Mediterraneanism

"Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East" proposes a new reading of modern Middle Eastern history and suggests alternate solutions to the region's problems. The book is an attempt at rehabilitating and bringing back to the fore of Middle East Studies the issue of language as a key factor in shaping (and misshaping) the region, with the hope of rediscovering a broader, more honest, and less ideologically tainted discussion on the Middle East. "Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East" has a special focus on Lebanon, a "Christian homeland" by the telling of many, because Lebanon has traditionally acted as the region's template for change and a barometer gauging its problems and charting its progress.

Moderns Abroad Moderns Abroad analyzes the theory and practice of Italian architecture and urbanism in modern-era colonies in North Africa, East Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean. Introducing the history of Italian imperialism and the expectations that shaped it, the book analyzes Italian architects' theories of modernism with respect to Italy as well as its colonies; and describes how Italian administrators and planners developed Tripoli, Addis Ababa and settlements for migrant farmers in Libya and Ethiopia. In addition to introducing the history of Italian colonialism (1869-1943), the book discusses the symbolic geographies governing Italians' approaches to the colonies: Italian colonizers worked from different assumptions regarding Mediterranean and sub-Saharan African populations, assuming the former to be more akin to themselves, and the latter less so. Colonial governments initially took no interest in how Italians' buildings represented the colonial power, but by the late 1920s architects began to theorize colonial design, and these different assumptions about the local populations and their level of "civilization" influenced their design theories. Similarly, in the mid-1930s, planners and administrators began to develop strict ideologies of racial segregation in colonial cities, particularly in East Africa. The final chapters of this book bring these theories into juxtaposition with what was actually built in the colonial settings, illustrating how wide the gaps between theory and practice were. Moderns Abroad is the first book to present an overview of Italian colonial architecture and city planning. In chronicling Italian architects' attempts to define a distinctly Italian colonial architecture that would set Italy apart from Britain and France, it provides a uniquely comparative study of Italian colonialism and architecture that will be of interest to specialists in modern architecture, colonial studies, and Italian studies alike.

In the paper, through an analysis of the specific case of Manifesta 12 in Palermo (2018), I look at modes in which the art world in general and recurring large-scale events in particular, have been enquiring into the epistemological framework of the Euro-Mediterranean in recent years, often by means of idealisation, reiteration of the periphery paradigm and reduction of complex geo-social contexts to exclusionary rhetorical devices.

C'è uno sguardo sul Mediterraneo intriso di pregiudizio sull'arretratezza orientale dei suoi popoli. E c'è uno sguardo lirico ed estetizzante che vorrebbe il Mediterraneo come mare resistente contro la potenza oceanica del capitalismo.
Entrambe le immagini sono false. Entrambe hanno contribuito a costruire un Mediterraneo di fantasia, che ha ventriloquato eventi, popoli, stagioni.
Un percorso di decostruzione di entrambi i mediterraneismi (dell'arretratezza e dell'alternativa) attraverso lo sguardo della filosofia politica, della filosofia del diritto, dell'antropologia, degli studi postcoloniali e subalterni (usati bene), della letteratura, del cinema...

By examining the representation of popular and inquisitorial forms of punishment in the works of Cervantes, this essay seeks to recover shame as an emotional register of lived experience in the early modern Mediterranean, an affect which has hitherto remained overshadowed by the abundance of critical literature on honor as well as by large-scale Mediterraneanizing studies.  The identification of an inquisitorial discourse of shaming in the episodes of Don Quijote’s encagement suggests the need, on the one hand, to reevaluate what twentieth-century anthropology denominated the “values” of Mediterranean society and, on the other, to rehabilitate local (hi)stories that are all marked by blood: the blood of shame’s blush; that which was shed through violent conflicts; and that which governed the politics of blood purity.