Its brilliant prose makes [ Empire's Mobius Strip ] easily accessible to anyone interested in today's migration crisis in the Mediterranean and elsewhere in the world. ? American Historical Review
Italy's current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Empire's Mobius Strip investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state's historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today's refugee crisis.
What is at stake in Empire's Mobius Strip is a deeper understanding of the forces driving those who move by choice and those who are moved. Stephanie Malia Hom focuses on Libya, considered Italy's most valuable colony, both politically and economically. Often perceived as the least of the great powers, Italian imperialism has been framed as something of "colonialism lite." But Italian colonizers carried out genocide between 1929–33, targeting nomadic Bedouin and marching almost 100, 000 of them across the desert, incarcerating them in camps where more than half who entered died, simply because the Italians considered their way of life suspect. There are uncanny echoes with the situation of the Roma and migrants today. Hom explores three sites, in novella-like essays, where Italy's colonial past touches down in the present: the island, the camp, and the village.
Empire's Mobius Strip brings into relief Italy's shifting constellations of mobility and empire, giving them space to surface, submerge, stretch out across time, and fold back on themselves like a Mobius strip. It deftly shows that mobility forges lasting connections between colonial imperialism and neoliberal empire, establishing Italy as a key site for the study of imperial formations in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Empire's Mobius Strip by Stephanie Malia Hom in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Italian History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
And the cage of Lampedusa has become an infernal machine âŚ
The cage of Lampedusa today has become the shame of our democracy.
âFabrizio 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?
âAnn 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.
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 boatâs name and port of origin. Many were spray-painted with a date and the code âC.C. 808â in a rough red scrawl. This code delineated the agency that recovered the boatâthe naval unit C.C. 808 Petraccaâand 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 âwelcome center.â1 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 Lampedusaâa 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 generalâa 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 Napoleonâs 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 todayâs 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 Italyâs nation-making and colonial projects in the early twentieth century have lent their peculiar texture to the countryâs 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 âpolities of dislocation, processes of dispersion, appropriation, and displacement [that are] dependent both on moving categories and populations.â4 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 âislandness,â 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 âforces in the making of new social relations and knowledgesâ 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 âendotopiasâ (an interior space that protects residents from the outside, like a sanctuary), while others can be defined as âexotopiasâ (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 âunnaturalâ selection of people who are deemed âfitâ for moral-political inclusion within state and society, as well as those who are excluded from it, often by the very same means. âIllegal immigrationâ 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 Lampedusaâs 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 Italyâs 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 âtemporary permanenceâ 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 Agambenâs camp.10 Yes, temporary permanence certainly marks such a limit; however, it also marks empireâs broader power over people through the control of mobility. Once the crossing of the indeterminate boundary of Lampedusa takes placeâone might think of the island as something like an event horizonâit sets into motion a process by which the fluidity of oneâs 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 âmigrantâ 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 chiasmusâa simultaneous crossingâfrom 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 forceânot unlike the black-and-white categories described by Frantz Fanon in the era of European colonial imperialismâa 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 betweenâa 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 nâammurati, 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...