As the geo-political and socio-cultural maps of the Mediterranean continue to be drawn and redrawn, the region’s emergent cultural politics increasingly demands the reconfiguration of its spatial, narrative, and memorial modes of harnessing both the littoral’s present urgencies and its volatile bequeathals, whether political, aesthetic or otherwise. The Mediterranean sea and its historic networks of exchange have played an inescapable role in the lives of its people.

Through narrative—written and oral, as well as various other modes of expression and representation—the Mediterranean experience has produced its own representational domains that enable people to engage, contest and understand the postcolonial worlds they inhabit. This dynamic spans the region’s economy of visual and performative arts and the current worlding of its literary platforms, as well as its emerging creative practices, artivist hubs, citizen and civil society scholarship.

 

 

Dr Norbert Bugeja