A Politics of Neglect: Trailing Life and Death in a Postcolonial Landscape
23.10.2024 CDC Lecture with Amade M'Charek (University of Amsterdam), Wednesday 23. October 2024 18:00 - 19:30 Leuphana Campus, Lecture Hall 3 (HS 3). Organised by research project: "Doing Digital Identities" (Link: https://www.digitalidentities.eu/).
Since 2014 more than 26.000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. They have been attended to as “border death” (Last & Spijkerboer 2014), crucially, drawing attention to the militarization of Europe’s borders and its migration policy. But what if we would make a decolonial move and cross the Mediterranean, move from Europe to Africa? What if we would attend to death, not in relation to borders that kill, but in relation to life and livelihood?
The starting point for this talk are the beaches of Zarzis, a southern Tunisian harbour town, where dead bodies have been washing ashore since the mid-nineties. I ask, “how did these bodies end up here?” A forensic question that I will not engage in any self-evident way. I reconfigure forensics, from an art of finding evince and closure, to an art of paying attention. A mode of opening up and articulating complex entanglements.
Inspired by forensics, its attention to materialities and temporalities as well as its tenet of following heterogeneous traces, I query the relation between death and the possibilities for life and livelihood by trailing what I call vital elements; materialities that are crucial for fostering live or causing death in their absence. Think of phosphorus, salt, water, or, sea sponges. Moving with, and being moved by these materialities and the way they have been part of extractivist practices, I will tell two stories to attend to the durability of unequal, (post)colonial relation, (1) underscoring what can flow easily between Europe and Africa and what is being stopped, (2) contributing to a conceptualization of neglect.