Editor's note: This story is part of The Marathons Series, a collection of articles written by faculty and students. It's a space to talk about work in progress and the process of research—think of it as the journey rather than the destination. We hope these stories help you learn something new and get in touch with your geeky side.
Nearly 10 years ago, photographs of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach shocked the world. They circulated amid news coverage of what was termed Europe’s “refugee crisis,” as thousands of people (more than 1 million in 2015) reached European Union countries to seek asylum.
The image of Kurdi, whose family was making their way from Syria to Greece, gave that “crisis” a face—the face of a young, innocent child—and prompted a wave of global empathy. One that was, it turns out, short-lived. This isn't a unique case: Images of suffering migrants periodically prompt donations to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and demands for an end to needless death.
But over the years, Europe’s migration policies have become only stricter, and people continue to die while crossing the sea.
I’ve thought a lot about the promises and failures of empathy in the context of migration. Why doesn’t empathy work to transform these precarious journeys into safe, legal routes? My own research focuses largely on Africa-Europe migration in the central Mediterranean between Libya, Tunisia, Malta, and Italy. Here, as we see in the US, the framing of human migration as emergency and crisis dominates headlines and political debate.
In Italy, I argue, this framing is so prevalent, and has been in place for so long, that it has come to shape ideas of foreignness and of who belongs in the country: Dominant narratives position migrants and people perceived to be foreign as threatening and as having no connection to Italy or Europe.
For my book Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present, I was interested in documenting how people narrate their experiences of arrival in Italy, where I lived after college and where I return regularly to visit my in-laws. Some of my questions drew on my own experience of being personally transformed by the work of Italian authors of African descent. Their writing calls attention to Italy’s largely disregarded colonial conquests of Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.
Short stories, essays, and novels by people like Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and Igiaba Scego opened my eyes to Italian realities that are rarely taught in schools or acknowledged in public discourse, such as why Rome has a street called “Viale Libia,” for instance (Libya was an Italian colony). Black Italian writers and artists also prompted me to grapple in new ways with my own position in Italy and with coloniality more broadly, as a white US citizen with the privilege of a passport that lets me move with ease, often mistaken for a German or Swedish tourist, but never a “migrant.”
In the mid-2010s, migration to Italy wasn’t new, but precarious sea crossings were increasing as Europe restricted other ways of reaching its shores. Watching news coverage of repeated migrant shipwrecks near the island of Lampedusa, I kept wondering: how will Italy treat survivors? What will Italian communities say about the people from former colonies who are coming to their shores in hopes of international protection?
My book traces the many ways in which what we call a migration crisis or a refugee/border emergency shapes people’s lives, and how it affects dynamics not only at international borders, but well within them. The crisis is both real and imagined, referring to actual, urgent situations—people stranded at sea—but also playing into a spectacle of border control that sensationalizes anonymous mass “waves” of migrants and focuses our attention on the present, disregarding the longer histories that connect those crossing with the places where they arrive.
I look at the impact of emergency-order policies on rescue and death at sea, and on the limbo survivors experience while they wait to hear whether they will receive papers in Italy. The “emergency imaginary”—with emergency as a primary and racialized lens for recognizing foreignness—affects people in the long-term as well, as they struggle to find work or housing. I investigate how emergency operates in the short- and long-term through fieldwork in places that reflect a range of realities, from small villages that were nearly empty until migrants rebuilt them, to cities resistant to offering more migrant accommodations, to occupied spaces like a former sausage factory in Rome where a collective of migrants hosts a museum. I focus on interviews I conducted with people on the move and Italians advocating for them, as well as testimonials in social media, writing, art, and film.
I trace this emergency apparatus of policies, practices, media, and material experiences over what has turned out to be a period of significant political change. When I started this research as a PhD student a decade ago, Italian and EU leaders still spoke about Europe’s “humanitarian values” and the need to save lives. By 2018, that narrative had shifted. Italian elections had brought right-wing populists to power who immediately enacted laws that limited rescue at sea and restricted the forms of protection available to migrants seeking asylum.
In this light, the racial politics of migration are ever more apparent. It was clear in my interviews that people understood that the fearmongering narratives of crisis told about them were driven by antiblackness, and that closing borders was about keeping nonwhite migrants out.
This is what I mean by the coloniality of emergency. Africa has long been seen by the West as a space of “crisis”—a space without a history, a space defined by what it lacks, as Achille Mbembe says. The “emergency” of Mediterranean crossings is a reminder that those ideas have long shaped discourses of identity and race in Europe. That matters when we think about European nations policing the movements of people from former colonies today.
Where does this leave us in terms of empathy? It means, I think, that we can’t depend on empathy to prompt change. Still, witnessing remains fundamental. Witnessing isn’t just about provoking feelings for a distant “other”—and in the book I show how, in oral, written, visual, and filmic work, migrant witnesses position audiences not to pity their plight, but to think differently about the spaces in which we move and the ways we relate to one another.
At an encampment in Rome, several Eritrean men introduced themselves to me by saying, “We’re from Eritrea. You know Eritrea—it was an Italian colony from 1890 to 1941.” They situated their presence in Italy not as the story of escape from enforced military conscription – the reason they were likely to be granted asylum – but as part of a longer shared (and violent) history between the two countries. That is, they expressed a right to be present in Italy in ways that pushed past the idea that their movements constituted an imminent threat or crisis. In this and other forms of witnessing, migrants reimagine freedom of movement and ideas of rights and belonging beyond the limited frame of emergency.