Mediterranean Fractures: Postcolonial Displacements, Political
Insurgencies
Friday 2 May
Peter Brown Room, Darwin College
3.30-4.00
Coffee and Tea
4.00-5.00
Plenary lecture: Professor Stephanos Stephanides, `Mediterranean
Fractures: a minor perspective`.
5.15-6.00
Drinks
6.00-7.15
Poetry Reading
7.30
Dinner Darwin Beagle Restaurant
Saturday 3 May
Peter Brown Room, Darwin College
8.45-9.15
Coffee and Tea
9.30-11.00
Panel 1 : Mediterranean Insurgencies
Luigi CAZZATO (Università di Bari): `Mediterraneanism, Meridionism, migration and
postcolonial resistance`.
Adrian GRIMA (University of Malta): `Alternative Mediterraneans`
Norbert BUGEJA (University of Kent): `Re-articulating the histories of subjection – rebellious
subjectivity in the southeastern Mediterranean`.
11.15-12.30
Panel 2
: Egyptian Unfoldings
Marta CARIELLO (Seconda Università di Napoli): `Revolution from the South: Narrating,
uprising, provincializing`
Ziad ELMARSAFY (University of York): `The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt`
12.30 – 1.45
Lunch
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1.45-3.15
Panel 3
: Cypriot Crossings
Bahriye KEMAL (University of Kent): Border-Broader Crossing North-South Checkpoints:
Solidarity and Intimacy in the Spaces of Forbidden Games
Nicoletta DEMETRIOU: The ‘common music’ of a ‘common land’: Redefining commonality
and difference in Cypriot traditional music-making
Alev ADIL: Aphrodite’s Gas Field
Aydin Mehmet Ali: A Reading from Forbidden Zones
3.30-5.00
Panel 4 : Mediterranean Fractures and Conjunctions
Kim FORTUNY (Bogazici University, Istanbul): `The Street Dog Goes to Gezi: Istanbul and
Post-Humanist Public Space`
Annalisa OBOE (Università di Padova): `Fractured hospitalities in postcolonial Italy: new
cinematic representations`.
Caroline ROONEY (University of Kent): `The Fractured Music of Arab-Jewish Friendships:
Defiance against the Grain of Defiance`
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Abstracts: Mediterranean Fractures
Panel 1
Mediterranean Insurgencies
LUIGI CAZZATO (Università di Bari): Mediterraneanism, Meridionism, migration and
postcolonial resistance
“Mediterraneism”, is a term first used by Michael Herzfeld to describe the category
invented by historians and anthropologists in order to confirm the stereotypes they wanted
to study and thus serving “the interests of disdainful cultural imperialism”. To him, the move
from the Braudelian ecological unity to the cultural unity of the Mediterranean (Horden and
Purcell), above all in the Anglo-Saxon area, contributed to such discursive formation.
Indeed, the issue of Mediterranean unity is not an easy one. The Mediterranean Sea is the
fracture and suture of continents and civilisations. It is both North and South, both Europe
and Africa, both West and East. Its supposed unity is more looked for than found. The
Mediterranean Sea is a pluriverse rather than a universe, a space of negotiation, of
encounters and clashes.
It is true that the peoples of the Mediterranean are like frogs around a pond, as Plato would
have it, and share cultures and climates. However, it is also true that its Northern shores are
European and in such a position they have participated in the feast of modernity and
colonialism. Nevertheless, their Europeanness is imperfect, dangerously near as they are to
what meridionism (Pfister, Cazzato) wants them to be, that is to say, near to African and
Eastern shores and far from the core of the perfection of “real” Europe, whose cultural and
historical self-understanding was achieved thanks to the othering of Southern peoples; an
Orient within now called P.I.G.S.
Given this complex identity context, now the migration question is offering a historical
chance to Southern Europe, or Northern Mediterranean, to distance itself from the
meridionist dicta of Euro-modernity and to refuse to become only the patrolling army of
Fortress Europe. The bifurcation Southern European shores (shores of historical emigration)
have in front of them is either to follow the ancient epistemological force of their waters,
turning themselves into a humanist bridge, or to go on being an inhuman wall against which
the migrants smash themselves, as a result, a trench where the fundamentalisms of market
and religion clash and thrive (Cassano).
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The Italian walling of the Mediterranean through its control apparatus (migration laws,
detention centres, “push back operations”) is well known: a policy that has brought about
around twenty thousand victims in the last twenty-five years. What is probably less known
is the attempts of Mediterranean ethics and practice of hospitality. It is a cultural-political
dimension that sees, for instance, the "conviviality of differences” thought of the Apulian
radical bishop Tonino Bello and the new-born “Lampedusa Charter” (the stating of the rights
and liberties of the migrants) as part of a Mediterranean strategy of postcolonial resistance.
