IAIN CHAMBERS
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In a deliberate uprooting of prevalent geographies and histories of the Mediterranean these three encounters will seek to challenge existing understandings and propose a radical reworking of the basin's historical, cultural and political formation. Insisting on the pertinence of its African and Asian shores, the political consequences of Occidental historiography will be be critically evaluated. In a maritime manner, that is going off-shore and diluting our inherited premises, we encounter interrogations posed by the largely excluded Islamic and Ottoman contributions to the formation of both the Mediterranean and modern Europe. Then, thinking in and through the contemporary ‘migration crisis’ on its waters and around its shores, the colonial archives of migration and modernity will be brought to bear on understandings of present-day bordering practices, citizenship and concepts of identity and belonging. These arguments will be developed through considering the eastern Mediterranean in the case of Israel/Palestine and the Balkans. In the final encounter other, less linguistically and culturally confined, languages of analysis – drawn from music and the visual arts – will be proposed as critical means for receiving and registering a decolonial Mediterranean and alternative politics of its spacetime. |
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Iain Chambers has taught Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Naples, Orientale. He is author of several publications including Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994), Mediterranean Crossings (2008) and Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), and with Marta Cariello, La question mediterranea (2019) |