Mediterranean Crossings and Tunisian Settlements is a panel of scholars working at the intersection of studies on mobility, migration, and coloniality between Southern Europe and Tunisia from the late 19th through the 21st centuries. During this period an estimated 300,000 Mediterranean islanders, proletariat people from Malta, Sicily, Favignana, Pantelleria, Sardinia, and Greece, migrated to Tunisia - a day’s journey across the central Mediterranean corridor. The presenters each follow various aspects of migratory movement across the central Mediterranean corridor and consider the making of emigrant settlements throughout Tunisia. The panel’s first paper opens in 1860 (before the arrival French Protectorate in Tunisia) in the village of Tabarka and presents a portrait of a Sardinian community of Roman Catholics who fished for coral just off the northern tip of Tunisia. Mapping a network of Sardinian familial relationships through vital records obtained in the Catholic Archive, we begin the panel by considering a close reading of the term mobility as applied to the Mediterranean. The next two presenters consider the ways that the socio-economic, political, and cultural identities of Italian and Greek communities in Tunis and Sfax maneuver between national regulations and policies of the French Protectorate. Mediterranean emigration generates multiple dimensions of colonial subjectivity, as exemplified through the history of Berber and Libyan emigrates to Tunisia via Italian occupied Tripolitania. These transnational examples illustrated the ways in which historical memory (as well as forgetting) contribute to the construction of Mediterranean boundaries and borders. We conclude the panel in the contemporary moment with our last two presenters drawing comparison of how this longer history of settlement in Tunisia is remembered and mobilized through the construction of local memory in Sicily. Missing Tunisian sons that are buried on Lampedusa are the subject of mourning rituals in communities of Southern Tunisia that have become depopulated due to contemporary migration to Southern Europe. The panel, therefore, seeks to unite these accounts of mobility to Tunisia as a way to both assemble historical narratives of movement and to mobilized local memory as an intervention in contemporary discussions around Mediterranean migration.
Tunisia, in all its complexities, is the central protagonist common throughout the panel. It is our aim to focus on the particularities of Tunisia in terms of resources, climate, environment, media, language, religion, food, culture, and politics in relationships to patterns of movement, settlement, and mobilization across the Mediterranean Sea. The criss-cross of local people on the Mediterranean Sea challenges the notion of a bound or bordered Mediterranean identity, and thus, this panel engages in a new narrative of Tunisia as a reciprocal space of Mediterranean crossings. This multi-disciplinary panel of historians, anthropologists, and geographers respond to 21st century mass Mediterranean migration through a collective re-articulations of mobility, not only from the perspective of emigrant crossings, but of settlements as well. From Tabark at the northern tip of the country to La Goulette, Tunis, Sfax, Zarzis, and the country’s southern-most border with Libya, the panel's aim is to privilege Tunisia as the focal point in which to assemble narratives about movement across the Mediterranean, to record this legacy, and to define a politics of Mediterranean mobility.
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Dr. Sarah DeMott
"Mediterranean Intimacies" constructs patterns of mobility across the Mediterranean archipelagos by reading the Roman Catholic archival records of Sardinian children baptized in Tabarka, Tunisia at the turn of the 20th century. Testimony of parents, godparents, and the Catholic record state the paternal origins and preserve the routes of the baptized child's genealogy. The records are such that they state the natal origins (the name and birth place) of each person on the baptismal certificate, thereby making it possible to physically map the relationships between the child, father, mother, godfather, and godmother to specific places. Through an archipelagic perspective, I trace the baptismal registry in order to literally and figuratively locate inter-personal patterns of familial connectivity across the islands of the western Mediterranean Sea. Surprisingly, what we find is a social network of intimate relationships that are not only local, but are also transregional spread across the islands of the western Mediterranean. As the baptismal record marks a public ceremonial presentation of one’s child to the Catholic community, I read this act of baptism as that of public assembly. By acknowledging the public record, Sardinian children represent the duality of mobility and settlement. Framed through an archipelagos approach, I considers the material and metaphoric realities of island life. An archipelago of intimacy emerges from mapping the geological and human body’s physical relationship to islands of the Sea (both Tabarka and Sardinia.) Therefore, I suggest that the archipelago is a performative category, a marker of both interpersonal intimacies and public assembly, which has the potential to recognize acts of movement, stability and intimacy across the Mediterranean.