Adrian GRIMA: Alternative Mediterraneans (Department of Maltese, University of Malta)
The predominantly European narrative of a unifying Mediterranean culture and identity
built on a shared Mediterranean heritage is almost completely absent from the discourse of
non-Europeans on the southern and eastern shores of this “Great Sea.” The Mediterranean
imaginary was also virtually nowhere to be seen in the "Arab" revolutions of 2011 which
some EU leaders tried, unsuccessfully, to call "Arab Mediterranean." The lack of affinity of
non-Europeans with this imaginary is evident also in their poetry and prose. However, as the
volume L'alternativa mediterranea edited by Franco Cassano and Danilo Zolo in 2007 has
shown, there is an "underworld" of shared social and political activism at grassroots level
that has been alive for a long time in the region, and the revolution in Tunisia has inspired
greater collaboration and given the Mediterranean alternative a new lease of life. The
question is whether the Mediterranean imaginary, with its roots in the ambiguities of
French Saint-Simonian idealism and its history of violent colonialism, can inspire initiatives
for meaningful dialogue and activism in the region, or condemn it to failure.
Norbert Bugeja: Re-articulating the histories of subjection – rebellious subjectivity in the
southeastern Mediterranean
When the Muslim Brotherhood’s exiled spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi
spoke to his crowd gathered in Midan Tahrir in Cairo, on his return from Qatar in the midst
of the 2011 uprisings, he toned down the confessionalist rhetoric to assert that “In this
Square, sectarianism died.” It was an acknowledgement that the revolts against US-backed
regional autocracies were compelled by a historical consciousness of dissent that was not
attributable to that “unshakeable eschatology” (Vijay Prashad) hitherto assigned to the
staying temporal power of religion. Neither is it traceable to secularist and liberal politics,
with their largely uninspiring trajectory in the region. It emanates, rather, from those forms
of rebellious knowledge produced as a result of intensely endured and intellectually
processed histories of repeated subjection. The paper references the work of Raymond
Williams, Caroline Rooney, Tunisian rap artist Hamada ben Aoun and Egyptian novelist
Ahdaf Soueif to tease out the transformation of endured repression into a galvanized
popular consciousness, as various forms of historically inherited knowledge (turath) engage
with dynastic or inherited power (tawrith) as a means of dismantling the political partition
of the proper as discussed by Jacques Rancière and others.
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Panel 2
Egyptian Unfoldings
MARTA CARIELLO (Seconda Università di Napoli): Revolution from the South: Narrating,
uprising, provincializing
In the last two years, the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have deeply affected
any discourse on the Mediterranean, which has become unavoidably enmeshed in the
material and discursive practice of “revolution”. Much debate is ongoing on whether the
uprisings taking place in the region are to be considered actual revolutions and whether
they are failing, or, as many maintain, are in fact “continuing revolutions”. Whatever the
temporary or long-term effects, a process has been set in motion that has re-introduced the
term “revolution” inside a narrative that – at least in the West – had long removed it from
its (political) vocabulary. The events in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria – though clearly
very differentiated and yielding different outcomes – have been and are narrated by visual
artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians with a strong and highly recurring reference to the
term “revolution”. With regard to Egypt alone, Ahdaf Soueif’s chronicle of and reflection on
the days of the ousting of Mubarak are recorded in her book Cairo, My City, Our Revolution
(2012); Mona Prince’s chronicle of those same days, self-published and mostly selfdistributed, is titled Revolution is my Name (Ismi Thawra) (2012); Egyptian rapper MC Amin
has recorded the piece “El Thawra Mostamera” (“The Revolution Continues”); the walls of
Cairo are covered with flourishing graffiti in which the word “thawra” (revolution) is
continually recurring. The events in Tunisia are referred to within the nation and region as
“Thawrat al-Karama” (the Dignity Revolution), or “Thawrat al-Shabab” (the Youth
Revolution), while the international press has mostly dubbed it the “Jasmine Revolution”.
Though the debate on naming and definitions is highly relevant, what is particularly
interesting in terms of the narrative produced is, again, the use of the word “revolution”.
Numerous anthologies and an immense volume of online and offline articles have been and
are being published on the narrative of the “revolutions” taking place in the region (see for
example L. al-Zubaidi and M. Cassel, eds., Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to
Damascus (I.B. Tauris, 2013).
