Like a Map Over Troubled Water: (Un)mapping the Mediterranean Sea’s Terraqueous Necropolitics

“Cartographic” imaginings and spatialization have come to rapidly infiltrate the necropolitical domain of the European migration crisis. In truth, cartographies concerning the precarious lives of people traversing land and sea are increasingly disseminated through digital media, news platforms, European and national political institutions’ press releases, and NGO projects. Additionally, they frequently appear in public visual campaigns, narratives, movies, and artworks. The ubiquity of mapped representations of migration reveals a still overlooked and crucial relationship between cartography and contemporary visual culture: a relationship in which the map emerges alternatively as an ambivalent navigational tool, and a meaningful evocative image in need of scholarly attention. Like a map over troubled water, this article explores the difficulties and opportunities as well as the navigational frictions or evocative agencies that amphibious cartography expresses in the contexts of forced migration.