Abstract: “Black Mediterranean Freedom Dreams” historicizes the discursive and material dispossession exemplified by Europe’s border agency Frontex and collusion between African leaders in Libya and Ethiopia with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and the European Commission to entrench (neo)fascist ideology, neocolonial governance, and border imperialism between Africa, the Mediterranean, and Europe. The chapter reflects on the killings of Soumaila Sacko, Willy Monteiro Duarte, and countless others whose deaths in Europe and at sea underscore the lethal consequences of European border regimes. It attends to griot cultural production, black feminist internationalism, abolition poetics, and the Black Radical Tradition against violent ideological traps of juridical sanctuary. Drawing on cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s “freedom dreams” and Ghanaian-Italian writer Djarah Kan’s “Story of the Good Life,” this chapter argues black imagination and storytelling as practices central to ethico-political projects of solidarity, memory-work, and collective struggle in the search for sanctuary beyond citizenship in the Mediterranean. [150 words]
In Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism, eds. Ananya Roy and Veronika Zablotsky (Duke University Press)
SA Smythe, PhD 