This article examines the transformation of migrant traces into dynamic forms of memory-making at the European Union’s Mediterranean border, focusing on the artistic and political work of the Askavusa Collective – a cultural association founded by a group of inhabitants on the island of Lampedusa in 2009. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and reflexive engagement, it centres on the development of Ahmed of Redeyef, a puppet play created by local artist Giacomo Sferlazzo, one of the core members of Askavusa. The play narrates the fictionalized journey of Ahmed, a fifteen-year-old Tunisian boy who migrates to Europe following the imprisonment of family members during miners’ protests in his hometown of Redeyef, only to face near-death at sea and eventual detention upon arrival in Lampedusa. While grounded in a singular narrative, the project emerges from a broader landscape of fragmented histories, material traces, and silenced experiences that characterize contemporary migration across the Central Mediterranean.The article introduces the concept of “memory in motion” to theorize a shift from static, musealized representations of migrant experience toward more fluid, processual, and relational forms of remembrance. Since 2009, the Askavusa Collective has collected and preserved objects left behind by migrants, retrieved largely from abandoned boats in Lampedusa’s informal “boat cemetery.” These items, ranging from clothing to personal effects, have been exhibited in Porto M, a space of memory where the collective’s curatorial choices deliberately resist conventional labelling practices. Instead, the objects are presented as fragmentary traces that speak through absence, evoking what scholars have described as the limits of representation in the aftermath of violence (Das, 2007; Goekke and De León, 2019; Napolitano, 2015; Navaro, 2020). Such traces demand an ethics of care and attentiveness, foregrounding both the presence and irretrievable absence of those who traversed or perished along these routes.Building on this prior work of preservation and critical musealization, Ahmed of Redeyef represents a significant transformation in Askavusa’s approach to memory. The play reanimates migrant traces by converting them into puppets crafted from the very materials of migration: wood from dismantled boats and fabric from recovered belongings. These “living objects” are mobilized within the narrative framework of Sicilian Opera dei Pupi puppetry, a traditional storytelling form anchored in medieval chivalric epics often featuring Christian-Muslim battles, yet one that is here reworked to engage contemporary geopolitical realities. Through this process, discarded remnants are not only preserved but re-signified, becoming agents of storytelling capable of movement across both physical and symbolic borders.The article argues that this artistic practice constitutes a critical intervention in dominant narratives of migration, which often rely on statistical representation and dehumanizing imagery. Rather than contributing another fixed account to the archive of migrant suffering, Sferlazzo’s project foregrounds the generative potential of incompleteness, fragmentation, and transformation. “Memory in motion” thus describes both a methodological and conceptual reorientation: memory is not contained within static sites such as museums but is continuously reconstituted through acts of engagement, translation, and circulation. In this sense, the play itself becomes a mobile archive, capable of traveling beyond Lampedusa and fostering new encounters with audiences across different contexts.At the same time, the article highlights how local actors, often positioned at the margins of national and European decision-making processes, actively participate in shaping alternative forms of memory and critique. The Askavusa Collective’s practices reflect a sustained commitment to caring for the remains of migrants’ passage while challenging the silences imposed by state institutions. Through Ahmed of Redeyef, this commitment is extended into the realm of performative storytelling, where the boundaries between self and other, local and foreign, are deliberately destabilized.The analysis identifies three key movements enacted by the play: from abandoned objects to animated puppets, from traditional puppetry to a contemporary hybrid form, and from a fixed conception of borders as sites of separation to a more relational understanding of shared histories. These transformations underscore the potential of artistic practices to reconfigure the terms through which migration is remembered and narrated. They also raise important questions about representation, agency, and the ethical responsibilities of speaking “for” absent others.Ultimately, the article contributes to interdisciplinary debates in anthropology, cultural studies, and history by proposing “memory in motion” as a framework for understanding how marginalized histories can be engaged without reducing their complexity or silencing their ambiguities. By tracing the metamorphosis of migrant traces into performative forms, it demonstrates how memory can be both materially grounded and imaginatively reactivated. In doing so, it calls for greater attention to the role of local, creative interventions in reshaping the politics of memory at contested borders, and to the ways in which such interventions open new possibilities for collective recognition and historical understanding in the Mediterranean and beyond.
