Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity 9780822388869

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Mediterranean Crossings

∫ 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as ‘‘The Mediterranean: A Postcolonial Sea,’’ Third Text 18, no. 5 (2004): 423–33. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as ‘‘Off the Map: A Mediterranean Journey,’’ Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 4 (2005): 312–27.

Contents Acknowledgments ix

1 Many Voices 1 2 A Postcolonial Sea 23 3 Off the Map 50 4 Naples: A Porous Modernity 71 5 Between Shores 130 Notes 153 Bibliography 163 Index 173

Acknowledgments Nel mio mediterraneo non ci sono vincitori. —alberto masala

To Lidia—light of my eyes—for bringing me to live beneath the volcano. To Ilse and Artù: generous four-footed companions among the lemon groves and wild fennel above the sea on the other side of the bay, where much of this book was assembled. To Rosaria and Maurizio for the marvelous Marciano retreat that has provided a horizon for both thought and everyday life. To the architects and friends of PaeseSaggio for introducing me to the possibilities of the mountains of Matese. To Étienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Giuliana Bruno, Rey Chow, and Catherine Hall for critical comfort and suggestions. For conversation and guidance in the soundscapes, tastescapes, and urbanscapes of Naples, I thank Mario Avallone, Danilo Capasso, Maria Cerreta, and Antonio Tubelli. Slightly farther afield, the culinary adventures proposed by the Caputo family at the Taverna del Capitano in Nerano (Massa Lubrense) have suggested the innumerable journeys and combinations of a mutable Mediterranean. To Angela for her friendship and support. To those I have taught and learnt from and who have gone their way and sent me on mine. To the city that absorbed me and gave me a home.

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Many Voices The Mediterranean speaks with many voices. —fernand braudel

I would like to commence this book with a voice from the Mediterranean city in which I live: My ‘‘territory’’ is not the local region of Campania, as it is for many chefs who say that they are ‘‘reflecting’’ the regional fare. I go to the market and my suppliers; there I collect material, and then, when I get here, I have to do something with it. It is here where I consider myself modern, in the subsequent combinations and mixture. Living in a multiethnic part of the city—the Quartieri Spagnoli, which today is increasingly stratified in ethnic diversity—where once I smelled the cooking of ragù or grilled scampi, I now also smell curry and mint tea. Why shouldn’t I use these aromas and tastes that have now become part of my daily experience? It is not as though when I wake up in the morning I find sheep grazing on my doorstep. Nobody invents anything; everything is already in circulation in one way or another. The more experience you have with an ingredient, the more you understand it, and in the end you transform it. The recipes are the combination of such an approach, like established grids that allow you to combine and mix the ingredients, but the results depend on the ingre-

dients. Without them . . . I don’t think I invent anything. I believe that I am simply developing an approach, a perspective. Right now in the menu, there are certain items that are almost fixed, but even those . . . for example, the roasted eggplant with smoked cod (melanzane arrostite con baccalà affumicato): If sometimes I can’t find the right consistency of tomato, I will use a green, slightly bitter tomato, so you will always have the eggplant, but the components of the dish are variable. In the pomegranate season, I will add their seeds. I constantly seek to improve the dish without destroying it—that’s the point. For this dish, I use the round, fleshy Sicilian type of eggplant, which is different from the long, local variety. Or the sweet that I make with chocolate and ricotta cheese. Right now, after various attempts with diverse cocoa, I’ve found the cocoa that I really like. But, again, the proposal seemingly remains unchanged, although it has actually grown and developed.∞

With this sense of a mutable and diversifying locality, a kind of ‘‘changing same,’’ to borrow a term from Amiri Baraka and Paul Gilroy, my friend the chef Mario Avallone provides me with a strikingly apt metaphor for thinking a seeming stability—all those local traditions, cults, and customs secured in the timeless zone of the olive tree etched against a sunlit sea—that is mobilized and perforated by the manifold transformations of a Mediterranean simultaneously suspended, stretched, and stratified within a heterogeneous modernity. The establishment of the coordinates of modernity at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the world was framed for the first time by a unique point of view and the universal eye of God was transferred to the typographies and the cartographies of power and knowledge that charted a European expansion on a planetary scale, provides an initial time scale and cultural framework for this study. Nevertheless the tributary histories that flow into the ‘‘modern’’ framing of the world, and the Mediterranean, also suggest deeper and more dispersive currents which draw us back in time while simultaneously projecting a radically different understanding of the present and its potential futures. The map becomes an altogether more fluid and fluctuating composition.

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the archive of the abject To propose a different way to ‘‘world’’ the Mediterranean is to recommend a way that acknowledges the cultural and ‘‘historical’’ intimacy of its multiple and diverse currents and components.≤ Rather than commence from the geometrically induced logic of barriers to be breached and differences to be bridged, Edward Said’s noted theme of overlapping territories and intertwined histories suggests a less rigid, more open comprehension of the making of a multiple Mediterranean. Such a perspective induces an important critical humility in the observer seeking to understand its complexities. Despite the attempts through ideological policing and national legislation to separate this multiplicity and diversity into quarantined realms, leading to a subsequent ‘‘clash of civilizations,’’ this mutability is profoundly pertinent for a contemporary Mediterranean where the Occident and the Orient, the North and the South, are evidently entangled in a cultural and historical net cast over centuries, even millennia. Yet if maps, movement, and mobility are clearly among the most obvious means for charting modernity, their contemporary restriction and blockage simultaneously also suggest another, darker and more disquieting account. The very right to travel, to journey, to migrate today increasingly runs up against the borders, confines, and controls of a profound ‘‘unfreedom’’ that characterizes the modern world. Of course, this does not touch the touted liberty of market forces and economic policies monopolizing the globe; rather, it refers to the gathering dusk that envelopes the refusal of rights and resources, leading to the eviction of so many into a no-man’s land without legal status or even recognition beyond that of being a nameless guest worker or ‘‘illegal’’ immigrant, condemned to inhabit the discarded regions of the abject.≥ In the twisted, asymmetrical human economy in which so many are losing their rights—that is, the right to immediate liberties secured by food, health, and education, rather than to the anonymous abstraction of ‘‘freedom’’—today’s walls, fences, surveillance, and detention announce discrimination, apartheid, exclusions, and new hierarchies. From the militarized U.S.–Mexico border and the Israel–Palestine Many Voices 3

wall to the internment camps dotted all over Europe, and increasingly over North Africa, we encounter macabre reminders of other ‘‘solutions’’ that sought to exclude and eradicate the outsider, the other. We are forced to take the measure of a world that is increasingly funneled into a one-sided management in which our ‘‘freedom’’ and ‘‘rights’’ are structurally dependent—not only economically but also politically and culturally—on their negation to others. It is not a question of a whim or bad faith or misunderstanding; it is a question of structural resources and their political management. Hence, the increasing attention and weight applied to the legal framing and construction of the immigrant, for in his or her juridical status the state most assiduously articulates its frontiers: Border guards, visas, passports, and detention are merely accessory to the legal definition whereby the state authorizes its actions, and itself. Today, individual states and the European Union propose a complex system of filters and channels that stretch outward into extraterritorial space, both on the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and over the horizon into the Maghreb. So Europe and the Mediterranean—how they come to be defined and regulated—emerge from a legal configuration in which human rights go largely unrecognized in the elaboration of juridical confines and citizenship. It is these that establish the borders between the ‘‘inside’’ and the ‘‘outside,’’ between belonging and expulsion. The ‘‘illegal’’ immigrant lies beyond the law and is fundamentally without rights. The nation-state, far from withering away, here reasserts its authority in managing the flow not so much of private individuals as of labor, skills, and competences in a complex symbiosis with the ‘‘laws’’ of the ‘‘free’’ market and its planetary developments. Who is let in and who is excluded has little to do with personal biography, persecution, or requests for political asylum. The apparently uncontrollable irruptions of the anonymous outsider, as immigrant but stretching away through shades of incomprehension to potential ‘‘terrorist,’’ become ‘‘events’’ that produce the pure and brutal inscription of power which configures decisions, governmentality, and ‘‘norms.’’ It generates the political environment and cultural ecology that seek to preempt and anticipate cultural and historical scenarios in order to colonize the world, its languages, its time, 4 Chapter 1

its becoming. As a preventive power structure, such a state of affairs seeks to direct and discipline the memories that you have not yet had. The future is already inscribed in the social, cultural, and racialized premises that police the present.∂ Hence, what is past and what is to come is never safe from the law of the victors. It is precisely in reworking the historical archive in all its cultural complexities and details that further prospects have to be promoted in order to evade a colonization which, seeking to control memory, puts its claims on life yet to come. To talk of the Mediterranean—of its past, present, and future—is to move in this disquieting space. Critical language travels along the lip between the known and the unknown, in transit between the familiar maps of a domestic interior and the hazy territories of the external world, between ‘‘our’’ way of life and that which exceeds its comprehension. Of course, such Manichean distinctions are merely place holders, simplified referents that serve to orientate thinking before the intricacy of the world. They are not, despite all the political, cultural, military, and legislative action they entail, necessarily real in any profound historical, epistemological, or ontological sense. They may, in a superficial manner, point to differences and diversity in a now acknowledged planetary complexity but not to absolute distinctions. So the borders are porous, particularly so in the liquid materiality of the Mediterranean. The outcome of historical and cultural clash and compromise is that borders are both transitory and zones of transit. They repeatedly draw our attention to the labor of translation: to confronting what arrives from abroad while simultaneously announcing the historical trauma of time that refuses to solidify in the existing state of knowledge. In this sense, critical thought as a border discourse is consistently haunted and interpellated by the invisible, by what fails to enter the arena of representation, by what is veiled or simply falls out of the field of vision of a predictable consensus. Borders (including those of knowledge and the disciplines) are patrolled. They inevitably reveal the essential violence on which the authority of the modern state ultimately depends to secure its legitimacy. Once inside, at least in the First World, this dimension usually slides out of view, and the more civil institutions of law courts, policing, education, and the meMany Voices 5

dia circulation of ideology take over. But the violence is always there, ready in exceptional moments to bloody and brutalize the tissues of everyday life. If the unwarranted police execution of a suspected terrorist in the London underground is the shocking signal of this paranoid patrolling exposing itself, then the militarization of everyday life in the most border-conscious nation in the world, Israel, is also the foretaste of our future. Before the decolonization of the 1950s, the southern boundaries of Europe were traced along the edges of the Sahara Desert: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt. This, today, has been transformed into a virtual space by European legislation, both in terms of the criteria imposed for the growing of foodstuffs for its markets and in the internment camps and surveillance installed to monitor illegal migration from the southern to the northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. For the border is not a thing but, rather, the materialization of authority. Here, then, something new is clearly emerging, a definitive sharpening in the rhetoric and tools of control: perhaps also the symptom of a certain, nervous recognition of the exhaustion of the liberal repertoire to absorb and annul the stranger. Of course, frontiers are not merely national or military; subtler ones exist that run inside the polity. They are the patrolled distinctions constituted by racism, by poverty, by gender, by dispossession and marginalization. If Marx’s concept of class once served to indicate this nation within the nation, today the complex articulations proposed by the Gramscian concept of the subaltern, subsequently reworked by postcolonial historians and critics, perhaps better serves to identify this constituency in both its immediate specificity and its global resonance. What is left out of global calculation and lives on as residue, refuse, and remnant, the world’s poor—the living dead seeking to survive on less than a $1 a day—is what comes to be socially, culturally, and racially classified in the abject pathologies of the subaltern. Whether it is the migrant and refugee blotching the global imminence of Occidental whiteness, or, contra the noise of progress, the unfathomable echo of a silent South, the consistent fear and terror that yesterday constituted the colonial space today infiltrates and haunts the modern 6 Chapter 1

metropolis.∑ In the insistence of what is considered a dead matter (the world of the colonized) but is very much alive, metropolitan space is increasingly zoned, categorized, cut up, and controlled by surveillance and policing. What for centuries, as Frantz Fanon pointed out, had been the characteristic of the colonial world—framing, objectifying, and alienating the ‘‘native’’ in the bestial categories of violence, savagery, and underdevelopment—is belatedly accredited as the space of a universal modernity.∏ The unacknowledged and unrecognized helots of a planetary order now jeopardize the boundaries, disrupting the desire for controlled difference and distance and rendering the management of multicultural public space both problematic and paranoid. It is the modern migrant who most acutely constitutes this constellation. Suspended in the intersections of economic, political, and cultural dispossession, she carries modern borders within herself. If the migrant’s body is directly inscribed in punitive legislation, her mobility exposes the instability of abstract distinctions and confines. This dramatic figure is not merely a historical symptom of modernity; she is, rather, the condensed interrogation of the very identity of the modern political subject. Her precariousness is ultimately also ours, exposing the coordinates of a worldly condition: the dark stain spreading on maps whose shapes dissolve their frontiers.π

Here race, racism, patriarchy, social discrimination, cultural hierarchy, caste, and class are concentrated in the continuities and discontinuities that emerge from the clumsy movement of the modern nation as it pushes its way through the uneven and unjust complexities of modernity. Today’s xenophobia—increasingly concentrated in the West on the fear of militant Islam (once exotically evoked in Hollywood images of swarms of Berber warriors storming Charlton Heston’s Christian Spain in El Cid; these days secured by tabloid photos of British passport holders attending a madrasa in Pakistan)—has much to do with the failure and unwillingness to work through a still largely unconscious European past in which colonialism and empire were (and are) distilled into national configurations of ‘‘identity,’’ ‘‘culture,’’ ‘‘modernity,’’ and ‘‘progress.’’ Many Voices 7

It is as though that history is now a closed chapter, composed only of a series of documents to consign to the museum and the textbook and not a contemporary presence molding and modifying the horizon of possibilities. History, as Walter Benjamin insisted, is always ‘‘now’’: The dead continue to speak and interrogate us.∫ Such a ghostly company haunts and disturbs the present, interrogates it, but it is rarely confronted; it is never answered. We remain dumb and sightless, nestling, as Gilroy puts it, in a state of ‘‘postcolonial melancholy.’’Ω To confront all that unfinished business, to work though the trauma to wake up to a history that would sunder the present and chart new directions, requires stepping beyond the security proposed by the blinding teleology of ‘‘progress.’’ To be brought to confront the mortality of ends and beginnings would be to embrace an ethics of limits, designed to sabotage the infinite prospects proposed by capital, the market, and their associated ‘‘freedoms.’’ To query a particular framing of sense is to insist on the critical necessity not only to undo such an imposition, but also to exhume what it has historically marginalized and culturally excluded. This, to return to border criticism, to criticism as a border discourse, is to recover the hidden dependency of Occidental modernity on what remains in the dark, over the frontier in the silenced territories of alterity. It is to analyze, disturb, deviate, and deconstruct a language and disposition of powers which unilaterally manage the ‘‘world picture,’’ deciding who gets to be represented and who does not. There exists a well-known photograph, taken by Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria in the 1950s, of a veiled woman on a scooter. The image, in its stark coexistence of seemingly separated worlds, underlines that there is no simple relationship with modernity; there is, rather, a series of complicated ambivalences within it. A disseminated modernity is certainly neither homogeneous nor one sided. An archaeology of the present, where the very powers that elaborated it via exclusion and negation, here becomes central. The Sardinian Marxist and Mediterranean thinker Antonio Gramsci insisted that struggle or conflict lay not between tradition and modernity, but between the subaltern and hegemony. This historical and conceptual perspective radically alters the whole critical axis. It charts within 8 Chapter 1

modernity itself the political, cultural, and historical complexities that compose the present. It is also here, as another dissident Italian voice proposed, that it becomes possible to separate ‘‘progress’’ from ‘‘development’’ (Pier Paolo Pasolini)—that is, to uncouple them and set them in a critical relationship which strips them of their purely instrumental and economical logic; that denudes them of their metaphysical mission and brings them back to earth to be transformed into openended terms of political debate and inquiry.∞≠ In this archive of the negated and the denied, the very identity of modern ‘‘Europe’’ emerges through a dependency on an alterity that is objectified in the absolute difference proposed by the German and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt of the ‘‘enemy,’’ identified internally with the ‘‘Jew’’ and externally with Islam (from the ‘‘Saracens’’ to the ‘‘Turks’’).∞∞ The history of this animosity is the flip side of conquest and the preservation of the limpiezza de sangre, or purity of blood, propagated in the Spanish Reconquista and subsequently extended, via the rationalizing protocols of both religion and science within the colonial enterprise, to the rest of the planet. At one end of the Mediterranean, the Arabs, the Jews, and the Rom were expelled from Europe; at the other, with the conquest of Constantinople and the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks, both Muslims and Jews returned to become once again internal, integral, to its history. If in the thirteenth century the Mosque, or Mezquita, of Cordova—the third largest in the world— was consecrated as a church and subsequently a cathedral, in Istanbul the Byzantine Hagia Sophia, or Church of Holy Wisdom, was converted in 1453 into a mosque. As Gil Anidjar has convincingly argued, we are constantly brought to ‘‘the image of Jews and Muslims in Europe, as the history, therefore, of Europe.’’∞≤ Today, the patrolling of such borders and fears is focused and amplified in the boat people attempting the new middle passage across the Mediterranean. While the major flux of present-day immigration into western Europe is actually from the East, from both eastern Europe and Asia, the markers of race, religion, and racism frequently skew the question into a spiraling moral panic obsessively staring south toward Africa and Islam. Here a previous history—that of a multiple and mutable Mediterranean—is inadvertently evoked, only to be rapidly Many Voices 9

shut down and silenced. Arabs and Africans, mute objects of a feared alterity, seemingly spew out of an immense and unknown continent that has been reduced in the world media to the wild site of the wretched of the earth: endemic famine, dictatorships, genocide, child soldiers, sexual mutilation. This is an Africa that is all but invisible to Europe and the First World. It is certainly an Africa without recognition, an Africa without rights. Now, the critical appropriation of this history requires far more than the adoption of contemporary tolerance in the face of diversity. It requires precisely that deconstruction of being and becoming Europe that has been persistently proposed by a brilliant Jewish Algerian philosopher from the African shore of the Mediterranean: Jacques Derrida. To critique the language that establishes its premises through a violent annihilation of alterity (this could equally be a definition of the modern European state or the modern, Cartesian subject), is, as the Italian critic Sandro Mezzadra rightly suggests, to address the ‘‘very definition of the European ‘we.’ ’’∞≥ Edward Said once pointed out that we all move within the boundaries of imaginary geographies in which what is available is not the truth as an absolute, a-historical measure of the world, but a constructed series of representations.∞∂ The Mediterranean, as both a concept and a historical and cultural formation, is a ‘‘reality’’ that is imaginatively constructed: the political and poetical articulation of a shifting, desired object and a perpetually repressed realization. Here the dominant language of mimesis gives way to a more ragged narrative that arrives through a rent in Occidental sense to insist on another way of telling, another way of being, in which the gesture of the body, the performance of a poetics, the distillation of being in a sound exceeds the conclusive logic of a monument, a book, a map, an archive, a law. Brought on to uneven and uncertain ground, the smooth platform of our pretensions disappears from beneath our feet; we are brusquely cast loose from the deadly anchorage of ‘‘progress’’ and released into another world. It is this reinscription of our selves within the contours of ‘‘the continuing critique of Western Logos that will characterize the emergence of a post-colonial polity and poetry.’’∞∑ Such a poetics, akin to Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s noted 10 Chapter 1

proposition of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, promotes a disturbance that renders inherited understandings deeply problematic.∞∏ The conceptual language that seeks to discipline and expose reality to its rationality is consistently confounded by a ‘‘creativity’’ in which established forms—the novel, the visual arts, music— give way to the testimony and tempos of a differentiated becoming that invariably deviates established framings. The critical categories that previously directed sense are profoundly affected by an excess, even delirium, of sense that promote a provocative reworking of prospects able to resonate with the immanent promise of a perpetual detour. In this gap, this interval, in this disparity between words and things, there emerges the space of representation; this is also the space that promotes and produces subjectivity. Both acquiescing and saying no to power occurs here. The horizontal plane of representation that apparently spins endlessly around itself in a closed circuit of infinite semiotitude remains perpetually vulnerable to a vertical axis where we are pulled into the sedimented depths of time where bodies bleed, birth and death occur, lives are lived.∞π This is not to suggest that the representations of life are somehow more distant from ‘‘reality’’ than its phenomenology; both are real. It is, rather, to point out that in the field of vision, many things are shown, but not everything is seen: the frame, the angle, language, aesthetical and ethical choice signal a duplicity in which representations are invariably shadowed and sustained by repression. To focus and foreground is simultaneously to blur and overlook. Nevertheless, it is impossible to reach behind this syntax to touch a truth that is somehow more ‘‘real,’’ more genuine. A way of seeing and receiving can, however, be identified. An absolute authority, supposedly secured in the immediate, technological transparency of modern-day vision (the ‘‘equipment-free aspect of reality . . . has become an orchid in the land of technology,’’ said Walter Benjamin), can be rendered vulnerable to the interrogations that emerge from what it shows but fails to ‘‘see.’’∞∫ From within the representational economy itself signs emerge to blur the vision and scratch the lens of transparency. These may be molecular processes suggesting lines of flight from the possessive, Many Voices 11

panoptical gaze; there are also paths of subjectivity, affects induced by dynamics that sweep through and beyond single management. From the ‘‘natives’’ who write back in the languages and literature of the colonizing power to the Internet blogs of besieged Baghdad, repressive and repressed representations are conjoined like night and day, life and death. The other of language—silent, subversive, unspoken—is also, as Derrida has consistently argued, within language. It is here that the narrative of authority, which presents itself in terms of ‘‘reality,’’ together with the power of narrative, invariably relegated to the ‘‘imaginary,’’ cross and contaminate each other’s paths. It is also here that his-story and the insistent navigation of Ulysses, intent on reaching the self-confirmation of home, loses its bearing and drifts before winds sustained by the polyphonic challenge of a multiple modernity and polycentric Mediterranean.

