RESEARCH IN PROGRESS SEMINAR SERIES

AT THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Friday 23 October, 4.30 pm

Lampedusa caught between shipwreck and tourism

Dr Anna Arnone, SOAS Research Associate

This event is free, but places must be booked. To book tickets please go to: http://annaarnone.eventbrite.co.uk

October 2013, la spiaggia dei conigli is Tripadvisor-rated most beautiful beach in the world and the place where more than 500 Eritreans drown. Lampedusa's recent link to migration from Africa shows African and European political decisions and media discourses. Such “regimes of movement” refer to the island as always linked to tragedy and emergency. The people living in Lampedusa emphasise the island's welcoming nature and launch new ways of experiencing tourism in Lampedusa. Its inhabitants experience tourism and migration, they make sense of both and in many ways migration may be becoming a tourist trope. Lampedusa is also visited by people of African origins who look for a place where to commemorate a loss or a successful migratory project. This paper reveals that the encounter of two types of movement is producing very important outcomes. Lampedusa is here understood as a space filled with multiple realities and signifiers.