Errant Mobilities: Decolonial Imaginaries of Mediterranean Migration in Visual and Literary Culture
Dr. Marian Aguiar, a scholar of literary and cultural studies, is challenging the dominant narratives of migration with her project, Errant Mobilities: Decolonial Imaginaries of Mediterranean Sea Migration. By looking beyond the simple act of crossing a border, Dr. Aguiar re-examines the experiences of migrants in the Mediterranean through the lens of movement that is “erroneous, roving, and wandering,” a strategic, fugitive movement that fundamentally resists the modern state's control.
We sat down with Dr. Aguiar to discuss how concepts like “drifting” and “floating” expose racial hierarchies, why surveillance creates “missing” people, and how artists are using debris to forge new histories.
The Core Threat: The Illegibility of Movement
The modern border state operates through a specific, controlled logic: circulation. As Dr. Aguiar explains, this understanding of security, drawn from Michel Foucault, argues that goods and authorized people move in predictable circuits. When migrants engage in errant mobility, modes of drifting, floating, or even sinking, they break that circuit. Their movement is not merely disorganized; it is an existential threat to state control.
This errant path, which lacks the circulatory logic demanded by the state, is not just geographical chaos; it is an act of political resistance.
The Black Mediterranean: Exposing Racialized Hierarchies
The concept of errant mobility is critical for understanding profound ethical failures, such as the “Left-to-Die Boat” tragedy in March 2011, where a distressed vessel carrying primarily African migrants from Libya to Italy was ignored and 63 migrants died. Dr. Aguiar argues that the failure to rescue was not just a lapse in maritime law, but a function of racialized hierarchy, a structure deeply embedded in the space known as the Black Mediterranean.
“The idea of the Black Mediterranean places this recent history in the context of a long history of violence that includes colonialism, enslavement, and uneven access to free movement... Decolonial studies traces how those racial hierarchies structure who is seen as human, and has access to rights... The boat was identified with its ‘boat people’ passengers, who were themselves understood within geopolitics as less than human.”
The errant path of the boat, containing black subjects, exposed the structural failure of the rescue mandate because, historically, certain subjects are denied access to the global sea commons of rights.
This structural refusal to “see” migrants at risk creates a dangerous paradox: How can migrants be “missing” in the Mediterranean, a space excessively monitored by satellite, radar, and sonar?
Cultural Intervention: Forging a Decolonial Imaginary
Dr. Aguiar explores how cultural interventions, from artists to forensic investigators, counter the state's official narrative, making the erased visible and challenging the cartography of power.
- Salvaged Debris and Affective Memory: Artists like Ai Weiwei use debris — lifejackets and lifeboats — as an aesthetic strategy, transforming objects into traces of migrant experience.
- Forensic Tracing and Counter-Mapping: Organizations like Forensic Architecture and Forensic Oceanography use ethical machine learning to create alternate, decolonial cartographies.
- Reorienting the Viewer: The film Purple Sea, directed by Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, creates a migrant-centered geography of survival.
“The film is oriented around her body... Rather than think in terms of the North or South... we are brought as viewers to orient geography as above or below the surface.”
The Methodological Thread: Close Reading and Transhistorical Links
To spin this academic net between border studies, decolonial studies, and mobilities studies, Dr. Aguiar relies on close reading.
“That close reading allows me to discover what is absent, or partially shown, as well as shown. This method also lets me show how something is represented, rather than only what is represented.”
The concept of errant mobilities is not limited to the Mediterranean crisis; it is a transhistorical and transgeographical idea, linking contemporary migration to longer histories of fugitivity and survival.
Finally, Dr. Aguiar’s work concludes by examining the idea of re-turn instead of “Return” (home). This shift acknowledges that arrival on land is not the end of the migrant’s movement and highlights the constant pivots migrants must make outside the regulated circulation of the modern state.