I.S. MED. - Interdisciplinary Studies on the Mediterranean

From the Editors

Giovanna Summerfield — 2024-05-19

Interview with Jessica M. Marglin

Jessica M. Marglin — 2024-05-19

Being Arab, Palestinian, Israeli, and Jew? Sayed Kashua’s ‘Arab Labor’ and the Challenge to Coexist in Israel

Andrea Pizzinato — 2024-05-19

In 2007, the first season of the sitcom ‘Arab Labor’ (in Hebrew: ‘Avodah ‘Aravit) was screened on primetime Israeli television. Most of the actors playing in the series are Palestinian, dialogues are mostly in Arabic, and the series is the first Israeli-Palestinian sitcom to bring the perspective of Palestinians in Israel to the general Israeli public. Its creator, Sayed Kashua, is a well-known Palestinian writer and journalist who was born and long lived in Israel, before moving to the United States. All of the above has represented a change in the place of Palestinian citizens within Israeli television, ensuring them renewed visibility among the Israeli-Jewish public. This contribution focuses on the first season of Arab Labor and conceptualizes it as a creative-subversive play that underscores the liminal condition of Palestinians in Israel, divided as they are between their social, cultural and national Arab-Palestinian heritage and their Israeli citizenship. By exploring some main characters, episodes, and cross-cut themes, it highlights the innovative power of Kashua’s representation of the entangled Arab-Palestinian identity in Israel. Through irony and sarcasm, Kashua lowers the tones of the political debate and stages stereotypical representations that Jews have of Arabs and vice versa, highlighting the inconsistency of these clichés and ridiculing them. The paper argues that Kashua’s creative resistance discourse (Goren 2014) on Arab-Palestinian citizens strives to spotlight the illusory character of exclusivist, supposedly pure imposed ethnonational identities, which ever fail to account for the complex entanglement of factors that contribute to shape hyphenated, fragmented identities, such as that of Palestinians in Israel. In order to present this argument, the article (1) sketches a historical background of Israel’s Palestinian history until the early 2000s and of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel; (2) it discusses relevant characters, episodes and cross-cut themes of the sitcom; (3) finally, it contextualizes Arab Labor into the wider artistic profile of Sayed Kashua.

Montenegro as a State Governed by the Rule of Law: Valtazar Bogišić’s Character and Contributions in Italian Travel Accounts at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Olivera Popović — 2024-05-19

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a significant number of Italian travellers were drawn to the Principality of Montenegro, primarily motivated by their curiosity about the homeland of their future queen, Jelena Petrović Njegoš, who wed Prince Victor Emmanuel III of Savoy in October 1896. The majority of these travellers, predominantly journalists, meticulously documented their experiences through travel narratives that were initially published as newspaper articles and subsequently compiled into books. These authors notably emphasized Montenegro’s legal developments, accomplished within a mere two decades following its international recognition as an independent nation. They attributed this remarkable progress to Valtazar Bogišić (1834-1908), a jurist, legal scholar, and ethnographer who came from the Konavle region near Dubrovnik. Bogišić, a Slavophile with a comprehensive education acquired at various European universities, also held the position of Minister of Justice in Montenegro. The primary aim of this case study is to analyze how various Italian authors portrayed Minister Bogišić to their readers across the Adriatic, elucidating the information they presented regarding the legal code he had crafted for Montenegro. Additionally, we delve into the significance of this legal code, which was subsequently translated into several foreign languages. In addition to presenting Valtazar Bogišić and his work, Italian authors also constructed an image of Montenegro as a state governed by the rule of law. They achieved this portrayal by referring to the Montenegrin rulers who, through the enactment of the first Montenegrin legal codes, orchestrated a profound transformation within Montenegrin society. From their perspective, Montenegro, which was originally rooted in customary law within a tribal framework, underwent a transition into a principality governed by a comprehensive system of written laws. This transformation is primarily exemplified by Bishop Petar I Petrović Njegoš and Prince Danilo Petrović Njegoš, whose pioneering endeavours in legal codification captured the attention of several Italian authors. The overarching objective of this paper is to discern the purpose behind the production of such an image of Montenegro, which became prominent in the Italian travel writing tradition in the late 19th century, and to seek to identify the factors that influenced the formation of this representation.