whose mediterranean? The ‘‘Mediterranean’’ as an object of study is fundamentally the product of modern geographical, political, cultural, and historical classifications. It is a construct and a concept that linguistically entered the European lexicon and acquired a proper name in the nineteenth century. There it simultaneously offered both the origin and the contemporary theater of European power. Napoleon’s expedition to seize Egypt in 1798–99 from the Ottoman Empire was both a military and a cultural exercise, intent on not merely colonizing but also on fully appropriating the Orient. In its mixture of military power and scientific enterprise, this expedition provided a dramatic precedent for the interweaving taxonomies of power and knowledge that subsequently formed the imperial core of ‘‘Orientalism.’’ In this history the Mediterranean comes to be suspended in a net woven by the objectification of alterity and the civilizing mission with which modern, ‘‘progressive’’ Europe has taken possession of the rest of the world. Within this frame the Mediterranean is transformed into an aesthetic and cultural measure: Its very ‘‘backwardness’’ and difference hold up to modern Europe the mirror of a lost world of antiquity, uncontaminated nature, 12 Chapter 1

and pristine ‘‘origins.’’ Although seemingly safely consigned to the margins of modernity, the Mediterranean nevertheless has consistently disturbed that picture, both in the violent resistance to the European appropriations of its southern and eastern shores and in the accompanying return of histories that unexpectedly breach the boundaries between past and present. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the foreign ministries of Europe were full of talk of the ‘‘sick man of Europe.’’ The reference was to the then declining Ottoman Empire. Why is it, that more than a century later, its more secular and modern offspring, the contemporary state of Turkey, has to negotiate a reentry? When, why, and how did it stop being part of Europe? After all, at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Ottoman Empire was perhaps the most powerful state in Europe and probably only fell behind European technology in the eighteenth century. The foundational violence of the modern state that perpetuated the genocide of Native Americans in the United States, the massacres of the colonized populations of European empire from the jungles of Latin America and Africa to the deserts of Namibia and Australia, was faithfully repeated by a modern Turkey which, in establishing its nationalist credentials, perpetuated the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1922.∞Ω In the answers to the question lies the fashioning of a world, and a Europe, that frequently feels secure only when purged of ‘‘foreign’’ bodies. The numbing simplicity of such divisions is, of course, fictitious and illusory, particularly as the criteria of evaluation—between modernity and the archaic, between Europe and its other, between secularism and religion—can play strange tricks, with a Turkey that may be more ‘‘modern’’ (for example, its present-day laws on abortion) and less ‘‘fundamentalist’’ than many areas of contemporary, ‘‘Christian’’ Europe and North America. The response to the Turks—and the centuries of apprehension that resonate in that phrase—draws on energies that lie well beyond a reasoned or historical evaluation. It is the same nebulous psychosis of the fear of being ‘‘overrun,’’ ‘‘invaded,’’ ‘‘contaminated,’’ and ultimately ‘‘destroyed’’ that also leads to the similarly blanket, but ungrounded, characterization of ‘‘Muslim women,’’ whether in Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Britain, Germany, or France, as a pathology. Many Voices 13

Women in Algeria are subsumed under the less-than-neutral labels of ‘‘Muslim women,’’ ‘‘Arab women’’ or ‘‘Middle Eastern women,’’ giving them an identity that may not be theirs. Whether the so-called Muslim women are devout, or their societies are theocracies, are questions that the label glosses over. The one-sidedness of the prevailing discourse on difference between women would appear intolerably grotesque if it were suggested, for example, that women in Europe or North America be studied as Christian women!≤≠

Such blocks, and blocking, of thought are very much part of a prevalent, common sense and bestow a powerful, almost implacable, grip on European and Occidental understandings of how the Mediterranean is to be differentiated and catalogued. This brings us back to Napoleon and the leap of both political and cultural power from Paris to the Pyramids. The multidisciplined study of antiquity, sealed in the nineteenth-century return to the Greco-Roman figuration of the Mediterranean as mare nostrum, together with the associated communality of an ancestral Latinized, European past, served to coagulate a contemporary incorporation of North Africa in an increasingly disciplined colonial project. In the dying decades of the nineteenth century, a by now global imperialism, explicitly sanctified in the Conference of Berlin (1884–85), reached its brutal apex in the ‘‘scramble for Africa.’’ It was in such an atmosphere that the seeming neutrality of archaeology, the study of the classics, and the modern disciplines of geography, anthropology, and historiography collated the contemporary sense of the Mediterranean as an integral part of Europe in a deliberate act of recovery and resurrection. The other shores—Southern and Oriental—figure on maps once drawn up in imperial Rome; they now return in the nineteenth-century elaborations of foreign ministries in Paris, London, Berlin, and Rome: all those straight lines, decided on thousands of kilometers away, indicating the frontiers of the colonial entities of Africa and the Middle East. Imperialism as a modern Rome, ambassador of the civilizing process (once to Gaul and the savage forests and swamps of Britain and Germany, now to the darkness of 14 Chapter 1

Africa and an Orient—from Turkey to China—ensnared in archaic despotism) is, of course, central to the opaque poetical and critical force of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.≤∞ On a cartography that stretches from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Egyptian shoreline on the Red Sea, and subsequently northward up the coastline of the former Ottoman province of Syria (that is, present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan), as well as southward into the Horn of Africa and still farther eastward through Syria to Iraq, the Mediterranean and the Middle East were elaborated and divided up by frontiers and spheres of influence that were central to both the foreign policies and national self-fashioning of France, Britain, and Italy. In the case of Italy, ‘‘The program of the Risorgimento, in a more or less explicit fashion, paid tribute to the myth of empire inherited from ancient Rome.’’≤≤ The colonial presence of the French in Algeria, the British in Egypt, the Italians in Libya evoked a modernity that was nationalist in form and imperialist in its reach. The Mediterranean, including its other histories, languages, and horizons, continues to exist under these particular shadows. It is as though the modern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa, were construed and constructed to recite this particular historical script. Of course, this is a narrative that either denies or denigrates the historical and cultural caesura realized by the Arab expansion and Ottoman Empire between the eighth century and the eighteenth century, when all three shores of the Mediterranean, including the European, directly experienced hegemonies that arrived from the south and the east. At this point, a certain skepticism inevitably emerges toward the strategic logic of area studies and the scientific ‘‘neutrality’’ of the political sciences that perpetuate an earlier imperial logic and continue to deploy the ‘‘civilizing’’ metaphor of illness and cure measured against the ‘‘healthy’’ body of the West. What remains unobserved, unquestioned, is that it may well have been the Occidental corpus—its political and military powers, but also its knowledge and disciplines— that has procured the illnesses and diseases of the rest of the world. After all, who decides the roles of ‘‘doctor’’ and ‘‘patient,’’ and under what conditions are they identified? Such studies and ‘‘expert’’ opinions operate as though the world were a chess game in which only one Many Voices 15

of the players decides the rules.≤≥ Here the technologies of power and the power of technology become one. Since the sixteenth century, the hegemonic European power to invent, explain, and render transparent—hence, imitate God—becomes the demonstration of a justness that transforms itself into a mission to redeem the world. As Massimo Cacciari has put it, technology becomes the new theology: To avoid doubt and disaster, it needs to imagine itself in the service of human happiness.≤∂ The power of the image and the prioritized political space of the media exist not just for the policymakers in the Pentagon or for a Berlusconi demagogically rewriting and eradicating the rules of parliamentary democracy, but also for the anonymous and the dispossessed. Kamikaze or suicide acts are also media acts. Further, they are acts that dramatically reduce the space between centers of power and previously ignored peripheries. Hijacked planes crashing into the world’s financial center is a language that cannot fail to resonate with a structurally resentful subalternity worldwide. The machinations of money, religion, and politics may well be complex, so complex that they crisscross and continually confound the simple lines between wealthy elites and poverty, east and west, business and cia stratagems, but the symbolic ground swell they release is not contained by sophisticated analyses of explicit political players and ideological groupings violently pursuing their ‘‘sense’’ of the world.≤∑ Beyond the evaluation of political programs and strategies lies the obdurate force of more turbulent, untold histories. The ‘‘mass’’ or ‘‘multiplicity’’ that is implicit in this calculation is persistently consigned to the role of an anonymous, seemingly indecipherable, cipher. Its differentiated, structural role in the question is simply ignored, and institutional power goes on talking only to what it recognizes: institutional power. However, even if set apart in brackets, the world’s majority remains crucial to all of the equations. It refuses to consign itself to oblivion. Despite the continual attempts by experts to deny the links that would disturb and ruffle the critical speculations that they neatly set out as flat as a map, such a refusal resonates with the structural interrogation posed by the South of the world, by Fanon’s damned of the earth. 16 Chapter 1

This is not simply to unfurl the banner of Third Worldism. It is, rather, to recognize in the persistence of a worldly interrogation, sustained by structural poverty and injustice, that the Gramscian concept of the subaltern continues everywhere to interpret the world, extending the ‘‘Southern question’’ on a planetary scale. We are not talking here about ideological belonging—to Western ‘‘civilization,’’ to the house of Islam—that may provide the initial forms of representation. We are talking, instead, of historical and cultural structures in which the power to frame and explain the world disciplines the distribution of wealth (and poverty); of access (and non-access) to water, clean air, food, well-being, automobiles, air conditioning, and . . . democracy. All of this is largely put on hold, left simmering beneath the threshold of analytical recognition, while unexamined assumptions which equate ‘‘free’’ markets with democracy are marshaled as proof for critical verdicts on the malaise of the planet. It is here that allegedly sophisticated thinking and fundamentalist logic often become hopelessly entangled in unilateral missions of self-justification.

uprooted geographies To raise such objections to expert opinion and explanation is clearly to seek to return the Mediterranean to a more unstable set of relations, suspended in the complex oscillations of a planetary mesh. It is to work with an uprooted geography in which attention to historical detail and local ecologies dislocates a cartography previously secured in the abstract universalism of a discriminatory mapping. Opposed to a violently imposed transparency that simultaneously encourages and guarantees a one-sided appropriation, there is the prospect of a stratified, multidimensional process of recognition that indicates, without exhausting, differentiated localities. This latter style of ‘‘mapping’’ registers the limited validity of its representations, acknowledges the margins of repression that permit certain configurations to emerge while others continue to remain outside its reasoning. In what follows, I have therefore chosen to tap into the baroque logic of the ‘‘fold’’ (Gilles Deleuze) that creases the simple maps composed of Many Voices 17

historical events, taxonomies, and chronologies.≤∏ Here the tabular space—of the map, the canvas, the textbook—comes to be transformed into a topology that rapidly acquires depth when it is bent and deviated by excluded rhythms and dislocating narratives. Space is never empty or merely geometrical; it is always full of detailed, unfolding configurations. It is not only physical but also temporal; it is not a mute object but product and process.≤π This is also, and most obviously, a baroque space, for it flees the closure of planned, panoptical, measured, geometrical framing. It is also a traumatic space, for it forces us to consider the darkness out of which the image appears. It both arrests our vision and propels us out of the frame. It is also, to evoke another Mediterranean formation, an inconclusive, arabesque figuration, ‘‘drawing every element into an unlimited speech or song.’’≤∫ In both cases, the self-assured pedantry of the project is confused and confuted by the peregrinations of a thinking and being that are exposed, under way and out of joint with respect to the conclusive logic of a self-assured narrative. Here in the tentative registration of invisible histories, an unfolding geography materializes that sets Europe and the Mediterranean moving to a diverse set of rhythms—rhythms that requires a radicalized historiography to be recognized, if not yet represented. Writing itself becomes the site of such folds, creases, and detours, where sense runs in multilateral movement, always falling short of the conclusion. According to the great Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, the past renews itself constantly in a language—literary, poetical, musical—that lives close to the edge of the ineffable.≤Ω Here in its twist and turns, in its opaqueness, language sounds out the presence of an absence, proposing the barely apprehended expression of the unknown in ‘‘the abyss of the alphabet.’’≥≠ In an excess critically conceived by Michel de Certeau and Jacques Derrida, and poetically pursued by Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès, the drive for transparency that announces the certitude of home and the confirmation of the subject is consistently betrayed by an inconclusive and exilic language that is always under way. The disturbing materiality of writing—the hand, the body that produces a space in which the lives, events, and the past 18 Chapter 1

are interred—is not so much written over as written up and inscribed in the account. Writing here seeks to open a fold in time to be invaded by other times, by others. Such a multiplication of tempos, textures, and temporality deliberately undermines the objectivity of the optical order and the scopic regime of modernity, where ‘‘to see is to know.’’≥∞ The authority of the eye, and its ‘‘I,’’ transforms bodies into things to be catalogued and explained in a system of objects. Yet an ambiguity and anxiety also exist that consistently haunt this ‘‘primitive magic’’(Karl Marx), busily seeking to objectify (and commodify) the world in all its manifestations. The refusal to be catalogued and consumed in such a logic forces a passage across, and beyond, the line of vision. This is not to abandon that formation, that inheritance—Occidental humanism and its presumed possession of modernity—but, rather, to excavate it, to dig deeper into the folds, to expose its languages, to explore the profound ambiguities that we speak and that speak us. It is, insisting on its complex cultural and historical configuration, to push well beyond illusions of neutral knowledge shielded by critical distance and the abstract universalism of ‘‘scientific’’ protocols. In situating such a paradigm (T. S. Kuhn) or ‘‘world picture’’ (Martin Heidegger), we potentially leave space for a series of replies, queries, and interruptions. Washing against the shores of Occidental humanism—its subjective appropriation of the world and the subsequent possessive individualism that cultivates the colonial and imperial view—is the critical insistence of invisible histories that shadow the logic of lack and abundance. While lack codifies primitive underdevelopment, abundance signals modernity and progress. Modernity, its state form and liberal ideology, depends on the premises of property and possession. Without the means of taking possession of the world, without a legal claim that can be demonstrated in capital, you are structurally excluded. These are the very real limits of ‘‘freedom’’ and ‘‘democracy.’’ To recognize this implacable logic is to touch the unacknowledged incoherence of the Enlightenment. The price for those without property and possession, without power, is invisibility. Excluded from representation, removed from the calculus of modernity, other histories, other bodies Many Voices 19

and lives, are left to survive in the dark: broken narratives denied the coherence that comes with recognition. It is this structural exclusion that permits a certain representation of the planet to command our vision and rule its possibilities. The implosion of that division and distinction, and the radical unraveling of the hermetic border between the West and the rest of the planet, leads into a very different narration of the world as the Western template comes to be challenged. Explanations that are legitimated through a Western order transmuting automatically into a universal one become both problematic and the site of inevitable political, cultural, and physical conflict. Terms such as ‘‘democracy’’ and ‘‘freedom’’ increasingly refer less to the detailed workings of a particular political regime and rather more to the registration of a cultural constellation in which they provide the unchallenged conduits of Occidental choice and the universalization (even imposition) of a Western order.≥≤ At this point, legislating against the migrant other and conducting a ‘‘war against terrorism’’ reveals a war against the political articulation of differences; simultaneously, the argument that ‘‘tolerance’’ and the accommodation of difference nurtures ‘‘terrorism’’ increasingly gains purchase. Within the Occidental polity itself, ‘‘democracy’’ runs on without the hindrance of responsive representation. It is now mandated to exercise the ‘‘values’’ of the West as a universal agenda for the world. This is why the destruction of the Twin Towers is the symbol of the epoch of global terror, rather than the eight thousand Muslims slaughtered by ‘‘Christian’’ soldiers in Srebrenica or the hundreds of thousands exterminated in the genocide of Rwanda. In this disenchanted scenario, modernity appears to be consistently at war with the world. Its teleology, the aggressive accumulation of its progress, achieves self-confirmation in every corner of the planet through the incorporation, the cannibalization, even the annihilation of whatever resists its embrace: ‘‘Everywhere they’ve announced that I’d been tortured. . . . Tortured with electricity, you too know what that’s all about!’’≥≥ The freedom of modernity, its ‘‘right’’ to impose itself, to overcome and conquer whatever fails to reflect and respect its interests, is the deadly announcement of the structural absence of 20 Chapter 1

peace. The consensual middle ground that supposedly guarantees critical ‘‘balance’’ is here brutally annulled. The center no longer holds. We slip beyond inherited analytical frames into a landscape scorched by the reworking of disciplinary parameters seeking to respond to asymmetrical relations of power. This drives a critical wedge into the humanist paradigm that has historically hegemonized both the technical and analytical languages—that is, the cultural landscape—of the present-day planet.≥∂ Here, within this hegemony, it is necessary, as Pier Paolo Pasolini pointed out many years ago, to disrupt the commonplace and ‘‘cultivate the atrocity of doubt.’’≥∑ Language not only travels elsewhere—the French of Assia Djebar, the English of Derek Walcott—but is literally elsewhere. Representation, its languages, codes, and technology, is not only translated and transformed but also resisted, revalued, and rerouted. Obstacles lie in the path of language itself. Music, sounds, and silence, like extraneous linguistic, cultural, and historical matter strewn across the page, announce refusals to adopt a readily recognized representation or to settle within the boundaries of preexisting meaning. Here in the stubborn insistence of the nontranslatable, there in linguistic darkness, emerges the challenge of the incomprehensible, of what remains within and yet resists translation. Words slip away in the excess of language that refuses to mean, that deliberately confuses the desire of selfconfirmation with the oblique insistence of an elsewhere that repeats and renews language in a reply to power. Writing, like language itself, also and always contains the supplement of what lies beyond our sense. It announces something more, something else, for it insists on the body of language: language as a body for meaning rather than a mere means of communication. This is to rework hope and history in defiance of the categories that classify the existing world and, hence, inaugurate a style of comprehension that is open and necessarily incomplete. It is a language that subverts information and gestates the site of inscriptions; it denotes an interference, an interruption that reveals unsung connections, uneven ground, troubled waters, and secret palimpsests.≥∏ In what Paul Ricoeur would have called a ‘‘linguistic emergency,’’ the opacity and Many Voices 21

complexity of the ‘‘solution’’ insists on registering the ‘‘stranger’’ suspended in language.≥π Hence, the habitual is rendered homeless, for it is shadowed by the otherness of time, history, and becoming. Something lives on: a disturbance, a deviation, a detour that can never be eradicated, despite all attempts to reduce the world to the intolerant straitjacket of instrumental reason.

22 Chapter 1

chapter 2

A Postcolonial Sea Let me commence from the landscape of writing that mirrors and echoes Occidental design and desire and yet refuses to deliver up its secrets: Joseph Conrad’s undecipherable jungle, the unfathomable echo in E. M. Forster’s caves, the reticent mountains of Assia Djebar’s Algeria. These all reside in the postcolonial archive, in the stunted translations of alterity and the uneven politics of memory. The persistent testimony of such intractable traces comes to mind in considering the shifting currents and cultures of the Mediterranean. There is here, too, an excess that remains as such, present but beyond representation, that bleeds into the account, that occupies the gaps between words, the space between lines, as the invisible support of the page. Here, too, there is the registration of the silence that, as Edward Said put it, echoing Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, represents ‘‘the end of the humanistic trajectory.’’∞ Silence is not merely the site of the void; it is, rather, an interrogation that draws me beyond the conclusion of my words. Such an insistent supplement challenges the fixity of the past and the reification of its authority deposited in a one-sided remembering and representation. Here I am invited to reconsider the limits of historiography not so much in temporal terms—what is presumably cut off from the present and irremediably lost—but in the ontological instance of the refusal to reflect on other ways of being in time. This is to unhook a

particular language and its explanations from the chains of authority, allowing it to drift, navigating ambiguous waters toward another shore from where the locality and provincialism of its previous home can be delimited, if never completely abandoned. From such a prospect there emerges a diverse cartography in which both the resonance and dissonance disseminated in the Mediterranean can be recorded in the interleaving of historical, cultural, and ecological complexities via its continual transformation into the multitude of differentiated places. Inevitably, this leads to apprehending how this particular region, however fuzzy its limits and definitions may actually be, is a composite locality that is simultaneously part of a decidedly wider world—today, in the present epoch of ‘‘globalization,’’ just as it once was in the extensions of Alexander’s empire from Macedonia and Egypt to the Hindu Kush, or in the thirteenth-century ‘‘world system’’ overseen by Islam that connected Spain and Sicily via Cairo and Baghdad to China, southern India, and the Asiatic steppes. Here, seeking to ‘‘map’’ what Fernand Braudel referred to as a ‘‘global’’ Mediterranean on a series of charts that reveal its worldly location, both then and now, is to adopt a more vulnerable geography in which histories transport us beyond established confines while simultaneously returning us to that space by other routes: ‘‘Alexander on the Indus, the Arabs in China, or the Moroccans on the Niger.’’≤ It is the sea itself that promotes the adoption of a more fluid cartography in which the presumed stability of the historical archive, together with its associated ‘‘facts’’ and interpretations, is set to float: susceptible to drift, unplanned contacts, even shipwreck. Sedimented in the sea are histories and cultures that are held in an inconclusive suspension. This provocative presence indicates both a route and a bridge—a póntos, as Massimo Cacciari suggests—that link together a complex heterogeneity in an arch-pélagos: ‘‘The idea of the Archipelago is not that of a return to origins, but rather that of a counter reply to the historydestiny of Europe.’’≥ In more prosaic terms, I am also encouraged to adopt the perspective of such uprooted maritime geographies by the recent verdict of the authors of The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History: 24 Chapter 2

The distinctiveness of Mediterranean history results (we propose) from the paradoxical coexistence of a milieu of relatively easy seaborne communications with a quite unusually fragmented topography of microregions in the sea’s coastlands and islands.∂

