Thesis Title: La Strage di Cutro: Narrating From and With the Wake
Abstract: This project situates the 2023 Strage di Cutro, the drowning of 94 forced migrants in their attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Calabria, Southern Italy, within global racial-colonial histories and geographies of mobility control. With a view to complicating linear, Euro- and terra-centric narrative arcs that frame and flatten border death as a ‘tragedy’, the project asks how mobility control and modulations on the politics of death (Mbembe, 2019) – by action or inaction – converge and continuously co-constitute death in and through configurations of difference. To do so, I develop the concept of necrogeography to hold in tension practices, structures, and relations that sustain, resist, and otherwise entangle with death, abandonment, and neglect, with acts of solidarity, connectivity, and collective care in the context of the EUropean border regime.
Grounded in my conversations with a network of affected forced migrants, local activists, and NGOs that generously shared their experiences, alongside my ethnographic practice in Crotone for the second anniversary of the Strage, I narrate from and with the wake, and yet only partially and fragmentarily, asking how we can mourn, cultivate collective memory, and exist amidst unfolding and ongoing violence and struggle. As an act of avowal in the face of erasure, I centre what Sharpe calls ‘wake work’ (2016), a tool of reimagination, mourning, and creativity to ‘produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing’ (p. 11). The story(e)scape as a concept, method, and ethic guides the approach, structure, and writing of this project.
Supervisors: Dr Stephan Engelkamp and Dr Leonie Ansems de Vries
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