In the wake of a boat: The politics of mourning the 18th of April 2015 shipwreck.

Abstract

On April 18, 2015, a fishing vessel was shipwrecked between Libya and Italy. The tragedy was the result of Italian and European border policies. More than 1,100 people (from across Africa and the Indian subcontinent) lost their lives in the vessel, making it the largest recorded civilian massacre to have occurred in the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond the huge number of dead, what distinguishes the shipwreck are the processes of the "translation" of its human and material remains, involving their displacement, material transformation and re-signification. In this paper, I summarize these processes in four stages, intertwining the vessel and the bodies of those who died inside it: their exhumation, naming, wake (whether artistic or forensic) and, finally, burial. By analyzing the work of translating the boat and bodies, and exploring what can be expressed through their different materialities, I show their intense social and political life, which led various actors involved to claim ownership over mourning. By delineating the mirrored relationship between the bodies and the boat, this article demonstrates the contribution death studies can make to the analysis of migration debris on the one hand, and, on the other, how tracing the social life of boats in the aftermath of migrant shipwrecks can enrich an analysis of the political life of border deaths.