It is in this arduous combination of communication and difference, of shared encounters and marked distinctions, of resonance and dissonance, that the Mediterranean proposes a multiplicity that simultaneously interrupts and interrogates the facile evaluations of a simple mapping disciplined by the landlocked desires of a narrow-minded progress and a homogeneous modernity.

the house of history The ‘‘realism’’ of historical narration, the ‘‘evidence’’ of documents, and the ‘‘verification’’ of ‘‘sources’’ are ultimately tropes, as Hayden White has taught us. Recognized as such, these constructions invite us to breach the boundaries of the self-assured confirmation of the self as the privileged subject of the historical tale. History continues to carry and propagate subjectivity in the name of a nation, a people, an individual, even in its most radical and oppositional forms, but that, as Walter Benjamin insisted in his famous theses on the question, is not history. It is merely the teleological triumph of historicism. In historical narration, in the representation of the past, sense, as Paul Ricoeur reminds us, emerges not from crude ‘‘facts’’ or isolated ‘‘events’’ but, rather, from the temporal articulation of a narrative, from an accounting of time that interpellates the teller and the tale with a critical responsibility.∑ The fragments that ‘‘flare up in a moment of danger’’ (Benjamin) to disturb the established explanation are far more than the afterglow of forgotten events—those associated with women, ethnic exclusion, and subaltern marginality—to be added to the institutional accounting of time and the subsequent securing of the past to an invariably national and nationalist framing: the English working class, Italian migration, the Algerian revolution. Faced with an ultimately uncontrollable excess and the insistent silence of the unrepresented, historiography is A Postcolonial Sea 25

inducted into the conditional writing of the unresolved, enumerating the persistent unfolding of lives that refuse to conclude—lives that continue to haunt the present, ghosting ready verdicts on the past. Such testimonies transport us beyond the passage of a monochromatic History into the multiplicity of histories and there invite us to consider the question of narrative, representation, and language itself as it critically folds back on our understandings of the past and the present. History does not arrive bleeding facts, dripping truths, flooding out of the past. It is elaborated, articulated, represented in language, organized in discourse, disciplined in institutions, relayed by authorities. The fragments of the past that erupt in the present direct us neither to the conclusions of official verdicts nor simply to the ineffectual carnival of the unresolved and the inconclusive meanderings of the multiple. Rather, they direct us to a dense constellation of past lives that shadow and query each and every attempt at telling. The fragment, the forgotten voice, the ignored body point to, even if it cannot represent, the disturbance and interrogation deposited in the history that has consigned us to our time and place. For another way of telling to emerge, the very premises of the history we have been told and inherited needs radically to be revaluated. Perhaps it is less a question of correcting the record than of changing the music—that is, of lending our ears to a very different manner of scoring the past and orchestrating the present. The question now becomes one of how to articulate a sense of the past that disavows the empty, homogeneous continuum of historical time apparently waiting to be filled by ‘‘progress’’ and produce a different, more open, less reassuring historiography. Of course, a transversal cut and subsequent interruption of the existing modality of historical knowledge has already emerged from the challenge of postcolonial studies and its proposed remapping of the past in the light of what the history of the West has occluded, marginalized, culturally repressed, physically (and metaphysically) eradicated. Such studies have accustomed us to the strategic sense of how the past is narrated via the simultaneous operation of representation and repression. Such studies, in contesting the very premises of re-presenting the past—and with it, the present— have also alerted us to the workings of a ‘‘nomad memory and inter26 Chapter 2

mittent voice’’ (Assia Djebar) and, hence, of the impossibility of a conclusive or definitive account. In this perspective, the house of history—where the West has traditionally secured its sense of mission on the world—is conceived not as a finished edifice but as a ruin. We do not simply open the door and walk into a well-lit archive, examining documents and comparing evidence. As a ruin, exposed to the winds of the world, history emerges from an untidy heap of rumble; beneath the official harmony of the past lie the vaster regions of sedimented traces and a variable topography of discarded memories and forgotten lives that reside in time, a time that is disturbingly always now. Perhaps this is why the metaphorical force of the sea, with its waves, winds, currents, tides, and storms, where the earth touches the sky in the infinity of a horizon that promotes a journey, navigation, dispersal, provides a more suitable frame for recognizing the unstable location of historical knowledge than the restricted location of a landlocked world and its dubious dependence on the fixity of immediate kinship, blood, and soil. So, turning to my immediate location, the Mediterranean becomes the site for an experiment in a different form of history writing, an experiment in language and representation where it becomes possible to engage with ‘‘the outside of the history of modernity’’ through points of resistance and refusal that continually relay us elsewhere, and leads to an inevitable ‘‘questioning of history as status quo.’’∏ The seeming solidity of the lands, languages, and lineages that border and extend outward from its shores here become an accessory to its fluid centrality. To be at sea is to be lost, and to be in such a state is to be vulnerable to encounters we do not necessarily control. Writing a history conceived in this manner is not to propose the linguistic mirror of empirical facts or an idealist teleology but, rather, to promote an open and incomplete composition where dimly perceived traces register the interval between sound and silence and where the pulsation of writing and the restrictive politics of interpretation can slide into the unexpected opening of a poetics. It is here that the nature of art insists, unexpectedly yawning open to revisit and rework the languages that contain us. The narrative is a passage—the Passagenwerk for BenA Postcolonial Sea 27

jamin, the uncanny working through of an analytical journey for Freud—a passage that commences without the promise of a conclusion. It leads to an apprenticeship in ‘‘learning to write with words soaked in silence’’ (Edmond Jabès).π Here history is not the ‘‘neutral’’ site of a science or universal truth; it is, rather, the place of remembering and a composing of fragments that reside in an interpretation that identifies the limits of representation and the threshold of silence. Here, incompleteness and dissonance hint at what is but is neither seen nor heard. Like the falsetas, the cascading constellation of notes between chords on the flamenco guitar, it sends us elsewhere, beyond the limits of the narrative and the narrator.

monotheism The complex geopolitical, cultural, and historical space of the Mediterranean concentrates our attention on the question of cultural crossovers, contaminations, creolizations, and uneven historical memories. It frequently reveals a stark absence, even structural failure, in a local critical vocabulary. From where I am currently writing, this might seem merely a local, Italian problem, but I believe that it has far wider implications about how we are talk about, reflect on, and live in the contemporary world. In contemporary Italy, for example, cultural and postcolonial studies overwhelmingly exist within the academic framework of an elsewhere and a distanced alterity—that is, in the literatures, cultures, and histories of the ex-colonial world that are transmitted in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. The postcolonial, as site of both analysis and critical interrogation, is always situated elsewhere, in another place and another language. This, I would suggest, is to operate with an extremely truncated and muted understanding of postcolonial criticism. It is, ultimately, to evade the insistent interrogations that are seeded in one’s own national past, in its historical and cultural articulation of Occidental modernity, in the unavoidable centrality of colonialism and imperialism to its formation. Above all, it is to avoid the postcolonial insistence on a radical revaluation of that narrative 28 Chapter 2

and the manner in which we have been taught to identify with it. The postcolonial, in other words, is not out there; it is in here, and it is central to who I am, who you are, who we are. This is not so much to criticize those who in Italy study literatures in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch from a postcolonial perspective as to index the institutional and cultural void around which their work often orbits, a void in the academic and intellectual heart of a culture and national formation that studiously evades an encounter with its own colonial past and its intricate involvement in the imperial realization of modernity. As such, the other remains object of the academic gaze, an inert element apparently incapable of disturbing the unilateral mechanisms of cultural incorporation and the silent hegemony of an apparently ‘‘neutral’’ knowledge. The overseas territories of Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, their violent appropriation and forceful occupation between 1882 and 1941 and the pedagogical imposition of Italian concerns via administration, legislation, and education, are somehow excluded from the composite making of modern Italy. Symptomatic of this state of affairs was the banning of the film Lion of the Desert and its account of the Libyan resistance led by the elderly Omar al-Mukhtar (subsequently hanged by the Italian authorities) against the fascist war machine in the 1930s. Released in 1980, it has never been shown in Italian cinemas. Colonial atrocities and war crimes in Africa and the Balkans have largely been consigned to a politically administered amnesia. In the immediate post-1945 period, while Addis Ababa was seeking unsuccessfully to bring the generals Badoglio and Graziani before a war-crimes commission, the Anglo-Americans, more intent on realizing an anticommunist front, turned a blind eye on the matter.∫ In the narration of the nation, the interrogation of the unspoken persists: in Africa alone, Libya, and the Horn of Africa for Italy; Algeria for France; the Congo for Belgium, Namibia for Germany; South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt for Britain, and so on. As Sandra Ponzanesi justly notes: The Italian presence in Africa is usually denied or marginalized as it is considered to have been historically too brief and geographically too limited compared to other European empires. Further, the association of A Postcolonial Sea 29

Italian colonialism with the apex of Fascism and its rhetoric has created a further reason for its negation in the national consciousness. We can say that for over half a century the African adventure, wrapped in mystery, exoticism and shame, has constituted our ‘‘postcolonial unconscious.’’Ω

To acknowledge this dimension would be to acknowledge both the essential violence in the very making of Occidental modernity and the historical responsibility—British, French, Belgian, German, Italian; all those straight lines imposed on a map in one nineteenth-century European capital or another—for the structural inequalities and contorted nationalisms of contemporary Africa. Let us step back briefly in time. Cultural studies, which for me is certainly neither a fixed discipline nor a rigid methodology, was historically born in a quarrel with the provincial prison house of a particular national culture and its formation: that of a version of Britain propagated by the hegemony of a certain sense of ‘‘Englishness.’’ Not by chance, it initially developed as a secession from English literature. This is a literature that over the past hundred years has come to be spoken and inhabited by other peoples and places, in India, the Caribbean, Africa. It has led to the increasing and necessary denial that Britain is the unique measure of the world, both politically and poetically. The very sense of English literature, and the identifications it proposes, radically changes connotation. Here, aesthetics and ethics— or, in another register, poetics and politics—become one. Here, the object reveals itself as a historical subject increasingly in the very languages that once reduced her or him to objecthood. This is to evoke a critical enterprise that goes well beyond the sociology of literature or a multicultured literary history, for it is to uncover a radical interrogation of one’s own cultural formation. Here, there is not simply the solution of adding the context to the text but, rather, the insistence on a historical problematic and cultural constellation that seeks to indicate both the resonance and the dissonance between language and land, between narration and nation, both today and yesterday, all suspended in the ambiguous density of the adjective ‘‘English’’ (or ‘‘French’’ or ‘‘Italian’’) that precedes and defines this literature and its associated cultural identity. 30 Chapter 2

‘‘As a political-theoretical project, then, postcoloniality has been concerned principally with the decolonization of representation; the decolonization of the West’s theory of the non-West.’’∞≠ To these words by David Scott, I think, we therefore also need to add the appendage that we are clearly dealing with the revaluation of the West itself in the ‘‘outraged light’’ (Adrienne Rich) of the history of such representations.∞∞ A further voice, this time coming from Jean-Luc Nancy: What is coming upon us is an exhaustion of the thought defined by the One and by a unique destination for the world: this thought is exhausting itself through a unique absence of destination, through an infinite expansion of general equivalence or, then again, and as a repercussion of this, in the violent convulsions that reaffirm the all-powerfulness and the allpresence of a One become—or re-become—its own monstrousness.∞≤

Against such a monotheism, we might like to conceive of a complex and composite world in which the ‘‘West can no longer call itself the West from the moment it witnesses the spread, across the entire world, of the form that could once have seemed to constitute its distinguishing features.’’∞≥ The languages of economic exchange; of technology; of modernity; of justice, democracy, and ‘‘truth’’ are no longer simply the West’s to define and impose. Here, strange as it may seem, we find ourselves encountering a modernity unexpectedly revealing its unsuspected religious substratum in an inflexible credo, mirrored in a moral righteousness that inflicts itself on the rest of the world. What emerges at this point, from the multiple responses of refusal, reformulation, and reconfiguration, is a direct challenge to belief in the unitary and unilateral revelation of the Occidental ratio, a rationale that ruthlessly represses its own particular history in the ferocious pursuit of a universal faith. The fundamentalism of Occidental humanism is exposed to reasons it is unable to accommodate; reasons that simultaneously confront and reveal the essential violence seeded in the brutal clarity of Western modernity’s proposed universality. Confronted by a disposition that has consistently closed its eyes to the carnage and terror that has proved essential to the dissemination of its ‘‘progress,’’ appeals to a counter-humanism that seeks to guard and A Postcolonial Sea 31

promote the ‘‘human,’’ however admirable, can ultimately appear critically insufficient.

at sea There is the Mediterranean, the sea itself, not so much as a frontier or barrier between the North and the South, or the East and the West, as an intricate site of encounters and currents. It immediately invokes the movement of peoples, histories, and cultures that underlines the continual sense of historical transformation and cultural translation which makes it a site of perpetual transit. We can return to that history, not so much with the idea of getting the historical record straight as to hear it again in order to listen to its other, repressed rhythms and reasons. The polylinguistic and polycultural composition of the Mediterranean encourages a reshuffling of the usual cards of national belonging and their partisan framing. Without the immediate explanations of nation and nationalism, a very different configuration emerges that proposes not so much the solace of cultural relativism as a complex and unfolding historical complexity. This encourages what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the creation of ‘‘conjoined and disjunctive genealogies for European categories of political modernity as we contemplate the necessarily fragmentary histories of human belonging that never constitute a one or a whole.’’∞∂ Most obviously, this runs counter to the temper of thought proposed by Occidental humanism: the monotheist perspective that structures the world in a subject-centred objectivity or ‘‘world picture’’ (Heidegger) which, in turn, reveals the unsuspected, even disquieting, relationship between the perspective of Quattrocento painting and later imperial design. From this perspective, we have inherited the centrality of visuality as the hegemonic modality of humanist knowledge, leading, via cartography, writing, and visual representation, to the continual reconfirmation of the I/eye in every corner of the globe. The gaze is rarely able to attend to listening, is unable to accommodate a reply. This is not necessarily to abandon the plane of the visual, as if we 32 Chapter 2

could. It is, rather, to insist on locating it on rougher ground, in the historical swell of a tempestuous sea, where no single perspective is ever able to fully impose its view. To insist on a shadow in the retina that disturbs the smooth surface desiring to render the world transparent to its gaze is also to supplement the limited politics of the eye/I with one of the ear, with a politics of reception and listening. Here the concept of the Mediterranean is set adrift to float toward a vulnerability attendant on encounters with other voices, bodies, histories. This is to slow down and deviate the tempo of modernity, its neurotic anxiety for linearity, causality, and ‘‘progress,’’ by folding it into other times, other textures, other ways of being in a multiple modernity. We are accustomed to think of the Mediterranean, at least since 1800, within terms overwhelmingly established by the cultural gaze that arrives from northern Europe—that is, from the ‘‘modern,’’ industrialized world, with its ‘‘progress’’ and nation-states, for whom the northern coast of the Mediterranean Sea (from Spain to Greece, but concentrated above all in Italy) represented its now superseded historical origins and preindustrial past. Here, potently evoked in Turner’s 1829 painting Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus—Homer’s Odyssey (National Gallery, London), the Mediterranean is the site simultaneously of antique civilizations and the sublime excesses of an untamed nature, all of which, of course, remains vibrant and highly central to contemporary, tourist appropriations of the region. This is the privileged site of the ‘‘Grand Tour’’ and, subsequently, Romanticism. Here the Mediterranean is largely represented only by its northern shore— largely as the cultural extension and historical periphery of modern Europe north of the Alps. Of course, Turner’s painting, and its evocation of a particular framing of time and place, remind us that it is Ulysses and the abstract singularity of ‘‘Nobody’’ (his reply to Polyphemus asking him to identify himself) who realizes the unilateral intent of returning home, thereby overcoming the challenge of a worldly heterogeneity announced in the numerous language of ‘‘poly-phemos.’’ Yet historically, the Mediterranean, and Europe itself, has until quite recently experienced a series of gazes and perspectives that have arrived from elsewhere, largely from its southern and eastern shores. To lend attention A Postcolonial Sea 33

to these possibilities permits us to reconfigure, in order to receive a more complex and hence more ‘‘open’’ and less domestic and habitual, understanding of both its past and present. A geopolitical area, a historical and cultural formation, is here transformed into a critical space, a site of interrogations and unsuspected maps of meaning. A North viewed from the South of the world represents not a simple overturning but, rather, a revaluation of the terms employed and the distinctions that have historically constructed the contrasts and the complexities of this space. This, as Franco Cassano suggests, is ‘‘not to think of the south in the light of modernity, but rather to think of modernity in the light of the south.’’∞∑ Here the Mediterranean proposes a composite historical site that interpellates, interrogates, and interprets the potential sense of Euro-America and the modernity and progress it presumes to represent. So I am not speaking of a simple addition of the negated sides of the picture: of the North African and Middle Eastern shores of the sea that constitute more than two thirds of the Mediterranean seaboard, or of the addition of one national unit to another, or of a simple teleology that commences with Egyptian, Phoenician and Greek civilizations and develops over three thousand years to be deposited in our modernity, unified by a common sea. I am proposing to think, rather, of the Mediterranean in a more malleable and unsettled manner, as a continual interweaving of cultural and historical currents. Here the relatively fixed confines of the sea, of the coastline, the plains, deltas, rivers, valleys, and mountain chains, have offered hospitality to often unforeseen historical processes and highly varied cultural formations. This unstable unity, brilliantly exposed in Fernand Braudel’s classic 1949 text La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Phillipe II has continually proposed a precarious state of affairs destined to disturb both instrumental political logic and refined critical conclusions. As a precise place, the Mediterranean evokes a continual intertwining of diverse roots and routes; in its longue durée (Braudel), it is testimony to both compounded sedimentations and disseminations. Aware of the ethical insistence that renders unsustainable the idea that culture, history, and language provide a stable and invariable sense of ‘‘home,’’ ‘‘hospitality,’’ and ‘‘belonging,’’ previous 34 Chapter 2

critical confidence is set adrift, encouraged in its vulnerability to seek new coordinates. How is it then possible to navigate this historical and cultural constellation armed with a sense of modernity that has developed in conditions of intercultural hybridization?

the illusions of home Seeking to reply to such a query would be to consider the Mediterranean, for example, in the light of Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s book Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350, and in the framework of the Jewish mercantile universe of the thirteenth century as described in Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land.∞∏ Both texts evoke a world that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Arab Spain to southern India, a world system—an economical, political, and cultural organization—that was centered on Baghdad and Cairo, serviced by financial and mercantile systems established in the Arab world from the eighth century onward (later to be copied by the Italian merchants of Venice and Genoa). Europe here was certainly ‘‘underdeveloped’’ and in the periphery of a ‘‘world system,’’ a system— and this, perhaps, should be underlined—that was not dominated by any single power. This is the intricate world traced in the massive twelfth-century floor mosaic of the Tree of Life, replete with Arabic letters and Persian motifs, of the Cathedral of Otranto. A rapid glance at Ghosh’s In an Antique Land—in part based on the fundamental five-volume work of Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (1967–88)—reveals a Jewish community in the Arab world of the thirteenth century that reached westward from Cairo to Sicily, north Africa, and Spain, as far as the Straits of Gibraltar, and east, down the Red Sea to southern India. It was a commercial and cultural system sustained by travel, correspondence, and kinship and suspended in a hybrid Arabic–Hebrew dialect that included the transliteration of written Arabic in Hebrew characters. The funeral instructions of Anna, wife of the Norman Drogo, who died in Sicily in 1149, are ‘‘written in three languages (Greek, Latin, and Arabic) and four alphabets. The Arabic is written in one corner in Arabic characters, A Postcolonial Sea 35

and in another in Hebrew characters.’’∞π Such modalities of networking, stitched together in familial, commercial, and religious ties, articulated the Mediterranean in a multilateral cultural complexity that stretched outward to embrace much of the then known world. Referring to the religious commentary that united Hebrew communities in the Islamic world of the eleventh century, the historian Henri Bresc observes: The personal history of R. Maslî’sh is a clear illustration of the community of thought that united local commentators and respected teachers, the geonim, installed in major institutions in the heart of the Islamic world. Leaving Palermo with a cargo of Sicilian silk to trade in Egypt, he reached Palestine, and then Baghdad in order to study with Hay Gâôn, who will put him in contact with the Patriach of the Nestorians, an expert of Biblical exegesis, to discuss a delicate point of interpretation of the Psalms. In another moment in his life he enters into contact with the nâgîd of Granada, Samuel Naghrîla, to whom he dedicates his book on Hay Gâôn.∞∫