Insanity in the army is commonly associated with war trauma, a subject on which recent historiography has focused particularly closely. However, some early 20th-century military psychiatric studies already highlight the complexity of what could be described as “military insanity”. At the 1909 Congress of French alienists and neurologists in Nantes, the problem of enlisting individuals with mental disorders is highlighted, raising questions about the effectiveness of recruitment systems. This issue is particularly striking in the colonial army, where the rate of psychopaths is significantly higher, a consequence, according to military psychiatric publications of the time, of less stringent enlistment criteria than those applied in metropolitan France. A study of the files of patients interned at the Berrechid neuropsychiatric hospital in Morocco (1919-1956), the largest during the Protectorate, reveals that, despite the ongoing “pacification war” until 1934, almost all of the soldiers who are discharged do so for psychiatric disorders deemed unrelated to the war experience. In light of the field data and the conclusions of contemporary publications on the difference in the incidence of psychopathy between the armies stationed in metropolitan France and in North Africa, we wonder whether the enlistment of the insane does not serve a specific purpose in the colonial context, whether it does not contribute to defining a specific type of desertion. Our study thus aims to “break out” of the colonial army by reconstructing the trajectories of soldiers who desert and are diagnosed with mental disorders. The preferred hypothesis is that, contrary to common sense and the historiographical orientation that has prevailed until now, the desertion itself responds to a logic of asserting power and social control. The article explores several aspects. In particular, we re-examine the categories commonly used in medical certificates to describe the psychological state leading to desertion. The aim is to question their actual use beyond simple medical description. These categories are less concerned with understanding the process that leads to desertion than with highlighting the “natures” of subordinate recruits deemed unfit for military service. They underscore the doctors’ conviction that the causes of desertion are rooted outside the military institution. Next, we address the destabilising effects that the colonial army has on soldiers torn from their family environment or their country, which encourage them to desert. We then highlight the colonial authorities’ need, revealed by the same medical certificates, to adapt disciplinary measures to a logic of social control and preservation of public order, even though many penalties unsuited to each individual profile could have dramatic effects. Finally, we criticise the supposed “indigenous” voluntarism in recruitment, as revealed in the files of interned soldiers. What is more palpable here is the exercise of socio-economic pressure to enlist, which is part of a more general framework of channelling the colonised into the army, in line with colonial objectives. In conclusion, knowingly recruiting people who are considered psychologically unfit and at high risk of desertion amounts to placing the phenomenon and its consequences within a specific colonial project. A madman within the army is, in reality, preferable to a madman outside it. While the latter risks escaping the control of the authorities, the former legitimises the colonial project. Indeed, by deserting, he gives the authorities the right to recapture him, sentence him to internment, and then re-enlist him. The awareness, evident in the files, of recruiting individuals who are psychologically unfit for military service leads us to evoke the distinctly colonial nature of the resulting desertions. Rather than constituting acts against the authorities, they are crimes constructed by the authorities in order to legitimise their security intervention against madness.
In this article, we examine how migrants from West and Central Africa deal with death and burial on the way to and within Morocco. Broadly speaking, existing studies on death and migration fall into two categories. They either concentrate on the integration of regular migrants in the Global North – often former labour migrants and their descendants, many of whom have Muslim backgrounds – by analysing the extent to which host country laws, regulations, and cemetery policies accommodate migrants’ religious and cultural burial practices. A second category focuses on violent confrontations between migrants and state agents at the borders between the Global South and the Global North. In the Moroccan context, scholarship on death in migration remains limited. Where it does exist, it largely addresses the deaths and burials of sub-Saharans with irregular status at the Morocco-EU border. There is hardly any literature from the first category that focuses on the experiences of migrants who are residing away from the border obscuring important empirical realities on two levels. First, Morocco is not only a transit country but increasingly a country of settlement, with significant sub-Saharan African migrant populations residing in its interior, regardless of legal status. Second, while much attention is devoted to deaths at sea in the Mediterranean, less scholarly consideration is given to those who perish crossing the Sahara en route to Morocco – despite the scale and frequency of such deaths – and the same applies to transnational death. As part of fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024 in three Moroccan cities, we carried out interviews and participant observation