The next session on the Mediterranean Institute Seminar Series will be delivered by Professor John Baldacchino, Director of the Arts Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The seminar will be held on Wednesday 14 March at 18:00 at ir-Razzett tal-Ħursun, University of Malta Msida Campus. The seminar is entitled 'Mediterranean Aesthetics and the Uncolonial'.
In his seminar, Prof. Baldacchino will dwell on how one could approach Mediterranean aesthetics as an identifiable concept that is equally disputed and recognized by qualifying it from the context of what he terms the uncolonial. (see Baldacchino, 2018).
What Baldacchino means by the uncolonial implies a heterogeneous subjective economy that firmly rejects a homogeneous economy of subjects. Put another way, this economy (understood as a narrative of communions—οἰκονομία, oikonomía) carries a value structure that blows open the instrumental metric of a narrow financial system. It is also the very opposite of an economy of subjects in that the latter remains a communion homogenised by the colonial condition, even when it claims to have moved into a post-colonial sphere.
Tracing this on an aesthetic trajectory, Prof. Baldacchino will invite his audience to think of the possibility of a subjective economy that rejects colonial homogeneity by assuming an uncolonial position.
This raises several paradoxes and it is invariably characterized as aporetic. In fact, a subjective economy radically lays claim on identity as being plural and hybrid and thereby conducive to nothing less than a radical discourse. Characterized by the politics of aesthetics, this radical discourse is meant to reject the homogeneous economy of subjects by which colonialism is sustained. This explains why a meta-theoretical approach must go beyond those metrics by which we are more familiar when assessing a colonial state of affairs.
The role of nostalgia is an aesthetic axel on which the Mediterranean imaginary rotates. However, as we seek to understand nostalgia, this needs to be done from the positions of (i) a hybridity of non-identitarian acts; operated (indeed, lived) by (ii) a heterogeneity of autonomous agents which move away from (a) the conservative myth of post-colonial apologetic nostalgia (what-has-been) (b) the reactionary politics of pre-colonial inventions and folkish false nostalgia (what-could-have-been) and (c) the anti-colonial pathos that is often characterized by a liberal-progressive form of ahistorical nostalgia (what-should-have-been).
Prof. Baldacchino will argue that without such qualifications, the assumption of a Mediterranean aesthetics will not only be irrelevant, but dangerous.
Unless the heterogeneity of a subjective narrative of communions is posed as a hybrid economy, the Mediterranean imaginary risks becoming reified into a form of aesthetized politics in whose roots one finds the violence, hatred and national-ethnic strife that has characterized the history of this region over centuries (see Baldacchino 2010).
John Baldacchino is Full Professor and Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of the Arts. A graduate of the universities of Malta (B.Ed) and Warwick (MA and PhD) he held Senior and Faculty positions in Columbia University in New York, and the Universities of Dundee, Warwick, Falmouth and Robert Gordon in Britain. A specialist in art, philosophy and education, he is a practicing artist and an essayist.
He is the author of many journal articles, reviews and catalogue essays, and journalistic contributions. To date he published ten books which include Education Beyond Education: Self and the imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy (Lang 2009); Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt and Nostalgia (Gorgias 2010), Art’s Way Out: Exit Pedagogy and the Cultural Condition (Sense, 2012) and John Dewey: Liberty and the Pedagogy of Disposition (Springer 2014). His is the editor of Histories and Philosophies. The Wiley-Blackwells Encyclopaedia of Art and Design Education (2018) and is completing three books in English and a volume in Maltese, all forthcoming in 2018.
For more information contact the Seminar Convenor, Dr Norbert Bugeja by email.
image courtesy of the artist, John Baldacchino