Unauthorized Crossings of the Strait of Gibraltar in the Arts

This book is the first English-language monograph to comprehensively analyze cultural representations of unauthorized migration across the Strait of Gibraltar, with a special focus on literature, photography, and installation and performance art from Morocco, Spain, Gibraltar, South Africa, and Colombia. The Strait is a bi-continental micro-region and global geopolitical crossroads that links the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Beginning in the late 1980s, it also became the first major crossing point for people on the move without authorization between Africa and Europe—a movement that prefigured the large-scale seaborne migrations that have been taking place across the central and eastern Mediterranean since the Middle Eastern and North African uprisings of 2011. This study of artistic and literary responses to the Strait’s epochal borderization enhances our understanding of the situations faced by the many thousands who have attempted to cross the Strait and kindred sea passages ever since the Cold War’s demise. It also illuminates how defiant journeys and state responses to them have transformed the waters and shores of a key node in the global flow of people, vessels, resources, and capital. In addition, this book sheds light on how unauthorized migration by boat—known in Moroccan Arabic as hrig (“border burning”)—has reshaped the individual trajectories of—and the complex interrelationship between—the Strait-facing Spanish and Moroccan nation-states.