For Bisi Silva (1962–2019)

Abstract

This essay surveys a number of contemporary artworks that address the recent migrations and perilous water crossings of African people to Europe, made by artists of the African diaspora. Paying specific attention to the deployment of photography, time-based media, and installation, we argue that artists like Isaac Julien, Alexis Peskine, Romuald Hazoumè, and others disrupt the photojournalistic portrayals of African migrant–refugees crossing the Mediterranean in overloaded small rafts and makeshift boats circulated by the international media. While the UN and its High Commissioner for Refugees have tried for years to call international attention to the situation of these migrant–refugees in Libya’s camps and those camps’ catastrophic violations of human rights, it has been only recently that public attention and discourse have begun to recognize these crossings as a “crisis,” primarily because a growing number of African migrant–refugees have succeeded in reaching Fortress Europe via Spain or Italy. The artists of the African diaspora considered in this essay have attempted to intervene in these public debates by offering counternarratives to often sensational and dehumanizing depictions of specifically Black migrant–refugee lives. In focusing on these counternarratives, we demonstrate how artists connect this contemporary mass migration from African countries to a longer history of forced migrations over water in the African diaspora. Artists have returned continually to the “chronotrope of the ship,” following Paul Gilroy, and have drawn on this long memory as a means to convey the contemporary crisis, thus addressing the sorts of “colonial amnesia” that conveniently ignore any prior entanglements.