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

From the editors

Giovanna Summerfield, Rosario Pollicino — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Old Questions and New Horizons in Mediterranean Literary Studies

Martino Lovato, C. Ceyhun Arslan — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Interview with Angela Fabris and Steffen Schneider

Giovanna Summerfield, Rosario Pollicino — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“Que des cendres” Negative Byzantinism as an Imperial Ideology

Paul Csillag — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this chapter, I will deconstruct negative Byzantinism by analyzing Abel-François Villemain’s historical novel Lascaris, ou les Grecs du Quinzième Siècle (1825). In French Romantic literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire symbolized imperial degeneration. As a special form of Orientalism or Mediterraneanism, negative Byzantinism served Latin Christians to belittle Orthodox believers. Western writers used fictionalized tales of the Byzantine Empire as historical analogies to indirectly criticize the allegedly Oriental habits of the nineteenth-century Greeks. As a cultural alternative to Byzantinism, they proposed (Phil-)Hellenism. According to Philhellenes like Villemain, the Greeks ought to honor their Hellenic, ancient heritage and not their Christian, medieval traditions. Since Western authors deemed themselves the heirs of ancient Hellas – because of their supposedly enlightened education and liberal politics – they claimed tutelage over the current Greeks in the form of a historically justified civilizing mission. In contrast, they described the Russian Empire as a poor imitation of degenerate Byzantium unfit to rule its Orthodox coreligionists. Villemain spearheaded this worldview with his novel Lascaris. With my analysis of his book, I will demonstrate how the author instrumentalized the notion of Byzantine degeneration and Hellenic progress to argue in favor of French imperialism in the Eastern Mediterranean. The deconstruction of negative Byzantinism and the unveiling of its imperialist connotations is vital for a better understanding of past and present representations of the Byzantine Empire in historiography and historical fiction.

The Last Mediterranean: Paul Theroux’s Obsessions Beyond the Pillars

Jawad El Annabi — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When Charlie Rose asked Paul Theroux about his reasons for writing about the Mediterranean, the subject of numerous other books in 1995, he said, “I don’t like other travel books, and this is my Mediterranean.” Theroux was a renowned travel writer and novelist known for his unconventional style and sharp satirical gaze. In 1993, he had set off on a journey of nine months through the Mediterranean and subsequently published The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean (1995). The mid-1990s was an important period in American engagement with the world: the Cold War had ended, and the US, now the sole Superpower, had kicked its “Vietnam Syndrome” in the Persian Gulf War. While historians have begun to examine the renewed sense of American exceptionalism shaping political events of this era, my article contributes to understanding how cultural works reflected and also shaped this era by delving into this author’s narrative choices, his craft as a travel writer and ultimately his silences. Theroux was an idiosyncratic author who still spoke to a generation of readers. My study assesses Theroux’s narrative style as well as the people and places he chooses to visit and describe in his book. Theroux’s Mediterranean thus provides a gateway to understanding what this sea meant to him as an individual while also providing insight into a rapidly changing socio-cultural landscape in the US.

