The Production of Illicit Lives: Racial Governmentality and Colonial Legacies Across the Strait of Gibraltar

Abstract

For centuries, the Strait of Gibraltar has been a crossroads between Africa and Europe. Since the 1980s, however, it has increasingly become a “zone of illegality” (Hannoum 2020) where racial governmentality produces illicit lives and creates an apartheid-like hierarchy of humanity. By exploring how colonial legacies and EU policies play out in the Strait of Gibraltar, I show how categories of difference are made and remade across time and space. Through a genealogical and ethnographic approach, I study the historically produced particularities that make racialised “Others” emerge and explore how human differences are created in terms of race, gender, and class. Migrants are historical actors that shape and are shaped by the social fabric of a border region. I thus argue that categories of difference are not fixed entities, but instead they are simultaneously reworked, reinforced, contested, and subverted.