African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism

African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism presents a probing examination of the contemporary migrant “crisis” in the Mediterranean Basin. By centering our analysis on how racial slavery has shaped European democratic culture, its abolitionist traditions, and the global structures of capital accumulation, P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods reveal and confront how contemporary discourse on the migrant “crisis” displaces Black sovereign mobility. Their inquiry into the modern world’s culture of politics investigates “freedom of movement” discourse’s ostensible confrontation with border policing, the memorializing of Black migrant deaths by artists and advocates, and the visual imagery of a cosmopolitan and multicultural Europe as conceived by filmmakers in response to the migrant “crisis” as variants of a slaveholding culture instantiated in the early Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. This analysis allows the authors to formulate a new critical framework for analysis of both the problems of contemporary migration and borders and the leading prescriptions on offer from analysts, advocates, and policy makers in order to develop alternate ways of conceptualizing global society.

The decadence of contemporary critical thought is clear in the use of the dead drowning abject black body as material for imaginaries of an antiracist, humanitarian and abolitionist Europe. Saucier and Woods analyze how radical thought is so often sucked into a liberal antiracism that reinforces colonial hierarchies rather than questions them. Written with passion and acuity, this important book opens up a new avenue for thought in migration and border studies and beyond. Required reading.

-- David Chandler, Professor of International Relations, University of Westminster

This outstanding book gave me the possibility of glimpsing the ethical, psychoanalytic and political implications of global migration.

-- Franco Berardi, Accademia di Brera, Milan

Saucier and Woods’ present the reader with a thoroughly rendered, but radically simple argument, which is that the foundations of our present-day reality are still that of a slaveholding culture; and that the antiblack racism that anchors this culture has only become more deeply engrained by humanitarian ideologies that cannot face up to the antiblack violence that has made the modern world what it is. African Migrants, European Borders is an uncompromising intervention. No matter what you make of it, you will not come away unaffected.

-- Philip Kretsedemas, Acacia Center for Justice

This is an important contribution to Black Studies and contemporary thinking on migration. The authors develop an incisive account of an antiblack world, weaving together a vital and compelling critique of antiracist humanitarianism. In rejecting new formulations of Black space like the Black Mediterranean, they forge a more radical approach to migration, illuminating the central role of race in the creation of the modern world.

-- Farai Chipato, University of Glasgow

P. Khalil Saucier is professor of critical Black studies at Bucknell University.

Tryon P. Woods is professor of crime & justice studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and special lecturer in Black studies at Providence College.

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