Chapter 15 - Mediterranean Afterlives of Slavery

Summary

This essay looks at the acts of saving that unfold in the maritime spaces of the Mediterranean as they are represented in Helon Habila’s 2018 novel Travellers. Habila’s radical proposition links the sea crossings undertaken by refugees to slavery. But rather than positing violence against black people as what structurally ties the refugees to the slaves, Habila’s novel suggests it is saving and its politics that establish continuities between slavery and the so-called refugee crisis. Probing eighteenth-century insurance discourses, I argue that the paradigm of saving that emerged from those discourses, can be found and operates in the Mediterranean scenes of rescue. Looking at what happens in the Mediterranean through the lens of the logic of slavery derived from the eighteenth century allows not only to discern how contemporary acts of saving thrive, politically and economically, on the utility of the refugees’ life rather than death but also to reveal a set of other significant and related claims: that refugee deaths in the Mediterranean are not exceptional; that structural unsaveability is a form of border control; and that the maritime borders redefine refugees as those who fail to arrive.