Mediterráneo negro

No border is a simple line, a barrier. In the case of the Mediterranean, which unites and separates Europe, Africa and Asia, this is even more true. The border area is a body of water with a tremendous load of stories of subjugation, forced labor, violence, but also resistance, escape, and emancipation. Black Mediterranean is the approach shared by the activists and scholars who contribute to this volume from different disciplines: geography, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies. The challenge to which they invite us consists of rethinking the Mediterranean area as a space of racialized production of borders, bodies and citizenship inserted in the global circuits of capitalist accumulation. The black Mediterranean frame is anything but academic frivolity. On the contrary, it is a concerted, coordinated and politically oriented effort, which comes to intervene on a fairly crowded battlefield. At present, several proposals with different agendas compete for the story and history of the borders of Europe. Black Mediterranean is directly opposed to both racist right-wing populism and the kinder calls for the closure of borders by nativist social democracy and a certain welfare chauvinism. His bet is radical: to go beyond the paradigm of reception and not settle for less than the abolition, both of borders and of all institutions at the service of racial capitalism and its dynamics of differentiated exclusion and inclusion, which keep the wage costs and social conflict. In short, this book challenges the terms of the debate on migrations in the middle of the crisis of the European middle classes. The task, of which almost everything remains to be done, consists of finding connections between the accelerated impoverishment of those who already live on the continent and the desperate situation of those who have just arrived. The creation of alliances, communities of struggle, desire and mutual support is the opportunity that these pages point to.