There is still one place available in our session - late abstracts are welcome...
Mediterraneans: the making and unmaking of the spatial imagination of the Middle Seas.
Convenors: Paolo Giaccaria (University of Turin)
Claudio Minca (Wageningen University and Royal Holloway University of London)
Phil Steinberg (Florida State University)
The ‘Mediterraneans project’ at AAG 2012 has three proposed elements:
• Papers session (see the call below)
• Panel session on Mediterraneanism and Mediterraneans with invited speakers.
• Film session on Atlantropa with invited speakers (co-organiser: Ricarda Vidal, University of London).
Session sponsored by: European, Historical Geography, and Political Geography AAG Specialty Groups.
Call for papers.
Since Braudel, the Mediterranean has been described as a space where the sea acts as a “liquid continent”, connecting different places and people and establishing shared identities based on both environmental and cultural “evidences”. Historians, identifying a seemingly strong connection between the region’s geomorphologic/environmental qualities and its social/cultural/economic features, have pointed to the Mediterranean as the archetype for a category of maritime spaces of connection known as Middle (or Inner) Seas. In historian David Abulafia’s words, these Middle Seas are “areas of the world where land masses are separated by intervening water across which commodities, ideas and people regularly cross” (2003: 17). Abulafia identifies six Mediterraneans (Baltic, Caribbean, Atlantic, Indian, Japanese and Saharan) but others might also be so designated (we might for example imagine the Alps or the Danubian region as “solid” Mediterraneans).
Despite their primary designation as arenas of connection, these Mediterraneans are areas of intense conflict in both geopolitical and geoeconomic terms, and they often are associated with a clash of civilizations à la Huntington. In many cases, the colonial past and the orientalistic imagination (what Michael Herzfeld denoted as “Mediterraneanism”) are the common features that bring these various Mediterraneans together. Such colonial and orientalistic imprintings play a key role in the representation of Mediterraneans both as cradles of civilization (the European one, of course, but also the Buddhist one in the case of Japan or the African one in the Saharan Mediterranean) and as dangerous, liminal spaces populated by prostitutes, pirates, thieves and other marginal subjects, eventually to be civilized and modernized.
Moreover, despite being widely acknowledged as colonial and orientalistic by contemporary post-colonial cultural studies (see, for instance, Iain Chambers’ seminal Mediterranean Crossroads), this Mediterraneanist imagination is still powerfully at work in the present. Mediterraneanist narratives assume a specific geopolitical dimension when it comes to current regionalism in the context of globalization, where “Mediterraneanity” is often taken for granted as an atout, as an asset enabling and facilitating regional integration. This is the case for the newborn macro-regionalization policies in the EU (although in this case the Baltic Sea Region is the model and thus the “classic” Mediterranean is called to follow the Northern example rather than vice versa) but also for different region-building processes in the other Mediterraneans.
Within this framework, we welcome both geographical-genealogical approaches and geopolitical ones addressing the following topics:
• How narrations of unity and homogeneity have emerged in different Mediterraneans.
• How different Mediterraneanisms have influenced each other in categorizing Middle Seas space.
• How colonial modernity has shaped these imaginations in different Mediterraneans.
• How cartography has contributed to modern and colonial understanding of the Mediterraneans.
• How the tension between (pre-modern) centrality and (modern) marginality is played our in Mediterraneanist narratives.
• How mobilities (of people, goods and ideas) link together the different Mediterraneans in world-system and globalization narratives.
• How contemporary regionalization processes make use of Mediterraneanism and Middle-Seas rhetoric.
Please submit a 200 word abstract as soon as possible, 2011 to the organizers.
For enquiries and abstracts, please contact:
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
Paolo Giaccaria
Dipartimento Interateneo Territorio
Università di Torino
|