative où Bloy vécut jusqu’à son décès étaient
ailleurs. Il n’est pas difficile de les apercevoir.
D’abord, un homme qui, à chaque lever de soleil, vide
consciencieusement son pot de chambre sur la tête des
« bourgeois » ne doit pas s’attendre au suffrage de la Bourgeoisie —
que celle-ci soit « bien pensante » ou qu’elle adore la déesse
Raison. Or Bloy procédait à cette opération avec une régularité
parfaite. Ajoutons tout de suite qu’on se garde de lui en faire un
reproche. Sa position vis-à-vis du « gros public » est symbolisée par
une anecdote qu’il plaça dans l’Exégèse des lieux communs
(nouvelle série) :
J’ai connu, dit-il, un épicier dans le temps de ma célèbre

captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne. Un jour que le total de ses
additions me suffoquait, il proposa loyalement de m’ouvrir ses
livres… Je lirai vos livres, lui dis-je, quand vous aurez lu les
miens…
L’épicier ne les aurait lus ni pour or ni pour argent. Et comme,

depuis le romantisme, l’épicier résume le tiers état, Bloy enfourchait
la Chimère quand il l’engageait à découvrir ses œuvres. Mais il ne
voulut jamais admettre qu’il y eût incompatibilité irréductible entre les
façons de penser du Bourgeois et les siennes. Plutôt que de se
rendre à cette évidence, il cherchait les explications les plus
déraisonnables à ses déboires.
Au commencement du Désespéré, il les attribue au triomphe des
romans de Georges Ohnet, « l’ineffable bossu millionnaire et avare,
l’imbécile auteur du Maître de Forges, qu’une stricte justice devrait
contraindre à pensionner les gens de talent, dont il vole le salaire et
idiotifie le public » (page 14).
Bloy se figurait peut-être que si Ohnet avait disparu, comme
Romulus, dans une apothéose, ledit public se serait précipité, avec
enthousiasme, dans les librairies pour acquérir les volumes des
grands écrivains jusqu’alors méconnus. Quelle erreur ! L’affinité
entre Ohnet et les innombrables lecteurs de ses élucubrations était
bien trop grande pour que ceux-ci vinssent jamais à goûter la vraie
littérature. A public bourgeois, fournisseur bourgeois ; c’est une loi
inéluctable. Et il est vraiment puéril de dépenser de l’énergie à s’en
indigner.
Mais Bloy n’acceptait pas cette loi. Il ne cessait d’étiqueter, en
vociférant, l’inoffensif Ohnet « voleur de gloire » — et il n’en acquit
pas un lecteur de plus. Ce dont il faut le féliciter sans arrière-pensée.
Un autre motif de son défaut de vaste notoriété, c’était
l’inaptitude d’un grand nombre de gens de lettres à comprendre
l’esprit catholique qui donne toute leur valeur à ses plus belles
pages. Les uns sont, quant à la religion où ils furent baptisés, d’une
ignorance de Papous. Ce qui du reste leur fait commettre de bien
divertissants quiproquos si, d’aventure, ils se risquent à parler des
choses religieuses. Les autres sont des païens délibérés que le
christianisme horripile, qui pratiquent l’hédonisme et que la seule
apparition d’une porte de monastère fait cingler aussitôt vers Gnide
ou vers Paphos. D’autres enfin, qui ont pris au sérieux Homais et
son ami Renan, se croiraient gâteux s’ils admettaient le surnaturel et
professent une certaine religion de la science tellement stable que
ses dogmes changent environ tous les quinze ans. Pour ces
derniers le catholicisme est un fossile dont il n’y a plus lieu de
classer les débris.
Bloy ne pouvait espérer séduire ce pauvre troupeau sans
pasteur. Il s’étonnait pourtant d’en être méconnu. Même, il aurait
voulu qu’ils répondissent aux injures qu’il leur décochait par des
actes de déférence. C’était trop demander à la nature humaine.
Mais ce qui l’indignait encore davantage, c’était que la majorité
du clergé parût ignorer ses livres. « Les curés, s’écriait-il, ont fait le
vœu solennel de ne rien lire jusqu’au jugement dernier ! »
La boutade est amusante ; elle porte à faux. Des prêtres le
lisaient ; mais il n’est pas surprenant qu’ils se soient abstenus de
témoigner leur approbation à un écrivain qui sabrait, à tort et à
travers, pape, cardinaux, évêques, séculiers et réguliers, tout en se
décernant le titre de soutien inébranlable de l’Église. D’ailleurs, ce
qui prouve leur indulgence foncière, c’est que Bloy n’a jamais été
menacé de l’Index. Quoiqu’on ait avancé le contraire, l’Église ne
déteste pas ses enfants terribles. Elle leur passe bien des incartades
— pourvu qu’ils ne touchent pas au Credo. Et Bloy n’y a jamais
touché.
Il y a une autre raison, fort simple, qui explique l’abstention
relative du clergé, celle-ci : la plupart des prêtres sont très pauvres ;
les livres coûtent cher ; et, de plus, les mille soins absorbants de leur
ministère ne leur laissent pas le loisir de s’adonner à la lecture. De
l’aube à la nuit tombée, les offices, le confessionnal, les œuvres
absorbent tous leurs instants. Et c’est à peine si, rompus de fatigue,
ils trouvent, avant un repos bref, le temps de lire leur bréviaire. Dire
cela, ce n’est point tenter une apologie dont notre clergé n’a pas
besoin, c’est constater un fait.
Il faut donc répéter ici ce qu’on a formulé ci-dessus à propos des
péripéties de la vie littéraire. Quand Bloy, traitant de l’Église
militante, s’indigne ou se courrouce à cause de tel incident qu’il
interprète selon sa manie dénigrante, neuf fois sur dix, il est
nécessaire de mettre au point.
En somme, il y avait en lui un démon sarcastique qui tentait
fréquemment d’égarer le grand chrétien qu’il était au fond. Assez
souvent ce chambardeur interne, aux embûches corrosives, le faisait
choper, mais une visite au Saint Sacrement le remettait presque
toujours et assez vite sur pied.
En outre, il y a un fait capital qu’il faut se garder d’oublier
lorsqu’on écrit sur Bloy, c’est la misère atroce qui le supplicia
pendant la plus grande partie de son existence — non seulement lui
seul aux années de célibat, mais, après son mariage, sa femme et
ses enfants dont deux en moururent ! Certes, cette indigence
meurtrière explique, justifie même ses colères imprécatoires et, en
partie, les malédictions qu’il fulminait contre les égoïstes et les
satisfaits. Se sentir une force de géant et se trouver souvent réduit à
l’impuissance par le manque d’aliments. Aimer les siens d’une
affection véhémente et les voir privés du plus strict nécessaire.
Concevoir une œuvre magnifique et, faute de ressources, n’en
pouvoir réaliser quelques parcelles qu’à de longs intervalles et au
prix d’efforts épuisants. Quel cercle de l’enfer ou, plutôt, quel ardent
Purgatoire ! Le miracle, c’est qu’il n’ait pas plié sous les railleries
fangeuses de certains journalistes, sous le silence calculé de « chers
confrères » plus ou moins envieux, qu’il n’ait pas écouté les conseils