Women Mystics, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and Cross-Cultural Pollination. The Mystical Model in the Mediterranean and Beyond

Borja W. González Fernández — 2024-05-19

Despite longstanding scholarly interest, or perhaps because of it, women mystics remain trapped between the psychological interpretations of modern academia and the idealized portrayals of Church authorities, making them figures that are still largely unknown and misunderstood. Moving beyond the limitations of psychological and theological interpretations that reduced these women’s experiences, this article will compare and contrast the lives of several mystics living at the turn of the modern era. It will argue that their ability to challenge societal norms and create spaces for female community relied on their meticulous adherence to a specific behavioral pattern known as the ‘mystical model,’ consisting of conversion, foundation, and teaching. The careful execution of these steps across diverse cultures and geographies not only validated their deeply personal religious experiences but also granted social legitimacy to the public expressions of their spirituality. Born and developed around the wider Mediterranean, as classically defined by Braudel, the mystical model came to transcend the borders of the Mare Nostrum with the missionary effort that accompanied the colonial expansion characteristic of the European Age of Discovery. Aided by the printing press and in the context of the assertive and militant Catholicism emerging in the wake of the Council of Trent, missionaries, in their quest to physically expand the horizons of the Roman Church, were instrumental in diffusing the privatized, individualist religious spirit irradiating from early modern Europe. Consequently, female religious vocations started to emerge in societies where women’s role in religion – and in public life – had been largely marginal. This phenomenon also contributed to the formation of new frames of reference, new archetypal categories, awarding these women with social sanction for their recently acquired religious self-awareness, as this article will prove. Examining the extra-Mediterranean expansion of the mystical model will underscore that the missionary effort cannot be exclusively understood in a one-directional sense. Instead, it must be seen as a pluri-directional phenomenon, a process of cross-cultural pollination that transformed both catechist and catechumen, simultaneously broadening their respective systems of collective representations.

Cross-Cultural Networks and Exchanges in the Mediterranean Port Cities during the Early Modern Period: The Case of a Jewish Merchant Colony in Marseille

Arazoo Ferozan — 2024-05-19

This article outlines the commercial engagements of Sephardic networks in Marseille’s Mediterranean trade during the second half of the seventeenth century. More than a century and a half after the expulsion of Jews from this city, the new mercantilist policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance to Louis XIV, finally enabled Jewish merchants to enjoy trading, settlement, and naturalization privileges. While local policies geared toward foreigners and state-sponsored privileges were often inconsistent, Jewish merchants managed to exploit periods of “limited toleration,” leveraging Marseille’s monopoly in trans-Mediterranean trade to transcend boundaries of faith and economic limitations. In recent decades, scholarship in diaspora and network studies has transformed our understanding of networks beyond the confines of co-religionists, family, and kin by focusing on interfaith and cross-cultural connections. Despite this, the port city of Marseille, its merchant community, and commercial networks have frequently been overlooked in favor of studies centered around France’s Atlantic ports. This case study directs attention to Marseille as a hub of the Sephardi trading diaspora and elucidates how merchants used both formal structures and informal networks, such as communal networks of trade and personal connections, to enhance France’s Mediterranean reach and their influence in an era of global maritime expansion.

Germany and the Mediterranean Crossings: Suppressing Past Traumas and Revisiting Present Ones in Burhan Qurbani’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

Kristina Štefanić Brown — 2024-05-19

In the most recent cinematic adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s literary masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz, Burhan Qurbani (2020) reimagines the figure of Franz Biberkopf as Francis, an African refugee who, after almost drowning at sea during his perilous voyage to Europe, is shown trying to rebuild his life in modern-day Berlin. While Döblin’s novel focuses predominantly on issues of class, Qurbani’s rendition centers on racial inequalities and Otherness. Upon his arrival in Germany, Francis does everything in his power “to be good” and succeed in the modern metropolis, yet he is set up to fail at every step. Francis’s failure is largely due to the suppressed trauma of losing a loved one at sea and to the symbiotic relationship that forms between him and Reinhold, a German criminal who uses and abuses Francis for his own libidinal investment. It is a relationship of peculiar dependency that also embodies Germany’s dependency on migrants and evokes Germany’s colonial past. By analyzing the effect that trauma has on the protagonist, this essay aims to show that while Germany may be geographically distant from the Mediterranean (and often disassociates its own politics from the migrant crisis in the region), it is nevertheless affected by and tangentially involved in the tragedy that continuously unfolds in the region. By alluding to the contemporary politics of disassociation, the film emblematically portrays and underscores the notion that the Mediterranean has been a focal point of development for cultures since the antiquity and to this day remains a palimpsest marked by the incessant movement of people reaching and shaping destinations far beyond the countries touched by Mare Nostrum.