It was along the Mediterranean–Indian Ocean axis that the crucial digit of modern science, transmitted by the Arabs to a suspicious and superstitious Christian world, arrived: the sense of nothing—that is, the zero.∞Ω In the same period, the initial opening up of the East to medieval Europe, witness to Italian merchants and papal emissaries arriving in China, was permitted by the Mongol conquest and control of the Asiatic steppes. Histories, cultures, and peoples both of the Mediterranean and from a distant elsewhere irredeemably modified the cultural configurations and historical horizons of this sea. Cultural routes and commercial journeys, as well as pre-national modalities of identification, have subsequently been absorbed and regulated, if not buried in oblivion, in the more rigid demarcations imposed by modern colonial wars, nationalisms, and the freezing of frontiers. From a historical point of view, the Mediterranean region has never been unified since the fall of the Roman Empire; it has in fact frequently been at war with itself. The result of such divisions is that many elements of its history have seemingly disappeared into the silence of time. There is, most obviously, the almost complete absence 36 Chapter 2

of the Muslim Mediterranean from the Occidental narration of the sea—the deliberate ignoring of the complex historical and cultural networks that Islam provided from the Atlantic to central Asia, and then southward to India and Africa and the portals of the Pacific. The great Chinese admiral Zheng He who reached the coast of east Africa in the early decades of the fifteenth century with the giant oceangoing junks (each manned by a thousand sailors) of the imperial fleet was a Muslim. Only yesterday, a large part of the Balkans sought to murderously annihilate its Ottoman and Islamic past. This particular Mediterranean, site of such intricate and undigested histories, traditionally divided by religious differences, often inhospitable until 1800 because of corsair activity yet simultaneously united by the pilgrimages of the diverse peoples of the Book, seemingly withdraws from immediate historical comprehension, for it exceeds the categories that we have been accustomed to employ. The symptoms of this other history, subsequently veiled by the nineteenth-century uniformity of Hellenic ‘‘classicism’’ and European nationalism, continues to emerge, however, in the incredible composition of the Mediterranean diet: the oranges, lemons, and rice introduced by the Arabs from the Far East; eggplant from India; peaches and cypress trees from China via Persia; sugar cane brought from India to Egypt and then introduced to Cyprus in the tenth century and Arab Sicily in the eleventh century, eventually migrating westward out into and across the Atlantic to the Americas, from where tomatoes, prickly pear, potatoes, beans, maize, chili, and tobacco were to arrive. Such signs and flavors invite us to reconsider the Mediterranean in the questioning light of this inheritance. The closed image of the Mediterranean world is rapidly opened up by a series of interrogations that refuse to disappear. The military confrontation between Spain and Morocco in July 2002 over an uninhabited island in the Mediterranean provides the unexpected testimony of the power of history. We are immediately drawn back to a sea dominated by Muslim maritime power, with Spanish garrisons clinging precariously to the coast of North Africa, nervously observing the seasonal passage of nomadic Berbers while seeking to contest Barbary Coast corsairs. It was these very same corsairs who sacked Sorrento in 1558 and then, when the A Postcolonial Sea 37

Spanish authorities of Naples refused to pay the ransom, sold the women and children in the slave markets of Tunis and Istanbul. Medieval Christian Rome also had its slave markets, as did the Byzantine duchy of Naples. Sixteenth-century Trieste sold Turkish slaves to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, while in Cagliari the slaves that were on sale were provided by Christian pirate vessels raiding North Africa. As late as 1571, Moscow was burned down by Mongolian raiders, who regularly consigned their Russian and Polish captives to the markets of Istanbul. It has been estimated that between the fifteenth century and the nineteenth century, millions of slaves were present on both sides of the Mediterranean.≤≠ While European attention was exclusively focused on Christian prisoners chained in Algerian galleys and prisons, their plight serviced by extensive religious and secular networks for their eventual ransom, a veil has historically been drawn over the thousands of Muslim prisoners, coming from as far afield as central Africa and Asia, who were captured and commercialized in a Europe that considered itself the source of enlightened progress and freedom. So this is a fluctuating, more ambiguous world in which El Cid fought for both Christian and Muslim princes and paymasters; in which the slaughter of Charlemagne’s rear guard in the passes of the Pyrenees was the work not of infidel Arabs, as the Song of Roland would have us believe, but of Basques who were probably pagan. Again, the careers of noted Muslim corsairs from the Barbary Coast are revealing: The career of the Barbarossas, sailors from Lesbos converted to Islam, who settled first in Djerba then at Djidjelli, and provided transport for Spanish Moslems who wanted to leave the Peninsula, later becoming corsairs and, finally, after 1518, rulers of Algiers—this whole episode was not an accident. Neither was the career of Dragut, another Greek whom we find in 1540s on the Tunisian coast and in 1561 installed at Tripoli in Barbary, in place of the Knights of Malta whom the Turks had expelled five years earlier.≤∞

In the late sixteenth century, when the Corsican Hasan Corso was one of its rulers, Algiers was home to some ten thousand European renegades, of whom six thousand were Corsican.≤≤ It is also Braudel who 38 Chapter 2

reminds us that before avid nationalisms exercised their sway, Greek ‘‘natives’’ tired of their Venetian overlords and imposed feudal ties frequently acquiesced with Turkish conquerors, as in the case of the Ottoman seizure of Cyprus and Crete, just as they abandoned the Venetian republic for better conditions of employment in the fleets of Istanbul.≤≥ Realities, apparently so distanced in time, space, and culture, reveal a surprising proximity before a common marine horizon. The Mediterranean as a sea of migrating cultures, powers, and histories continues to propose a more fluid and unstable archive, a composite formation in the making, neither conclusive nor complete. Today’s immigrants from the south of the planet, however feared, despised, and victimized by racism and social and economic injustice, are the historical reminders that the Mediterranean, firmly considered the origin of Europe and the ‘‘West,’’ has always been part of a more extensive elsewhere. If its ‘‘internal’’ constitution has, as we noted in the case of its diet (but the observation could be extended to the complex, migratory weave of its languages, its literatures, architecture, and music), always depended on ‘‘external’’ forces, its histories, cultures, and peoples (including 27 million Italians) have also consistently abandoned its shores for other places. If Ulysses is the mythical figure of the traveler, the stranger, with which that history commences, it is once again with the traveler and the stranger that this history continues. Alongside the reintroduction of its southern and eastern shores, of its African and Asian components, there also exists the continuing interrogation that arrives from the confines of the fluctuating and floating state of the Mediterranean. As Braudel famously reminds us, even the most generic of geopolitical definitions that seek to identify the limits of the Mediterranean (the famous palm line to the south and olive growth to the north) find their criteria superseded by the historical waves and cultural fluxes that roll outward toward the Baltic (announced in the presence of imperial Viking guards in tenth-century Constantinople); eastward into the Levant and beyond; west out into the Atlantic; and south, over North Africa into the sub-Saharan zone of the continent. This is to recognize Slav, German, Arabic, and AfriA Postcolonial Sea 39

can histories as an integral part of the Mediterranean’s fluid state, its peoples, histories, and cultures. It is all too easy to forget that the Nile is also a Mediterranean river, just as Islam was and is a European religion. These are all elements—despite historical chapters of intolerance and attempted eradication—that continue to reverberate in contemporary Spain, the Balkans, and the modern European metropolis. A scholastic image exists of the Mediterranean as the source of European culture: A Greek poet plucks the strings of his lyre on the shores of the Aegean Sea and chants the first lines of the Iliad. Behind this image lies a constellation of histories that are certainly more confused, but also far richer, in which ethnically ambiguous elements and cultural complexities pulsated without concern for the later ideological cleansing exercised by modern European historiography, classical aesthetics, and Hellenic scholarship, all jointly pursuing their shared faith in the unique destiny of an apparently homogeneous Europe. In the Athenian agora, wheat and slaves from the colonies on the edge of the nomadic world of the steppes bordering the Black Sea mixed with urbane Egypt and cosmopolitan Persia. Fifteen centuries later, this is also the mobile world of the Jewish communities in the Arab universe described by Ghosh that stretches outward from Cairo, along North Africa to Arab Sicily, and eastward down the Red Sea and the port of Aden to southern India. The invasion of dar al-Islam, the house of Islam, by the Crusades (1096–1250), and the subsequent colonization of the Holy Land and Syria, needs also to be read as an attempt by the then ‘‘underdeveloped’’ periphery to appropriate the riches of the center. This was most brutally exposed in the Fourth Crusade of 1204, when the ‘‘Franks,’’ transported by the Venetian fleet, sacked the Christian city of Constantinople and then simply returned home with the booty, leaving the Venetians to administer what they had violently appropriated. After the fall of the Venetian state of Constantinople in 1261, it will be the Genoans who sell slaves, transported from the Black Sea and southern Russia, to the Mameluk authorities in Cairo (the land route being blocked by the antagonist Mongol power ruling Persia and Mesopotamia). For the Arab commentators of the time, the Franks were the barbarians who destroyed the cities of Palestine in a series of mas40 Chapter 2

sacres, acts of enslavement, and cannibalism, all in the name of their God.≤∂ A fixed image of the Mediterranean disciplined by the Northern gaze—its romanticism, classicism, nationalism, and ‘‘progress’’—can unexpectedly open up to expose a series of interrogations that refuse to disappear. This is, of course, obscured in the epistemological violence of liberal thought, deposited in the implicit knot of race and civilization, where it is always the former that ultimately disciplines and defines the latter. Whose civilization becomes the measure of the world requires a comparative measure in which the Darwinian ‘‘progress’’ of the race is always lurking in the wings to provide the justification of an unjust power. It bestows an inheritance of hierarchical and racialized recognitions that continue to operate after the seeming conclusion of the colonial moment, even within the new, postcolonial state and its own oligarchies of local power. Reading the great Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, I am always struck by the historical slide her language traces from the tortured body of the colonized to the body of the present-day torturer. Both reside in the name ‘‘Algeria’’: the ex-colonial state that has become a state of emergency, sanctified in the name of a ‘‘nationalism without a nation’’ (Abdelmalek Sayad).≤∑ In the vicious mimicry of the legitimated violence of an Occidental policy, the post-independent state—in Africa, as elsewhere (and Europe is not immune to these tendencies)—atrophies politics in the brutal barter house of power. Modern nationalism, the fierce child of colonialism, defends the dead husk of an empty abstraction. Its unique program is to occupy the apparatuses of the state precisely to perpetuate power. Here the pedagogic and punishing logic of a ‘‘modern,’’ European inheritance transforms dreams of cultural and political freedoms into a perpetual nightmare, where the long ‘‘night of colonialism’’ (Assia Djebar) seems destined to last forever. Finally, to elaborate a sense of place, of belonging—that of the Mediterranean—ostensibly implies the registration of borders and limits, as a minimum, between an inside and an outside, between the cultivated place of the domesticated scene and the strangeness and disturbance of the external world. After Freud, but, as Jean-François A Postcolonial Sea 41

Lyotard reminds us, already acknowledged in Greek tragedy, we know this home is illusory.≤∏ The foreign, the repressed, the unconscious manage to infiltrate the domestic space; the door is porous. As Georg Simmel noted in the case of the door, the closed and the open touch each other not in the dead geometry of a separation, but in the sense of a continual exchange.≤π The Mediterranean, too, is a historical and cultural hinge of this type. We live in the uncanny, where the repressed and the negated complete the architecture of our histories. Read and received in this manner, the Mediterranean becomes the site of an ongoing and unfolding critique of the ‘‘progress’’ which has sought to enclose and explain it over the last five hundred years that constitute ‘‘our’’ modernity.

sounds On this threshold, and witnessing the journey of language, the transit of history, and the always incomplete constructions of ‘‘home,’’ I will conclude with a further, telling, expression of unrelenting historical complication: that bequeathed by the cultural testimony of music. Musical languages invariably signify and sound out the composite realization of a differentiated communality; they give voice to the invisible. Listening to Oum Kalthoum, the great twentieth-century Egyptian singer discussed by Edward Said in Musical Elaborations, we can tune in to an overarching trajectory that weaves together the Mediterranean inheritance of Arab music and, for example, Neapolitan song. The streets, squares, and stone; the form of a city: Do these contours also shape its sounds? Has the ‘‘spaciousness’’ of a rural blues from the Mississippi Delta or country music from the U.S. Southwest something to do with the width of horizon and the breadth of sky in such localities? Similarly, the hard streets of urban Chicago are seemingly inscribed in the insistent bass and cutting intercessions (all those hard-edged guitar lines and rumbling saxophones) of the urban blues, or the infinite ‘‘emptiness’’ of the desert in the arabesque improvisations of Arab sonorities. Such potential correspondences might per42 Chapter 2

suade us to return to the immediacies of place in reconsidering music, a language that seemingly floats free of precise location. For the history of place is itself an archive of sound, a collection of musical accents and accidents, an accumulation of historical notes, an orchestration of cultural traces. If sounds historically emerge from certain places, they are nevertheless destined to travel in a manner that rapidly exceeds the frontiers imposed by local identities and immediate boundaries. Italian opera and German symphonic music—or, more recently, reggae and rap, these days encouraged and amplified by the globalizing media—are obvious examples. Yet localities inscribed in sound do stick out and sometimes remain as though untranslatable. Popular Neapolitan music is surely an example of the latter. When songs such as ‘‘Te voglio bene assaje,’’ ‘‘Santa Lucia,’’ ‘‘Lacreme napulitane,’’ ‘‘O sole mio,’’ and ‘‘Funiculì Funicalà’’ travel—invariably, in the first instance, to immigrant communities in the New World—they evidently remain immune to the musical and cultural stimuli of a fresh context. They exist, and resist, as museum pieces, soaked in nostalgia, evoking a particular city, the sound of a largely imagined community living by a sunlit sea beneath a volcano, institutionalized in the musical celebration of the Neapolitan dialect. Proposed as the sound of authentic ‘‘roots,’’ the genuine expression of street life inscribed in local musical and linguistic expression, Neapolitan song in its transit and transmission is nevertheless an implacable example of the transforming modernity it supposedly negates. Although the music itself draws on a far older formation in which the cultural mixing of aristocratic lyricism and popular culture had been encouraged in the urban life of a city second only to Istanbul as the most populous metropolis of the Mediterranean, the genre was institutionally consecrated by the musical competition and festival of Piedigrotta. Inaugurated in 1835, the Festival of Piedigrotta, like the London Music Hall, came to depend on professionally paid composers, songwriters, and music publishers. It was part of the general business and professionalization of popular culture that increasingly characterized Occidental urban life throughout the nineteenth century: from songs to soccer, from the corner pub to cinema. Neapolitan song is central to A Postcolonial Sea 43

both the ‘‘invention’’ and subsequent selling of ‘‘tradition,’’ an exquisitely modern practice that stretches from the invention of Scottish Highland dress to the mythological construction of the cowboy and the American West. The specificity of Neapolitan song was the localized expression of a modern, international tendency. What is remarkable about the genre is that it has, like so many modern ‘‘traditions,’’ tenaciously endured to provide a sonorial glue for local identities today. This is the sound with which the male singer, usually accompanying himself on guitar (sometimes a mandolin), will sing for your (and his) supper, moving between the dining tables before departing for another restaurant. Yet it is clearly more than a tourist sound. In many ways it is the sound of popular, urban Italian tradition. This perhaps explains why Venetian gondoliers will croon Neapolitan melodies to their passengers in an attempt to create an atmosphere that the rationalizing pragmatics of modern life has allegedly exterminated. To be Neapolitan is, if not to sing, at least to know the famed songs of the classical repertoire. It is to present this music as an autochthonous authority. The sound in its proposed ‘‘timelessness’’ is sanctified by time itself as the unique and authentic reverberation of the city: of its pains and pleasures, its dreams and delusions, its lives, loves, and losses. To insist on its historical collocation within the recent past, and the associated commercial configuration of modern metropolitan culture, would be clearly to belittle the mythical sense of the muse. This may well be true, but it would also permit the exploration of the complexities of a historical past (and present) that the canonization of Neapolitan song and culture has persistently sealed off from critical consideration. Traditions, in whatever language they are expressed, are invariably lived as though homogeneous, without contradictions. To suggest otherwise is to contest their authority. If we know that historically all traditions are in debt to others, to the strangers and foreigners they are designed to exclude, this is not what tradition desires to tell us. Yet if tradition draws its power from narcissism, it can only survive, live on, by borrowing from the other, by reproducing itself through encounters that are not of its own making. A tradition never explicitly acknowledges such a transmission (and translation) of the past; if it did 44 Chapter 2

it, would no longer be considered tradition. But judging the circumstances in which it continues to exercise its authority—the music, language, and grammar of its immediate context—can allow another history to emerge, sometimes in a manner that radically alters inherited musical, cultural, and historical horizons. Naples, a Mediterranean city, has known more than its fair share of strangers, of rarely invited foreigners, from Arabs to the Allied Forces. Its culture, its language, its music, its historical identity and destiny are a product of this complex inheritance. The melisma and micro-tones so crucial to the lamenting tonalities of Neapolitan voice perhaps owe more to the musical scales of the Arabic maqám (modal mood) than to the disciplined parameters of European harmony. In this ‘‘Mediterranean musicality’’ (Paolo Scarnecchia), Neapolitan song, with its urban pathos and recited marginality, is musical cousin to the flamenco of Seville and the fado of Lisbon, as well as to the eastern Mediterranean sounds of rebétiko in Athens and the modern orchestration of the fundamentally improvised music of ughniyna in Cairo (most famously associated with the voice of Oum Kalthoum) and, more recently, Algerian raï.≤∫ This is part of a meandering musicality for which every song in the Reign of the Two Sicilies was transformed into an ‘‘Arab dirge, the destiny of every lively tune that is sung in Sicily’’ (Tomasi di Lampedusa). Such sounds reveal the ragged confine between the closed and conclusive logic of an institutionally tempered musicality and the open, unruly ambiguities of uncertain tempos and tonalities and the polyvalent possibilities of improvisation that underline the ritual and performative realization of music. The contemporary Neapolitan singer and actor Peppe Barra most successfully captures this sense of performance in his artistry. If the rationalization of the European tradition creates an object, these latter sounds give voice to a performative language that continues to permit traditions to transmit and transform themselves in modernity. Heard in this key, Naples, like Algiers, Seville, Istanbul, Marseilles, and Cairo, is a Mediterranean city whose historical script can be continually sounded to expose a mixed heritage, now considered in the light of a postcolonial world. It is an invitation, distilled in sound, to rethink a modernity that invests A Postcolonial Sea 45

both immediate Neapolitan culture and a wider, ultimately planetary, inheritance. Why deny this creolized richness to preserve the poverty of monotony? We all know why, of course. We all cling to the familiar, to the homely and domestic understandings of the world. Yet music reveals another prospect, where sounds travel without the neurosis of seeking a homogeneous identity. Following the sound rather than the dictates of imposed identities opens up a more intricate history and a wider set of unexpected possibilities. Significantly enough, tradition as the site of potential transit and translation is how the space of Neapolitan song has recently been occupied by both Pino Daniele, a local blues and rock guitarist who sings in Neapolitan on a cd symptomatically entitled Medina (2001), and Nino D’Angelo. On D’Angelo’s two-cd set Stella ’e Matina (1999), the first cd contains his own material woven into a world-music-style mix that is then counterbalanced with a cd of traditional songs. But while D’Angelo represents the last and most innovative singer in a longstanding convention, best represented in the 1970s and ’80s by Mario Merola and, more significantly, by Sergio Bruni, as well as in more ‘‘classical’’ terms by Roberto Murolo, it is elsewhere in a more extensive cultural and musical mix that local tradition has been transported well beyond previous limits. Today, a younger generation of Neapolitan musicians and their publics move in an urban soundscape characterized by the complete fusion of technology and sound in which the means of musical reproduction (microphones, turntables, and digital reproduction) have become means of musical production—that is, instruments in their own right—while the mediator, the disc jockey, has often become the musician; the perpetual research of new sounds under the labels ‘‘world music’’ and ‘‘ethnic’’ sounds; and the full realization of the metropolitan aesthetic of collage and bricolage, sustained by the black, diasporic bass that reverberates around the world in rap and reggae and their digitally extended derivatives and now declined into scores of local dialects. Neapolitan groups such as 99 Posse and Almamegretta are very much part of this planetary configuration. Local accents and vocal traditions are crossed by transnational modalities that permit a 46 Chapter 2

new sounding out of the current world. This leads to immediate identities being referenced in an extraterritorial space where inherited traditions are breached to become the site of ongoing translations. This represents both a break with and a renovation of an inheritance. In this journey, the homogeneous narration of cultural, historical, and musical identification is destined to be deviated by the drift of sound itself, a deviancy that frustrates any obvious anchorage in a timeless localism that claims universal validity through its assumed uniqueness. Against that normative aesthetic, the composition (both musical and cultural) that emerges from the unfolding details of transit suggests an aesthetic which, based on an ‘‘ontology of the present’’ (Michel Foucault), is perhaps not an aesthetic at all in a conventional sense, for it proposes a judgment of sound that does not refer to an abstract absolute but, rather, resonates with the open conditions of its historical and cultural making.≤Ω This prospect leads, of course, not merely to a critique of a ‘‘Neapolitan’’ song tradition that represents itself as though it were an autonomous grammar of being, but also to an inherited conceptual apparatus now forced apart by a worldly and historical complexity that exceeds its desire for conclusion. In the opening up of the interstices between locality and sound, an immediate legacy, both musical and cultural, comes to be re-located on a more extensive map. Here a sense of one’s past, now also approached through sounds and suggestions that arrive from elsewhere (Jamaican reggae and dub, New York rap, London drum ’n’ bass), is reworked in the light of an ongoing musical elaboration of the appropriation and translation of both a multifarious past and present.≥≠ It is in this context that, for example, the arabesque vocalization of Neapolitan in the larynx of Raiss of Almamegretta over the sparse bass riddim of dub that comes from Jamaica via London acquires its potent historical sense and direction. Music as sociology supplants the sociology of music. Here, both sides of the Mediterranean discover a transitory synthesis in the cultural soundings permitted by the musical mix. Both the African and the European shores are rendered proximate, and mutually translatable, as subaltern musics (dub, reggae, Neapolitan dialect, raï, and urban Arab mixes) mingle in a shared sea of sound. This is not A Postcolonial Sea 47

simply the North once again raiding the South of the world for new sensations and timbres. Reggae, just as digital music making, is also very much a local presence in North Africa. The Mediterranean here becomes a complex echo chamber where the migrancy of music suggests histories and cultures sounding off and sounding out, transforming and transmuting each another. But, then, this was already clear from Almamegretta’s first release in 1994, Figli di Annibale (Hannibal’s Children), and its announcement of the continuum of identifications in the charged grammar of hybridity: Africa, Africa, Africa, Africa Hannibal, Hannibal, great black general Hannibal, Hannibal, great black general With a host of elephants you crossed the Alps and came through in one piece Back then Europeans couldn’t even cross them on foot But you Hannibal, great black general, were able to cross them with a horde of elephants Do you know how big and slow elephants are? Do you know how big and slow elephants are? And yet Hannibal got them across the Alps with ninety thousand African men Hannibal defeated the Romans, remaining in Italy as a ruler for fifteen or twenty years That’s why many Italians have dark skin That’s why many Italians have dark hair That’s why many Italians have dark eyes That’s why many Italians have dark skin.≥∞

The historical details may well be suspect (Hannibal’s troops were most likely largely recruited from the rebellious populations of Spain and Italy), but the ethical imperative remains impeccable. The group subsequently went on to embrace Martin Bernal’s noted thesis on the Afro-Asian incubation of classical Greek culture and the ‘‘foundations’’ of the West in the composition ‘‘Black Athena.’’ We have evidently come a long way from ‘‘classical’’ Neapolitan 48 Chapter 2

song, from the timeless tenor of Caruso and the eternity of self-pitying sentiments, to arrive at the pervasive bass and electronic rumble of creolized metropolitan sounds. Yet if there is here a sense of a musical and cultural break, there is also a continuity disseminated in the very timbres themselves. If Almamegretta’s ‘‘sound’’ is readily recognizable in any club from London to Los Angeles (after all, the band has worked with Adrian Sherwood and Massive Attack in London and with Bill Lasswell in New York), it is also a music that is haunted by the arabesque maqams of the great Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum. This is also the musical parable disseminated in the music of Demetrio Stratos, born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Greek parents; resident of Milan; vocalist of Area; and tireless explorer of the potential of the voice until prematurely struck down by leukemia in 1979. His vocalizations straddle the Mediterranean, linking its northern and southern shores, its western and eastern contours, through a series of dis-orienting variations. Going forward into the modern urban mix, we are also taken on a path that spirals down through time into the historical complexities of the Mediterranean and the composite cultural textures that are relayed and renewed in sound.

