Panel 2
Border Violence and resistance at sea
Thursday 6 May 2021
12:50 - 1:50 pm (PDT)
Panel speakers:
SA Smythe
Deanna Dadusc and Hela Kanakane
Mikki Stelder
Moderated by Sebastian Prange
Littoral and Literary Imaginations in the Black Mediterranean
SA smythe
The Black Mediterranean is increasingly known as one way of understanding Black life and histories both within and beyond the racial geographies that circulate between the Mediterranean Sea and its surrounding European and African nation states. In this talk, I will discuss the ongoing colonial logics of xenophobia, anti-Blackness, and racial capitalism undergirding Europe’s self-initiated migration “crisis.” Specifically, I turn to Black Italian women’s writing and collaborative Black cultural production to emphasize intertwined Black and migrant struggles and the tensions between citizenship/state recognition and what it otherwise means to belong. This transdisciplinary analysis aims to historicize the presence and politics of Blackness in Italy and at sea with an analysis of literary and other political responses to the violence of national borders and Europe’s economics-driven (de)valuation of human life. In order to theorize oceanic crossings, arrival, and Black belonging, I engage Black trans thought and the poetics of abolition to read diasporic attachments, discipline, and to mobilize a “nonbinary approach” to Black life and study.
SA Smythe (they / them) is a poet, translator, and assistant professor of Black European Cultural Studies, Contemporary Mediterranean Studies, and Black Trans Poetics in the Gender Studies and African American Studies Departments at UCLA. One facet of Smythe’s research is represented by their forthcoming edited volume titled Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity, and their first book project, Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean. The latter is a transdisciplinary study of Black belonging and postcolonial, migrant, and Black Italian literature that responds to racialized notions of citizenship in the wake of Europe’s self-initiated migration crises and the anti-Black, colonial, and xenophobic violence Europe engenders against East Africa, and the Mediterranean. Another facet of Smythe’s work is about Black trans poesis (that is, poetics and the philosophy of creation/creativity related to Black trans theory, reading praxis, and embodiment). Forthcoming in that vein is a full volume of poetry titled proclivity, which centers around Smythe’s a familial history of Black migration (between Britain, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Italy), trans embodiment, and Black emancipation.
Women’s struggles in the black meDiterranean
deanna dadusc & Hela Kanakane
In this conversation, Hela Kanakane and Deanna Dadusc discuss their work with Alarm Phone with a focus on the struggles of women on the move in the Central Mediterranean Sea. In the context of current 'Black Lives Matter' uprisings, we discuss how the ongoing invisibilization and denial of migrants deaths at sea make Black Lives in the Med impossible to grieve, and their murder by the European border regime difficult to protest. This silencing has recently been upheavaled by a group of women detained in Libya, who reconstructed their violent interception of their boat back to Libya and the death of 12 people, by sending voice messages from a hidden phone. Their voices became powerful weapons against the lies of European authorities. While migrant women's capacity to act politically has been historically erased or denied, we discuss their central role in multiple struggles against patriarchal and racist violence perpetrated both by humanitarian organisations and by the militarised border regime in the Black Mediterranean.
Hela Kanakane is based in Tunis, she is a student of Economics. She has been active in civil society and volunteered in several Tunisian organisations since the 2015 World Social Forum in Tunis. She is a member of Watch the Med – Alarm Phone and in 2020 she has been awarded the Pro Asyl Foundation human rights prize.
Deanna Dadusc is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Brighton. Her research is focused on the criminalisation of practices of resistance, from housing to migrant struggles. She is a member of Feminists Against Borders (FABs) and of Watch The Med - Alarm Phone network.
Leusden
Mikki stelder
This is a paper I cannot write. An event that I cannot speak of. An unremarkable occurrence swept away under the currents where at the mouth of Suriname, the Marowijne River, meets the South Atlantic. It is a story about a ship that made ten journeys. It is not about the ship, yet the ship carries the loss that arose and the silence of the archive. The same silence surrounds the largest massacre in the history of the transatlantic slave trade today, as it did in 1738. The traces that remain are accounts of the crew fighting for their lives and a chest of gold. A note from the Directors of the Dutch West India Company stating the massacre constituted a “sensitive damage to the company,” “an unfortunate business risk.” Whereas the Zong’s legacy became a pivot in abolitionist struggle and a marker of the emergence of finance capital, the silence around the massacre on the Leusden is emblematic of how the racial violence undergirding Dutch state formation and notions of Dutchness continues to be obscured. In this paper, I begin to try to make sense of why the largest massacre in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, the nailing of the hatch, the murder of 664 captives didn’t cause a ripple, hasn’t led to waves of protests, remains sedimented in the shoal that still lingers at the place where the Marowijne River and the South Atlantic meet.
Mikki Stelder is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer and organizer fascinated by anything that has to do with oceans and water; queer, trans, feminist, antiracist and anticolonial thought and praxis; and scholarly practices that intersects with art, poetics and movements for social justice. They are a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people and the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Squamish people Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw, and at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Their research project Maritime Imagination: A Cultural Oceanography of Dutch Imperialism and its Aftermaths is funded through a three-year Marie Skłodowska Curie research fellowship. Recent work has appeared in Settler Colonial Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies, Radical History Review. You can find more about their work at www.mikkistelder.com where they also write on their blog Finger in the Dike!