No one can find me here

No one can find me here — presentation by Associate Professor Bidisha Banerjee
“No one can find me here.” Affect and Residual Ontologies of the Mediterranean in Refugee Graphic Novels — presentation by Dr Bidisha Banerjee, Associate Professor at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong.

About the presentation to be held in English:
Often referred to as the world's deadliest migration route, the Mediterranean has become the site of a European, necropolitic strategy to deter migration. An estimated 25,500 migrants have perished in the depths of the Mediterranean since 2000.

Several recent graphic refugee novels tell harrowing stories of the perilous journeys migrants undertake to reach “Fortress Europe.”

These include works such as Sergio Nazzaro and Luca Ferrara's Mediterraneo, which depict a desolate Mediterranean where the waters have receded, exposing all that the sea has hitherto hidden. Armin Greders: The Mediterranean examines the “food chain” of aquatic migration, where bodies sink to the bottom of the ocean only to be consumed by fish, which might end up on our dinner tables. Other works document a child's journey across the Mediterranean — Ebo in Illegal (Colfer, Donkin and Rigano 2018) and Amina in Zenobia (Durr and Horseman 2018).

Starting from the field of Blue Humanities, I propose that the graphic and affective representation of marine environments, which seems to have been assigned the role of guardian of the border between self and the Other, between citizen and migrant, is of paramount importance. In this context, I ask how such representations both counter human manipulation of the environment while at the same time arousing empathy for both the human migrants and the non-human environment.

The presentation is related to the exhibition SOLID. Read more about the exhibition here

The exhibition and research projects are funded by the European Research Council (ERC)