Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis

282 Pages·2018·4.83 MB·English

by  Yasser Elhariry

EDITED BY YASSER ELHARIRY & EDWIGE TAMALET TALBAYEV
CRITICALLY
MEDITERRANEAN
Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments
of a Sea in Crisis
Mediterranean Perspectives
Series editors
Brian Catlos
University of Colorado-Boulder
Boulder, CO, USA
Sharon Kinoshita
University of California Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA, USA
As a region whose history of connectivity can be documented over at least
two and a half millennia, the Mediterranean has in recent years become
the focus of innovative scholarship in a number of disciplines. In shifting
focus away from histories of the origins and developments of phenomena
predefined by national or religious borders, Mediterranean Studies opens
vistas onto histories of contact, circulation and exchange in all their
complexity while encouraging the reconceptualization of inter- and
intra- disciplinary scholarship, making it one of the most exciting and
dynamic fields in the humanities. Mediterranean Perspectives interprets
the Mediterranean in the widest sense: the sea and the lands around it, as
well as the European, Asian and African hinterlands connected to it by
networks of culture, trade, politics, and religion. This series publishes
monographs and edited collections that explore these new fields, from the
span of Late Antiquity through Early Modernity to the contemporary.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15161
yasser elhariry • Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Editors
Critically
Mediterranean
Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments
of a Sea in Crisis
Editors
yasser elhariry Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Dartmouth College Tulane University
Hanover, NH, USA New Orleans, LA, USA
Mediterranean Perspectives
ISBN 978-3-319-71763-0 ISBN 978-3-319-71764-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71764-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932751
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Viktor Witkowski, We Have Stories Bigger Than The Sea (30" × 24",
oil on panel, 2015). Image courtesy of artist.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
A
cknowledgments
Our initial efforts in thinking about the modern and contemporary
Mediterraneans followed extensive correspondence and long conversa-
tions, and culminated in a three-day, five-panel seminar during the Annual
Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, held at
New York University in March 2014. Entitled “About the Mediterranean:
Cities, Capital(s), and the Production of Culture,” our seminar probed
the extent to which imperial capitals and peripheral cities around the
Mediterranean littoral played a central role as the sites of the emergence,
creation, and production of historical, cultural, artistic, and religious
modes of expression. It sought to excavate the layered cultural and artistic
memories of mythical and historical Mediterranean cities. Through a com-
parative study of visual and literary representations, the collective vision of
the seminar outlined the traces of a transhistorical and interdisciplinary
genealogy of Mediterranean capitals that spoke to both their local rele-
vance and their global appeal. Although one of our aims was to question
the relevance of the concept of the Mediterranean as a field of inquiry, as
a site of knowledge production, and as a cross-disciplinary nexus, our pri-
mary concern then was, ultimately, to bridge the gap in Mediterranean
studies between pre-modern and early modern scholarship, and research
in the modern and contemporary periods. For the spirited debate around
Greenwich Village and SoHo, we wish to thank all of our seminar partici-
pants: Chen Bar-Itzhak, Ziad Bentahar, Alexander Bevilacqua, Maya
Boutaghou, Marlene Eberhart, Hoda El Shakry, Federica Frediani, Maria
Hadjipolycarpou, Ruth Jones, Sharon Kinoshita, Elizabeth Marcus, Ethan
Pack, Erin Roark, Toby Wikström, and Oumelbanine Zhiri. Adrian W. B.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Randolph provided support for our reception at the Pegu Club on West
Houston in his capacity as then Associate Dean for the Arts and Humanities
at Dartmouth College.
Following our initial meeting, our intentions in critically conceiving of
the contemporary Mediterranean squarely put the focus on recent decades,
and even recent years. Our initial focus was permanently transformed into
a temporal one that questioned how the Mediterranean lends itself to plu-
ralities of temporal divisions. The next move was a panel entitled
“Mediterranean Times: Past, Futurity, Afterwardness” with some of the
contributors to this volume during the Annual Convention of the Modern
Language Association in Austin in January 2016. The invaluable contribu-
tions of Norbert Bugeja, Michal Raizen, and Veli Yashin advanced our
interrogations of temporality in the Mediterranean and the discipline of
Mediterranean studies, with their concurrent and ever-c ontentious stria-
tions, layerings, and overlappings of time and history.
With the generous support of the Leslie Center for the Humanities and
the Guthrie Fund of the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth
College, we were able to meet a third time in Hanover, New Hampshire,
in November 2016 with all contributors to this volume in order to discuss
and workshop our material together. David Alvarez and Claudia Esposito
joined us for the weekend-long series of meetings and discussions, as did
Michèle Hannoosh, who delivered a closing lecture entitled “Practices of
Photography: Circulation & Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century
Mediterranean.” For having made these events possible, we wish to thank
the former director of the Leslie Center, Colleen Boggs, and the Advisory
Committee for funding our project, as well as Graziella Parati for welcom-
ing us in her capacity as the center’s new director. At the Department of
French and Italian, we wish to thank Andrea Tarnowski, Nancy Canepa,
and Robert St. Clair, who served on the Guthrie Committee, for choosing
to fund our project.
At Palgrave, our gratitude goes to Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos
for believing in our project. Our editors, Megan Laddusaw and Christine
Pardue, provided invaluable guidance and assistance, and we are indebted
to them for their stewardship and advice, and the care with which they
brought the project to completion.
c
ontents
1 Critically Mediterranean: An Introduction 1
yasser elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Part I Mediterranean Modernities: Immanence and Dynamics 23
2 Heidegger as Mediterraneanist 25
Annika Döring and Peregrine Horden
3 Lawrence Durrell’s Mediterranean Shores: Tropisms
of a Receding Line 45
Isabelle Keller-Privat
4 The Text without Rupture: Jewish Itineraries
of Mourning in Edmond El Maleh’s Mediterranean 65
Michal Raizen
5 Mediterranean Modernisms: The Case of Cypriot Artist
Christoforos Savva 77
Antonis Danos
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Mediterranean Temporalities: Remembrance,
Haunting, Slow Time, Anachronism 111
6 Old Anxieties in New Skins: The Project of al-Andalus
and Nostalgic Dwelling in the New Mediterranean 113
Jonathan H. Shannon
7 Haunting the Mediterranean? Orhan Pamuk’s The Black
Book and Its Politics of the Afterwardly 129
Norbert Bugeja
8 The Mediterranean Seametery and Cementery in Leïla
Kilani’s and Tariq Teguia’s Filmic Works 147
Hakim Abderrezak
9 Resemblance, Choice, and the Hidden: Mediterranean
Aesthetics and the Political “Logics” of an Uncolonial
Subjective Economy 163
John Baldacchino
Part III Deployments 179
10 We Have Made the Mediterranean; Now We Must Make
Mediterraneans 181
Claudio Fogu
11 Etel Adnan’s Transcolonial Mediterranean 199
Olivia C. Harrison
12 Heritage Washed Ashore: Underwater Archaeology
and Regionalist Imaginaries in the Central Mediterranean 217
Naor Ben-Yehoyada
CONTENT S ix
13 M editerranean Lyric 241
yasser elhariry
14 A fterward: Critical Mediterranean Times 261
Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Index 273