Seite - 62 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 2/2016

62 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis regard to history, memory and representation. It will query whether or not they are ethically appropriate and analytically helpful with regard to the pursuit of a comparative framework and, from that, politico-cultural intervention. Introducing Human Cargo, Caroline Moorehead defines an ‘illegal immigrant’ as a ‘person residing in a foreign country without permission’. As her narrative progresses, incorporating the harrowing personal testimony of refugees who have risked their lives in dangerous sea and land journeys, she returns to that definition. She interrogates it especially in relation to the Austra- lian homeland of her father, Alan. A leading war journalist and writer, best known in Britain for his powerful reports on the liberation of Belsen, he continuously explored the nature of Australianness, a tradition that his daughter was continuing through its treatment of desperate sea migrants. There, such boat people, regardless of their status, were labelled by the Liberal government during the 1990s as ‘illegals’. For Caroline Moorehead “The use of the word ‘illegals’ suggests criminals, people who have done wrong, terrorists, certainly people not entitled to anything. They are seen as ‘queue jumpers’, stealing the places of the good refugees who have been patiently waiting their turn...” 8 This process of ‘othering’ through the discourse of ‘illegality’ blatantly replicates that of the official mind and Jewish migration to Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s – the term ‘illegal immigration’ as a legal category was itself coined in 1933/1934 by British civil servants in White- hall and Jerusalem. The closeness in language reinforces the validity of Judith Butler’s analysis of hate speech and how its sedimentation through repetition ‘gives the name its force’.9 Initially Britain provided Palestine with its alien legislation, but it was from this quasi-imperial space that the term ‘illegal immigration’ came back to the Metropolis and, from there, to global usage in rhetoric and policy by the end of the twentieth century.10 Moorehead’s Human Cargo is an important statement about the nature of debates about world asylum seekers which had grown increasingly animated in the early twenty first century. By the time of its publication, the island of Lampedusa had become infamous in this respect, a notoriety that has grown exponentially in the subsequent ten years. Lampedusa, as Moorehead poetically suggests, is ‘where Italy ends and where Africa begins’.11 Famous (until the recent migrant crisis) only through its connection to the author of The Leopard, Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (whose ancestors had a long connection to the island, but who himself never visited, residing in Sicily), it is a small, sparsely populated and starkly bare island (a result of misgui- ded nineteenth century deforestation) where fishing and tourism were the mainstays of the economy until the migrant crisis. It had minor military importance in the twentieth century, especially as a postwar NATO base. Within Jewish folklore the island was much celebrated when a British RAF pilot, Sidney Cohen in 1943 allegedly single handedly (and accidentally) achieved the surrender of the Italian garrison there having crash landed – a story which some- what embellished his role. This feat was then commemorated at the time and subsequently in 8 Ibid, 104. 9 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 36. 10 More generally see Georgina Sinclair and Chris Williams, ‘”Home and Away”: The Cross-Fertilisation between “Colonial” and “British” Policing, 1921-85’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35 (2)(2007), 221-38. 11 Moorehead, Human Cargo, 51.