P. Khalil Saucier

Tryon P. Woods

African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism presents a probing examination of the contemporary migrant “crisis” in the Mediterranean Basin. By centering our analysis on how racial slavery has shaped European democratic culture, its abolitionist traditions, and the global structures of capital accumulation, P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods reveal and confront how contemporary discourse on the migrant “crisis” displaces Black sovereign mobility. Their inquiry into the modern world’s culture of politics investigates “freedom of movement” discourse’s ostensible confrontation with border policing, the memorializing of Black migrant deaths by artists and advocates, and the visual imagery of a cosmopolitan and multicultural Europe as conceived by filmmakers in response to the migrant “crisis” as variants of a slaveholding culture instantiated in the early Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. This analysis allows the authors to formulate a new critical framework for analysis of both the problems of contemporary migration and borders and the leading prescriptions on offer from analysts, advocates, and policy makers in order to develop alternate ways of conceptualizing global society.

African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism

Gabriele Proglio

Camilla Hawthorne

Ida Danewid

Giuseppe Grimaldi

Angelica Pesarini

Timothy Raeymaekers

Giulia Grechi

Vivian Gerrand

This edited volume aims to problematise and rethink the contemporary European migrant crisis in the Central Mediterranean through the lens of the Black Mediterranean. Bringing together scholars working in geography, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies, this volume takes the Black Mediterranean as a starting point for asking and answering a set of crucial questions about the racialized production of borders, bodies, and citizenship in contemporary Europe: what is the role of borders in controlling migrant flows from North Africa and the Middle East?; what is the place for black bodies in the Central Mediterranean context?; what is the relevance of the citizenship in reconsidering black subjectivities in Europe? The volume will be divided into three parts. After the introduction, which will provide an overview of the theoretical framework and the individual contributions, Part I focuses on the problem of borders, Part II features essays focused on the body, and Part III is dedicated to citizenship.

Bodies, Borders and Citizenship

The Black Mediterranean

P. Khalil Saucier

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