Aquatic affect, (im)mobility and empathy: thalassic spatiality in Sergio Nazzaro and Luca Ferrara’s Mediterraneo

The modern-day refugee crisis has demonstrated the dramatic convergence of migration and the environment. The 'prevention through deterrence' border regimes of Western nations have led to the co-opting of natural landscapes and the weaponisation of deserts and seas in the service of borderization. What often remains unacknowledged is the intersectional violence of environmental ruination, and anti-refugee border policies. Drawing attention to the physical background in refugee graphic novels can arouse empathy and awareness for the plight of refugees as well as the problematic weaponisation of landscapes. This article will consider the depiction of the aquatic spaces now turned into the barren seabed in Sergio Nazzaro and Luca Ferrara's graphic novel Mediterraneo (2018). I argue that by transforming the sea, a space of mobility into a barren and ravaged maritime cemetery, a static space of death, the novelists expose the true agents of migrant death, namely the necropolitics of Western nations rather than the natural environment. Yet, through their use of perspective and the anthropomorphisation of life vests, they are also able to portray the Mediterranean as a fluid space, and to insert the reader into the drama of the treacherous journeys undertaken by the migrants.