Dialectic of Identity: Paskvalić’s Guide to Four Poems Dedicated to Serenissima

Ane Ferri — 2024-05-19

This paper comprehensively explores the national-literacy identity of the Renaissance poet Ludovik Paskvalić, through a study of four of his poems, in which the poet’s close relationship with the Republic of Venice is reflected. Despite the note about his identity that the poet himself left on the cover of his printed Italian songbook entitled Rime volgari, the scientific and professional public often placed Paskvalić in different, often inaccurate, identity frameworks. The reasons for the poet’s inclusion in the corpus of Italian or Venetian Renaissance poets can be found in Paskvalić’s prominent Italianist activity, in his linguistic virtuosity in the Italian language, which was not his native language, as well as in the fact that until today the scientific public has not managed to find Paskvalić’s literary legacy in his mother tongue. Thus, the Renaissance poet from the Bay of Kotor first found his place in Italian and world anthologies, and many years later in scientific studies from this side of the Adriatic Sea. Wrong premises regarding the poet’s national identity often had a negative impact on the analysis of his verses. The aim of this paper is to use the example of four of Paskvalić’s poems dedicated to the Republic of St. Marco from his collection in the Italian language, the occasions and contexts in which the poems were written are analyzed to shed light on the poet’s identity through the explanation of his attitude of full respect and admiration towards Serenissima. The method is of a comparative, research and literary-historical character, based on combinatorial research about the author, through the analysis of four of his poems dedicated to the capital of the Republic of Venice. In this way, for the first time, attention would be paid to the analysis of the opening and closing songs of the second part of the Italian songbook, completely excluded from the significantly larger number of other songs from the same collection that have been analyzed in detail so far according to their stylistic and typological characteristics. Our research strongly supports the claim that the writer’s national identity should be based on an understanding of the wider context of the time and space in which he created, as well as his own determination, which can be read from his work, but also from other testimonies.

Re-placing the Mediterranean Diet: Historical Exchanges and Possible Futures

Juliann Vitullo — 2024-05-19

The term Mediterranean Diet (MedDiet) suggests a strong geographic orientation, a connection to a region—its flora, fauna, land, sea and histories--that its current generic and ephemeral classification (2018-2023) as the “the best diet overall” by the U.S. World and News Report ignores. As this consistent ranking suggests, one of the most common representations of the “Mediterranean” today, in the U.S., and even globally, is that of the MedDiet. It is a concept, tied to idealized images of health and pleasure, which first developed through exchanges in the post-WWII period between scientists from the United States and communities in Greece and southern Italy, which had not yet been substantially transformed by industrialized agriculture and highly processed foods. In the 1950’s the now-famous physiologist from the U.S., Ancel Keys, “discovered” the MedDiet during a research trip to Naples. Ever since, tension has existed between Keys’s place-based research and the call for this diet, based largely on plant foods, seafood, olive oil, and limited consumption of meat and dairy products, to be universally translated. Any attempt to evaluate the influence of the MedDiet must face the overwhelming influence of the model in scientific studies (with over 5,000 publications a year just since 2020 in the U.S.) as well as its branding by agri-food interests. While Ancel Keys’s epidemiological research on lipids and heart disease was groundbreaking, the concept of the MedDiet has evolved into a global scientific mythology that needs to be reevaluated and re-placed into specific historical and social contexts that acknowledge the biological and cultural diversity of Indigenous, peasant, and traditional foodways as well as the challenges of the contemporary industrialized food system. As early as 1998, two southern Italian researchers, Vito Teti and Massimo Cresta, formed a transdisciplinary team that questioned the tunnel vision of the scientific model, reminding scholars that the southern Italian communities associated with the MedDiet had evolved agricultural and eating patterns, which maintained balanced and sustainable relationships, not as a choice but as a means of survival in specific environments. Although their research has been largely ignored by scholars of the MedDiet, it invites us to examine how certain traditional Italian foodways were de-territorialized or stripped of their rich and complex cultural and environmental histories, as scientists paradoxically categorized them using the often-slippery geographical term of “Mediterranean.” At the same time, the contemporary revalorization of the biocultural heritage created over generations within marginalized communities in southern Italy, which Vito Teti continues to help document through his concept of la restanza, emphasizes the importance of recognizing transdisciplinary and transnational exchanges as well as the possibility of healthier and more sustainable futures through relational and collaborative foodways wherever we live.

Book Reviews

Sherine Hafez — 2024-05-19