Postcolonial Mediterranean Subjectivities
Seminar Organizer(s):
- Maria Hadjipolycarpou (University of Michigan)
The Mediterranean remains an unexplored region in postcolonial studies for two reasons: 1) the geopolitical emphasis on Africa, India and Southeast Asia in postcolonial studies; 2) the emphasis, in Mediterranean Studies, on the Mediterranean as a space of co‐existence and connectivity. The Mediterranean however, is also a region heavily colonized both by European empires and by Mediterranean regimes like the Ottoman, the Byzantine, the Venetian, and others; something that historian David Abulafia calls “the cataclysm of conquest” (2003).
This seminar explores questions of postcolonial subjectivity and identity in the Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. It explores the ways in which the subject incorporates imperial and colonial pasts and the ways in which it (re)claims its individuality in forms of artistic expression such as literature, film, performance, installation art.
Research questions:
- What conditions shape Mediterranean postcolonial subjectivity?
- Could the study of postcolonial Mediterranean subjectivity refine the existing methodology in postcolonial studies?
- What new literary and artistic examples the Mediterranean puts on the postcolonial literary map?
Possible Topics:
the self and its relationship to history; autobiography; biography; the body; layers of the historical past; ruins; archaeology; the palimpsest; (imaginary) mapping; geography; women and homosexuals as alternative voices within the nation; stories, storytelling and their embodiment; fascism; resistance through art.
SEMINAR KEYWORDS: postcolonialism; empire; nationalism; history; postcolonial subjectivity; the body; storytelling; resistance; temporality