This book examines how Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island, has become a transnational symbol representing migration to Europe from the Global South. It analyses how three very different associations have used the name “Lampedusa” as a means of restoring a sense of subjectivity or agency to migrants themselves. Jacopo Colombini argues that the work of the Archivio delle Memorie Migranti (Rome), the self-organised refugee group Lampedusa in Hamburg, and the Lampedusa-based Collettivo Askavusa offers an alternative to the stereotypical, often racially connoted, public discussion of migrant presence in Italy and Europe. He also demonstrates, however, that the marginalisation of migrant and refugee voices in the public discourse is also partially and unavoidably reproduced in the cultural projects that wish to restore their agency.

This book analyses the European border at Lampedusa as a metaphor for visible and invisible powers that impinge on relations between Europe and Africa/Asia. Taking an interdisciplinary approach (political, social, cultural, economic and artistic), it explores the island as a place where social relations based around race, gender, sex, age and class are being reproduced and/or subverted. The authors argue that Lampedusa should be understood as a synecdoche for European borders and boundaries. Widening the classical definition of the term ‘border’, the authors examine the different meanings assigned to the term by migrants, the local population, seafarers and associative actors based on their subjective and embodied experiences. They reveal how migration policies, international relations with African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries, and the perpetuation of new forms of colonization and imperialism entail heavy consequences for the European Union. This work will appeal to a wide readership, from scholars of migration, anthropology and sociology, to students of political science, Italian, African and cultural studies.

Transnational Tolstoy renews and enhances our understanding of Tolstoy's fiction in the context of "World Literature," a term that he himself used in What is Art? It offers a fresh perspective on Tolstoy's fiction as it connects with writers and works from outside his Russian context, including Stendhal, Flaubert, Goethe, Proust, Lampedusa and Mahfouz. Foster provides an interlocking series of cross-cultural readings ranging from nineteenth-century Germany, France, and Italy through the rise of modernist fiction and the crisis of World War II, to the growth of a worldwide literary outlook from 1960 onward. He emphasizes Tolstoy's writings with the most consistent international resonance: War and Peace and Anna Karenina, two of the world's most compelling novels. Transnational Tolstoy also discusses a shorter work, Hadji Murad. It shares the earlier novels' historical sweep, social breadth, and subtle interplay among a large cast of characters. Along with bringing Tolstoy's gifts to bear on a Muslim protagonist, it also represents his most sustained attempt at world literature.

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Politics - Other International Politics Topics, , language: English, abstract: Lampedusa is definitely a hot spot in the great European migration debate. The tiny island of Lampedusa, “with its 5,000 inhabitants” (Telegraph Online), is located only 167 kilometres from the Tunisian coast and has become the front gate of Europe's south and a symbol for undocumented mobility. Lampedusa functions as a vicarious example of EU (external) borders all focused in one place. Borders consist of conflictive features: on the one hand border means exclusion of people from another state and on the other hand borders are always a zone of contact. Although the right to mobility is an important point of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “border regimes set up limits to the freedom of movement” and ignore the right of asylum. In this text, the author argues that in the last two decades, Lampedusa has been made the main example for the grievance of migration.

"Bartolo tells us about rescuing everyone he can, burying those he cannot, and saving their stories as if they were his own. This is a personal, urgent and universal book" GLORIA STEINEM "An urgent, wrenching dispatch from the frontline of the defining crisis of our times . . . Bartolo is at once the saviour and the coroner to boatload after boatload of migrants who risk everything to cross the deadly seas. It is also a damning indictment of the broader, collective indifference of humankind to both the drowned and the saved" PHILIP GOUREVITCH "Dr Pietro Bartolo has seen more suffering and death in his career than any one man should have to witness" Amnesty International "Through Bartolo we understand that it is impossible to do nothing in the face of such great human need" Vanity Fair It is common to think of the refugee crisis as a recent phenomenon, but Dr Pietro Bartolo, who runs the clinic on the Italian island of Lampedusa, has been caring for its victims - both the living and the dead - for a quarter of a century. Situated some 200 km off Italy's Southern coast, Lampedusa has hit the world headlines in recent years as the first port of call for hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern migrants hoping to make a new life in Europe. The shipwrecks began in 1992. Before the Arab Spring, they came from Africa, but now they come from across the Arab world as well. And the death toll is staggering. On Christmas Eve, 1996, 286 bodies were recovered; on the night of October 3, 2003, 366 out of 500 migrants died after a shipwreck nearby. For the past twenty-five years, Doctor Bartolo has been rescuing, welcoming, helping, and providing medical assistance to those who survived. But, above all, he has been listening to them. Tales of pain and hope, stories of those who didn't make it, who died at sea, their bodies washed up on shore; stories of those who lost their loved ones, of babies that never had a chance to be born. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ITALIAN PROSE TRANSLATION AWARD (IPTA) Translated from the Italian by Chenxin Jiang

This book aims to shed light on a global and complex phenomenon: migration. In order to grasp this vast and ambiguous issue, the book offers ten multi-layered case studies, each focussing on one aspect of migration. With this selection of articles, this collected volume builds a bridge between the past and the present and highlight the many sides of migration. The chapters will demonstrate how the questions of controlled migration, movement of labour, improvement of one’s life, and interaction of people of different origin have puzzled us in the course of the last five hundred years.

This book offers a unique mapping of Mediterranean cultures and histories in transnational contexts. A diverse collection of diasporic scholars stage a critical examination of transmediterranean subjects across a broad spectrum of geopolitical spaces that encompasses India, Greece, Palestine, Sudan, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy and Libya. Focusing on the transnational dispersions and heterogeneous embodiments of Mediterranean cultures, this book examines how these cultures, geopolitical spaces and subjects are caught within flows of exchange, contestation and reconfiguration. Working in the interstices of global formations, the essays in this volume proceed to articulate transmediterranean affiliations that challenge the borders and limits of the nation-state.