The scene was familiar, hauntingly so. Italian authorities stood over a crowd of young men huddled on the ground. Their guns and their uniforms accorded them the power to keep these men fixed into place. Scenes such as this are recognizable as iconic images of Italy’s current crisis of migration and detention. They circulate widely in today’s media.

The island of Lampedusa, in particular, has emerged as the site where this “border spectacle” plays out in the Mediterranean. It is the place where hundreds of thousands of people arrive on the shores of Fortress Europe, and where migrants become subsumed into the labyrinthine process of identification, imprisonment, and expulsion.