African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism

Co-authored with P. Khalil Saucier, published with Lexington and its Challenging Migration Studies series, and available at the Rowman & Littlefield website and the online bookseller of your choice.  African Migrants, European Borders, and the Problem with Humanitarianism aims to blacken our understanding of the plight of the displaced person as it relates to Africans on the move.  This study examines the contemporary migrant "crisis" in the Mediterranean Basin by revealing how racial slavery has shaped European democratic culture, its abolitionist traditions, and the global structures of capital accumulation.  By exploring a range of artistic and humanitarian responses to the "crisis," the authors venture a new critical framework for assessing the twin problem of border policing and its multicultural critics that connects today's leading interventions to a slaveholding culture instantiated in the early Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds.  The imperative to reconnect humanity through innovation and not imitation remains urgent and awaits our collective fulfillment. 

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Reviews:

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“The decadence of contemporary critical thought is clear in the use of the dead drowning abject black body as material for imaginaries of an antiracist, humanitarian, and abolition- ist Europe. Written with passion and acuity, this important book opens up a new avenue for thought in migration and border studies and beyond.”
—David Chandler, University of Westminster

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“This outstanding book gave me the possibility of glimpsing the ethical, psychoanalytic, and political implications of global migration.”
—Franco Berardi, Accademia di Brera, Milan

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“Saucier and Woods present the reader with a thoroughly rendered, but radically simple argument, which is that the foundations of our present-day reality are still that of a slave- holding culture. This book is an uncompromising intervention. No matter what you make of it, you will not come away unaffected.”
—Philip Kretsedemas, Acacia Center for Justice

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“Saucier and Woods develop an incisive account of an antiblack world, weaving together a vital and compelling critique of antiracist humanitarianism. In rejecting new formula- tions of black space like the Black Mediterranean, they forge a more radical approach to migration, illuminating the central role of race in the creation of the modern world.” —Farai Chipato, University of Glasgow

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