A Postcolonial Sea 49

chapter 3

O√ the Map We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if traveling Is the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees. . . . We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone. We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel.—mahmud darwish It is only too easy to say map, a term that comes from Arabic and refers to the cloth in which objects are wrapped up in order to be carried around in a bundle.—franco farinelli

The fundamental failure of political and historical intelligence that characterizes the contemporary horizon is not merely the result of an institutional ignorance of other worlds and cultures; it lies, above all, in the failure to appropriate one’s own history, culture, and ‘‘self’’ in a critical manner. To opt to remain within the immediate comfort of dead metaphors (which are increasingly also metaphors of death) that apparently secure us in ‘‘our’’ culture is, as Judith Butler has incisively

argued, to refuse to enter into an encounter that invites us to go beyond our selves.∞ The political and cultural repertoire that is mobilized in defense of ‘‘our way of life’’ and ‘‘civilization’’ involves abstractions that are so general in their unilateralism and so vague in their homogeneity as to brook no critical reply or interrogation. To criticize such generalities, and to be exposed to accusations of betrayal, is presumably to commit cultural suicide. Beneath the banner of ‘‘freedom’’ that the media-sustained carnival of political leadership and power unfurls—which should also include freedom from political, economical, and cultural poverty and injustice, as well as freedom for the exercise of personal and communal liberty—the concept is rendered largely ineffectual. Freedom and liberty are now terms that are rarely able to respond to the mounting disregard of the state for democratic rights, rights that are increasingly subsumed in the agenda of national security and homeland defense. Here all forms of dissent and opposition are destined to be harvested beneath the billowing clouds of the threat of terrorism. In this scenario, critical discourse is increasingly denied a home. So, for example, if we read a recent work such as Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony, we cannot help but be struck by the worldly point that the imposition of acceptable sense, accompanied by a regime of violence that girds and limits the public space, is not only characteristic of many states in Africa, or Asia and Latin America, but increasingly also of Occidental democracy.≤ The abuse of the intolerant management of language, so that it always reflects the positivity of those in political power, is constructed on a cultural amnesia whereby both the past and other presents are not permitted to interpellate such rhetoric and its ‘‘imaginary institutions of society.’’≥ With this in mind, and bending attention to the questions and prospects that might emerge between the shores of diverse languages, culture, and histories, I will turn to the Mediterranean, that is, to a historical and cultural space which also happens to be the apparent origin of so much of the present-day discourse on ‘‘democracy’’ and ‘‘civilization.’’ What attracts me, commencing from my own personal location in this particular zone, is the simultaneous sense of division— in particular, the sea as a purportedly divisive barrier between, on the Off the Map 51

one hand, Europe and the modern ‘‘North’’ of the world and, on the other hand, Africa, Asia, and the south of the planet—and connection. After all, so much of the formation of Europe was, and is, intrinsically dependent on this negated elsewhere. It is in this mutable space— profoundly marked by the linguistic, literary, culinary, musical, and intellectual dissemination of Arab, Jewish, Turkish, and Latin cultures that questions, apparently forbidden elsewhere, can perhaps be accommodated. These are interrogations, due to their structural repression, that continually explode before our eyes in the bloody unfolding of the present state of Israel/Palestine. They are also questions that exceed the immediacies of such dramatic localities, extending outward to invest the ongoing becoming of the rest of the world. On the shore, facing the sea, dressed in cavalry trousers and jackboots, right arm stretched out in a Nazi salute: Anselm Keifer’s 1969 provocative remembrance of the will to power over the waves, and the world, in his photographic series Heroische Sinnbilder is a brutal reminder of the heart of darkness that pulsates in the irremediable configuration of European modernity. But there is also something that remains beyond representation, irreducible to the ‘‘human, all too human’’ pathos of tyranny. Present but unrecognized, this elsewhere invades the account and propositions silence with the expectancy of sense. Abandoning the shore, putting out to sea, afloat, it becomes possible to reconsider the tangled lines of a heterogeneous inheritance in which, for example, the imposed seclusion of women and the veil arrived from the eastern Mediterranean of both classical Greece and Byzantine Christendom prior to its subsequent acquisition by Islam and the Arab world centuries later.∂ Just as it is the vibrant example of Arab poetry that will transform Hebrew in the hands of poets like Samuel Naghrîla, grand vizier of Granada, whose native tongue was Arabic, from a restricted liturgical language into vernacular poetry in eleventh-century Andalusia.∑ Here, to consider the contentious contemporary presence of the veil not as a fixed sign that reflects a stereotyped Islam (patriarchal, archaic, intolerant, oppressive) is to respond to a symbol of cultural, historical, and gendered differences that signals a permeable threshold between an interior and an exterior, between bodies and appearances, 52 Chapter 3

the visible and invisible, between a modernity conceived unilaterally and the historical complexities of its heterogeneous realization. In a semiotic drift that floats free of incarceration in a unique sense, imposed by a singular logic, the veil, as the Franco-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida has taught us, proposes the perpetual deviations of a deferred meaning. In fact, in Arabic, this object of Occidental obsession fails to respond to a single word: haïk, hijab, chador, burqa, tarha, niqab . . . In the complexities of historical and cultural configuration—and recalling again that the veil was most certainly not invented by Islam but has been part of the Mediterranean and the Middle East for several millennia, from the aristocratic circles of ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia to Hebrew culture, the Byzantine Empire, the cult of the Madonna, rural Catholicism, and the wedding dress of the modern bride— the language of the veil suggests a constellation that throws as much light on the culture that seeks to unveil the world as on that which veils itself. On the surfaces of the veil, Occidental culture elaborates its power and knowledge precisely so that its interpretations prevail and circulate as the explanation of the world. To borrow a title from Edward Said, this is the intentional form of ‘‘covering Islam’’: simultaneously screening it, containing it, and explaining it away.∏ The paradoxical upshot is that it is the West itself that has transformed a particular dress code into a political symbol, a potential sign of refusal and resistance. As Frantz Fanon pointed out in the experience of colonial Algeria, the veil as sign of separation between the sexes also became the sign of resistance against the colonial power that sought at all costs to unveil a colonized country and people, and its culture. It touched its apex in the desire to reveal the Muslim woman, transformed into the maximum index of the ‘‘progress’’ of modernity that believes it is capable of revealing all. Servants under the threat of being fired, poor women dragged from their homes, prostitutes, were dragged to the public square and symbolically unveiled to the cries of ‘‘Vive l’Algérie française!’’ Before this new offensive old reactions reappeared. Spontaneously and without being told, the Off the Map 53

Algerian women who had long since dropped the veil once again donned the haïk.π

In the context of a teleological understanding of the ‘‘progress’’ of modernity, the question of the veil is reduced to a signal of a female condition and its relative backwardness. That modernity might be multiple, proffering diverse manners of inhabitation, is excluded from consideration. Yet to criticize, transform, and renovate one’s culture to improve women’s condition surely cannot simply mean to negate that culture. Western women also had to criticize, transform, and renovate their culture; at no point was it suggested that they should abandon the West to improve their condition. Nor has it ever been argued, whether in Mary Wollstonecraft’s day, when European women had no rights, or in our own day and even by the most radical feminists, that because male domination and injustice to women have existed throughout the West’s recorded history, the only recourse for Western women is to abandon Western culture and find themselves some other culture. The idea seems absurd, and yet this is routinely how the matter of improving the status of women is posed with respect to women in Arab and other non-Western societies.∫

In the opinionated arrogance that the Occident offers the unique modality for ‘‘freedom’’ there exists a profoundly undemocratic understanding of historical complexities and cultural differences. Translated into the militarized exportation of ‘‘democracy’’ and the murderous fundamentalism of a so-called clash of civilization, we arrive at a deadly, and wholly unacceptable, conclusion: ‘‘Westernize or die.’’ Along with the waves, the wind, the sound of the pebbles being sucked seaward, there is also the registration of the infinity of mutation, capped by silence. Perhaps we should slacken control and venture into this elsewhere. For although indebted to Romanticism and the terrifying powers of the sublime that scatter the confident pretensions of a universal rationalism, this is not merely to join Samuel Taylor Coleridge and acknowledge our potential annihilation before the infinite; it is also, and perhaps more significantly, to engage with a historical silence that draws us beyond the conclusion of our words. 54 Chapter 3

blood in the strings Perhaps it is in the work of art, in the explicit working through of language and silence, of bearing witness and promoting testimony, that this more incomplete and inconclusive understanding of cultural residence and historical registration is most sincerely received as ‘‘a friend to man’’ (John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn). As painting, prose, poetry, and performance, the Mediterranean comes here to reveal an open, creolized complexity that the narrow requirements of modern nationalism and identity are unable to contain. But, then, this is a possibility that the poetics of maritime life—the musics of the black Atlantic, the poetry and prose of the Caribbean—has consistently taught us in recent years (the critical teachings of Edouard Glissant and Paul Gilroy, the poetical lessons of Derek Walcott: to name the most obvious). Art here reveals itself to be political in its very presence. It is not a question of authorial intention or institutional imposition; rather, it is a critical disturbance disseminated by the irrepressible journey of language itself. Like the arabesque patterns that emerge from the sound hole of the ‘oud (the Arab lute, precursor of the European lute [in Spanish, the laúd] and subsequently the guitar), and the endless improvisations on the scales of the maqám (modal moods), the intricate pattern and design of language, whether in music or prose, extricates us from the predictable and propels us toward the unconsidered and the unknown. Not by chance, in classical Arab culture the ‘oud was the ‘‘instrument of the philosophers.’’Ω This suggestively directs us toward shifting, more elusive tonalities, the incomplete body of performance, and the subsequent weakening of the decisive orchestration of time and being proposed by official modernity. Music, as we have already noted, proposes a ‘‘home’’ that fluctuates, travels, and is perpetually uprooted. It is full of discontinuous histories, the sounds of voices that evade conclusion, accents that do not seek to domesticate the world but, rather, bear interrogations that promote a sense of the unhomely, full of memories that, as Caryl Phillips would put it, draw blood.∞≠ Off the Map 55

The guitar player is coming. I can almost see him And smell blood in his strings.∞∞

It is in this poetics (in Italian, the term poetica neatly sustains the conjoining of the poetical and the ethical) that a potential passage is cultivated: running along the shoreline between land and sea, between the ambiguous depths of marine memories and the blinding clarity of the desert from where the peoples of the Book and their fervent monotheisms arrive. If we are all seemingly drawn toward ‘‘home,’’ then our ties, our bonds with the domestic, are continually crossed and configured by the insistence of being in transit, under way, without the guarantee of ever arriving. Here, time itself, the time of memory, and the time of identification, all bundled together in the seeming implacable chronos of history, implodes. The resulting fragments constitute an archipelago of sounds and memories, of voices and silences, that populate a constellation whose critical light proposes an oblique or sidereal illumination of our temporality. Contrary to the conclusive continuum of institutional explanation secured in the selective accumulation of the past and the ‘‘capitalization of memory’’ (Jacques Derrida)—Walter Benjamin’s ‘‘winners’’ writing the narrative—we here step sideways into another temporality and another, less ordered way of telling that is destined to disturb and dispute the presumably ineluctable teleology of ‘‘progress’’ and its discriminatory management of modernity. This alternative sense of modernity is perhaps not merely a countermemory, contesting an implacable amnesia that has destined lives and histories to oblivion, but is, instead, a counter-figuration in which what has occurred—both that which is remembered and that which is negated—is redistributed in the space of a fresh gathering whose sense no longer radiates in an unique direction. In what Jacques Derrida refers to as the unsolicited topos of the archive, history is here cited in order to be re-sited.∞≤ The present is not merely haunted by the past, but is shot through with heterogeneous fragments whose recognition can only render the world unhomely, ‘‘out of joint.’’ Contrary to the ordered memory of the archive, to the filed away names, events, and explana56 Chapter 3

tions, there is the persistent murmur of a world whose insistent ‘‘noise’’ betrays the order that seeks to regulate and, in the end, remove it. The journey in sound recently evoked in the playing of the Iraqi musician Naseer Shamma and his marvelous re-creation on the ‘oud of the maqáms that the ninth-century musician Abu 1-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Nafi‘, generally known as Ziryab (789–858) brought from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Guadalquivir, from Baghdad to Cordova, is a journey that proposes an alternative configuration of time and space: both then and now.∞≥ An inherited linearity in which the past is invariably considered underdeveloped with respect to the amassed achievements of the present is temporarily undone, suspended in the delicate notes of an unfolding composition. Yesterday is not only rendered vitally proximate, but its fleeting intrusion into our time queries the assumed possession of that previous time and space. The music, largely improvised, traces on a culturally saturated space—that of a European and Mediterranean past but, simultaneously, also of an Arab, North African, Islamic, and Asiatic world—a passage in sound where the denied and the silenced bear witness to both a past and a present that the conclusions of modern progress have systematically excluded from their historical and political accounting of time and space. Yet Islam, like the other monotheistic religions that emerged from the deserts of Palestine and Sinai, was, and is, also a European religion. Perhaps the fear of Islam is the fear of recognizing a cultural, historical, and theological intimacy that, along with Judaism, is folded into the formation of the (Christian) West and poses itself as an alternative formation within modernity.∞∂ The modern map of meaning that rapidly papers over the cracks of underlying cultural complexity and superficially stitches together the bleeding wounds of time on a rationalized and homogeneous plane is here, once again, creased, torn, and stained by the demands and lacerations of other lives. Through eyes stinging with fear, rage, hate, despair, and disbelief, that particular map is observed askance. Hence, what it covers over and covers up also becomes part of the picture and enters the fragile frame of a potential understanding. When Naseer Shama sings the verses of the Sufi poet from Seville Abú Medyán (1126–1197), a historically composite Spain and Europe returns to Off the Map 57

our ears. It is a sound that the well-tempered, disciplined scales of modernity are structurally unwilling to recognize. Art, as Maurice Blanchot insisted, is the other of power, the other of what is inadmissible to power: ‘‘Here art gives voice to a world that it is the function of disenchanted rationalism to withhold or erase from consciousness.’’∞∑ As such, art represents the incessant refusal to conclude and hence to accept the present state of affairs; it ultimately remains unframeable and, hence, without a fixed form or abode. As a refusal of ground, property, and propriety, art is always under way toward an undecided elsewhere. Art does not triumph over, but traverses, the reasons of modernity, maintaining another, more ambiguous space in which the interrogation of the will to finality is suspended. In this lies both its autonomy and its politics. Perhaps this helps us to understand why the distinctions of genre, between fact and fiction, documentary and imaginative representation, art and anthropology, poetics and the prose of the everyday, slide into a more ambivalent state, revealing in the previous condition of separation the crippling authority of powers unwilling to consider the aesthetic and ethical pulse that exceeds their domain. With this in mind, I frequently find myself navigating the Mediterranean in the company of artistic works that encourage me to travel beyond the immediate surface of inherited categories and sail before the interrogative winds of memory. In such works, there is the irrepressible tempest of a terrible sublime in which the beauty of language, sound, and image is sutured into the savagery of life scarred by injustice, oblivion, and the brutal exercise of arbitrary powers. An unsettling poetics of disquiet and discomfort surfaces to sustain the promise of disturbing and dispatching existing arrangements to the moribund territories of a discredited topography.

a history of silence The postcolonial theme of rewriting and re-presenting the past to reconfigure the present is threatening to become a fashionable orthodoxy, yet in revealing the disquieting stubbornness of a yesterday that 58 Chapter 3

refuses to disappear into the stillness of the ordered archive, it remains imperative. Such a return of the excluded clearly offers far more than a series of additions to fill in the gaps in the already established historical mosaic. The forgotten do not complete the picture; rather, they query the frame, the pattern, the construction and advance what the previous representation failed to register. For this is not simply to propose the heroic space of the counter-narrative that offers the promised homecoming of an alternative history, identity, and autonomous sense. Here the divisions between the colonizer and the colonized, the hegemonic and the subaltern, the victors and the victims decline into a more disquieting critical complexity that frustrates all unilateral desires to complete the picture. Encountering voices, bodies, and lives that exist beyond the official accounts supplied by both colonial and postcolonial power, we are drawn into dissonant narratives. Here the continuum of history fragments under the pressure of the unassimilated, and the resulting remains are worked over in a poetics that punctuates and exceeds the narrow logic of an inherited political view. The tale is perpetually interrupted or broken, and through the resulting gaps the silenced and the marginalized intercede in the telling of the world. From this redistribution of the power of language emerge the unplanned capacities of an unexplored tongue. The land, its rocks, rivers, fields, and skies, its sedimented occupancy by different languages and lives, are translated from a supposedly dying tradition into an unfolding palimpsest to be written of, on, and over, again and again, always attendant on an uncertain becoming that is irreducible to the violent homogeneity of ‘‘progress.’’ A sense of ‘‘belonging’’ emerges not so much to the ancestral soil as to the social, cultural, and historical narratives that rework an inherited terrain in an unsettling fashion. Caught between the hammer of European colonialism and the anvil of a fractured and increasingly reified, autochthonous past, such a poetics proposes lines of flight in the very act of writing and performing memory. The ensuing texts are both untimely and monstrous in their inevitable excess. They spill out of the picture and the temporality in which an officially fostered modernity is prepared to receive them. Algeria: the baked soil and blinding beaches of Albert Camus. Male Off the Map 59

figures moving in an inexplicable landscape. Everything flat, apparently immobile, a backcloth for individual absurdities and angst dispersed in ‘‘the gentle indifference of the world.’’∞∏ This is a Mediterranean and North Africa that is the accidental terrain of a universal condition. Here the solipsistic pretences of human history are scattered in a setting bleached of psychic emotion and cultural investment, stripped down to a terrible responsibility that has custody for meaningless being. But the absurdity of life perhaps lies less in the cosmic absence of sense than in the consistency of historical negation; in the fact that we blindly believe in the abstract totality of history as the source of meaning, while consistently failing to respond to its scarred bodies or listen to its troubled voices. In its deliberate return to Eugene Delacroix’s eponymous painting of 1834, Assia Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartment offers up a stuttering, episodic language that cracks and disturbs the surface of the picture. From this fracturing vision, on the threshold of the visible, diverse bodies and locations emerge to readdress and deviate the conclusive accounting of time.∞π The time of colonization—the French seizure in 1830 and subsequent occupation of Algeria—and the colonization of time by both Occidental and patriarchal imperatives is revisited through tracing the diverse trajectories of voices, memories, and telling of Algerian women. The immediacy of personal accounts, of her-stories, reconfigures the very texture of our historical understanding. The past is neither sealed off nor necessarily condemned to an empty silence. ‘‘Delacroix’s painting becomes a plane of memory that can be turned around and recharged with new meanings.’’∞∫ As a murmur of women’s voices, as the mute but persistent testimony of a scarred body, as a presumably indecipherable recollection, the past bleeds into the present as though it were an open wound. Through this slit in the screen of administered time, travel questions and interrogations that survive, live on, and remain as such: unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, but persistent in their perpetual pertinence. If this is a narrative of female ghosts and survivors, of the excluded that nevertheless continue to demand a reply, it is also a writing that commences from silence. This is an occluded, veiled history that speaks, when heard, with a feminine timbre, from lips behind a veil. It 60 Chapter 3

is the writing itself, its language of broken narratives sustained by the right to write, that gives body to the anonymity of the margins, to the unnamed, to their tortured past and ‘‘dismantled memory.’’∞Ω The shards and shafts of existence live on in the present tense of an unresolved, interrogative, sometimes shocking inscription—violent in its insistent irresoluteness: the dissonant echo of disquiet, a sob, a cry, the voice of the Jewish singer at a wedding, sounds that floats free of the page—the ululations of history that crease time to reveal in its folds other times . . . others. In this landscape, in a country, a countryside, wounded by colonialism and the war of liberation, there are words that emerge between the impositions of colonialism and nationalism, between an imported French and an obligatory Arabic. Assia Djebar writes in an uprooted language that brings another cadence, a further sonority, another body to its earlier syntactical and semantic order. Against the imposed monolingualisms of both the past and the present, beyond the gaze of France and Algeria, of the foreigner and the father, a female telling runs on, unheard, unacknowledged, seemingly lost in ‘‘the cult of silence.’’≤≠ Suspended in sound, as song, whisper, and lament, carried away in the winds of time, it nevertheless persists. What words have uncovered in time of war is now being concealed again underneath a thick covering of taboo subjects, and in that way, the meaning of a revelation is reversed. Then the heavy silence returns that puts an end to the momentary restoration of sound. Sound is severed once again.≤∞

