ESSAY 1

The Island

And the cage of Lampedusa has become an infernal machine …
The cage of Lampedusa today has become the shame of our democracy.
—Fabrizio Gatti
What material form do ruins of empire take when we turn to shattered peoples and scarred places rather than to their evocations and enchantments?
—Ann Laura Stoler
It is hard to think of Lampedusa as a place that holds the promise of salvation. Flat-topped and windswept, this tiny island is a mesa of scrub and limestone set in the middle of the Mediterranean. In the fall and winter, the marine haze merges sea and sky into a pale, silvery curtain, one indistinguishable from the other. In the spring, the winds blow alternately warm from Africa or clay-cold from the north, and the sea surrounds the isle in a halo of brilliant turquoise. It has only one town, close to the center of which lies a graveyard of boats (figure 2). It is a sepulcher of brightly colored wood, frayed ropes, and rusting hulls covered by a fine mixture of dirt and sea salt. These are the remains of hundreds of old fishing boats known as pescherecci, which carried tens of thousands of migrants from North African shores across the liquid plateau of the sea to a long-dreamt-of life in Italy. The pescherecci appear to have been abandoned in a hurry. As if frozen in the time of emergency, they were left pell-mell in the tense and frantic moments of rescue. Shoes were scattered on the decks of splintered wood and sun-cracked rubber. Crumpled blankets stained with engine oil were discarded in a corner. A faded life jacket. Unopened bottles of water. What must have once been valuable possessions were abandoned instantly at the prospect of salvation. And those who actually made it to these rocky shores, like the survivors of a plane crash, bore impossibly good fortune. Most have withstood harrowing desert crossings, debilitating illnesses, constant hunger, enduring poverty, unthinkable abuses at the hands of traffickers, and even the sea itself. Those who arrive on Lampedusa are already shattered and scarred by death and loss, but they survived. Many are not so lucky.
FIGURE 2. The graveyard of migrant boats on Lampedusa. Photograph by the author, 2013.
I saw this boneyard on my first visit to Lampedusa in March 2013. Each boat carried the scars of its traumatic journey. Some had prayers painted in Arabic. Others gave the boat’s name and port of origin. Many were spray-painted with a date and the code “C.C. 808” in a rough red scrawl. This code delineated the agency that recovered the boat—the naval unit C.C. 808 Petracca—and the moment when the boat and its survivors were quite literally fished out of the sea. Migrant arrivals on Lampedusa are commonly called sbarchi (landings); however, residents are quick to point out that rare is the case of a boat actually landing on shore. One hotel owner told me that it was more accurate to call them recuperi (recoveries) because each arrival involved a complex, quasi-theatrical rescue operation. He described how sirens sound in the harbor, then a coast guard flotilla motors out to sea and brings back sea-soaked migrants huddled against their gunwales. White vans whisk these people off to the nearby migrant detention center, a place misleadingly classified as a “welcome center.”1 It is a coordinated dance between ships and skiffs, carabinieri and coast guards, social workers and boat migrants that repeats itself again and again on the proscenium of Lampedusa—a Sisyphean passion play of a political and humanitarian crisis inextricably linked to the massive waves of migrants arriving, unannounced, from the global south.2
The island has become an unqualified signifier of globalized mobilities today in two contradistinct senses. It is a destination of luxury tourism in Italy, on the one hand, complete with boutique hotels, gourmet restaurants, and a beach, Isola dei Conigli (Rabbit Island), ranked as the best in the world in 2013.3 On the other hand, Lampedusa has become more famously synonymous with the humanitarian emergencies that have arisen from the fraught collisions between the mass movements of people and the politics of migration. Both are big businesses. The island has emerged as the symbolic geography of the migration crisis in contemporary Italy, if not Europe in general—a crisis brought forth as millions of people engage mobility as the strategy to ameliorate their stations in life. Yet the perceptions of emergency and crisis here do not emerge spontaneously.
Lampedusa has long been tied up in the histories of modern empire: it was an enclave in the crosshairs of Napoleon’s march across the Mediterranean and Egypt and a potential territory for the British Empire. Its miniscule population has ebbed and flowed for centuries, migrating with fishing seasons, military directives, and social obligations on nearby islands. The island has always been caught in the tides of transit across the Mediterranean, as well as in the tides of empires, and it is important to see the island in the context of these multidirectional movements. Too often the perception of today’s migration crisis as unidirectional, from northern Africa to southern Europe, eclipses the omnidirectional networks that have characterized Lampedusa historically. By positioning Lampedusa within these longer histories of movement and empire, it becomes clear that direct antecedents exist for the techniques of containment and spaces of exclusion present on the island today.
This essay explores the layered histories of Lampedusa, and in particular, the ways in which the movements occasioned by Italy’s nation-making and colonial projects in the early twentieth century have lent their peculiar texture to the country’s crisis of migration and detention in the twenty-first. The island is the scene of an imperial palimpsest, a critical node for what Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan have called imperial formations, or “polities of dislocation, processes of dispersion, appropriation, and displacement [that are] dependent both on moving categories and populations.”4 Lampedusa entwines a number of imperial strands, among them the colonial empire of Italy, the military empire of the United States, and the global economic empire of neoliberalism, all of which come under scrutiny in this essay.