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Mr. Gabriele Montalbano
During the colonial period, Tunisian society was composed by different cultures, religions and nationalities, an aspect quite common in all Mediterranean basin. Among the biggest foreign communities who lived in the French protectorate of Tunisia, there were the Greeks, the Maltese and the Italians who largely outnumbered the French community until 1930s. Colonial policy wanted to put all Europeans exclusively under French rule through naturalization. Nevertheless, in 1896 new Conventions were made between France and Italy that guaranteed Italian citizenship to all children born in the Regency from Italian parents (or, at least, from Italian father). Furthermore, thanks to these Conventions, Italians schools, associations, banks and hospitals could continue their activities. This web of Italian national institutions formed a kind of State within the State protected by international laws. The composition of the Italian presence in Tunisia was diversified from a social, religious and regional point of view. An upper-class élite composed mainly by Jews from Leghorn managed the national associations and institutions, that were the bones of the community. On the other side, the lower and working class came from Sicily, Sardinia, and Southern Italy and formed the first trade unions in modern Tunisia. In this paper I'll try to focus on the relations between the upper-class and the working-class, and how national identity and its construction was used in order to build a well-defined collective group. The interest is to analyze and to understand the practices of a cultural and social hegemony inside an emigrant community in a colonial context. Individual and collective strategies managed the national identity to specific interests. However, it cannot underestimate the importance of the France-Italy diplomatic relations, Italian colonial wars and nationalist rhetoric in this community building process. Internal and external factors contributed in defining a national feeling for Italian migrants in French Tunisia.
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Chiara Pagano
At the outset of 1910s European intra-imperial competition led to a rapid reorganization of North Africa’s internal boundaries. In particular, in 1910 French authorities signed a treaty with the Ottoman Empire establishing the border between Tripolitania and Tunisia. However, at the end of 1911, the Italian occupation and rapid annexation of Ottoman Tripolitania and Cyrenaica marked the beginning of an Italian-Libyan war that led to the displacement in Tunisia of around 35.000 Libyans, both for economic and ideologic reasons. On the one hand, the economic stagnation and consequent poverty caused by the Italian efforts to reprime Tripolitania resistance forced many Tripolitanians to emigrate to Tunisia seeking a job. On the other hand, the leaders of Tripolitania’s resistance participated, together with Tunisian reformists and Algerian migrants in Tunisia, to a pan-islamic and anti-imperialistic regional network whose activists profited of the ambiguities of sovereignty in French protectorate to regionally strengthen their alliance. Recent works have already stressed that, despite sharing the ideology inspiring Tunisian anti-French mobilization, Tripolitanian migrants challenged French sovereignty in a qualitatively different way compared to native Tunisians. In fact, they remained foreign muslim communities subjected to Italy’s claims of sovereignty and, consequently, international protection, thus forcing French authorities to reconsider their domestic policy not just as result of intra-colonial dynamics, but also assessing issues related to inter-imperial competition with colonial Italy.
Using this considerations as a starting point, the paper aims to point out to the margins of agency the ambiguous category of French protectorate left open for a regional pan-islamic network to express itself reuniting Tunisian natives with Tripolitanian and Algerian emigrants communities. This network merged by relying on pre-colonial ties that were reinterpreted and remobilized, together with the Islamic ones, as instruments for a wider anti-imperialistic mobilization. By problematizing the pan-islamic activism of Tripolitanian migrants in Tunisia I will argue that, between the 1910s and 1920s, Tunis became the intersection of different trajectories of regional pan-islamic mobility. The latter, after IWW, and levering on the emergence of the Wilsonian ideals of democracy and self determination, gave momentum to a new idea of Maghreb, alternative to the one defined from French colonial imaginary, and already involving Western Libya.
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Giorgia Cantarale
In the last few years, the European Union has pursued a geopolitical strategy that, as far as migration is concerned, has had serious impacts on its neighboring countries. In the frame of the EU’s foreign policy, North Africa is one of the three areas of interest. This contribution highlights European migration policies. In particular, it engages the following questions: what do the external borders mean for the EU and what are their impacts for refugees in Tunisia?
