The escalation in migrant and refugee deaths at the borders of Europe, particularly in the Mediterranean Sea, is no mere coincidence or accident of geography, but rather a predictable result of European immigration law-making, as well as a systemic feature of the routine functioning of the increasing physical fortification of the maritime border and the increasing militarization of border enforcement tactics and technologies.  In light of the evident systematicity of this (infra-)structural violence, which converts the sea into a border that kills, we are challenged to critically comprehend the spectacle of border policing in relation to its brute material effects, above all, a ghastly accumulation of dead Black and Brown bodies. Notably, this means that the sheer magnitude and momentum of migrant and refugee movements has meant that the sociopolitical space of “Europe” has been convulsed by a postcolonial racial crisis arising from the contradictions of the subjective projects of migrant/refugee non-Europeans and states’ efforts to “manage” their subordinate inclusion.

BIO:  Nicholas De Genova <www.nicholasdegenova.com> is currently an independent scholar, based in Chicago.  He most recently he held a permanent appointment as Reader in Urban Geography and Director of the Spatial Politics research group at King’s College London.  He previously held teaching appointments in anthropology at Stanford, Columbia, and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as visiting professorships or research positions at the Universities of Warwick, Bern, Amsterdam, and Chicago.  He is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago (2005), co-author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (2003), editor of Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (2006), co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (2010), and most recently, editor of The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (2017).  He is currently writing two new books — one on The “European” Question: Migration, Race and Postcoloniality and another on The Migrant Metropolis.