Gibraltarian Academic Publishes Book on Representation of Migrant Crossings of the Strait

The US-based Gibraltarian academic, David Alvarez, has just published the first single-authored English-language study of how unauthorised migrant crossings of the Strait of Gibraltar—which began in the late 1980s and continue to this day—have been represented in a variety of literary texts and artworks by writers and artists from Spain, Morocco, South Africa, Colombia, and Gibraltar. 

Crossings that took place at the Strait between the late 1980s and the early 2000s pre-figured the large-scale passage across the central and eastern Mediterranean of migrants and refugees from Africa and Asia in the wake of the 2011 North African uprisings. Similarly, the reinforcement of Europe’s maritime borders at the Strait presaged the creation of a Mediterranean-wide moat between Europe on the one hand, and North Africa and the Middle East on the other. 

Alvarez examines how the ramifications of both facts—Strait crossings and attempts to forestall them—have been depicted in a large body of work by artists and writers who hail from both sides of the Strait and from much farther afield. Although this corpus is highly varied in genre and form (it includes novels and short stories, photo essays and performances), its various components have a common focus, which is that the lives and deaths of those who for almost forty years have been undertaking life-threatening journeys across the Strait are at the center of narrative or artistic attention. 

In the book’s epilogue, Alvarez turns his attention to a recent poem entitled “Gharb” by Gibraltarian poet Trino Cruz which attempts to visualise a de-bordered future Strait, even as it delves into the Strait’s deep past as a quintessential site of inter-cultural encounters and creolisations.

The book’s table of contents can be accessed here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-27106-8?as=webp#toc