Sergio Atzeni: The Retelling of the Mediterranean Sardinian Space

Giovanni Maria Dettori — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores how Sergio Atzeni (1952-1995) deconstructs the crystallized image of Sardinia as an island outside time and space, untouched by the historical events occurring in the Italian Peninsula and the Mediterranean. Putting the author in dialogue with long-lasting representations of the island as found in travelogues and the Sardinian literary tradition, I investigate how the author in his latest works Il quinto passo è l’addio (1995) (The Fifth Step is a Farewell) and Bellas Mariposas (1995) (Beautiful Butterflies) creates a recounting of Sardinia. By challenging the fixity of a preconceived Orientalizing vision of the island, Atzeni engages in a totalizing representation of the insular space which expands the island storytelling into new settings, giving relevance to the previously neglected Sardinian urban space. My contribution, embracing Atzeni’s postcolonial framework as investigated by Birgit Wagner, introduces a discourse of geographical repositioning and remapping of the island. While the traditional discourse on the island remarked Sardinian isolationism and peripheral localization, I claim that the Sardinian author reinstates Sardinian Mediterranean-ess and openness through the representation of the urban environment of Cagliari transformed by Atzeni into a quintessential Mediterranean harbor city. In the rewriting of the island Atzeni presents Sardinia as connected to the Mediterranean Sea, no longer conceived as a barrier but rather as a water highway which for millennia has favored the transit of people, the mixing of cultures and languages that forged the island’s character. By repositioning the island at the center of the Mediterranean Sea, the island ceases to be a periphery and a marginal secluded insular territory. Thus, the island’s cultural and linguistic diversity embodies in Atzeni the intrinsic nature of the Mediterranean space that opposes openness to the closeness of the Sardinian borderland narration. I state that the novelty of his works is the introduction of a contemporary and multicultural image of the island in the Sardinian literary canon, more representative of the complexity of Sardinian historical past and society. By representing a multifaceted multicultural and multilingual society, he conceives literature as a place where cultural and linguistic diversity meets anticipating contemporary Italian multiculturalism.

A Mediterranean of Remnants: Jewish and Arabo-Islamic Sicily in Vincenzo Consolo

Salvatore Pappalardo — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In his novels, writer and intellectual Vincenzo Consolo (1933-2012) intricately maps the intersecting histories of Sicily’s Mediterranean civilizations. This article discusses what I call Consolo’s “Mediterranean of remnants,” highlighting the author’s approach to Sicily’s historical narratives as he seeks to recover and emphasize the often neglected Jewish and Arabo-Islamic legacies embedded in the island’s cultural fabric. Through his narrative archeology, Consolo unearths and reinterprets layers of Sicilian history, reimagining his own lineage in the process and challenging traditional views of Sicilian identity. The exploration begins with an analysis of Jewish Sicilian history as depicted in Consolo’s novels Nottetempo, casa per casa and La ferita dell’aprile, linking these stories to his personal reflections on his suspected Jewish ancestry. The study then shifts to examining his representation of Sicily’s Arabo-Islamic heritage, particularly through his aesthetics of grafting, which he uses to explain the cultural hybridity of Sicilians. Consolo’s works challenge the erasure of Sicilian Jewish and Muslim histories, advocating for a richer, more inclusive understanding of Sicilian identity that acknowledges its profound connections to the broader Mediterranean basin. By weaving these complex narratives together, Consolo not only enriches our understanding of Sicilian history and literature but also contributes to a more nuanced appreciation of the Mediterranean’s multifaceted cultural legacy. This study reaffirms his literary and philosophical significance, positioning his works as essential readings for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the Mediterranean’s intercultural dynamics.

Olympic Barcelona and the Mediterranean Through Displacement and Satire in Eduardo Mendoza’s Novels

Jerikho Ezzekiel Amores — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to explore displacement and satire of ways of urban life in the Mediterranean before and after the Barcelona Olympic Games of 1992 in three of Eduardo Mendoza’s novels: Sin noticias de Gurb (1991), La aventura del tocador de señoras (2001) and El secreto de la modelo extraviada (2015). These three novels testify to and fictionalize an alternative narrative (featuring the other side, the margins, the outskirts) of the euphoric development of contemporary Barcelona and how the city has undergone urbanistic, political, and structural transformation for the international event with its repercussions in the social fabric. Paying attention to their excentric narrators interacting with different classes of people, such developments are inscribed in Mendoza’s novels through senses of displacement and effects of financialization, while interacting with the language of humour and satire as critical prism to the representation of the absurd happening to various characters mainly involved in a crime situation. Taking into account some of the ideas from influential and emerging studies on crime fiction and the Mediterranean especially by Barbara Pezzotti and Stewart King, this article’s angle through satire in Mendoza’s novels are considered creative displacements in language, geography, and narrators, rendering them a critical method of how culture and society in contemporary Barcelona (represented through characters, autochthonous and issued from migration) has distinguished itself from other places of the Iberian Peninsula but unites with the rest of the Mediterranean on its worldly aspirations and outlook at a certain cost to urban life. The article will develop displacement and satire through the construction of the city, the novel as space of interaction, and the role of money and financial imaginaries. Mendoza’s novels that feature pre- and post-Olympic Barcelona fit the discussions within the framework of Mediterranean literature, as Mendoza’s lucid satirical worldview in fiction commonly resonates with the complexities of contemporary life, such as the challenges that come with the transition and the perception of the local culture in a multicultural environment at a time when the state of politics and financialization that have become intertwined.

