Preserving Maltese Identity in Refugee Management: On the Emergence and Absence of a Prison Spatiality

Abstract

Since 2002, roughly 19,000 refugees have reached Maltese shores. Both European Union law as well as national Maltese policies shape their reception and treatment. In discourse, these refugees are repeatedly represented as a threat to the social order on the island and its unique Maltese identity. Through various practices of separating refugees from non-refugee society, the societal vision of Maltese uniqueness is stabilised as a sociotechnical imaginary. Through these practices a prison spatiality experienced by refugees emerges. The emergence of this spatiality is illustrated by drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with both refugee and non-refugee institutional actors. Pointing to the relationship between the emergent spatiality and societal self-understandings connecting past, present and future visions of Maltese identity, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries is applied in conjunction with theories of islandness. It is analysed how practices of physical separation, the impediment of social participation, legal separation and its partial suspension enact Malta as a prison for refugees and thereby stabilise a concrete vision of Maltese identity.

1 Doing research on, with and about the island: Reflections on islandscape

“…Over the past five years, he has commuted regularly between Italy and Malta to maintain both his legal status in Italy and his job in Malta. This illustrates that refugees fluctuate between immobility and mobility leading to an interesting observation (see also Otto, Nimführ, & Bieler, 2019): whilst the majority of refugees have difficulties leaving the 'island prison', refugees like Malik Darboe enter the island on purpose as it offers more job opportunities compared to Italy. Malik Darboe does not conceive of Malta as a 'prison' or as 'closed', but rather as a place he can easily enter and exit, as he stated in October 2015: "I'm happy to meet my friends and family there [Italy], but I'm also happy to have a great job in Malta.…”

Coloniality and Islands

“…Fiji acquires independence in 1970, while the Philippines' neocolonial relationship with the United States has fractured the unraveling of its decolonial options, as Virgilio Rivas points out (Rivas, 2019). Yet "independence" is a normative framework since many of the island spaces discussed in this issue continue to contend with the political and economic fragmentation and social inequalities produced out of the ongoing experience of coloniality (Schwartz, 2019;Alvarez et al, 2019;Otto et al, 2019). We need to consider the temporal and spatial coordinates of the histories of island spaces as comprised of a multichronic and fragmented colonial optic.…”

“…We need to consider the temporal and spatial coordinates of the histories of island spaces as comprised of a multichronic and fragmented colonial optic. Ideas such as the detour, the counter story (Aikau and Gonzalez, 2019), sociotechnical imaginaries (Otto et al, 2019) and the atoll-based wave perspective that incorporates an intersection of ocean, dry land and sky (Schwartz, 2019), are all models that experiment with such rethinking. The contributors in this collection offer methodologies and approaches whose decolonial possibilities reside in fully accounting for these histories as well as imagining that all is not lost as the seas continually rise.…”

“…Aikau and Gonzalez ask how might one begin to articulate the heterogeneity of coastal beings shaping island ecologies today (Aikau and Gonzalez, 2019). Otto, Nimführ and Bieler on the other hand, unpack the legal and ontological difficulties that such heterogeneity of island becoming generates (Otto et al, 2019) in the face of slavery, immigration, displacement and forced migrations. Remembering minoritarian, Black and Indigenous spaces of labor and industry as part of the matrix of sea edges is key to unlocking this question of heterogeneity for island economies, Guerin argues (Guerin, 2019).…”

“…This Coloniality and Islands issue demonstrates how the notion of the stacked (Bratton, 2016) or layered impact of colonialism on island futures disrupts conceptions of peripherality (Otto et al, 2019;Schwartz, 2019;Aikau and Gonzalez, 2019), periodicity (Aikau and Gonzalez, 2019;Faris, 2019;Alvarez, 2019) temporality (Rivas, 2019) and proliferates _______________________________ Shima Volume 13 Number 2 2019 -7 -"zones of epistemic deprivation and dependency" (Schwartz, 2019: 120). The case study presented by Alvarez et al ( 2019) on the indigenous practices of fishing weirs around the Interior Sea of Chiloé offers a tangible instance of how indigenous knowledge-making habitats survive.…”