Borderscaping, o ripensare il nesso frontiere migrazioni nel Mediterraneo. Nuove agency politiche nella frontiera italo/tunisina

This article explores the conceptual and methodological potential of the borderscaping approach to investigate the complexity of the border-migration nexus in the Mediterranean from the geopolitical level to the epistemological and historical-anthropological level, by encouraging a new interpretation of borders as a resource for constructing novel geopolitical and social imaginaries beyond the metaphor of the border as a line. Specifically, the borderscaping approach fosters alternative Mediterranean border imaginaries, which allow for the modern, state-centric geopolitical order to be called into question by raising three aspects: the politics-aesthetics nexus, the need for a genealogical perspective, and the relevance of a political and performative method. These conceptual and methodological insights are explored referring to an ethnographical research conducted in the Italian/Tunisian borderland, which is investigated zooming in on the urban space of Mazara del Vallo, in Sicily, and its relations with the city of Mahdia, in Tunisia. During the course of this research, working with young Tunisian migrants, who are born or live in Mazara, has been particularly interesting and has shown the chance for new conditions of possibility for agency that originates from inhabiting the Italian/Tunisian borderscape. This agency makes Tunisian youths the precursors and creators of a new and original form of Mediterranean-inspired citizenship based on a deep relationship, which is often denied by modern state-centric political geographies, between the political and the anthropological and emotional dimension, opening up the way to encourage new forms of political belonging that overcome modern political categorizations.