**This event is open to those of the Stanford community ONLY**
❗️There will also be lunch with the speaker on Monday, October 12th @12:30pm in room 51A❗️
Since 2015, the Central Mediterranean has become known as the world's deadliest border. In the wake of the long summer of migration, states and their publics debated who had the obligation to rescue or repel people attempting the sea crossing to Europe and why. While European and North African states developed new strategies of border deterrence, international activist collectives mobilized their own rescue fleet to address the crisis unfolding at the maritime crossing. The ensuing “rescue wars” reverberated on land, where the question of rescue circulated across legal, political and literary fora, serving as a litmus test for the definition of “European values,” the significance of universals such as humanity, the origins of responsibility and the claims of strangers.
In this talk, I examine how sea rescue came to function as a narrative form, a political practice and a technology of border policing in the enduring aftermath of Europe’s so-called “refugee crisis.” Through what I call “the rescue plot,” I trace the political and legal conventions that shape the encounter between border-crossers and the European border regime, treating the sea as a heuristic for considering epistemologies of doubt. I begin with Herman Melville’s 1855 novella, Benito Cereno, which stages how failing frameworks of intelligibility at sea expose impasses in the social orders that authorize them: namely, race and empire. The novella offers an instruction in method I bring to the contemporary Mediterranean. Drawing on ethnography conducted on board a civilian search-and-rescue aircraft operating over the maritime crossing and from the legal case following an alleged migrant mutiny, I investigate the conversion of the sea into forensic space. The conflicting interpretive frameworks that humanitarians, border-crossers, sailors and prosecutors mobilize to perform or police the rescue plot crystallize the broader political tensions shaping the contemporary Mediterranean: between humanitarianism and politics, necessity and desire, European liberalism and its colonial underpinnings.