with West and Central Africans of diverse residency statuses, religious backgrounds, and genders. We anchor our analysis in the trajectory of one of our participants, Frank, whose experiences of death and burial unfolded across three distinct contexts: deaths while crossing the Sahara; deaths of co-migrants within Morocco; and transnational deaths that connect migrants to relatives and communities across the country of residence. These experiences do not fit neatly within the existing migration-and-death literature outlined above.We propose approaching migration – and death in migration in particular – as a “total social fact” (Sayad, 1999) that centralises the experiences of our research participants encompassing all social dimensions, instead of fragmenting individuals into separate dimensions and functions. We argue that personal preferences around death and burial intersect with conditional and hierarchical forms of belonging, shaped by political dynamics that impose multiple, overlapping conditions for inclusion.Indeed, our findings show that the question of whether individuals can be buried according to their religious and cultural traditions emerges across all three contexts and affects irregular migrants as well as regular residents. Furthermore, death and violence are not issues limited to border crossings. We observed that multiple communities play a significant role in shaping how migrants experience and manage death and burial. These include family and kinship networks, religious communities, migrant networks, host-society dynamics, and supranational actors such as the European Union. To interpret these dynamics, we draw on the concept of belonging. Following Yuval-Davis’ distinction between belonging as a personal sense of being “at home” and belonging as the social validation or rejection of that sense by a community, we show how the identification of the deceased and the communication of their passing to loved ones, dignified burial practices, and acts of remembrance (such as headstones) contribute to post-mortem social recognition and continued inclusion within a community. Struggles over inclusion and exclusion unfold across multiple social arenas and are continuously negotiated as migrants navigate family ties, religious groups, migrant networks, and the broader host society, each shaped by its own politics of belonging. Focusing on belonging thus highlights how both the subjective sense of home and its social and political recognition shape migrants’ membership, even after death.
Beginning in the 1980s, Moroccans involved in the leftist anti-colonial independence movement began advocating for the restoration of historical sites, including Jewish cemeteries. They saw pluralistic heritage preservation as part of Morocco’s post-independence nation-building. Jewish cemeteries were an essential piece of the country’s landscape, preserved thanks to historic interfaith practices, with Muslims frequently serving as principal caretakers and participating regularly in spiritual pilgrimages to saintly gravesites. For Shim‘ūn Levy, an anti-colonial Moroccan Jewish activist and a leader in this movement, preserving Jewish heritage in Morocco was a way to resist the removal of Moroccan Jewish patrimony that accompanied the accelerated deracination of Moroccan Jews from their homeland during the 1960s and 1970s. More recently, cemeteries that were restored thanks, in part, to Moroccan anti-colonial organizing have been used to justify diplomatic, economic, and military cooperations between Morocco and the State of Israel. While many have framed Jewish cemeteries in Morocco as unique symbols of the unbroken relationship between Moroccan Jews and their homeland, for years the dead within these cemeteries have been exhumed for reburial in historic Palestine. Administrative obstacles, including legal limitations and the lack of direct flights between Morocco and the State of Israel, slowed this process until recently. Over the last decade, what was a slow and mostly clandestine movement of exhuming Jewish remains from Morocco has now become much more frequent, publicly acknowledged, and even celebrated at times.In this article, I will contrast cases of Moroccan Jews who choose to be buried in Morocco to Moroccan Jews who were buried in Morocco, sometimes centuries ago, and who have been exhumed and reburied in historic Palestine. Through interviews with caretakers of Moroccan Jewish heritage, including cemeteries, participant observation at sites of memory, as well as analysis of documentary, literary, and international media coverage of Moroccan Jewish burials, I argue that a serious incompatibility appears between how Moroccan (Jewish and Muslim) belonging in Morocco has been preserved for generations and the settler colonial relationship to Palestine that Zionism imposes. Specifically, I argue that the removal of Jewish bodies from Morocco for reburial in occupied Palestine/Israel disrupts historic, celebrated, interfaith practices for cultivating belonging in Morocco through custodianship of the dead. Furthermore, I contend that what Meriam Belli has described as Israel’s “ethno-necrocratic order,” which reinforces “the supremacy of Jewish bodies and afterlives over non-Jewish ones” through appropriation of land in Palestine, including desecration of ancient non-Jewish cemeteries, extends to other places, like Morocco (Belli, 2022, 624). In other words, exhumations of deceased Jews from homelands like Morocco for reburial in modern-day occupied Palestine contribute to the State of Israel’s implementation of a Jewish supremacist ethno-necrocratic order in Palestine while further deracinating Jews from historic homelands.
