Rereading Migration: Corridors of Circulation, Bordering, and Inhabitation

Abstract

Infrastructural corridors of circulation and connectivity form the backbone of the colonial project of modernity, facilitating its rise, expansion, and domination over the past centuries. Contrary to the spatial imaginaries of the unhindered and smooth circulation spaces of commodities, energetics, wealth, and cargo, these global corridors are fragile zones that operate across multiple scales and temporalities of bordered and militarized circulation. This dissertation focuses primarily on the cracks and fissures of corridor infrastructures as they become entangled with postcolonial migratory moves and their creative inhabitation of these spaces for survival in the project of western modernity. Specifically, it focuses on Europe's post-2015 self-declared migration crisis through the framework of three corridor geographies of migration and bordering: the western, central, and eastern Mediterranean corridors. Instead of a linear projection of corridor geographies, this dissertation argues for the uneven and patchworked nature of these spaces which consists of the strategic coming together of nodes, lines, and zones of simultaneous bordering and circulation. Furthermore, this work argues for the nonlinear and circular understanding of the timespace of the migratory vernacular as it manifests against the horizontality of the modern corridor ontology of unlimited extractivism and commodification of bodies and nature. In conclusion, this project by closely examining infrastructural spaces of circulation sheds new light on the less studied in-between condition of the postcolonial migratory subject: her extended liminality of nondeparture (always of there) and nonarrival (never of here).