Underground Europe. Lungo le rotte migranti

Through the lens of a remote history, distant in both time and space, the book explores the present of Europe, a space surrounded and marked by violent and peremptory borders, yet reached and crisscrossed by ongoing and persistent illegalized routes. The migration crisis triggered in 2015 has further heightened the selectivity of the internal and external border regime adopted by the EU, its member states, and the surrounding countries. As a consequence, the whole European space has turned into a broader borderland, which has made reaching its territories increasingly risky and incredibly lethal, while making any movements within them more and more difficult and almost impossible. Still, behind the impression of violent impermeability suggested by the image of a “fortress” and within the striated spaces of a territory permeated by a panoply of border devices and apparatuses, the routes built up and inhabited by migrants and asylum seekers’ “secondary movements”, which are often supported by heterogenous solidarity networks, reveal a different, reversed, and deferred political landscape. More precisely, they seek to transform what appears to be a trap into a possible crossroads, within and towards “Europe”. The book explores this twofold dimension by reading it through the historical antecedent of the Underground Railroad (UGRR), the abolitionist network made up of hidden passages, connections, nocturnal itineraries and day-time safe houses that supported tens of thousands of runaway slaves in their escape from the regime of exploitation and racial terror of chattel slavery and the plantation system, by finding asylum in the free states of the North and, after the Fugitive Act in 1850, in Canada. From this celebrated, disputed, and often usurped black history, it picks out a series of possibilities and traces that have yet to be redeemed, establishing a kind of intimacy, a distant dialogue between them and the present of Europe. These possible futures of that past are contained, hidden, and retraced through the peculiar idea of routes understood as built and inhabited counter-spaces aiming toward a place perceived as free, through the possibility of coalitions and alliances along those routes, and through the tension toward a different horizon evoked by the notion of “abolition democracy” suggested in 1935 by W.E.B. Du Bois. In a kind of space-time travelogue triggered by an old abolitionist book we stumbled upon in Canada, amidst ancient UGRR stations which now lie abandoned or have been transformed into museums, remains of utopian communities created in mid-nineteenth-century New England, and through a debate that continues to concern historians and haunt a present marked by the chains of modern racial capitalism, a series of connections are established with possible junctions and stations of an Underground Europe. Calais, Ceuta and Melilla, Patras, Lampedusa, Ventimiglia and The Roya Valley, but also Paris, Athens, and many other points scattered across a map under constant transformation, become places for partisan ethnographic accounts and stories, nodes along indefinite routes, opportunities for heterogeneous coalitions, bringing out a different, real, and possible underground image of Europe. For over three years, from the "humanitarian eviction" of the makeshift camp of Calais to the outbreak of the pandemic, the authors have followed the stories and routes of an incessant struggle for mobility, carried out by migrants on the move and supported by solidarity networks, with the aim of transforming borderland Europe into a porous, “Maroon” space to meet one another and live together, an Underground Europe.