The Colour(s) of Lampedusa

Abstract

As a dystopic space, Lampedusa represents the hyper-real functioning (or dys-functioning) of border control. Site of biometrics and definitions of European “imagined community”, Lampedusa is the conundrum of a number of colour lines/borders that have old and more recent origins: the North–South (Continental Europe vs. Mediterranean Europe), the South–South (Mediterranean Europe vs. Mediterranean Africa), South–East (Mediterranean Europe vs. the Middle East) faults—constructed within a set of discourses that are racialised, gendered and sexualised. Her paper explores the overlapping of local, national and international colour lines and European borders, their cooperation in constructing a system of definitions that fixes the meaning of “life” (Butler) and distinctions between “killability” and “grievability” within what Talal Asad has called the “small colonial war”.