Theatre Journal

Abstract:

The sea is central to constructions of the refugee —maritime passage indelibly linked to political process—even as image-making and narrativization on water are inhibited by the otherness of the pelagic environment. Legally unauthorized maritime transit has informed condemnatory narratives of refugeeness in recent decades, and wealthy nations increasingly rely on extra-territorial and expulsive procedures to prevent the arrival of forced migrants. The central Mediterranean is unique for its maritime activist activity, whereby NGO vessels carry out a volume of migrant rescues. The self-fashioning of NGO vessels—the so-called Civil Fleet—highlights the link between constructions of refugees as disorderly collectives and neocolonial power structures. This discussion centres around the work of the NGO boat Louise Michel, funded by the pseudonymous British graffiti artist Banksy. The vessel’s entry in 2020 into the domain of NGO search and rescue (SAR) activity in the Mediterranean increased the profile of this form of political humanitarian activism. As far as refugee processing is concerned, the Civil Fleet exemplifies intervention in its literal sense of coming between, using direct action to disrupt expulsive state-sanctioned bordering regimes, visibly exposing the relational dynamics of asylum. The maritime rescue of refugees by European NGOs constructs a hospitable mode of refugee processing that is paradoxically both predicted and unsanctioned. The aestheticization of Louise Michel’s interceptive acts is considered here in a dual sense: visually, as design, but also conceptually, as framed political dysfunction. The former renders rescue as image and narrative, while the latter reveals the limits of political humanitarianism itself within an ill-functioning asylum system.