Description
The imperial afterlife is everywhere. Occupying a budding set of temporal connections, geographies of empire live on as malleable manifestations of politics, culture, and materiality as represented by peoples, objects, ideas, images, and events. Never truly ‘dead’, imperial afterlives are part of a diverse spectrum of imperial sustenance, manifesting themselves as rhythms of the past haunting the present in time and space. One such example of where imperial sustenance can be found is in the context of EU migration control, as also seen through the geopolitics of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF for Africa).
This paper traces these imperial afterlives as maintained by the EUTF for Africa. Reading the EUTF as a contemporary expression of historical European attempts at managing African spaces, I demonstrate how the Trust Fund’s cartographical choices exhibit strong echoes of an imperial past. Focusing on the EUTF as a ‘mapping exercise’, I show how each of the three EUTF windows — including the window structure itself —contain important traces of a central but forgotten post-imperial project: Eurafrica. Weaving together Eurafrica as ‘past’ and the EUTF as ‘present’, the EU Trust Fund today is reflective of a tangled set of historical European-African relationships rearticulated through the contemporary context of EU migration control. Both a product of ‘the past’ as well as productive of ‘a past’ reanimated, and complicating our understanding of the relationship between ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’, the EUTF represents a panoply of imperial afterlives, hiding as they are in plain sight.