Mediterranean Thought: Queerness and Migration in Contemporary Italian Literature

Alice Parrinello — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today, mainstream narratives about migration centre around an imagery of attack, portraying Europe as a Fortress under siege and migration as an invasion. Significantly, in Italy, these narratives intersect with homonationalism. While the term was coined for the U.S. context (Puar 2007), in Italy homonationalism places openness and acceptance at the heart of Europe (in countries like France, Germany, and the Netherlands), and simultaneously promotes the need to protect the country and its LGBTQIA+ citizens from migrants (Colpani and Habed 2014). At the same time, Italian homonationalism intersects with antimeridionalist discourses, which deem Southern Italians as a hindering factor in the socio-cultural advancement of the country towards Northern Europe (De Vivo and Dufour 2012; Colpani and Habed 2014; Acquistapace et al. 2016). Consequently, this rhetoric endorses a push and a migratory movement towards Northern European countries, and a simultaneous rejection of both its Southern regions and the Mediterranean context (Colpani 2015). However, the Italian literary scene features a new trend: novels depicting LGBTQIA+ characters refusing these pre-set mainstream narratives. The article analyses Spatriati (2021) by Mario Desiati, Polveri sottili (2023) by Gianluca Nativo, Baba (2023) by Mohamed Maalel, and Tangerinn (2024) by Emanuela Anechoum, as case studies, in order to investigate how they chart different cartographies of migration, how they challenge a homonationalist rhetoric, and how they even trouble a linguistic standard. While Nativo tackles movements between Campania and the United Kingdom, Desiati instead focuses on a journey from Apulia to Berlin. However, both Spatriati and Polveri sottili simultaneously reproduce and challenge the homonationalist view of the Mediterranean, ultimately rejecting Northern Europe and promoting a view from the South. Significantly, the novels by Maalel and Anechoum reverse the perspective provided by Desiati and Nativo, opening Italy’s Southern shores towards other Mediterranean regions and towards Tunisia and Morocco in particular. Ultimately, the article argues that the novels foster an in-betweenness mirrored by the space of the Mediterranean sea, which paves the way for a Southern thought (Cassano 2012), or rather, for a Mediterranean thought of complexity, fluidity, and liminality.

Ayla Kutlu and Bejan Matur: Two Pioneering Mediterranean Turkish Women Writers

Roberta Micallef — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, I examine Ayla Kutlu’s “Sen de Gitme Triyandafilis” (Please Don’t Go: Triyandafilis), a novella included in the collection of the same title and selected poems by Bejan Matur to gain a deeper understanding of what the label ‘Mediterranean’ signifies regarding the authors and their work, I apply tools afforded by Area Studies, and Comparative Literature to argue that these two authors provide readers with a deeper understanding of Mediterranean identities and literature. Shaped by the Mediterranean region, Matur and Kutlu write about overlapping themes from different vantage points and think about the past in distinct ways. Kutlu, a generation older and a proud daughter of the Turkish nation-state although of Chechen origins and Matur, a local Kurdish woman, are separated by age, ethnicity, religion, and mother tongue; however, their texts are united in their exploration of women’s experiences of the Mediterranean. Examining the texts in their source language with conceptual frames and close reading allows the reader to see that despite Kutlu and Matur’s vastly different relationships to the Turkish state, both authors yearn for the days when diverse communities could live side by side on the Turkish Mediterranean coast, in a cosmopolitan milieu.