Tunisia has around 1,000 refugees coming mainly from Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea and Libya. Around 10% of them live in the southern regions of the country, such as in Medenine, Tataouine and Ben Gardene. The lack of an internal organ recognizing refugees and, on the whole, of a national legal system, largely constrains the refugees’ lives. Several hundred thousand people crossed the border from Libya into Tunisia in early 2011 following the overthrow of the Ghaddafi regime, and most of them are still holed up in a camp on the Tunisian side of the border.
For Tunisia, which had not experienced high immigration since colonial times, this prompted immediate practical challenges, and required the government to elaborate new migration and asylum laws after many years of inactivity in this policy field. In terms of mobility, in fact, the freedom of movement sealed in Article 13 of the Human Rights Declaration never features in these conversations about the democratic transition in Tunisia. Hence, Tunisia’s effectiveness in policing its maritime and land borders against the human right of “leaving one’s country” is at the center of the policy conversation about Tunisia.
In terms of forced migrations, the juncture between human rights and Tunisian democratization tends to be openly embraced by international actors, humanitarian organizations, and European institutions working in Tunisia. Tunisia is a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention and adopted a new Constitution in January 2014, which guarantees the right of political asylum in Tunisia and the principle of non-refoulement.
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Ilaria Giglioli
Invoking histories of Mediterranean mobilities has long played a role in Mediterraneanist projects, ranging from European colonial enterprises in North Africa (Fuller, 2007), to more recent EU sponsored Euro-Mediterranean cooperation projects (Giaccaria & Minca, 2011). This paper analyzes the mobilization of histories of late 19th Century Sicilian southward migration to the French Protectorate of Tunisia by advocates for Tunisian migrants' rights and 'intercultural dialogue' in contemporary Sicily.
While Sicilians across the political spectrum have long invoked histories of 9th to 13th Century Arab and Arabo-Norman Sicily to advocate for increased cross-Mediterranean relations, over the past decade, interest in the little-known 19th Century history of Sicilian southward migration has grown. In this context, advocates for migrant rights - both from the secular left, and from a Catholic background - research and mobilize the history of late 19th Century Sicilian migration to Tunisia in order to legitimize their visions for and practices of contemporary cross-Mediterranean relations. This history is invoked in three main ways: i) as a model for contemporary relations between Sicilians and Tunisian migrants, ii) as a means to question the current fortification of the Mediterranean sea by pointing to the long-history of cross-Mediterranean mobility, and iii) as a way to construct Sicilians as Mediterranean subjects, with a long history of connection with North Africa. Absent from the discussion, however, is an acknowledgment of Italian colonial ambitions over Tunisia, and an engagement with the inequalities and social hierarchies of French Protectorate Tunisia.
By analyzing the discourses and practices of these Sicilian actors through critical literature on Mediterranean cosmopolitanism and through postcolonial analyses of migration to Europe (see Bromberger, 2007; Haller, 2004; Dakhlia, 2005; Khiari, 2009), the paper argues that mobilizing this history of southward migration represents an attempt to define a model of 'Mediterranean multiculturalism', distinct from supposed 'failed European models'. This vision, however, re-articulates older racial and 'cultural' tropes, which define Sicilian specificity within, and centrality to, Europe thanks to the island's heritage of mixing and interconnection with the Southern Mediterranean.
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Ms. Valentina Zagaria
The European Union's border has in recent history developed into an extensive zone that encompasses seas and lands beyond what is commonly regarded as Europe's geographical perimeter. Both the Italian island of Lampedusa and the Tunisian coastal town of Zarzis exist within its borderland. The fact that the Strait of Sicily is a maritime frontier means that the residents of its shores are directly involved in border practices, and have to confront the presence of those who die trying to cross it. This paper will explore how the inhabitants of these two locales conceive of themselves and of the state as a result of the deaths of people on the move. By focusing on local lived experiences, I hope to attain a deeper understanding of the consequences of European migration policies, laws, and state discourses. In Lampedusa and Zarzis respectively, how is death understood? How do individuals, communities and states decide on who and how to bury, and who and how to mourn? What affective resonances do the graves of unknown migrants transmit? How do the presences and absences of unknown persons and loved ones affect people's understandings of the state and of themselves as political actors? What moral discourses are invoked and challenged as a result? In sum, how and why do people in Lampedusa and Zarzis mobilise around the issue of border deaths?
