Conscripted and Drowning: Criminality, Coloniality and the Logic of the Edges

This essay maps the spaces occupied by undocumented migrants and refugees on the edges of Northern Africa and Southern Europe. It does so by sketching the trajectories of the main characters in two very different texts: The Conscript (1950) by Gebreyesus Hailu, an anti-colonial narrative set in the late 1920s between Eritrea and Libya, and My Fourth Time, We Drowned (2022) by Sally Hayden, a non-fictional text set in the present detailing the journeys of refugees from Eastern Africa to Europe. Despite their different historical conjunctures, both texts trace similar movements that unveil the colonial re-enactment of strategies of confinement and exploitation typical of the colonial project. These spaces rely on the strategic extraction of resources located on the margins through mechanisms of legalisation and othering. The criminalisation of refugees’ and undocumented migrants’ spaces feeds populist narratives which are ‘anti-immigrant and anti-offshoring’. It is exactly this rhetoric that this essay unveils, by foregrounding a map of the edges of Europe located at the crossroads of land and sea. These territorial demarcations, which establish what I call ‘the logic of the edges’, serve two main purposes: they give visibility to the restricted areas that refugees are forced to occupy; and they reveal mechanisms of silencing, consent and extraction of migrant labour.