Between la langue de la mère and le silence de la mer, a grammar of belonging emerges that draws on a mixed linguistic inheritance: Berber, Arabic, French. It articulates an extraterritorial excursion that travels in a language without a body (French), exposed to a body (of the women of Algiers) that is without a voice. Exiled in the language of the other—the immemorial whispers of the past, the cries of massacres, the stillness of the dead—return this time to silence History. A history that speaks within the vicinity of this silence is a history that accommodates the haoufis of the women of Tlemcen, ‘‘women’s songs of times gone by.’’≤≤ Past and present are held together in a chain Off the Map 61

that coordinates the dance at the edge of logos. Here, a poetics of time and memory realigns history with the unresolved and the forgotten becoming of our diversified being in a world that no rationalism can either fully imagine or hope to discipline for its benefit. Such writing does not throw light on the past; rather, it releases a bitter stream of consciousness whose undecipherable flotsam decomposes the communicative logic of a validating syntax.≤≥ In this multilingual murmur, like the Berber language that Algeria itself today exiles to the mountains and the desert, memories consign us to a history that is diversely scored: sounded out by excluded timbres and forgotten rhythms. Among the tatters of time that continue to flutter over the present, it suggests other directions; it justly leaves us, and our self-assuring conclusions, lacerated. Don’t claim to ‘‘speak for’’ or, worse, to ‘‘speak on,’’ barely speaking next to, and if possible very close to: these are the first of solidarities to be taken on by the few Arabic women who obtain or acquire freedom of movement, of body and of mind. And don’t forget that those who are incarcerated, no matter what their age or class, may have imprisoned bodies, but have souls that move more freely than ever before.≤∂

the imaginary road Through the windscreen, a dry landscape dotted with olive trees and traffic signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and Roman script, lies on either side of the road. A few old stone buildings and many more white apartment blocks, an overarching blue sky pierced by passing military helicopters: This is the pervasive view in the road movie Route 181, a collaborative four-and-a-half-hour work by the Palestine director Michel Khleifi and the Israeli director Eyal Sivan.≤∑ The visual journey follows an imaginary road: that of the line of partition between the two independent and sovereign states of Israel and Palestine proposed by United Nations Resolution 181 in November 1947. Setting off from its southern point, a car carrying a driver, a camera operator, a sound technician, and the two directors, along with a map 62 Chapter 3

of Palestine on the dashboard, follows a virtual line of separation that fractures and dissipates as diverse maps, meanings, and narratives emerge along the route. Chance encounters and the memories of different places provide the narrative structure of a film that seeks to establish the tempo of listening and to liberate the tongue, language, and the right to narrate. As if in a ‘‘talking cure,’’ the viewer is carried well beyond the binary of Jew and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian, Zionist and Arab, while the audiovisual passage probes the ‘‘philosophy of the wall,’’ rendering explicit, as Michel Khleifi puts it, such ideological positions ‘‘alien, inhuman.’’ Through a gathering of words, sounds, music, gestures, bodies, memories, and drama, the zigzag meandering along roads, tracks, and across country, following a lost solution, patiently undoes blocked memories—both those memories sealed in institutional orthodoxy and those memories that spill out of the past and flood the present with their frustrated insistence. Emerging from this debris, the imaginary road, the spaces it crosses, the encounters it provokes, gives life to a recognition of historical, cultural, and linguistic differences whose layered and sedimented complexity promote the possibility of dissipating the relentless passion for both physical and metaphysical possession. The segregation of time and place, of memories and identities, fails to imprison the journey as its poetics continually breach the ‘‘rational’’ and ‘‘realistic’’ conclusions of an imposed order. Against this background, the implacable trauma of the Shoah slides into the new, unexpressed trauma of repressing the historical crime against the Palestinians, as though the monstrous uniqueness of that previous genocide screens out all other injustices. Official memory cancels the initial terrorism, racialized aggression, ethnic cleansing, and military appropriation of the Palestine region of the former Ottoman province, or vilayet, of Aleppo. This process has been accompanied by the exercise of internal racism against the ‘‘Oriental,’’ often Arab-speaking, Jews (schvartze hayas, or ‘‘black animals’’) of the Sephardic diaspora and the Middle East in a ‘‘Europeanized’’ Israel that simultaneously imposes authoritarian rule on its own 1.2 million Israeli Arab citizens.≤∏ In this exclusive victimhood, the victim apparently cannot have its own victims. To untie such a desperate knot is Off the Map 63

clearly to appropriate in a critical, disenchanted manner the modern, European formation of Israel (today sustained by the financial aid of $3 billion a year from the United States), and to carry its nationalist and colonialist imperatives over onto a more ambiguous and less reassuring map. The dramatic condensation of the essential violence that authorizes the modern state, Israel, whose survival ostensibly depends on moral and military certitude before the perpetual threat of ‘‘terrorism,’’ exposes in concentrated form what modern Europe most desperately seeks to disavow: the planetary trauma of modernity itself. A critical Jewish diaspora that included Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, the movements Brit Shalom and Ichud, and the consistently acute cinematic probes of the Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai has continually addressed the question and sought to separate out a complex Jewish inheritance from its public disciplining by militant Zionism. Here there emerges the critical necessity of insisting on the ‘‘pluralization of Jewish histories,’’ in which particular identifications are historically sustained in hybrid cultural formations, to break the stranglehold whereby the State of Israel and the ‘‘Jew’’ become interchangeable entities, leading to the subsequent accusation of anti-Semitism in the face of any criticism of the former’s politics.≤π In 1918, Buber spoke against the relentless nationalism of the Zionist leadership; thirty years later, with the foundation of the State of Israel, he was prophesying an ‘‘imminent catastrophe.’’ It is in this context that Buber considered those who were attacked in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948–49 to be not the Israelis but the Arabs, victims of the ‘‘peaceful conquest’’ of Zionist nationalism and its subsequent ethnic cleansings and massacres, now supported and protected by imperial powers. The very idea of the land being ‘‘virgin,’’ ‘‘empty,’’ and underdeveloped—‘‘a land without a people for a people without a land’’—waiting to be incorporated into the ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘civilization’’ of a belligerent, European modernity, is a well-rehearsed colonizing motif that Buber rejected.≤∫ It was, of course, also denied by bloody evidence on the ground: These include . . . the prolonged ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ of Palestinians, especially in the ‘‘Nakbah’’ of 1948, with the destruction of hundreds of villages, thousands of homes and several massacres, leaving 700,000 people 64 Chapter 3

forcibly driven from their land. (In a hideous twist of fate, the worst massacre, at Deir Yassin, now sits alongside the present site of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, commemorating not the massacre of Palestinians, by Jews, nearby, but of Jews slaughtered in a distant land).≤Ω

What is most violently being played out in Israel today, in the disquieting anachronism of realizing the redemptory promise of an exclusive ethnic state (if not the absolute purity of the religious state of Medinat Halakah desired by the fundamentalists of Eretz Israel), is also a further, contorted chapter of a colonial history, complete with racial segregation, settlers, frontier incidents, and a permanent state of military readiness in which the ‘‘pioneering’’ West forcibly imposes itself on the ‘‘Orient’’: ‘‘Israel inscribes at its heart the very version of nationhood from which the Jewish people had had to flee.’’≥≠ A complex sense of Jewishness that for well over a millennium had its historical residence in the cultural, even linguistic, resources of the Arab world is negated as ‘‘Jewishness is equated with Europeanness’’ in an Israel which sees itself as a prolongation of Europe ‘‘in’’ the Middle East, but not ‘‘of’’ it.≥∞ Buber himself was convinced that without a radical political mutation, Israel was destined to exist in a state of permanent emergency.≥≤ In a letter to the Iraq Times in November 1938, Yusuf al-Kabir, a Jewish lawyer from Baghdad objecting to the Zionist proposal to displace the Palestinians, ominously captured the momentous nature of this historical maneuver and the potential menace of a world ruled by ‘‘militant archaeology’’: Reconstruction of historical geography, if accepted as practical theory, would for instance bring the case to ground, and provide a recognized legal basis for German claims on Eastern Europe. In a certain influential section of the German press, the theory is now being held out that Eastern Europe, up to [the] Volga, was in some remote time wholly occupied by Germans. If the legal basis is accepted, there remains nothing but to work out history in detail for a suitable epoch, and everyone knows that modern science can do anything. Moreover, if one goes reconstituting history two thousand years back, there is no reason why one should not go back still further back, say four or five thousand years, and presently have the world ruled by militant archaeology.≥≥ Off the Map 65

Europe and the West, rendered speechless by the historical guilt of a perpetual persecution that culminated in the Shoah, have rarely dared to see in the nationalist and colonial project of Israel its own violent, state-authorized heart of darkness, which has continually othered and subordinated the rest of the non-European world. History cannot be undone; colonialism cannot be canceled. Still, it can be rerouted and deposited on another map; a map whose torn edges are shadowed by the darkness of oblivion, ghosted by those consigned to roads not taken. With such maps in hand it is even possible to journey in the present, adopting a shifting, less commanding view, scanning both the past and the present with a series of interrogative glances that imply not so much a definitive verdict as a tentative opening: a critical alignment whose ethical task is to promote a crisis in inherited judgments and the unilateral conclusions of a deaf and deadening power. As the radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has recently pointed out, it is precisely the obstruction to historical recollection and the negation of past trauma—the cancelation of the massacres and dispossession of the Palestinians in the Nakbah in 1947–48 and the ‘‘exclusion of the past in the name of peace’’—that destines the peace process to be blocked forever. The return of that past is evidently impossible to sustain, for it would lead to ‘‘the moral questioning of the foundation of the state of Israel and the very sense of the Zionist project.’’≥∂ Yet it is surely in this sense, rather than in the official marshaling of Holocaust memory to silence critical opposition, that the catastrophe of Auschwitz and the Shoah today interrogates Israel, Palestine, and the West. At a certain point in Michel Khleifi’s and Eyal Sivan’s Route 181, an Israeli observing the guarded frontier zone between southern Israel and the territories administered by the Palestinian authorities says: ‘‘The model is South Africa.’’≥∑ The regime of apartheid that establishes the border patrolled by economic, cultural, and racialized divisions is not, however, limited to specific nation-states. They are invisible frontiers that run across a world map, snaking through both First World and Third World cities, stretching over the territories of both center and the periphery. In this sense, the world remains a profoundly colonial space. The old distinctions of the colonial city analyzed by 66 Chapter 3

Fanon—between the ‘‘European’’ and the ‘‘native’’ quarters—live on in the more intricate divisions sustained by work permits, passports, surveillance, security protocols, and augmented legislation and policing directed at ‘‘terrorism.’’ Nevertheless, the question explodes, the sought-for distinctions and distances are continually annulled by the presence of citizens who are in Europe, in Israel, in the West, but who do not necessarily completely adhere to a unique and unilateral mode of identification. Here the noted Schmittian distinction between friend and foe drifts away into the richer, more open and ambiguous territory of shifting allegiances and assorted alliances that can seemingly be clarified only in the brutal violence of an emergency that threatens to become the permanent condition of both present and future polities. This particular journey can be temporarily terminated by considering The Road Map project by the Milan group Multiplicity. This multimedia work is itself an installment in an evolving framework titled Solid Sea. The Road Map is presented in the following manner: The territories of Israel and Palestine are, in these days, a laboratory of the world. In particular, the West Bank is a region where, in a few acres, an incredible variety of borders, enclosures, fences, checkpoints, and controlled corridors are concentrated. On January 13–14, 2003, we tried to measure, with our [European Union] passport, the density of border devices in the surrounding area of Jerusalem. On January 13, we traveled on highway 60 along with a person with an Israeli passport from the colony of Kiriat Arba to the colony of Kudmin. The following day, we traveled with a person with a Palestine passport from the city of Hebron to the city of Nablus. The two routes start and end in the same latitude; at some points, they overlap. Their traveling times, though, are profoundly different. To move between the two latitudes, the Israeli traveler took about one hour, while the Palestinian took five and half hours.≥∏

The Solid Sea project itself considers how the Mediterranean basin is rapidly being transformed and ‘‘solidified’’ through the impositions of Off the Map 67

frontiers and controls and the increasing rigidity of identities tied to specific forms of passage: tourist, mercantile, military. Off the map, hidden from the cartography of permissible routes, are the unauthorized itineraries of illicit passage. Here, with its nightly delivery of the desperate and the dead on northern Mediterranean beaches, we are forced to register a contemporary ‘‘middle passage.’’ From the south of the world, from as far afield as China, Sri Lanka, India, and sub-Saharan Africa, the boat people, after surviving the North African desert, undertake a final dash toward a promised prosperity. They invariably turn up under the heading of illegal migration, overcrowded reception centers, forced repatriation, and rarely reported tragedies that accompany their movement across the Mediterranean sea. In particular, The Ghost Ship, shown in 2002 at Documenta11, the contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and also part of Solid Sea, is a multimedia installation that re-visits and remembers a shipwreck that occurred at Christmas in 1996 in the channel between Tunisia and Sicily. Two hundred eighty-three Pakistani, Tamil, and Indian immigrants lost their lives. The event was only officially recognized by the Italian authorities five years later, thanks to the evidence snatched from the murky depths of the sea by an underwater camera and collated by Giovanni Maria Bellu, a journalist from the newspaper La Repubblica. The unnamed have never been recovered. Their bodies rest on the seabed, unconsciously contributing to the solidifying of the Mediterranean, transforming a site of transit into a mounting barrier. I am seeking here to propose a different geography; an uprooted geography articulated in the diverse currents and complex nodes of both visible and invisible networks, rather than one that merely follows the horizontal axis of borders, barriers, and allegedly separated unities. This, of course, is to consider the Mediterranean before, between, and beyond the self-serving objectifying logic of European humanism, its modernity and its nationalism. It is to register, even if it cannot fully recover or remember, the interrogative complexity of a diversified and multilateral space. When the Normans conquered Sicily in the eleventh century, after Sicily had existed in orbits stretching outward from Cairo, North Africa, and Muslim Spain for several cen68 Chapter 3

turies, they referred only to the Muslims as sicilienses; the Christian inhabitants of the once Byzantine island were known as greci. In the perspective of Braudel’s longue durée, the ‘‘unity’’ of the Mediterranean could provocatively also be considered, as the Italian critic Silvio Marconi justly points out, within the historical conditions of heterogeneous networks that extend from North Africa, the Sahara, and the Sahel (including the Senegal and Niger basins) through the Middle East to the valley of the Indus and the Indian Ocean, as well as spilling out across the high desert plateaus and steppes of Central Asia.≥π Considered from within such a humus, these networks have been rudely disrupted on three momentous occasions in the past two and half thousand years, each time through the interruption and imposition of monocentric visions arriving from the north. The Punic wars, the Crusades, and the Reconquista, European modernity, are traumatic moments in which multilateral networks were torn apart by pitiless force and the imposition of the unities and hierarchies of Rome and Europe with their monotheistic and imperial sense of mare nostrum. Contrary to the sedimented consensus of the Pirenne thesis (Mahomet et Charlemagne, 1937), according to which a Mediterranean ‘‘unity’’ was destroyed by the advance of the Arab world, it was perhaps the vibrant intrusion of Arab conquests in the seventh century and eighth century that actually restored and revitalized this possibility, permitting a peripheral Europe to establish contact with the Middle East and subsequently with a world system of commerce and culture orbiting in Asia along multiple axes between Baghdad and Beijing. Perhaps it would be legitimate today to consider the ‘‘illegal’’ immigration across the waters of the Mediterranean from the south and the east of the planet as once again revitalizing within the antique imperium, which is right now being reworked within the planetary pretensions of a capitalist order, this perennial and irrepressible passage. No doubt such cultural prospects are overdetermined by illusory identifications with the vanished worlds of Arab, Muslim, and Ottoman power that a contemporary subaltern world proudly evokes in its responses to Occidental hegemony. Still, even if the ‘‘tolerance’’ of the Ottoman Empire that welcomed exiled Jews from Catholic Spain, or the cultural diversity of a Muslim Mediterranean, is easily mytholoOff the Map 69

gized, it nevertheless suggests a more complicated cartography. Here a richer, more uncertain sense can be taken up in receiving and responding to histories deposited in an always imperfect archive that recognizes a complex and unfinished modernity that is always in the making. The singular idea of actually possessing the sea, controlling and defining its traffic, is, after all, both a profoundly modern but also a highly contestable invention. When the Portuguese circumvented Africa and the Arab world and burst into the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century, the rules of the Indian Ocean ports were utterly confounded by the demands and actions of the Portuguese. Having long been accustomed to the tradesman’s rules of bargaining and compromise they tried time and time again to reach an understanding with the Europeans—only to discover, as one historian has put it, that the choice was ‘‘between resistance and submission; cooperation was not offered.’’ Unable to compete in the Indian Ocean by purely commercial means, the Europeans were bent on taking control of it by aggression, pure and distilled, by unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on those shores. As far as the Portuguese were concerned they had declared a proprietorial right over the Indian Ocean: since none of the peoples who lived around it had thought to claim ownership of it before their arrival, they could not expect the right of free passage in it now.≥∫

Unfortunately, many of us have seemingly inherited only this manner of looking at the planet; we are still held within this possessive, unilateral framing of the world.

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chapter 4

Naples: A Porous Modernity The word ‘‘history’’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience.—walter benjamin I remember that my heart finally broke in Naples. Not over a girl or a thing, but over an idea. When I was little, they’d told me I should be proud to be an American. And I suppose I was, though I saw no reason I should applaud every time I saw the flag in a newsreel. But I did believe that the American way of life was an idea holy in itself, an idea of freedom bestowed by intelligent citizens on one another. Yet after a little while in Naples I found out that America was a country just like any other, except she had more material wealth and more advanced plumbing.—john horner burns

under the volcano To speak in and of Naples is to feel bound to an overwhelmingly historicized place. The evidence is irrefutable: A gaping hole in Piazza

Bellini reveals the Greek walls of Neapolis; the ubiquity of Baroque buildings; the disrepair and decomposition of antique streets and irregularly paved alleys. All of this material evidence of the passage of time superficially provides an immediate set of explanations. After all, this is what the hundreds of books on the city tell me again and again. It is also what the local account, suitably crossed with Oriental and Greco-Roman myths, and then amplified in folkloristic details, also provides. The Sirens (Homer’s adoption of a Phoenician myth) and the passage of Ulysses between Capri and the tip of the bay at Punto Campanile, the Sybil of Cuma and the entrance to the underworld at Lake Averno in the nearby Phlegrean Fields, traces of the Asiatic cult of Mithras, the adoption and solace of souls in Purgatory through the polishing and personal care of skulls in the city’s underground cemeteries—all of this deepens and disseminates the mystery. In this narrative Naples emerges, in Curzio Malaparte’s words, as a survivor from an ‘‘antique, pre-Christian world, that has remained intact on the surfaces of modernity.’’∞ Evoked against the timeless intensities of the Mediterranean Sea and a slumbering volcano, such accounts color, if only tangentially explain, the textures and temper of the contemporary city, its sedimented reason and unfolding rationale, its passionate geography and psychosomatic philosophy. Naples is a multifaceted city attached to the edge of southern Europe. As such, it has often provided a favorite site for examining the loose ends of a European formation, where civil society and the state seemingly wither away in the chaos of its streets and the snarledup complexities of its institutions. For it is here that the urban web tends to come undone and expose a living museum of archaic fragments, customs, and practices. Yesterday its ruined landscape was the source of the Romantic sublime (Goethe, Turner), or later of a disenchanted capitalism (Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel). Today it increasingly attracts the gaze of anthropologists as they retreat from previous peripheries to considering Europe’s own internal frontiers and the peculiar rituals of its native populations. Yet Naples is not simply the laboratory of the archaic or a zoo of arrested urban development. Its crumbling historical core toasting in the sun has also been 72 Chapter 4

abruptly interrupted by the modern skyline punctuation of a commercial and administrative center that was conceived in Tokyo, complete with mirror-windowed high-rise office blocks and external express elevators. With its violent mixture of antiquated street rites and global-design capitalism, Naples confronts us as a riddle. Its sphinx-like qualities, reflecting back what we hope, and fear, to see, disclose an unstable hubris dissected by different cultures and historical rhythms. Until recently, a precarious water supply and an erratic public-transport system serviced seventeenth-century streets and sewers blocked with the traffic of the twentieth century. Male youth pissing in the nighttime streets. Is this just a generational bloody-mindedness or an expression of the banal fact that there are very few public toilets in Italian cities? Perhaps the absence of ‘‘public’’ toilets is itself indicative of an understanding of the relationship between one’s private body and the community of public zones, between the fanatical securing of personal purity and an indifference to public filth and the anonymous character of civic space? Neapolitans consume five times more water than the inhabitants of Paris; not only bodies, but also floors, are washed daily. Although managed by capital, the city seems frequently to be out of control. Only an exasperated individualism, everyone free to invent his or her own highway code and building legislation, manages to leave its mark. Yet it works: The rubbish is collected each and every night; the litterstrewn streets are swept each morning; good-quality drinking water arrives in your home; a modern subway system is slowly creeping under the town. Still, the modern myth of the rational organization of urban space, production, labor, and profit continues to be interrupted, decomposed, and deviated by innumerable pockets of social resistance, mercantilism, barter, corruption, and crime that frequently cross-fertilize each other: the corner deal concluded on the cellular phone, blackmarket couriers on their scooters, the buying and selling of favors, the institutionalized bribe. This is the tangled undergrowth of another city and of a cultural formation that loses its strands in the labyrinth of Naples: A Porous Modernity 73

