Sandro Mezzadra Guest Lecture
The Institute for International Studies and Trans/forming Cultures present:
Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna - University of Western Sydney)
Border crossing and border reinforcing. Politics of citizenship and movements of migration in a postcolonial Europe
6:30pm, Tuesday 21st November, 2006
Lecture Theatre, CB01.04.06 (Entrance via Tower Building)
The presentation will start by a definition of the postcolonial condition in contemporary Europe. The point will be made that it is precisely the composition and the characteristics of migratory movements that make possible and indeed necessary to talk about a "postcolonial Europe". Taking into account a series of recent analysis of the EU structure, the paper will further highlight some peculiarities of the relation EU is developing with its territory. Transformations of migration management schemes in recent years will be discussed with particular reference to the issue of borders control. Confronting movements of migration that challenge any rigid definition of borders, European politics seem indeed to point at a flexible model of border control, that is increasingly blurring the very distinction between an "inside" and an "outside" to European space. This tendency will be analysed in the third and last part of the presentation, where I will try to underscore the consequences it has for the still in the making European citizenship.
My hypothesis is that European citizenship is currently crisscrossed by the contradictory dynamics of border crossing and border reinforcing, to borrow the concepts proposed in his analysis of the US-Mexican border by the anthropologist Pablo Vila. On the one hand it presents the risk of an drift toward what Étienne Balibar has provocatively called a "new apartheid" (or toward the postcolonial re-emergence of the distinction between citizen and subject within the European space itself). On the other hand it potentially hosts the tendency toward an opening up of democracy, beyond the constraints of the nation-state form and a narrow interpretation of the European identity. In both senses the condition, the movements, and the struggles of migration are crucial sites of investigation and political action.
Brief Biography:
Sandro Mezzadra is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bologna and is currently visiting fellow at the University of Western Sydney (Centre for Cultural Research). His research has been focusing for many years on the issue of borders politics, citizenship and migration. He is involved in various forms of borders and migration related activism in Italy and in Europe.
Among his recent publications in English:
Sandro Mezzadra - Brett Neilson, Né qui, né altrove. Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue, in «Borderlands, e-journal» Volume 2 Number 1, 2003.
Sandro Mezzadra, Citizen and Subject. A Postcolonial Constitution for the European Union?, in «Situations», I (2005-2006), 2, pp. 31-42.
Sandro Mezzadra - Etienne Balibar, Borders, Citizenship, War, Class. A Dialogue, ed. by M. Bojadzijev and I. Saint-Saëns, in «New Formations», Number 58, summer 2006.
Sandro Mezzadra - Federico Rahola, The Postcolonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present, in «Postcolonial Text», II (2006), 1.