The discursive production of revolution coming from the voices of North Africa and the
Middle East carries a particularly disruptive character for the humanist narrative of
progress, because such revolutions are re-narrating the access to and production of
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democracy both without following Western models and without opposing them, but
seemingly independently; in a certain sense, as Bhabha would have it, the revolutions that
are irrupting into the Western cultural and political discourse on the Middle East are the
performative temporalities of the postcolonial irrupting into the pedagogical temporalities
of Western humanism.
The Mediterranean, therefore, is charged today with a drive that, in a way, “provincializes”
Europe and the West in terms of discursive and material revolutionary practices, while at
the same time interrogating its limits in terms not only of material barriers (as the tragic and
sadly not new events of Lampedusa have shown), but also in terms of the narrative of time
and change, that has been faced and disrupted with the renewed and complex discourse of
“revolution”.
Ziad ELMARSAFY: This paper explores the ways in which Egypt has been imagined and
discussed in the Western (mainly Anglophone) mainstream media following the events of
2012-13. The focus is on identification of the Muslim Brotherhood and its political party, the
openly right-wing, capitalist Freedom and Justice Party with Egypt’s proletariat, as well as
the description of the Brotherhood/FJP as the sole legitimate representative of the Egyptian
people. The danger of such identifications lies in their occultation of the very existence of
Egypt’s religious minorities, as well as the work done by Egypt’s workers in paving the way
for the 2011 revolution. Ultimately the “Egypt=Brotherhood” stands for a process whereby
Egypt’s Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Berber, Nubian and Mediterranean identities are all
written out of its history, leaving behind a myth of a hollow nation-state that has never been
anything other than Arab and Muslim.
Panel 3
Cypriot Crossings
Cyprus Panel: Crossing North-South Checkpoints: Literary Agency Cyprus (LAC)
Bahriye Kemal: Border-Broader Crossing North-South Checkpoints:
Intimacy in the Spaces of Forbidden Games (Bahriye Kemal)
Solidarity and
The paper will explore the case of Cyprus through the energy production and pipeline that
are currently in the making, with particular focus on the project and movement Literary
Agency Cyprus (LAC). Upon introducing LAC, the paper will explore further the literary and
artistic energy of two LAC members, Aydin Mehmet Ali and Alev Adil, to show the active
processes and practices by which they expose and negotiate between the north-south
fractures – that is to say, in what Lefebvre calls ‘the excluded spaces [...] of forbidden
games’ to produce a differential Cyprus. The writers border-cross to generate pipelines
between the north-south partition and checkpoint in Cyprus, which enables them to
Cypriotise Homi Bhabha’s third-space. They simultaneously extend this third-space to
broader-cross and create channels between the north-south world divide, particularly
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between the former imperial centre (London) and the ethnic-centres (Ankara and Athens) to
reveal and localise what Svetlana Boym calls ‘diasporic intimacy’ and ‘global diasporic
solidarity’. In this process the writers expose the layers of fractures in relation to the northsouth divides, by which they manipulate and exploit this complexity through localising and
Cypriotising the third-space, diasporic intimacy and global diasporic solidarity to enable
them to make and produce a differential Cyprus.
Nicoletta Demetriou: The ‘common music’ of a ‘common land’: Redefining commonality
and difference in Cypriot traditional music-making ()
Historically, Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot traditional music was defined in terms of difference
and divergence. Music could be either ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’, depending on which community one
belonged to or, later, which side of the divide one stood. The emphasis on difference passed
from an ethnonationalist musicological discourse (at its peak in the mid-twentieth century)
to discussions about music among musicians. The segregation of Greek and Turkish Cypriots
that followed the events of 1974 became the means to put that proclaimed difference into
practice; no contact meant fostering divergence. Following 2003 and the opening of the
checkpoints dividing the northern and southern parts of the island, an alternative discourse
was formed: one that celebrated similarities, and the ‘common heritage’ of a ‘common
land’. Music-making followed (and in some cases preceded) this new rhetoric, with bicommunal music and dance groups being founded, and ‘common’ songs and dances being
rediscovered. But as division continued even after the checkpoints opened, bi-communal
music-making all but died out, even if the bi-communal rhetoric did not.
This paper
explores the production of a discourse on commonality, especially after 2003, and how it
emerged from a previous discourse on difference. It discusses whether the idea of
commonality was not (similarly to difference) also constructed on the basis of a ‘positive
nationalism’, and whether constructing it did not also mean erasing particularities that
emerged from a decades-long separation. By probing popular theories of musical
rapprochement, the paper finally looks at whether living with (musical) difference can be
viewed as an alternative ‘third space’.
