Underground Europe
Along Migrant Routes
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Beschreibung
“This is a magnificent book — brilliant, politically astute, beautiful, creative. It's certainly the most important abolitionist books on Fortress Europe I have read, a remarkable and capacious tale of the routes of unauthorized movements, ideas, and solidarities that constitute the European underground railroad.”
—Avery F. Gordon, author of The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins
This book is grounded in an extended analogy between the 19th century story of the Underground Railroad in North America, transporting fugitive slaves to safety in the North, and the 21st century routes and trails of migrant passages to and within Europe. It begins as a kind of historical travelogue tracing the remnants of the 19th-century Underground Railroad in the US and Canada, including its legacies and unfulfilled heritage. It then shifts to the political present by ethnographically sketching a series of different border instances and situations, both external and within the EU space (Ventimiglia, Athens, Paris, Calais, Ceuta and Melilla, Patras, Pozzallo). Focusing on the violent harshening of local border regimes, this book nonetheless suggests a different picture, one conceived as the dynamic effect of both migrants autonomy and of the solidarity provided by local and international groups. Focusing on these specific and contested situations, it is possible to reverse the image of a main borderland into one of a space crisscrossed by many routes and passages. Reading those experiences through the historical lens of the US antebellum Underground Railroad, the book suggests the idea of an analogous "Underground Europe".Luca Queirolo Palmas is Professor of Sociology of Migration at Genoa University, Italy, and Co-editor of the journal Mondi Migranti.
Federico Rahola is Professor of Sociology of Culture at Genoa University, Italy, and member of the editorial board of Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa.
They are both principal and senior investigators in the European Research Council project SOLROUTES and founders of the research collective Laboratorio di Sociologia Visuale.
This book is grounded in an extended analogy between the 19th century story of the Underground Railroad in North America, transporting fugitive slaves to safety in the North, and the 21st century routes and trails of migrant passages to and within Europe. It begins as a kind of historical travelogue tracing the remnants of the 19th-century Underground Railroad in the US and Canada, including its legacies and unfulfilled heritage. It then shifts to the political present by ethnographically sketching a series of different border instances and situations, both external and within the EU space (Ventimiglia, Athens, Paris, Calais, Ceuta and Melilla, Patras, Pozzallo). Focusing on the violent harshening of local border regimes, this book nonetheless suggests a different picture, one conceived as the dynamic effect of both migrants autonomy and of the solidarity provided by local and international groups. Focusing on these specific and contested situations, it is possible to reverse the imageof a main borderland into one of a space crisscrossed by many routes and passages. Reading those experiences through the historical lens of the US antebellum Underground Railroad, the book suggests the idea of an analogous "Underground Europe".
Makes a powerful case for understanding contemporary European migration in a new political frame Grounded in an extended analogy between the Underground Railroad and contemporary migrant passages in Europe Focuses on encounters between subjects in transit and solidarity and abolitionist actors
Autor*in
Luca Queirolo Palmas
Themen in »Underground Europe«
International migration Asylum seekers Border regimes Solidarity network/activism Abolitionism Racial capitalism Underground Railroad Detention camps Informal encampments European migration
Stimmen zu »Underground Europe«
“This unique and important book confronts migration and border studies with a new spatial and political figure: the underground. This underground is much more than a retracing of the clandestine or the undocumented, which have become rather familiar landscapes for migration scholarship. The underground is something new, for it recasts themes of hiding and revealing, moving and staying, evading and resisting, escaping and moving in a fundamentally new light. Underground Europe takes not only political and historical but poetic inspiration from the Underground Railroad, the abolitionist infrastructure through which enslaved people resisted the domination of the plantations in the United States before the Civil War. Bringing that experience into a conversation with borders, migration and solidarity in Europe’s troubled migration borderlands, this book offers us new concepts and new hope. Not many books open entirely new vistas on their subjects. Underground Europe certainly does.”
—William Walters, Carleton University
“The "unauthorized" movement of thousands of migrants with a call "To Europe" is a powerful feature of our time. It symbolises old and new border apparatuses and countering these apparatuses the heterogeneous coalitions of solidarity networks to support people on the move, in spite of everything, both at sea and on land. This "event" of our time is radically reshaping the global present. In this endless battle between forces of control and survival and solidarity there is a colour line which is indeed a race line. Slaughters of coloured immigrants as on the Spain-Morocco border co-exist with homilies of democracy, care, and protection. Yet migrants defy and continue their trek. Is there an underground Europe then calling back for us the legacy of underground movements of escapee slaves in the United States in the nineteenth century? Underground Europe is a possible history – a suppressed one - of a contentious borderland.”—Ranabir Samaddar, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group,author of Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2017)
“It is not often that you finish a book that leaves you in awe of what the authors have managed to accomplish. In Underground Europe Palmas and Rahola take us on an incredible journey: one that deftly intertwines the experiences of enslaved people escaping the southern states just before America’s Civil War, with those of present-day migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers in Europe, together with their own impressions as ethnographers/activists as they seek to make sense of these past and present histories. Weaving their narrative back and forth from the Underground Railroad of the nineteenth century to Underground Europe, Palmas and Rahola explore what is remarkably transhistorical about migrant routes, the lives of those who travel along them, and the solidarity networks that support them. Following in the footsteps of the “History from Below” movement, and writing mostly in the first person, Palmas and Rahola sensitively and evocatively convey the migrants’ stories. We learn not only of the struggles - the dangers, camps, walls, barbed wire, deplorable conditions, and officialdom – but also of the migrants’ resilience, determination, and their dreams. This is a powerful piece of work that ultimately introduces the reader to the possibility of a radically different Europe.”—Jayne Mooney, Professor of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
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