Haunted borders: Visualising the spectral child refugee’s Mediterranean crossings in contemporary graphic narratives

This article discusses the representation of child refugees in graphic narratives about clandestine crossings of the Mediterranean Sea. Bringing together perspectives from the blue humanities and children’s literature studies, we explore how depictions of aquatic geographies of flight shape constructions of childhood in two texts with a humanitarian agenda written in the wake of Alan Kurdi’s death in 2015: Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer (2017/18) and Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin’s Illegal (2017). Analysing the visual, spatial, and narrative tropes employed by these works in their representation of spectral children on the Mediterranean and its shores, we consider how conceptions of the sea as voluminous and mobile flip tropes of massification familiar from public anti-immigration discourse. In drawing on the blue humanities and focussing on graphic texts, this article complements previous work on the importance of space for children’s literature and on how geographies of flight affect representations of child refugees.