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Mediterraneans: the making and unmaking of the spatial imagination of the Middle Seas.
AAG Annual Meeting
New York
February 24-28, 2012
Convenors:
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 ą 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:
Please submit a 200 word abstract by September 1st, 2011 to the organizers.
For enquiries and abstracts, please contact:
Paolo Giaccaria
Dipartimento Interateneo Territorio
Universitą di Torino