This collection of essays presents a study of migration cultures in the contemporary Mediterranean with a particular focus on Italy as a point of migratory convergence and pressure. It investigates different experiences of, and responses to, sea crossings, borders and checkpoints, cultural proximity and distance, race, ethnicity and memory, along with creative responses to the same. In dialogic and complementary interaction, the essays explore violence centring on race as the major determining factor. The book further submits that the interrogation of racialized categories represents different kinds of critical response and resistance, which involve both political struggle and day-to-day survival and coexistence. Following the praxis of cultural and postcolonial studies, the essays focus on the present but draw indispensable insight from past connections and heritage as well as offering prognoses for the future. The ambitious aim of this collection is to identify some useful lines of thought and action that could help us to think outside intricacy, isolation and defensiveness, which characterize most of the public official reactions to migration today.

CONTENTS: 99 Posse: «Spara!» - Claudia Gualtieri: Cultures in movement across the postcolonial middle sea - Giuseppe Campesi: Frontex and the production of the Euro-Mediterranean borderlands (2006-2016) - Martina Tazzioli: Lampedusa as a hotspot: Channels of (forced) mobility and preventive illegalization beyond the island - Yodit Estifanos Afewerki: The failures of Italian migration responses/approaches: The relocation scheme and the protection of unaccompanied and separated children - Simona Taliani: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child: Nigerian migration, race memories and the decolonization of motherhood - Fabio Caffio: Governing illegal immigration by sea: The difficult Italian challenge - Andrea Mario Lavezzi and Eileen Quinn: Migrant smuggling across the Mediterranean: An economic analysis - Claudia Gualtieri: Bodies in transit: The imperial mechanism of biopolitics - Jill H. Casid: Necropolitics at Sea - Tahar Lamri: The master's house - Marina Warner and Valentina Castagna: Stories in Transit/Storie in transito: Storytelling and arrivants' voices in Sicily - Paolo Gaibazzi: Back way to Babylon: (Unauthorized) migration and postcolonial consciousness in the Gambia - Massimo Zaccaria: Migration from the Horn of Africa: Rethinking space and time - Paul Carter: Emergency languages: Echoes of Columbus in discourses of precarity - Lidia De Michelis: Of islands and bears: The aesthetics and politics of Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare - Daniele Comberiati: Identity, memory, gender and plurilingualism in postcolonial women writers from Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia - Marco Martinelli: The circle of «I am us»: The dreams of Mandiaye N'Diaye, griot by vocation - Pap Khouma: Twenty thousand alive under the Sea of Sicily - Itala Vivan: The Janus-faced doors of Mediterranean emigration/immigration in museums and archives - Dagmawi Yimer: Documentaries as a new form of resistance - Roberto Pedretti: Resistance through performance in the Italian hip-hop scene - Iain Chambers: Broken geographies - Alda Merini: «Una volta sognai» / «Once I had a dream».