Its “islandness,” too, needs to be taken into account. Islands are often outposts that mark imperial borders, but their porousness renders them flashpoints of conflict surrounding who should be included in or excluded from empire as well as to why and how.5 Islands are alluring objects to think with, for they are defined paradoxically by their insularity and their connections to elsewhere. They have always been connected by an intricate skein of commercial and transit networks, especially in the Mediterranean.6 The interdisciplinary field of island studies has made great strides to critically map the ways in which islands emerge as sites of political and cultural contestation, powerful imaginaries, and “forces in the making of new social relations and knowledges” via the contrapuntal relations between land and sea.7 While these studies underscore the remarkable diversity of islands, the through line in all of them emphasizes the fact that islands are multivalent. Godfrey Baldacchino refines this notion of insular multivalence, noting that some islands exist as “endotopias” (an interior space that protects residents from the outside, like a sanctuary), while others can be defined as “exotopias” (an outside space excised from society, like a quarantine).8
Lampedusa is the rare island where sanctuary and quarantine visibly collide. In the space of just a few miles, the clash takes shape in the tourists seeking sanctuary and the migrants being quarantined within intimate proximity of one another. This island is a living laboratory, not only for Darwinian natural selection but also where the mobility regime of temporary permanence contributes to the evolution of different subjectivities. The space of the island throws into relief the “unnatural” selection of people who are deemed “fit” for moral-political inclusion within state and society, as well as those who are excluded from it, often by the very same means. “Illegal immigration” has proved an especially attractive object of study for it hinges on such notions of inclusion and exclusion, and a number of scholars have taken this to task, tracing the limits of the law and the state on Lampedusa, a seemingly bounded, finite space. My aim here is to unpack the historical forces that have given rise to these limits: Lampedusa is not wholly circumscribed by the present crisis of migration and detention but rather located in a much wider network of imperial formations.
These formations, too, exist on moving grounds. The pages that follow weave together an account of Lampedusa’s contemporary crisis with that of its imperial histories in the modern era. I employ a sort of analytic enjambment, an asymmetrical crosscutting between past and present, to render a picture of Italy’s empire that is both historically deep and ethnographically present, which at the same time attempts to capture the unevenness of imperial formations, or in the words of Edward Said, the very contradictory energies of empire itself.9 The mobility regime of temporary permanence spatializes empire on Lampedusa, and as the oxymoron of its name suggests, this regime brokers in paradox. Many scholars have argued that the “temporary permanence” of Lampedusa stakes out the island as a space of exception, a limbo that exists both inside and outside of the law, a biopolitical limit that collapses distinctions in the sense of Giorgio Agamben’s camp.10 Yes, temporary permanence certainly marks such a limit; however, it also marks empire’s broader power over people through the control of mobility. Once the crossing of the indeterminate boundary of Lampedusa takes place—one might think of the island as something like an event horizon—it sets into motion a process by which the fluidity of one’s mobility becomes inscribed within, and thus controlled by, the increasingly hardline politics of the Italian state and the sharpening lines of inequality intrinsic to neoliberalism. This movement from fluid to rigid works in concert with what Ruben Andersson has described as the increasing abstraction of the “migrant” as a subjective category the further she becomes imbricated within the illegality industry.11
Thus, the mobility regime of temporary permanence on Lampedusa marks a chiasmus—a simultaneous crossing—from fluidity to rigidity and from actuality to abstraction. And to state the obvious more clearly, the mobility regime of temporary permanence marks an accelerating compartmentalization, petrification, and essentialization of people who are perceived to be threats to the Italian state owing to their unsanctioned mobilities. What is happening on Lampedusa, then, can be seen as a renewed Manichean division of the world into those who move by choice and those who are moved by force—not unlike the black-and-white categories described by Frantz Fanon in the era of European colonial imperialism—a rigidity that takes shape among the flows and liquidity said to characterize our globalized age.

Destination Nowhere

I often heard a common refrain on my field visits to Lampedusa: while the island is politically Italian, it is geologically African. The Pelagian Sea is shallow here, and an underwater plateau connects the island to North Africa. Its limestone, flora, and fauna more closely resemble those of Tunisia, just seventy miles away, than those of Sicily, its administrative unit, more than one hundred miles to the north. Lampedusa connects Italy and Africa in many ways, geologically and geographically as well as historically and politically. It feels like both and yet neither at all. It is quite literally a place between—a middle place in the middle sea.
The island is only five miles long with a single town at its southeastern end. It is surrounded by bays and inlets with strange-sounding names that trip up the tongue: Cala Giutgia, Punta Javuta, Rutta n’ammurati, Cala Sponze. Its few streets lattice the main pedestrian drag, Via Roma, where the evening passeggiata (stroll) takes place and local gossip changes lips. As the undisputed center of island life, Via Roma sits atop a hill and commands a view of the porto vecchio (old port) to the southeast and the porto nuovo (new port) to the northwest. The former, quite smaller than the latter, provides anchorage for fishing boats and sightseeing excursions. The entrance to the new port, on the contrary...