A May 2015 vigil in Berlin for the unknown refugee dead in the Mediterranean. Florian Boillot/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
The tragic weekend of April 18-19, 2015, in which over 700 so-called African ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees’ perished less than 130 miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa, with another 400 Africans stranded in the Mediterranean desperately awaiting rescue, repeated with violent clarity the terms of black death and suffering which continue to underwrite the modern world and the European project in particular. Lampedusa, as one of the southernmost outposts of ‘Fortress Europe,’ has buried scores and scores of Africans in recent years—this most recent spectacle will probably be eclipsed by the next one by the time this essay goes to print—as part of Europe’s ongoing confrontation with the world it created through African enslavement and colonial subjection for over five centuries.
Our intervention into the debate on Europe’s border policies addresses from the vantage of black political praxis the historical specter of slavery haunting current events. Calls for action on the Mediterranean crisis frequently mobilize the discourse of slavery in various ways, but never in the way most pertinent to our contemporary situation. The most ethical assessment of the Mediterranean crisis is not in the terms of what Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and many others call the ‘new’ or ‘modern-day’ slave trade, but rather in terms of racial slavery’s constitutive and consolidating role in the formation and functioning of Europe and modern society itself. The Mediterranean Basin has been an ongoing crisis for black people for the better part of the past and present millenniums. At issue, then, is a more accurate understanding of what slavery was in order to grasp what it is today. We suggest, following the leading edge of black thought, that today’s scene in the Mediterranean reveals slavery’s afterlife.
