Description
This paper situates the 2023 Strage di Cutro, the drowning of 94 forced migrants off the coast of Calabria, Southern Italy, within global racial-colonial histories and geographies of mobility control.
Drawing on what Sharpe calls 'wake work’ (2016), I explore storytelling, practices of mourning, and calls for reparation in the aftermath of the Strage that 'produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing’ (p. 11).
Together with a network of affected forced migrants, local activists, and NGOs who generously shared their stories, alongside my ethnographic practice in Crotone for the second anniversary of the Strage, I narrate from and with the wake, asking how we can mourn, imagine, and exist amidst unfolding and ongoing violence and struggle.
In this paper, I particularly focus on how different people in the Cutro context relate to, narrate, experience, and contest spaces - at sea, on the shore, and on land - that sediment and entangle histories of abandonment and neglect with acts of solidarity and collective care. In doing so, I suggest that ethnographic practice and writing can become part of that wake work, opening towards conceptual, methodological, and ethical reflections on how we research border death, struggle, and survival.