Aphrodite’s Gas Field (Alev Adil)
Alev Adil’s performance with digital projection will excavate layers of the mythic, historic
and every-day resonances and dissonances that shape becoming-Cypriot when that journey
is a moving towards alterity and indeterminacy, living with your head in the clouds and a
gas field in your guts. Poetry , philosophy and photography are interwoven in a performance
that seeks to refuse and confuse border patrols and identity politicians
Forbidden Zones (Aydin Mehmet Ali)
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This will be a reading from Forbidden Zones, which is a collection of short stories and other
creative pieces written over the last thirty-five years. This collection reflects on the
experiences of women, caught up in conflict, both personal and political, and gives voice to
cultural and political issues that are often silenced by taboo.
Panel 4
Mediterranean Fractures and Conjunctions
Kim Fortuny, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey): "The Street Dog Goes to Gezi: Istanbul
and Post-Humanist Public Space"
The urban street dog, neither friendly, nor working, nor wild, tends to cause discord
because he is culturally unclear. This paper takes into consideration a range of factors that
have led to the abuse and the survival of the Istanbul street dog, from Islamic taboos against
canines, to Islamic sanctity of life; from the pressures of westernization in Turkey, to the
place of dogs in Sufi mysticism; from animal rights movements to grass-roots stewardship.
The ambiguous position of the Istanbul street dog is also reflected in recent human events
in contemporary Istanbul. The summer protests at Gezi Park in Taksim Square were a direct
response to the government’s violent defence of unchecked urban development. The
protesters, much like the historical street dogs, created confusion due to the unclear nature
of their requirements and demands. In their resistance to both the conservative ruling
powers and the efforts of the traditional centre-left to co-opt the movement, this
asymmetric collection of individuals were unified primarily in their defence of public green
space as cultural heritage.
The historical case of the Istanbul street dog, and these recent environmental protest
movements in Turkey, put pressure on current post-humanist ecosystem theories and in
doing so help us identify limitations that persist in fields focusing on environmental ethics,
including animal ethics.
ANNALISA OBOE (Università di Padova): Fractured hospitalities in postcolonial Italy: new
cinematic representations
In the context of a reflection on the postcolonial changes at work in the Mediterranean and
in Italy, the paper looks at cultural “fractures” as moments when cracks appear in the
established order and spaces materialize in which the old and the new circulate, clash, and
mingle. These fractures significantly appear in recent examples of Italian cinema that
represent stories of contemporary migration, in which the issue of (in)hospitality is
foregrounded. The analysis refers to documentary and feature films by Emanuele Crialese
(Terraferma 2011), Andrea Segre (Io sono Li 2011, Mare chiuso 2012, La prima neve 2013),
and Dagmawi Yimer (Va’ Pensiero 2013).
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The paper looks closely at contemporary “fractures” in Crialese’s Terraferma, which concern
both the natives of the southern Italian island on which the film is set (the never-mentioned
Linosa, in the archipelago which includes Lampedusa), and the African people who arrive by
sea. The ruptures at work on the island allow for a comparative reflection on the different
“laws” that rule the life of the groups involved (the customary law of the island’s fishermen,
the law of the sea, the patriarchal law, the state law, the law of the tourist market, the
rights of migrants, shipwrecked people and refugees) and, I argue, a liberating critique of
each of these. The discussion focuses on how the particular form of exclusion that
characterizes the position of the migrating Africans on their way to the mainland joins hands
with other forms of exclusion and arrested development concerning the women and the
youth of the island. The combination points at the necessary revision of the conventions
that keep people stuck in non-places, both existential and physical, and block survival and
the future. It also sparkles a reflection on the meanings of hospitality in the Mediterranean
context, which disrupts commonly accepted behavioural codes.
Caroline Rooney: The Fractured Music of Arab-Jewish Friendships: Defiance against the
Grain of Defiance
A number of Arab novels and films engage with explorations of friendship between Arabs
and Jews in the explicit or implicit context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, to an
extent, Arab-Israeli divide. In engaging on a personal level (as opposed to national level)
with a Jewish history of persecution, they touch on eclipsed familiarities between Jewish
and Arab experiences while serving more widely to invite a dialogic or contrapuntal
awareness of liberation struggles. This paper aims to explore this phenomenon with
particular reference to Egyptian novelist Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, while
touching on other works that share its concerns, in particular, Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Free Men.
While the internal counterpoint of the art works examined will be the focus of
consideration, attention will also be paid to the historical untimeliness of such compositions
in relation to debates initiated by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim on musical form and
orchestral experience as a means of communication across divided communities.
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