Libri

Questo libro esplora le intersezioni tra migrazione, arte e colonialismo, interrogando il Mediterraneo e Gaza come uno spaziotempo plasmato da rapporti di potere storicamente asimmetrici e configurato come un laboratorio aperto della modernità. Attraverso una serie di itinerari critici, si estrae dalle rovine del presente la trama intrecciata di colonialismo e razzismo costitutiva della modernità occidentale. Nei linguaggi delle arti postcoloniali si incontrano strumenti critici in grado di sfidare le narrazioni egemoniche con configurazioni inaspettate della realtà contemporanea. Qui, Gaza, devastata dal genocidio, si impone come punto focale, rivelando tutti i limiti dell’Occidente: la sua politica, ovviamente, ma anche il suo umanesimo e la sua estetica. Nella violenza coloniale del presente, il testo afferma con urgenza la necessità di smantellare le architetture epistemiche e politiche dell’Occidente, per sostenere degli orizzonti critici che rispondano alle storie negate e alle voci e vite rifiutate. In questo lavoro di smontaggio del Mediterraneo e del mondo contemporaneo, si mette in luce la centralità politica della traduzione storica e culturale continua che sostiene un’appartenenza mobile e ci parla sempre di futuri più aperti e democratici.

Whose Mediterranean are we talking about? What languages are most appropriate to its reception and understanding? With two-thirds of the Mediterranean constituted by the histories and cultures of its African and Asian shorelines and hinterlands, and its principal spoken language being Arabic – in all its variants and dialects – then the Mediterranean clearly exceeds the Western frame of explanation. Without pretending to speak for or in the name of these ignored and repressed dimensions, The Mediterranean Question explores the resulting gaps of a Mediterranean reduced to a European and Western mirror by listening and attending to some of those other histories, cultures, and lives.

How to puncture prevalent European understandings of the Mediterranean? The colonising impulse inscribed in Western historiography cannot be undone simply by adding previously repressed and unacknowledged histories. Instead, a re-examination of the premises and procedures that produced such exclusions yields a valuable shift in coordinates. An order of knowledge that creates subaltern objects of study to reconfirm European centrality and subjectivity is interrogated. Insisting on a politics of registration and listening, further critical incentives drawn from the trans-local dissemination of literature, music, cinema, and the visual arts can be deployed to query existing representations.

In this more ragged and open series of maps, there lies no complete picture but rather a challenge to the violence of existing explanations. Insisting that present-day knowledge is sustained in asymmetrical relations of power, The Mediterranean Question promotes a reconfiguration of historical archives and cultural ties, casting a critical light on the deeper histories that have made the Mediterranean, Europe, and Western modernity. Proposing a series of intersecting analyses that underline the colonial constitution of the present and its mobile and creolized formation, the authors seek to establish new coordinates for thinking and practicing the possibilities of another Mediterranean.

Extended and revised edition of La questione mediterranea (2019