ABSTRACT
This second ethnographic chapter explores how irregularised travellers seek to subvert Greek borders in order to move to northern EUrope. The island of Lesvos, the capital city of Athens, and the coastal city of Patras constitute three particular, but connected ‘borderscapes’ where people in transit hope to find the paths to, and means for, their eventual escape. Through the narration of their experiences in arrested transit, the chapter wonders whether their everyday strategies of survival and attempts to find ways to cross borders in an unauthorised manner can or should be thought of as a form of resistance. Closely linked to the Autonomy of Migration scholarship as well as Foucault’s conception of infamy, I probe the idea of migratory excess as signifying resistance, underwritten by the creative human potentiality to remain or become ‘otherwise’, to re-imagine and re-invent one’s possibilities, even in conditions of extreme violence and subjection.
