Terri Gordon (The New School)

This panel considers the centrality of the space of the sea in the contemporary global migrant/refugee crisis. At no time since the age of piracy has the open sea been a more tumultuous place. In its current form, the contemporary global migrant/refugee crisis is without precedent. According to a recent United Nations Refugee Agency report, over one million migrants and refugees crossed the Mediterranean in 2015, and over 3,500 perished or disappeared in the crossing. Escaping violence, poverty, civil war, and religious persecution, thousands of families and individuals (often children) from Africa and the Middle East are making perilous journeys across the Mediterranean in fishing boats or overcrowded ships. Women and girls fleeing across the Indian Ocean from Thailand, Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries may face the choice between forced marriage and the commercial sex trade. Rising tides of xenophobia and Islamophobia have made the issues of refugee status and asylum more acute.

This panel invites papers that explore the complexities of the current crisis by addressing issues such as global capitalism, national violence and religious persecution, race and gender, sexual trafficking, precarious labor, and migratory law. Papers may address current and historical crossings, and they may consider various bodies of water, such as the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea, etc. Papers may also consider the experience of being “at sea” in its literal and metaphorical form (as in the state of being lost, adrift, without bearings). Papers that take a cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach are welcome.

This panel is significant in that it addresses one of the most important global crises of our time and considers the intersections between literature, history and politics.

This panel considers the centrality of the space of the sea in the contemporary global migrant/refugee crisis. We invite papers that explore the complexities of the current crisis by addressing issues such as global capitalism, national violence and religious persecution, race and gender, sexual trafficking, precarious labor, and migratory law. Papers may address current and historical crossings, and they may consider various bodies of water, such as the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea, etc. Papers that take a cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach are welcome.