ABSTRACT
According to the latest data released by the International Organization for Migration, despite a sudden decrease in the number of arrivals in early 2017, the death toll in the Mediterranean Sea keeps rising. At the same time, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and racist narratives mostly depict the Mediterranean as a border repeatedly crossed by dangerous non-European bodies. In this double space of ‘discursivity’, poised between sympathy and hate, those who cross(ed) the Mediterranean see their (inter)subjectivity denied, expelled, rejected, both made invisible and hyper-visualized by large parts of the media. This may be viewed as the outcome of two entangled processes: on the one hand, social, territorial, and cultural exclusion and, on the other, a differential inclusion. My chapter focuses on the production of contemporary narratives about arrivals of migrants via the Mediterranean in their first Southern European land, namely Italy, by examining the populist narratives of Matteo Salvini, deputy prime minister of Italy and minister of the interior, from a cultural history perspective. Some scholars have argued that the Mediterranean has become the epitome of the spectacularization of tragedy. I analyze the role of cultural memory in linking the colonial archive(s) to populist narratives about the postcolonial condition in Europe, using such sources as newspaper articles, photographs, TV footage, and movies. Availing myself of psychoanalytic theory for a historical interpretation of this double space of ‘discursivity’, in which populist narratives are born and migrant subjectivities are repressed, I will turn to the theoretical debate on the ‘mirror’ and the ‘ghost’ to address those fears, anxieties, and phobias in European societies that are partly inherited from colonialism.
