Prof. Adrian Grima's book chapter on "Elusive Mediterraneans. Reading Beyond Nation," which deals with conceptions and representations of the Mediterranean in Maltese literature, but also questions notions of "Mediterranean Literature," has been published by de Gruyter in the book, Sea of Literatures: Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature (2023).
The editors of the book are Angela Fabris, Albert Göschl and Steffen Schneider.The many contributors include Karla Mallette, Sharon Kinoshita, Iain Chambers. Sara Izzo, and Daniel G. König.
ELUSIVE MEDITERRANEANS
Malta supposedly lies at the “heart” of the Mediterranean and Mediterraneanists expect its literature to be something like the very “essence” of the Mediterranean region, an expression, as it were, of its “rich culture and identity,” of Mediterranean connectivity.
And yet, Maltese literature in Maltese has, all in all, contributed little to the Mediterranean imaginary. It has bought into European stereotypes of Mediterranean spirit, culture, identity, and unity deconstructed by Michael Herzfeld and others, with their roots in colonial perspectives of Mediterranean backwardness. unruliness, and seductiveness.
The Maltese Pre-Independence Romantics and the Post-Independence Modernists were busy constructing, and recalibrating, the national imaginary, while the Postnational, Cosmopolitan generation that emerged in the 1990s, looked beyond the national and the regional.
READING BEYOND NATION
But there are notable exceptions, like Poet Antoine Cassar, with his long poems Passaport and Mappa tal-Mediterran, and Walid Nabhan, the Amman born Palestinian Maltese writer with his Prize-Wnning autobiographical novel, L-Eżodu taċ-ĊIkonji (The Exodus of the Storks), who acknowledge the discursive nature of representations of the Mediterranean and engage with them critically.
This study explores Maltese literature’s engagement with the Mediterranean imaginary and asks whether this evaluation has anything significant to contribute towards a theory of Mediterranean literature.
