Making Immigrants Visible in Lampedusa: Pope Francis, Migration, and the State

Abstract

, the recently elected Pope Francis chose lampedusa for his first pastoral visit. a tiny island, part of the sicilian region yet closer to tunisia than to italy, lampedusa has at times become hyper-visible in the media and national discourses surrounding immigration while at other times it is ignored-part of italy's geographic and social margins. i trace stories of migration to lampedusa through the objects and speech employed by Pope Francis. i examine the once discarded wooden migrant boats and their transformation into visible representations of migration. during the papal Mass, these sacred, liturgical objects born from trash became part of Pope Francis' visual challenge to the invisibility of migrant deaths. i explore the genealogies of the liturgical objects used at Mass, specifically the altar, chalice, ambo, and ferula, to understand how discourses of migration and religion intersect to challenge italian state practices of migration management. keywords migration, state, Pope Francis, religion, Lampedusa In May 2011, an old wooden fishing boat from Libya carried migrants from sub-Saharan Africa towards Europe. After being rescued by Italian authorities, its rudder broke as it was being guided into port; crashing into the rocks and cliffs of Lampedusa's shores (see Figure 1). No one could foresee that in 2013, part of that boat would hold the precious blood of Christ. Another boat, this one small and carrying Tunisian migrants to Lampedusa after the Arab Spring of 2011, would later become the altar on which the Vicar of Christ, Pope Francis, would consecrate bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The rudders of two more Tunisian boats and the wheel from another Libyan ship would be joined together to create the ambo, or lectern, from where the Gospel of Christ was proclaimed; from where Pope Francis would try and steer human consciousness towards compassion for all human souls, especially migrants, by decrying the globalization of indifference. These objects, central to Pope Francis' visit to the island

Governing migration through death in Europe and the US: Identification, burial and the crisis of modern humanism

“…She thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines the politics of migrant deaths in terms of the relation between regulatory practices and practices of contestation or resistance. Such works include analyses of burial as a form of ‘necropatriotism’ that fixes ambivalent identities (Balkan, 2015b), analyses of religious ceremonies that ‘people the state’ through mourning migrant deaths (Catania, 2015), analyses of grieving practices that constitute a solidaristic ‘resource of politics’ in protesting necropolitical violence (Stierl, 2016), memorial practices that disrupt the anonymity of unidentified burials (Zagaria, 2011) and an ‘improper’ politics of mourning that tends to dead strangers (Bieberstein and Evren, 2016). As Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass (2016) suggest in their analysis of mourning practices in the US, mourning can enact not only a closure and depoliticisation, but also a moment of disruption that repoliticises migrant deaths.…”

“…11 In January 2016, he described Europe as a ‘beacon’ of the principles of equality and dignity that are ‘inherent in human nature’, and appealed for anti-smuggling measures to protect ‘victims of human callousness and harsh weather’. 12 R. Tina Catania (2015: 485) argues that, here, Pope Francis ‘peoples the state’ by highlighting the ‘God-given dignity’ of those otherwise exploited by Europe’s exploitative labour and border security practices.…”

“…Doty, 2011;Rygiel, 2010;Vaughan-Williams, 2012), and Achille Mbembe's work on necropolitics (Estevez, 2014;De Leon, 2015). There is also an important body of work that explores the ways in which contestations over migrant deaths un-or re-make citizenship and political community (Rygiel, 2014(Rygiel, , 2016 through practices of grieving (Stierl, 2016), mourning (Bieberstein and Evren, 2016;Délano Alonso and Nienass, 2016), burial (Balkan, 2015a(Balkan, , 2015b and memorial (Zagaria, 2011), all of which reject exclusionary state practices associated with such deaths (Catania, 2015). This article contributes to these literatures by paying attention to the specificities as well as the affinities of contemporary bordering practices in contexts of relative stability and privilege.…”