kinship, street culture, local identity, popular memory, and urban folklore. To be open to this dimension, to the collective narration of identities and the exchange of memories that pass under the name ‘‘Napoli,’’ is clearly to abandon the possibility of conducting all these threads into a single conduit, a unique narrative able to explain such details. Of course, we can employ terms like ‘‘uneven development,’’ the ‘‘backwardness’’ of southern Italy, and refer to the local, national, and international concatenations of mixed temporalities, of structural inequalities disseminated in specific historical and political formations, but the particular syntax of these conditions, their ‘‘Neapolitan’’ mix, can only find inconclusive explanations in these categories. Perhaps, rather than seeking to ‘‘resolve’’ such questions, it might be instructive first to absorb them in a manner that might suggest another sense of the city and the urban and historical style it exposes. For Naples certainly proposes its own particular configuration of modern life. Here conflicts and contradictions are uncovered, sometimes brutally and often violently registered. This is a manner of being contemporary that is strikingly different from those institutional proposals that persistently mask social, economic, and cultural tensions behind the glass-and-steel facades of an official modernity that simply exorcises and consigns to the ‘‘market’’ what it cannot absorb and manage. To follow the twists and turns of the city’s intestines, to enter what the late-eighteenth-century Neapolitan journalist Matilde Serao referred to as its ‘‘belly,’’ and to precede along its winding streets is to register what, in reference to the silent cinema of the Neapolitan film director Elvira Notari, was disparagingly termed a ‘‘mad body language.’’≤ For here, one’s own uncertain trajectory and that of the illdefined urban corpus are mutually integrated and interrogated. The insistent physicality of the streets, daubed by decay and disregard, accompanied by the aggressive overspill of private effluence into public matters—from street rubbish to raised voices seeding a potential public drama—draws you into the city’s interior, transforming a walk in the street into an unscripted performance for all its participants. The street as spectacle, as simultaneously the space of a performance 74 Chapter 4

and a mass public, is what no doubt links the figure of Pulcinella (who apparently first appears in 1609 at the Stanza della Commedia in Via Medina) to the great twentieth-century Neapolitan comic Totò. The intertwining of public and private in the theatrics of street humor signals the modern wrenching away of entertainment from aristocratic clutches (there is a similar parabola in the shift of opera from court to theater in the seventeenth century) and the growth of modern urban mass culture. Initially a cabaret and theatrical performer in the 1930s, Totò went on in the postwar period to appear in innumerable comedy films (some brilliant, some mediocre, but all unequivocally marked by his presence). A somewhat aloof, even contorted personality, marked with a tragic streak that Pasolini sought to explore, Totò’s comic seriousness ineluctably caught the absurdity of an official rhetoric that was unable to contain the turbulence of postwar Italy. Totò’s popular but pungent art transformed the banter of the alley and the street into a metaphysics of the human condition. His hyperintelligent dismantling of the formal pomposity of institutional oratory—both Italian and Neapolitan—carried his audience to the slippery edge of acceptable sense. In his mouth, language punned and punished to an extreme in syntactical hyperbole and linguistic overkill falls apart to reveal the joins, the glue and the gaps, that the official facade and the rigid stereotype seeks to paper over. A contorted body, a mobile face, an illogical expression breaks through the phrase; language is pushed out of place, and the limits of sense are registered and then rendered comical, ultimately poetical. The very ‘‘now’’ of a performative body, its accumulated tics and specificities, ridicules the legislative pretensions of imposed norms and empty abstractions, revealing the cynical wisdom of what, underneath it all, was a tragic humor. Totò, in the deliberate ambiguity of his language and the exaggerated ambulation of his body, has become fully identified with the city itself. In a profound sense, to have seen one of his major films, for example, Guardie e ladri, Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina, or Siamo uomini o caporal? is already to have visited the city and inadvertently touched some of its deeper chords.

Naples: A Porous Modernity 75

an architecture of transit The inhabitants of the Mediterranean belong more to a city than to a state or a nation.—predrag matvejevi c´

Like many Mediterranean cities, Naples refers to itself and its local hinterland long before the nation-state appears in its sense of identity. Even the Nativity scene becomes a Neapolitan scene. The papiermâché models and ceramic figures of biblical Bethlehem that constitute the Christmas presepe are invariably populated with local market figures, piazzas and pizzas. Two myths are fused into a miniaturized language of representation in which the religious and the secular, the past and the present, the distant and the immediate, the dead and the living, share the same world. Once a capital, Naples has become an excentric city without an obvious compass. Seemingly robbed of its destiny, its trajectory has been blocked by a loss that it is seemingly incapable of confronting and working out. As a defunct center, a victim of history, and a corpse, the city is perpetually ready to ‘‘enter into the homeland of allegory.’’≥ The visceral gestures of self-referentiality— and the presepe and a local literature deeply self-absorbed in the city’s dissolution and imminent demise are only the most documented exposure of this daily narrative—continue to propose all of the pathos of that loss. This is to appreciate that there is no overall project or unifying design able to encompass the Neapolitan experience. It is a story that can be caught in fragments, in the economy of disorder, in the cathartic laughter induced by a tragic comedy, in the flickering half-light of an apparently ineluctable decay. Paradoxically, as a built environment, an architectural reality, a historical testament, the sense of the city continues to be represented as though it were homogeneous: The teleology of temporal stratification at all costs has to be respected and conserved. There seems to be little interest in the idea of re-proposing elements from the past and relocating them in the present—that is, of provocatively re-citing them in order to re-site the city. Faced with demands for urban renewal, architects and planners invariably find themselves locked in the prob76 Chapter 4

lem of conserving the past, which in turn leads to the blocking of architectural renovation. It ought to be possible, on the contrary, to respect the past in a diverse fashion—that is, not in a closed logic, but, rather, through a more complex engagement with its undeniable presence. Surely there exists the possibility of a contemporary architecture that recovers such traces and subverts the problem of bowing before an implacable historicism and the divisive logic of the ‘‘past’’ and the ‘‘present.’’ Yesterday it was the ‘‘Baroque’’; today it is the ‘‘Modern.’’ This simply leads to a debate between the Baroque and the Modern in which, to preserve the Baroque, it becomes impossible to consider the Modern. It ought to be possible to conceive of the Modern and modernity in an open-ended manner so as to return the traces and interrogations of the past to the present. This would be to learn from the critical evidence deposited in the city itself. The social and cultural problems of the historical center continue to be dominated architecturally by the ideological insistence of conservation, even when sometimes it might be more beneficial simply to eliminate a crumbling building to create an open space or green zone. Naples has the smallest quantity of recreational space and parks in the whole of Europe, and, probably, in the First World. It has very few ‘‘lungs’’ and has a lot of difficulty in ‘‘breathing.’’ That is why, when observing some of these decaying buildings, often accentuated by the effects of the 1980 earthquake, it would seem better, despite all the difficulties of resolving the personal situation of those who live there, to remove them; not to build again, but, instead, to change the use of that space by leaving it open, unbuilt. Maria Cerreta, an architectural friend, tells me that this approach has rarely been considered. The temptation is always to fill space, never to leave it empty. This, associated with the lengthy processes such interventions require, means that the historical center is full of ghostlike building sites and precarious edifices that are literally propped up by scaffolding. Given the length of time involved, this often means living in a building that will never be fully renovated and will never ‘‘return’’ to its ‘‘original’’ state. As a propped-up environment, a propped-up city, an uncertain ambient that experiences continual mutation, Naples inadvertently sugNaples: A Porous Modernity 77

gests a more transitory sense of habitation. There are many major cities in the world, not necessarily Occidental, such as Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, where large segments of the population live in a transitory habitat, in buildings that the inhabitants themselves are architecturally responsible for, creating housing that employs urban detritus for their building materials. This is not to suggest that the damaged and decayed buildings of Naples are of this order, but to think about a temporal and transitory architecture is also an invitation to reconsider how one might inhabit urban space in a more flexible fashion, as opposed to the static logic of the historical ‘‘palazzo’’ deeply rooted in time and the terrain.

critical city The evidence appears banal, beneath the threshold of our intelligence, while on the contrary it is strikingly beyond it.—ermanno rea

As in all cities, rational explanations in Naples are drawn from the evolution of the urban settlement in time. Geography and history are distilled into a coherent framework, occasionally seeded with accidental forces, that advances the continuity of development. A certain inevitability is secreted in the account: The present state of the city somehow already exists in embryonic form in the instance of its foundation. There is a progression that initiates with birth and concludes in the maturation of the present. Cities only die in antiquity. This, however, is only one particular manner of collecting and re-membering the past. The history of a city could also be narrated through discontinuities, temporary states, and transitory configurations: invasions, destruction, disasters—all the uncertainties that attend an uncontrollable nature and irreverent time. Naples, for example, certainly lends itself to this latter form of telling. The desire for stability, like the desire for survival, perhaps blinds us to these other dimensions, these other senses. Writing in the 1920s, the German visitor Alfred Sohn-Rethel noted: 78 Chapter 4

The city lived under Vesuvius, and its existence was therefore constantly threatened. As a consequence it participated in the diffusion of the technical and economical development of Europe in piecemeal fashion, because it was impossible to know whether the year would not be interrupted by a catastrophe.∂

Experienced in this fashion the city is not simply a physical reality, the sum of its collective histories, memories, and monuments. It is, instead, more aptly apprehended in the instance of what the Situationists called psychogeography: the practice of mental and physical drifting that leads to rewriting the urban text in terms of a desire that snares the unexpected and the incalculable in the immediacy of a situation. The instructive value of Naples, both socially and aesthetically (and are they really so easily divisible?), may lie not so much in its pretended uniqueness as in its capacity for dispersal, for losing itself and thereby escaping the predictable. Here the city does not stand for a firm, rational, and unique referent; it slips through conventional schema to propose a floating semantics, drifting through a hundred interpretations, a thousand stories. Its meaning flows beyond the rough physicality of its streets into the interior architecture that provides the scaffolding of the imaginary. This imaginary place, like all dream material, promotes a language that calls for a mode of interpretation. Sohn-Rethel’s linking of the city to the idea of catastrophe, to imminent destruction and decay, draws us into the language of the ruin, the language of the Baroque. Naples is fundamentally a Baroque city. This is how Walter Benjamin, who wrote much of his book on the Baroque theater of mourning in 1925 while staying on Capri and frequently visiting the city, comments on the centrality of the ruin in the figural economy of the Baroque: In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. This explains the Baroque cult of the ruin.∑

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It is, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann notes, in the allegorical style of the Baroque, in its insistence on ruin and decay, in the shriveling up of history and life, that the ‘‘maximum energy emerges due to it being a corpse.’’∏ To live under the volcano in a constant reminder of one’s mortality: Is that the key to the city’s schizophrenic energy, its language of exultation and despair, its extremes of physical violence and mental resignation? In Naples you are constantly aware of not simply living an urban experience, but also of living urban life as a problem, as an interrogation, as a provocation. As an unfolding negation of the assumed inevitability of ‘‘progress,’’ the city continually proposes physical and philosophical foundations that stymie the principles of stability. Hence, lived as a predicament rather than as a planned environment, Naples presents itself as a critical city. Its innumerable seventeenth-century buildings are silent witnesses to the continuing disruption of linear development as urban and architectural design dissolve into sounds, streets, and bodies that do not readily bend to the structural stability sought by the modern will. Inhabiting the Baroque motif of the ruin, positioned in the precincts of progress, always on the threshold of disaster and decay, Naples is perhaps emblematic of the city in crisis, of the city as crisis. The self-conscious pathos of its language, its composite but insistent style, betrays the multiple histories and memories that swell up in the rupture and revenge of signification, leaving us with a profoundly metropolitan interrogation of the enigma of what Heidegger once called the nebulous quality of life. A desired historical continuity frequently obfuscates the complexity of the past which lies in those loose ends and uncoordinated strands of unfinished business that are always ready to snare the present; all those lives, voices, projects, patterns, and occasions that somehow failed to register or are only permitted a marginal presence in the consistency of the present-day tale. Here the incoherent, the silent, the banished exist only as noise, as background static, as unheeded disturbance. The relentless nature of time, the inevitability of progress, the implacable determinism of a destiny ruled by the past seduces us into accepting a unique understanding. It is presumably only our individ80 Chapter 4

ual ignorance that prevents us from reaching out to grasp the wholeness of history. But contemporary voices, invariably arriving from elsewhere, have suggested that time is not so homogeneous, that both collective and individual lives are not so continuous; a heterogeneity, sustained by silent and excluded witnesses, draws us into listening to the other side of history, both to the histories of others and to another history. This latter tale leads us to abandon the longing for a single coherence; it forces us to recognize in the narration the act of repression that accompanies every representation as the price of coherence. Some years ago I wrote: Writing in 1924, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis noted, in what has subsequently become a much cited commentary, that the city of Naples consists in a ‘‘porous architecture.’’ Its principal building material is the yellow tufo, volcanic matter emerging out of the maritime depths and solidifying on contact with sea water. Transformed into habitation, this porous rock returns buildings to the dampness of their origins. In this dramatic encounter with the archaic elements (earth, air, fire and water) there already lies the incalculable extremes that co-ordinate the Neapolitan quotidian. The crumbling tufo, child of the violent marriage between volcano and sea, fire and water, is symptomatic of the unstable edifice that is the city.π

Applied to the physical and metaphysical sense of the city, the idea of porosity can be extended to include its historical and cultural formation. Porous matter absorbs whatever it encounters; it soaks up external elements while maintaining its initial form. It embodies and incorporates foreign elements and external pressures. The history of Naples is also, and perhaps most significantly, the history of such processes. Naples has hosted innumerable invasions, incursions, overlords, and political delegations over the past millennium. Conquered and occupied many times, in the end it is invariably the conqueror who is subdued and ends up paying tribute to the internal rhythms and autochthonous design of the city.

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unruly histories Landrò always found himself contrary to something or somebody, and it seemed that his main worry was that of being always able to say no, to negate every possibility of anything positive or affirmative. —giuseppe montesano

The original settlement of the future city was inaugurated by the colonizing Greek Cumini (themselves apparently from the island of Rhodes). They established Palaepolis on the hill of Pizzofalcone. In the fifth century, the second settlement of Neapolis was established farther to the east in the present-day historical center; the most obvious traces are in Piazza Bellini and in the subterranean classroom, or Aula delle Mura Greche, at the Orientale University in Piazza San Domenico Maggiore. As a Greek city, Naples was a favored choice for Romans, of both the republic and the empire, who desired a ‘‘classical’’ education. The language of the city was Greek; Greek were the festivals and the modalities of civic administration and the education system. It was also here, to Villa Lucullo (once home to Virgil and today the fortified complex of Castel dell’Ovo), that Odoacre dispatched Romolo Augustolo to end his days as the last Roman emperor. In the sixth century, Naples was a Byzantine city where religious institutions were both Latin and Greek. The city was bilingual; only in the eighth century did Latin replace Greek as the official language of the now autonomous duchy which was only nominally linked to distant Constantinople. Fear of losing their newly won independence led the Neapolitan dukes to solicit aid from Arab forces in Sicily and North Africa against a possible Byzantine return. This, in turn, led to increasing Arab incursions in southern and central Italy, including the sack of Rome in 846. At Vico Equense, half an hour’s drive south of Naples, there is a Torre Saracense; built as a fortification by Arab raiders, today it is a sophisticated restaurant. Farther south, Sicily was under the dominion of Berber powers from North Africa and the emirs of the Egyptian dynasty of the Fatimidi until the arrival of the Normans in 1061, who, in turn, became turbaned monarchs. Al-Idrisi, 82 Chapter 4

resident at the court of Palermo, dedicated his important geographical treatise in Arabic Kitab Rujar, or Amusements for those who long to traverse the horizon, to the Norman Roger II.∫ Roger’s wife, Elvira, was daughter of Alfonso VI of Castile and his Arab wife Zaida. Roger’s grandson, the Arab-speaking Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II— founder in 1224 of the University of Naples—was to reinstall the Muslim call to prayer in the Christian-controlled city of Jerusalem and to deploy Arab cavalry to defeat the Lombard League. Under the Norman monarchy in Naples, the commercial area outside the city walls was known as the moricino, for it was there that the Moors, or Arab merchants, lived. It is perhaps in this more profound sense, in its historical debt to the southern and eastern Mediterranean, rather than in the supercilious and racialized stereotypes imposed by the Piedmont commanders who took over the city in 1860, that Naples is an ‘‘Oriental’’ city. Its own creolized past casts a critical light into the internal formation of a future Europe that has persistently sought to counteract such southern and Oriental ‘‘roots.’’ Such negations perhaps also explain the city’s own neurotic relationship to modernity, in which an imposed inferiority is often worked up into the persistent mannerisms of uncritical local pride. Naples is famously a city framed by the sea, the sun, and a volcano. Beyond such immediacies, rendered commonplace in a hundred descriptions, a thousand songs, ten thousand photos and postcards, these natural referents reveal themselves to be a perpetual reminder of what our anthropocentric understandings often fail to register. The earthquake, the threat of volcanic eruption, or simply the perpetual accompaniment of the sea registers the limits and continual interrogation of a self-absorbed humanity. Beneath the indifferent glare of sunlight, unsolicited accidents and natural hazards are invariably considered marginal and insignificant in the unfolding narrative of immediate lives. Nevertheless, if reintroduced into the account, the ‘‘natural’’ dimension of history renders the social security of the earlier narrative altogether more fragile and transitory; that is, more ‘‘historical’’ in the deeper, temporal and tellurian, sense of the term. For here history is not merely the story of selected human events; it is also the testimony of an unfolding and unforeseeable terrestrial transit. Naples: A Porous Modernity 83

The figure of the city, with its sedimented strata of previous lives and memories, was a favorite metaphor of Freud’s for the unconscious, and Naples is certainly a city that believes in the talking cure. It repeatedly refers to itself, offering up the scene of endless analysis. Perpetually constructing and reassuring itself in words, the city is continually exposed in laments for the past and fantasies for the future, while the present often passes unattended, abandoned, like the peeling walls of its buildings. Self-absorbed, as though blocked in what Jacques Lacan refers to as the mirror phase—the glance of Narcissus that avoids the void, the abyss (Vesuvius?), the other that might challenge its presumed uniqueness, its identity—Naples, witnessed from elsewhere, also becomes the laboratory of a critical configuration. For the city, despite all of its specific details and provincial claims on experience, cannot avoid acquiring a part in other stories, other idioms, other possibilities. It is ineluctably transformed from being a self-referring monument to becoming an urban intersection, a rendezvous, a site of transit in a wider network. Set loose from its moorings, the city drifts into other accounts. Its parochial hold on reality is compromised by economic and cultural forces that are also being narrated elsewhere: in a global economy that is simultaneously signaled in the world stock exchanges, the world drug market, and contemporary patterns of international migration. Walking in the city, I follow narrow alleys that turn inward toward the piazza, a church, or that bring me to monuments set up in the name of death and disaster: the decorated guglie, or obelisks that commemorate volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and plagues. Only rarely do streets direct me toward the opening of the sea. It is as though the city draws its energy from the darkness, the shadows, sucking the light out of things in an irrepressible self-reflection that serves to illuminate its passion for self-centeredness. The sea remains an accessory, an appendage from which fish once arrived and urban effluence is now dispatched. Naples is above all a vertical city, reflected in its archaeological sedimentation and social stratification. The class ladder commences with one-room dwellings on the streets—i bassi— to arrive at the attics and terraces of the professional classes and splinters of aristocracy still clinging to the heights. The sea and sky are 84 Chapter 4

caught in snatches; the lateral (democratic?) view is rarely permitted. The gaze is either bounded by narrow streets or directed skywards toward secular and religious authority. Probably the aspect that most immediately strikes a visitor, a stranger, is that Naples is a city that exists above all in the conundrum of noise, in the ‘‘incessant shouting of that paranoid city’’ (Tomasi di Lampedusa). Added to the constant murmur that a local intellighenzia spins in literary lamentations and critical conservatism are the sounds that arise from the street between the interminable acceleration of scooters and angry car horns: the shout of the fishmonger; the cries of greeting; the passing trucks and megaphoned voices offering watermelons, children’s toys, glassware, and pirated cassettes of Neapolitan song; the fruit seller who publicly comments on his wares and their supposedly low prices in the third person—‘‘Che belle pesche. Duemila lire . . . ma questo è pazzo! (What fine peaches. Only two thousand lire . . . but this guy’s mad!)’’; the itinerant seller of wild berries at seven in the July morning whose acute cry fills the empty alley. These lacerations of silence attest to the physical punctuation of space by the voice, the body. It is also the body that provides a fundamental gestured grammar in which hands become interrogative beaks, arms tormented signals, and faces contorted masks. A pre-linguistic economy erupts in urban space to reveal among the sounds a certain distrust of words, their promise of explanation and their custody of reason. The hidden plan of the city lies in an architecture of introspection that is revealed not only in crumbling edifices and grim-coated facades, but also in the taciturn faces and skeptical sentiments of its inhabitants. Here, where the linearity of time spirals out into diverse tempos, the residual, the archaic, and the premodern can turn out to be emergent when visceral details and distortions undermine the dreamed-of purity of rational planning and functional design. In its art of getting by (arrangiarsi), making do, and rearranging available elements as props for a fragile urban existence, the presence of Naples— as a European, Mediterranean, and contemporary metropolis—proposes an eternal return to the inscrutable lexicon of modern urban life, to the contingencies of an unstable language in which all city dwellers are set and configured. Here, to return to the underlying connection Naples: A Porous Modernity 85

