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Seeking Refuge in an Era of Naturalized Borders 

Review by Fiori S. Berhane 
 

Migration by Boat: Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival 
Edited By: Lynda Mannik 
Berghahn Books, 2018 
 
 
Images of drowned children, of African men and women in bright orange life vests, of newly arrived 

Syrian refugees on Greek islands—all these snapshots continue to shock and, in turn, numb European 

publics to the daily realities of the European migration crisis. Despite the sensationalist term ‘crisis’, as 

Lynda Mannik rightly points out in the introductory chapter of the multi-disciplinary collection of 

essays entitled Migration by Boat, human beings have migrated by boat for centuries. Moreover, it is 

only since “World War II that the legalities of such migrations have become increasingly contentious” 

(2018:1). Starting in 2015, European governments have taken ever more extraordinary measures to 

ensure that migrants do not land upon their shores. The latest measures, including the criminalization of 

NGOs that operate search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean and the tasking of nominal 

authorities in Libya with intercepting and detaining would-be migrants, have resulted in precipitous 

drops in the number of migrants entering the European Union. While this number declines, anti-

migrant populists continue to gain ground in European elections. This seemingly paradoxical situation 

is not without historical precedent, as the authors in this edited volume make clear. 

 

This collection of essays, adding to the scholarship of refugee and migration studies, travels through 

both time and space in its survey of boat migration. The authors chose to focus on boat migration 

because much is made in contemporary discourses of both the danger this form of migration poses for 

the migrants themselves and the threat that refugees who travel by boat are seen to present to societies 

in the Global North. Shifts in refugee policies throughout the 1980s and 90s first portrayed refugees 

from the Global South as uncontrollable masses threatening Western economic prosperity and security. 



 

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These refugees and migrants are generally perceived to be threats to international order as they 

transgress consecrated notions of territory, demarcated and increasingly impassable borders, and 

racialized forms of national belonging. As migration policies in Global-North nations shift towards 

securitized borders, the attenuation of the right to settle, and the closure of available channels of 

authorized movement, migrants from the Global South find themselves undertaking dangerous 

maritime journeys. As the authors argue, while these journeys present clear challenges for those 

involved, they also create new forms of belonging, confound “terrestrial nationalism” (Nguyen, ch. 3), 

and sew complex webs of sociality along the way. 

 

The book is organized with four themes in mind: public and private memorialization, artistic 

production, media and representation, and the phenomenological aspect of boat migration. The essays 

in this book are a corrective to negative media representations that mark this phenomenon; the authors 

also work to recover the voices of those who survived the journeys and those who did not. As such, this 

is a valuable collection of case studies examining boat migration in all its complexity. The geographic 

focus spans Australia, the Euro-African Mediterranean, and North America. In the first section titled 

Embedded Memories for Public Consumption, the authors engage with memorialization politics. 

Roseman’s piece traces the rise of a memory-activism movement centered around British child-labor 

migrants’ passage to Canada from the late 19th to the early 20th century. In particular, Roseman analyzes 

children’s literature produced in the 1990s that commemorates the repressed history of Canada’s use of 

child labor migrants. Tao’s piece examines “how migration by boat has been remembered and 

represented in three recent programs at the Australian National Maritime Museum” (p.49). The author 

focuses on the display “Waves of Migration,” which aims to historicize the different refugee groups 

that have arrived in Australia in its post-war history. The following essay on “Oceanic Spatiality and 

the Vietnamese Diaspora” best addresses the themes of the collection. The first ‘boat people’ to seize 

public consciousness were Vietnamese refugees fleeing the Vietnam War in the 1970s. As such, 

Nguyen’s piece touches upon memory, loss, trauma, and the constitution of new forms of sociality and 

belonging that boat migration engenders. The author does so through a critical engagement with 

Vietnamese diasporic literature, arguing, in effect, that the sea “[is] a space that facilitates and bares the 

traces of various human movements—one of them being asylum seekers” (p.70). This repositioning of 

the sea as the central site of human mobility and migration taking place at this historical juncture is the 

crux of this collection of essays. Never has migration been so dangerous in the post-war moment, a fact 

that the authors unveil as a consequence of the global migration management policies of wealthy states.  



 

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The second section titled “The artist and the illegal migrant” focuses on the politics of commemoration, 

specifically of artistic production. The three essays in this section all refer to border-externalization 

programs, such as the remote detention centers of the Euro-Mediterranean and Australia. The first, 

written by Horsti, focuses on artistic representations of Europe’s border externalization policies. She 

analyzes the Mimmo Paladino’s sculpture displayed on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, entitled Porta 

d’Europa, and that of Kalliopi Lemo’s piece At Crossroads, which displays relics of migrant boats as 

part of an exhibition at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, named At Crossroads. While the authors argue 

that the violence of Europe’s border-externalization policies is kept out of view, these artistic works re-

center the border both spatially and symbolically in western metropoles, confronting the cultural 

amnesia that surrounds migrant deaths at sea. Rutherford’s piece, a critical analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s 

The Childhood of Jesus, links Coetzee’s allegory to Australia’s treatment of migrants in its offshore 

processing centers and to a wider framework of how Australians understand the originating violence 

that brought Australia into existence. By using the concept of “holing,” “the propelling or projecting a 

subject into a negative space” (pp. 102), Rutherford argues that Australia’s policies around irregular 

maritime migration serves to “hole asylum seekers semantically, spatially, juridically, and discursively” 

(pp. 103). David Alvarez’s follow-up essay argues that the small boats used to traverse the Strait of 

Gibraltar “implicitly contest the priorities of current cross-Mediterranean mobility regimes” (pp. 117). 

