Page - 63 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis 63 the King of Lampedusa, a play that revived the Yiddish theatre in Britain and beyond to counter the image of the cowardly, unmanly Jew and instead announced the arrival of a new ‘type’ who would fulfill a similar role in ‘liberating’ Palestine as a Jewish national home.12 Ominously in relation to its later function as a reception then detention camp for migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty first century, Lampedusa had a pre-history, serving as ‘a penal colony during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.13 In this respect it has a similar history to other remote islands as racialised spaces to relocate those deemed as ‘matter out of place’. Robben Island, for example, was a penal and leper colony before it became noto- rious for incarcerating opponents of apartheid. Moreover, Lampedusa’s role in the processes of modern migration is not out of place in its history from antiquity onwards. As Stefano, the fisherman hero of Anders Lustgarten’s play Lampedusa (2015), explains: “This is where the world began. This was Caesar’s highway. Hannibal’s road to glory. These were the trading routes of the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, the Ottomans and the Byzantines... We all come from the sea and back to the sea we will go. The Mediterranean gave birth to the world.” 14 12 The fullest account is Katie Power’s MA dissertation, University of Southampton, 2015. The play was written by Shmuel Harendorf shortly after the news of the surrender. For the text and commentary see Heather Valencia (ed.), The King of Lampedusa (London: Jewish Music Institute, 2003). 13 Nick Dines, Nicola Montagna and Vicento Ruggiero, ‘Thinking Lampedusa: border construction, the spectacle of bare life and the productivity of migrants’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 43 (3)(2015), 443, note 8. 14 Anders Lustgarten, Lampedusa (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 3. Fig. 2: One of the Libyan/Tunisian boats carrying migrants, Lampedusa Beach, Photo: Tony Kushner