Burning the Sea: Clandestine Crossings in the Mediterranean Seametery

Abderrezak’s Academy project is comparative in approach, panning from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa. It rethinks discursive formulations centered on clandestine maritime migrations, delving into ethics, aesthetics, poetics, and politics in Arabic, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. Moving beyond a Eurocentric interpretive framework, Abderrezak examines global displacement and reframes the “refugee crisis” by calling attention to misnomers, which obstruct a clearer understanding of the current exodus. “My focus on the sea rather than land and border crossings,” he says, “aims to present a new vantage point into the lived experience of migrants and refugees for whom the act of ‘burning the sea’ (crossing furtively to Europe) represents an ethical and political endeavor as well as a contestation of the romantic vision of the Mediterranean as a crossroads and site of exchange.” Abderrezak poses several questions: How do misnomers wage a war of words? To what extent can scholarship about a Global South phenomenon, typically conceptualized through the lens of Western terminology, benefit from an approach that includes a South-South perspective? How can fiction provide alternative narratives to stigmatizing mass-media handlings of migrants and refugees? Why should literary and artistic productions inform theories within migration and refugee studies? In Berlin, Abderrezak will consult with German scholars doing parallel research on mobility from the Mashreq, the eastern part of the Arab world. He will also conduct archival research into the life and art of Germany-based Marwan Kassab-Bachi, as well as locate and examine underground, hard-to-find non-commercialized footage made by refugees now residing in Berlin.