Together the essays contest the politics of forgetting that border externalization schemes effect by 

keeping the violence of the border far from public view and deliberation.  

 

The third section, much like the previous one, focuses on memorialization politics through discursive 

analysis of efforts to memorialize migrant deaths at sea. Salerno’s piece locates the commemorative 

efforts of the Katër I Radës, the pivotal shipwreck marking the beginning of Europe’s regime of death 

in the Mediterranean. Salerno argues that efforts to memorialize the wreck, which excluded the voices 

and testimonies of survivors, failed to mourn those who lost their lives adequately, as it only served to 

reify existing discourses of Italian hospitality. The memorial, which focused on the reaction of local 

Italians, ignored the need of survivors, their families, and friends to grieve for those who died. Instead, 

the memorial turned into a celebration of locals’ hospitality in the face of strangers. Olivieri’s piece 

examines the efforts of mothers of Tunisian migrants to hold public authorities accountable for the 

disappearances of their sons at sea. Their efforts work to re-politicize migrant death as a consequence 

of political decision making, which values Western security over the rights of refugees. In the third 



 

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essay of the set, Mannik departs from the previous two approaches, which center on European 

migration, and engages in a discourse analysis of news reports about the arrival of Sikh refugees to 

Nova Scotia in 1987. It succeeds in tracing how media panic over the arrival of boat migrants shifts 

public opinion rightwards on the political spectrum. In the fourth essay, Hintjen emphasizes the role 

small islands play in the reporting on the European migration crisis. All four authors in this section 

agree that media reports on boat-migration do little to humanize boat migrants or to elucidate the 

political decision making that has made seeking refuge so dangerous. 

 

The final section acts as a rejoinder to the politics of representation that the previous section unmasks. 

By focusing on the subjective experience of boat migration, the authors shift the emphasis to those who 

should matter most— the refugees themselves. The narratives of refugees who survived these maritime 

journeys frame this final section. Sue Hoffman examines the complicated relationships engendered by 

human smuggling through the example of Iraqi refugees and their journeys to Australia. Papa Saw et 

al.’s essay draws upon the experiences of Senegalese boat people migrating to Europe to chart the 

complex affective responses elicited by migrant trajectories—in both failed and successful attempts to 

reach Europe. Briskman and Demasi’s final piece looks towards the 2010 Janga boat crash off 

Christmas Island, in which 50 people died within sight of land.  

 

The plurality of voices in this collection of essays serves as both a strength and a potential weakness. 

The collection does an excellent job tracing the political and legal transformations of migration 

regimes; however, while I recognize the difficulty and sensitivity of conducting ethnographic research 

with vulnerable groups like boat migrants, the collection would have been better served by the 

inclusion of more ethnographic insights. Moreover, while the two Canadian examples underscore the 

geographic breadth of boat migration, the reality remains that the European Union and Australia have 

taken to securitizing the seas just as other powers, like the United States, have increasingly deployed 

natural barriers, like the desert, as forms of border violence, a topic explored in excellent theoretical 

and empirical depth in Jason DeLeon’s The Land of Open Graves (2015). Canada has, largely, avoided 

these issues due to two factors: it’s lack of geographic proximity to the Global South and because of the 

Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement, which stipulates that refugees apply for asylum 

in the first country of entry. This agreement functions much like the Dublin regulations in the European 

Union, which shifts responsibility for migrant reception and rescue to its Southern partners. This is, 

however, only a minor critique; Migration by Boat is an exhaustive survey on maritime migration in an 



 

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era of securitized borders. It is also an incredibly valuable compendium for students and scholars in 

migration studies, critical border and refugee studies, and for those who generally grapple with our 

contemporary moment.  

 

 

Works Cited: 

 

De León, J. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland, CA: 

University of California Press. 

 

Fiori Berhane is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at Brown University. She is currently 

finishing her fieldwork in Italy on Eritrean migrants' political polarization and memorializing practices 

within what is largely termed the ‘migration crisis’. Her work engages theories on forced migration 

and refugeeism and identity, memory and politics, with an emphasis on chronicity and notions of crisis. 

Her research has thus far been supported by the Fulbright IIE, the Wenner Gren foundation for 

Research in Anthropology, and the Mellon Demographic Fund at the Population Studies Training 

Center at Brown University. 

 

 

© 2018 Fiori S. Berhane 


