Under Construction @ Keele 2019 summer 2019, vol 5 issue 1 | Page 35

accounts. Fuocoammare reiterates ‘the distorted view [of refugees]’ 23 ; referring again to
Butler, Rosi’s gaze does not break from dominant epistemological frames, and therefore,
reiterates the ‘distorted view’ of displaced people which fails to recognise precarity as a
shared human condition.
By assuming a status similar to that of the Italian authorities, Rosi’s perspective of ‘the
refugee’ restates the ‘political opportunism that uses migration as a scarecrow’ 24 as they are
solely depicted through such frames. The film then illustrates problematic images and
accounts of displacement. The mere identification process through a number dehumanizes
the subject and conjures up shared imaginaries of criminal records; the film thus reproduces
and somehow amplifies this process projecting a problematic image of the incoming refugee.
As the identities of the refugees are reduced to a number as soon as they reach European
territory, Mbembe’s notion of ‘necropolitics’ 25 is enacted. The screen-capture (fig. 1)
normalises such politics of death: the migrant is immediately stripped of their identity and
given one which inserts them into a system (of numbers); as soon as they move onto the
rescue boats, they become ‘the migrant’, ‘the refugee’, they cease to be who they were.
Mariangela Palladino and Agnes Woolley refer to necropolitics in the process of ‘rescue’ and
identification: ‘thanks to shady deals between European and African countries, migrants can
be returned to places where their rights under international law are not recognised or
enforced’. 26
23
Ibid., 153.
Ibid.
25
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15:1, Translated by Libby Meintjes, (Winter 2003), 39-40.
26
Mariangela Palladino and Agnes Woolley, “Migration, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Salvation,”
Literary Interpretation Theory Journal LIT 29:2 (April 2018), 134.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2018.1463591.
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