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Mediterranean ARTivism: Art, Activism,

and Migration in Europe Elvira Pulitano

Book Markets in Mediterranean Europe and Latin America:

The Criminalisation of Irregular Migration in Europe:

Irregular Afghan Migration to Europe : At the Margins,

Militant Aesthetics - Art Activism in the Twenty-First

Art, Science, and the Natural World in the Ancient

The Migration Turn and Eastern Europe: A Global

Debordering Europe: Migration and Control Across the

Migration Conundrums, Regional Integration and

More information about this series at

ISSN 2731-5592 ISSN 2731-5606 (electronic)

Cover image: japatino

To the survivors of these dangerous journeys, as they are bravely

also wish to thank Edwidge Danticat whose beautiful writing continues to

“Based on first-hand field research in the central Mediterranean, Pulitano’s vol-

Entanglements: Some Reflections on Migrant Journeys 1

Island(s): Lampedusa as a “Hotspot” of EU Border Policies 43

Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments 75

Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memories103

“La mia terra è dove poggio i miei piedi (My Land

Island(s): Lampedusa as a “Hotspot” of EU Border Policies

Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments

Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memories

Fig. 9 Massimo Sansavini, Touroperator, “Stella Maris.” (Reproduced

Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts

Watery Confluences: Toward a (Trans)MediterrAtlantic

Perché, mi chiedo, il viaggio è garantito a chi viaggia da Nord

Mediterraneo, migrazioni, migranti, sans papier, clandestini. Mediterranean,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

human right long recognized by the international community.1 The stories

the challenge it poses to the logos of the Mediterranean “homeward

It is only by deconstructing charged terminology and analyzing the

discourse of migration in contemporary Europe. Mazzara’s focus on

The book intends to be a critique, a tribute, and a memorial: a critique of

and border crossing. A migrant myself, I am also a cervello in fuga,6 as

I am not an anthropologist or an ethnographer by training and this

my discussion of Porto M, later on in the book, the island opened up an

All the Stories Converge in Lampedusa…

mayor Bernardino de Rubeis demanded the Berlusconi government to

“hotspot for migration” designated by the EU to regulate the contempo-

memory: within ourselves, as we contemplate the traces of the

regain their stories and counteract the process of dehistoricization to

Someday an epic tale of Lampedusa will be born. Hundreds of thousands of

Fault: a break in the earth’s surface

Fault line: a problem that may not be obvious

Fault: Default, failing, neglect

Europe was conceived on the Mediterranean

Migration and border crossing have characterized the history of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

transatlantic slave trade to the creation of modern capitalism, Di Maio

The Human Rights Question

i­ntersects the debates on contemporary global migrations in complex and

civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights—also known as the

famine, persecution, and overall economic disparities between poor and

ongoing tension between “the self-determination of a state and a state’s

Geological terminology offers a fitting framework to unpack some of the

Mobility and migration are certainly not new phenomena. What is

Title: Léon Bloy : Essai de critique équitable

Author: Adolphe Retté

Release date: March 23, 2024 [eBook #73235]

Original publication: Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1923

Credits: Laurent Vogel (This book was produced from scanned

Entanglements: Some Reflections on Migrant Journeys 1

Island(s): Lampedusa as a “Hotspot” of EU Border Policies 43

Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments 75

Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memories103

“La mia terra è dove poggio i miei piedi (My Land

intersects the debates on contemporary global migrations in complex and