The Mediterranean Question: Thinking with the Diver

Abstract

How and why to interrupt and redirect our understanding of the histories and cultures of the Mediterranean? As a result of temporal and spatial relations, its geographies and histories are never neutral. They are the outcome of contestations, and are elaborated and practiced, above all, by those who have the power to impose their maps and chronologies. Reasoning with the historical and cultural impact of the mobile, migratory and mutable configurations of the Mediterranean, the prospects proposed here seek to dismantle the authority of the established archive. In its place the authors propose a series of interdisciplinary and transcultural considerations that would permit another Mediterranean – subaltern, repressed and negated – to emerge and interrogate the habitual narrative.