This somewhat longer post involves a reflection on a number of meetings I’ve had over the last months with African refugees in the city of Bologna, while preparing research onmigrant labour and urban marginality. Though these meetings took shape in the context of a travelling theatre project (called City ghettos of today), I am thinking of enlarging my questions into a broader comparative agenda on what some people have started to call, first hesitantly, but ever more publicly and consistently, the Black Mediterranean.
I would like to contribute to this discussion by adding a few, loosely related, ideas aroundmaterial labour conditions (for more on this dimension see here) as well as emerging hybrid identities in the arena of migrant mobilisations on the Afro-European border (primarily in Italy but also in other places). All of this may result in a research paper later this year.
Recently the Black Mediterranean has started to surface as a term to indicate the cultural crossroads between Africa and Europe. Under the radar of often violent and discriminatory migration control regimes, which make the journey between both continents an uneven experience indeed, a hybrid, cross-cultural exchange is visibly taking place. At first timidly, and always characterized by a geography of racial subordination, the Black Mediterranean represents an emerging borderland, a zone of cross-border encounter between people, knowledge and ideas.
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