Is Lampedusa a space where different types of mobility meet?

Dr. Anna Arnone (SOAS)

October 2013, la spiaggia dei conigli on the Italian island of Lampedusa is Tripadvisor-rated most beautiful beach in the world and the place where more than 500 Eritreans drown. Lampedusa's recent link to migration from Africa reflects African and European political decisions, while media discourses refer to the island as always linked to tragedy and emergency. The people living in Lampedusa emphasise the island's welcoming nature and launch new ways of experiencing tourism in Lampedusa. Its inhabitants experience tourism and migration, they make sense of both and in many ways migration may be becoming a tourist trope. Lampedusa is also visited by people of African origins who look for a place to commemorate a loss or a successful migratory project. Taking Lampedusa as a space filled with multiple realities and signifiers, this seminar reveals that the encounter of two types of movement and the ways people deal with it are producing very important outcomes in terms of interrogating existing classifications of people and emerging counter-discourses.

About the speaker

Anna Arnone is a Research Associate at SOAS, working on the Italian island of Lampedusa as a space where different mobilities meet and show the contradictions of the regimes of movement. Narratives of tourism and journeys among the Eritrean diaspora are an ongoing topic of interest which she has published in various forms. Her DPhil research at the Sussex University (2010) was about Eritreans in Milan and the multitudes of agents constituting identities in a transnational context of sharp political tensions.

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: cb92@soas.ac.uk