between criticism and crisis, Naples is also a potential paradigm of the city after modernity; of what, in the wake of that dream, survives and lives on. Connected in its uneven rhythms and volatile habits to other non-Occidental cities and an emerging metropolitan worldliness, Naples proposes an interruption and interrogation of our inherited understanding of urban life, architecture, and planning. Participating in progress without being fully absorbed in its agenda, Naples, as a composite space, reintroduces the uneven and the unplanned, the contingent, the historical. Viewed and, above all, lived in this manner, the interrogation posed by Naples returns the question of the city to the relationship between politics and poetics in determining our sense of the ethical and aesthetic; that is, our sense of the possible and imagining our location within it. Beyond the numbing sentence of rationalism, was that not what modernity itself once sought to achieve? What, elsewhere, is invariably forgotten and overlooked in Naples remains strikingly evident. Every city involves a pact, a settlement, between human occupation and the physical site in which it is located. There exists an ill-understood relationship between the geography and the sensibility of a city. Every city develops an unconscious trauma with its location: London on the Thames, Los Angeles in the desert, Moscow on the steppes. The site of a city is invariably a source of both attraction and repulsion for visitors and inhabitants alike. Wherever it is located, the geographical location of the city is also the subsequent source of a sedimented, emotional map. In its combination of natural setting and psychosomatic elaboration, every city is therefore also the historical realization of a human allegory. If Naples shares this condition with all cities, it is in the explicit concentration of these elemental forces that it perhaps appears atypical. The instability of the ground on which buildings are erected and over which human traffic moves, the proximity of the volcano, the indifference of a timeless sun and sea have all contributed to an ubiquitous pessimism in which, as the Neapolitan writer Raffaele La Capria eloquently puts it, the topos rapidly slides into pathos. Naples is La Città del Sole, and Tommaso Campanella was to spend more that twenty years imprisoned in its three castles—Castel Sant’Elmo, Castel dell’Ovo, and Maschio Angiovino—while, between torture, he com86 Chapter 4

posed this utopic text. In such a charged setting, a human presence is tolerated but not essential. In this disquieting geography, a deathly uncertainty coalesces around an almost Bartlebyesque affirmation of the individual and collective refusal to choose. Here the ‘‘barometer fails to register and the compass goes crazy’’; one makes contact with a rarefied immobility such as that of ‘‘the equivocal smile that appears on the face of the dead’’ (Anna Maria Ortese). Destiny, rather than decision, has the upper hand. Still, if this might explain the seeming arrest of so much of the city’s official culture and thought—its conservatism and nostalgia for the ‘‘lost harmony’’ of a vague and mythologized past—it also nurtures a widespread skepticism that refuses the superficial optimism of those, invariably from more northern climes, who believe they are predestined for ‘‘progress.’’ In a negation that is often simply condensed in a visceral ‘‘no,’’ the seamless temporality of modernity is rent by a disquieting refusal to accept its confident prophecies. As the site of a compressed and concentrated urbanity—some parts of the city have the same population density as Hong Kong—where modernity is squeezed into the custody of seventeenth-century streets and archaic rituals, in the end Naples, rather than announcing a slide into a stereotypical vision of the ‘‘Third World,’’ perhaps reveals less about its own obvious shortcomings than about the limits and illusions of modernity itself. The details, the psychogeographic and allegorical particularities of Neapolitan life, also represent a local version of a far vaster configuration. Ultimately, the formation of a city like Naples is inseparable from its historical location in a Mediterranean, and, ultimately, a worldly setting. Among the clearest symptoms is the immigrant labor force that lives in the city and hinterland. In Naples, the vast majority of immigrant domestic female labor once came from Cape Verde, Somalia, and the Philippines; more recently it has been supplemented by immigration from the Ukraine and Sri Lanka, while male labor employed in agricultural and street vending largely comes from West Africa and China. Chinese labor is also predominant in the semiclandestine clothing industries in the satellite towns at the foot of Vesuvius. To hear Arabic in the buses and Chinese on the streets; to observe the turbans, scarves, and vivid patterns of the cotton dresses Naples: A Porous Modernity 87

of women from East Africa at the post office sending money home is to recognize an urban future destined to transform local coordinates. If Naples is unwillingly thrust into the critical and global limelight of metropolitan enquiry, it also donates its own form of questioning: a particular contribution to the simultaneous formation of concentration and dispersal that Unheimlichkeit or uncanny recognition of the visceral proximity of the foreign and the strange—perhaps the profoundest symptom of modern life—that consistently doubles and displaces urban geometry with the unruly histories of the repressed and the disquiet of impending displacement. The city itself is frequently reviled for seeming to be precariously placed at the limit of Europe and modern urban life, clinging intermittently to those more ordered lifestyles associated with London, Paris, Milan, and New York. Yet in its apparent proximity to the more ‘‘typical’’ world cities and civic clutter of Cairo, São Paolo, Mumbia, and Lagos, this Mediterranean city also paradoxically finds itself drawn into proximity with the cosmopolitan composition of a Los Angeles or a London as its own internal history comes increasingly to be intersected by the intrusion of extraEuropean immigration and the imposition of global capital reworking its local concerns. Here, in the space of these ‘‘new powers and expanded intercourse on the part of individuals’’ (Karl Marx), where we are forcefully invited to rethink the spatial division of center and periphery, of ‘‘First’’ and ‘‘Third’’ worlds, the specific historical and cultural configuration of Naples acquires a new and unexpected insistence.

interrupted narratives Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas!—friedrich nietzsche

Living under a volcano—the ‘‘furious giant, rebel of the sky’’ (Girolamo Fontanella) of Neapolitan Baroque poetry—that is always on the verge of eruption (the last one occurred in March 1944, and the next, with a 88 Chapter 4

projection of a catastrophic eruption and a death toll of eighty thousand, is long ‘‘overdue’’), the violent persistence of Arcadian forces is periodically underlined by seismic events. Such reminders are mirrored in a ubiquitous uncertainty and the resigned acceptance of decay that accompanies mortality. While waiting in a doctor’s waiting room, one inevitably overhears the muttered phrase ‘‘Siamo nati per morire (We are born in order to die).’’ The fundamental pessimism revealed in this phrase—saturated with historical determinism as well as the unsuspected Heideggerean insistence that the sense of our lives arises from our potential death—condenses in a phrase the mental style and wisdom of the city. In this sense, Naples is both architecturally and existentially a profoundly Baroque city. I have always been struck by how, in Naples, a person’s height is often referred to as though the body is in a horizontal state: a tall person is considered not to be ‘‘tall’’ but ‘‘long’’—as though just born or already laid out on the mortuary slab. The circularity of birth and death is, of course, a profoundly seventeenth-century motif, and it is this circular, Baroque, manner of thought that perhaps best captures the worldly and ironic relationship of Neapolitans and their city to modernity. Walter Benjamin, as theorist of the Baroque, of the allegorical, and of a fragmentary modernity, clearly haunts such descriptions. To insist on the allegorical fashioning of the city is to insist that every explanation is transitory, mortal, and forever incomplete. To express and experience the city in this manner is to render its enigmatic quality emblematic. This path is chosen not to deepen the mystery of arcane mythologies populated by Sirens, sibyls, martyrs, and neo-pagan cults of the dead, but, rather, to render explicit and problematic the modernist desire for a conclusive transparency secured in another myth: that of the teleological inevitability of ‘‘progress.’’ For all of its parochial concerns, Naples here emerges from its local coordinates to query and disturb the projected homogeneity of the blueprint born in the anxious midst of metropolitan powers desirous of a seamless symmetry. The city, of course, is certainly not a homogeneous place. Every city is the site of collective and contested memories. To represent a city is Naples: A Porous Modernity 89

not only to describe its physical form and material details; it is also to enter the more immaterial passages proposed by memory, myth, and legend. The city is an immense archive that betrays the unconscious architecture of what is simultaneously represented and repressed. If we attempt to exhaust the meaning of the city, to render it transparent, it turns out, as Poe reminds us in ‘‘A Man of the Crowd,’’ to be a text whose secret cannot be told. The city proposes a narrative that is inexorable, relentless; it is a tale that exceeds the sequential logic of writing and the conclusive evidence of a document. The voices, bodies, and lives that compose the urban script move in diverse directions and render every narrative provisional, every history susceptible to a further telling. The transitory image that gels in a photo and lacks any pretense of explanation is perhaps a more fitting modality of representation than that proposed by writing. For the immediacy of the instantaneous ‘‘now’’ caught in a photograph is saturated with time and simultaneously the testimony of its passage. In such images, the past both invades and exceeds the present. In turn, this both encourages and interrogates our desire for interpretation and brings us back to writing. Against a local, often folkloristic, orthodoxy that fosters a predictable vision composed of sun, mandolins, and pizza, or the more refined metaphysics of the timeless sublime of ‘‘a splendid day’’ (Che bella giornata!) evoked by Raffaele La Capria, there are the memories, the dead lives and labor inscribed in the streets, sounds, languages, and life of contemporary Naples that continue to contest a predictable accounting of both the past and the present. The latter potentially renders the city a stranger to itself. February 1724: The Jesuit priest Matteo Ripa leaves China aboard an East India Company vessel accompanied by four young Chinese men bound for Naples and the subsequent establishment of the ‘‘Chinese College’’ in the city, later to become the Istituto Universitario Orientale. On May 6 in the following year, the four Chinese students, popularly known as ‘‘Turks,’’ witness the annual liquefying of the blood of the city’s patron saint—San Gennaro—in the cathedral. The college itself, where today I teach, was intended to promote both the ecclesiastical and commercial interests of the Holy Roman Empire in India 90 Chapter 4

and China and to provide instruction in Chinese for members of the Ostend Company, established by Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1722 to contest the hegemony of the English and Dutch companies in Asia. The company will be dissolved five years later, crushed by English and Dutch commercial opposition. Real ‘‘Turks,’’ however, whether in the form of corsairs from the Barbary Coast or in the direct presence of the Ottoman Empire itself, are deeply entrenched as the privileged figures for feared strangers and an alternative political and religious hegemony that continues to patrol the Mediterranean even after the Catholic naval victory of Lepanto in October 1571. In fact, Istanbul will rebuild its fleet within a year, hold on to the island of Cyprus, and, a century later, lay siege to Vienna. Venice, meanwhile, will slide into its long decline, and Spain will increasingly turn its attention to the exploitation of the New World. In everyday contemporary Neapolitan parlance, to be ‘‘taken by the Turks’’ means to be seized by panic. The city is most obviously the material repository of historical memory. As such, it is the primal archive of that shared but ragged discontinuity that presents us with our ‘‘selves.’’ The city, its buildings and spaces, its tastes and sounds, all deposited in the physical and poignant languages of locality and place, is not merely a crypt conserving dead matter; it is also witness to the disquieting ambiguity of who we ‘‘are’’ and what we might become. But what type of memory is this? After Freud, we know that historical memory, like all memory, is a selective process, dependent on language as the factor of truth. Memory depends on a language of representation and repression, of choice and displacement, of expression and oblivion. Sometimes it is necessary to forget in order to survive. Yet what is forgotten remains an essential part of the story. So the memories and forgetting deposited in the city of Naples, and the languages that seek to retrieve them, ultimately circulate without the guarantee of either continuity or conclusion. While the inventory of ‘‘facts’’ and ‘‘documents’’ apparently establishes the historical archive, it is the more unstable language of interpretation that sustains them. It is here in our relationship with the dead, and in our awareness of a past that is simultaneously represented and repressed, that a more open Naples: A Porous Modernity 91

and ethical understanding of the present is expressed. Explanations always remain susceptible to interpellation by the past. In this space, the knowledge and authority of historiography finds itself on unstable terrain, appealing to uncertain foundations, for it is here interrogated by the very processes it seeks to explain. Unavoidable corpses lie between the pages of each and every homogeneous accounting of time. The past, like memory, the unconscious, and language, overflows rational arrest. The city, its languages and lexicon, exceeds such a confinement. It is the failure of a historicist reason to engage with the living potlatch of the city—what the past offers up as an excessive gift that exceeds reification in a stable historical object—which suggests that historical knowledge is ultimately subordinate to a more extensive reasoning. What I have learned from living in Naples is that the explanatory frames of historiography, sociology, and anthropology are clearly insufficient. The city as an allegorical tangle; an entwined knot of language, dialect, and idiolect of sounds, signs, and souls—and Naples is a supreme example—punctures the analytical picture that seeks to immobilize and render the ‘‘city’’ explicit in an imposed coherence. This is not to suggest that the city therefore remains a mystery, a riddle beyond the frontier of understanding; rather, it is to suggest that the city itself, its complexity and seeming indecipherability, proposes a diverse sense of ‘‘understanding,’’ one that requires us to supplement a taxonomic cartography with an ‘‘atlas of emotion.’’Ω To understand, to take stock, to seek to possess and to register the perspiring skin and mutating body of the city is perhaps to appreciate that ‘‘sense’’ is both corporeal and temporal. It ultimately resides in the ambulatory body that contains and sustains the transport of our thought. This is to suggest a way, a direction, the movement of sense, rather than a stable semantics that seeks the impossible goal of critical distance. Sense is not what is; it is, rather, what becomes. It emerges in transit, in the unguarded transfer of language, and in the passage of bodies in time that circumscribe, transform, and produce a space in the particularities of a place. To register what escapes the immediacy of reason, what remains asymmetrical, is to acknowledge what remains out of joint, negated, and invariably repressed. To bend attention to this 92 Chapter 4

subterranean and subaltern telling is to disperse the authority of history by other narratives, by forms of telling that transgress, while traversing, the relentless sequential rhythm of ‘‘progress.’’ So the ‘‘sense’’ of Naples is not to be found solely in a series of historical, sociological, and anthropological verdicts. The city is obviously not only authorized in this manner. The seemingly implacable assurance of these and other institutional voices are not ignored; rather, they are heard while under way, seeking to register and sound out a city that refuses to be read as though it were a definitive script. The city presents itself as the site of an inconclusive passage that we can explore, experience, and exhume but never fully explain. It is this that draws us on, step after step, street after street, ready to be sidetracked, distracted, and deviated—like Walter Benjamin’s ‘‘botanist on the asphalt’’—by the details and then, finally, to recognize in the detour the making of our selves and the infinitely layered world we inhabit.∞≠ Writing the city is also to be written by the city, suspended in a narration without pretence to finality. In Naples, such an openendedness is historically accompanied, as in every city on the sea, by the horizontal slash of infinity suggested by a marine horizon. From the sea, novelty, foreigners, and invaders arrive; toward the horizon, the desired stability of sense slips away. The definitive is destined to unforeseen drift; ‘‘the break in the horizon produced by the sea prevents thought from arriving at a definitive state and power from fixing itself in the immobility of a personal patrimony.’’∞∞ This does not mean to be left reading a merely subjective account. What is sought in the city, in the rude hospitality of its languages, is the sense of a critical constellation able to portray Naples in its simultaneous uniqueness and connection to the worldly landscape of a differentiated modernity that ultimately frames us all. Finally, how should I write and view this city: as a travelogue, from the point of view of the stranger, or as an inhabitant? How to avoid the superficial eye and the imposition of an external measure, fruit of an imperial formation? Whatever posture I adopt, I find myself within the long tradition of these questions and gestures. For this city is also my home. Naples: A Porous Modernity 93

the subverted eye Coming in off the narrow, shadowy street, full of people, rain, small shops, and urban decay, and stepping into the brightly lit grays and whites of the octagonal structure of the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia in Via Tribunali is a shocking experience. It is as if one is stepping dramatically out of one world into another, out of rough chaos into a stilled order. As with all uncanny experiences, the disarming familiarity of both dimensions sucks me into the dramatic milieu of the city. In the wink of an eye, I am thrust into startling proximity with one of the greatest paintings of the European Baroque. Caravaggio’s Sette opere di misericordia/Seven Works of Mercy (1606, Chiesa Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples) is a large canvas, almost four meters by three. It lies brooding over the altar and, despite competition from other large works, including paintings by Luca Giordano and Battista Caracciolo, completely dominates the church. The seven works of mercy—that is, the six works enumerated by Christ in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, plus the additional but very pertinent burial of the dead for a plague-ridden sixteenth-century Naples— are immersed in a dramatic slice of then contemporary street life. Bodies are creased by shafts of light and enveloped in folds of darkness. A woman succors an old man with milk from her naked breast, the arched back of a bare body, the Madonna and child protected by the outstretched wings of an angel gaze on the abject details of this urban scene. The painting is framed by angles. There is no simple or obvious center but, rather, an agitated constellation of attention. The eye is not drawn in; it is drawn across the canvas in a series of trajectories that refuse to coalesce in a single point of unity. The bodies that populate this space are bodies of light seemingly distributed in a casual and quotidian manner, looming out of the shadows sustained by layers and layers of darkness. Their faces and looks propose a series of intersections that cut across the privileged perspective of the viewer’s gaze. The viewer is de-centered, his or her centrality displaced. Instead of the eye traveling into the picture toward a hypothetical vanishing point, the pictures invade the eye: disturbing, deviating, and dissecting its habitual line of vision. Attention is unfolded across the canvas in 94 Chapter 4

multiple directions. We are drawn into the undulations of clothing, flesh, faces, and the wings of an angel, all suspended in varying quantities of darkness.∞≤ If the painting and the church represent the triumphal affirmation of the Counter Reformation, they also, and above all, recall the complex composition of an emerging metropolis. Naples was the second city in Europe after Paris and the second in the Mediterranean after Istanbul. Host, as Peter Robb reminds us, to some ten thousand foreign slaves and perched on the edge of a Mediterranean Sea that had witnessed the temporary defeat of Ottoman hegemony only a few decades earlier, Naples, a colonial city ruled from Madrid, was suspended in the traffic between multiple worlds, both old and new. Its very diet was being radically transformed by the Americas: tomatoes, chili peppers, and subsequently potatoes, beans, chocolate, peppers, squash—all ingredients to be added to the earlier Arab contribution of citrus fruits, eggplant, and rice, and all destined for the formation of the ‘‘traditional’’ Mediterranean diet. Continuing my walk along Via Tribunali is to continue to wander in a gallery of Baroque churches, buildings, hidden gardens, stumbling into skulls and bones sculptured in bronze on the side of the street, fresh flowers thrust between the grinning molars: the Chiesa delle Anime del Purgatorio (one of the innumerable signatures of the Baroque architectural giant Cosimo Fanzago responsible for works that run from innumerable churches and palazzi to the massive, incomplete Palazzo Donn’Anna, whose gloomy presence dominates the sea at Mergellina). The street itself, the civic trace of the original Greek plan, cuts the ancient city in half—Spaccanapoli—as if a physical metaphor for the dualism that characterizes both the Baroque and, in a more repressed fashion, modernity. In the unresolved division between mind and body, terrestrial decay and celestial perfection, between darkness and light, the framing of thought, and life, comes to be suspended in a fluctuating and ambiguous balance: caught between the flat, tabular frame of reason and the infinite spread and interlayered folds of the body of becoming. As suggestively caught in the Italian translation of Gilles Deleuze’s book on the Baroque, between a spiegare (to explain, expound, unfold) Naples: A Porous Modernity 95

and a piegare (to fold, wrap, crease) there emerges the spiegamento (the explication, the spreading out, the unfolding).∞≥ Contrary to the fixed point of Cartesian rationalism, there is the mutable point of view revealed by the body, where to explain is to disclose a complexity to be subsequently traced in the folds, creases, and envelopment of the world. In this sense, the centrality of rhetoric to the Baroque world— and, hence, to Naples—is not an idle or ‘‘ornamental’’ matter. The art of seeing and comprehending has to be sensually assembled; it is diverse from abstract knowledge or mere information. In the violent instability of the Counter Reformation and the uncertain world of a new social, political, geographical, and scientific order, knowledge demands conviction; a mute consensus is insufficient. Sometimes the construction, whether in architecture, theater, or thought, leans more toward the light; sometimes, more toward the shadows. Invariably, it recognizes its hybrid provenance in both. The constraints of mortality are inscribed as much in the abstraction of rational flights as in the vivid immediacy of bodies and light obliquely pictured in Caravaggio: temporarily caught but not centered, falling away, out of the frame. It is in the art of Caravaggio that we most persistently encounter the uncertain sense of stability and certitude. His paintings open a window on the seemingly inexplicable and indecipherable matrix of this fundamentally Baroque city. Here the perspective of mimesis and the desired transparency of reason sought in representation is subverted and the doubts of depiction announced. The neoclassicist Poussin declared that Caravaggio had come into the world to destroy painting. Frustrating a rationalist appropriation inscribed in the pleasurable measure of classical order and interpretation, Caravaggio’s manner of painting directly ‘‘from life’’ threatened the nobility of the gaze (theoria) by offering what was seen and felt rather than what reason composed and condoned. The deadly beauty of theory; the conclusive, crypt-like configuration of discourse; and the rationalism of representation that render the world legible and ready for possession are destroyed by Caravaggio’s turning the gaze inward on itself and the mortal framing it announces.∞∂ With Caravaggio, as Louis Marin points out, we encounter not the truth of the object represented, but the truth of the representation. Eliminating distance and trapping the 96 Chapter 4

eye in appearance all occurs on the surface of the painting, on the ‘‘plane where the outside and inside coincide in a blurred and undecideable boundary. It is here that the outside and inside are at their most intense and attain their greatest power—a power so overwhelming that it cannot be resisted.’’∞∑ The ‘‘idea’’ of painting as faithful mimesis, as ‘‘true’’ to nature, as a historical judgment and critical prospect is replaced by the act of painting, in which ‘‘the moment of sight erupts within representation.’’ Marin concludes: What looms out of the black space of these canvases is that ‘‘the self-reflexive moment within Caravaggio’s paintings reveals painting to be a representation without basis, without foundations.’’ In Caravaggio, ‘‘the glance is a gesture of pointing, a wordless ‘this’; that does away with supplementary discourses and description, striking here and now.’’∞∏ In its violent affirmation, this temperament announces the precarious space of the emergence of the modern urban world and anticipates what in later centuries will be referred to as ‘‘mass culture.’’

rubbish At every corner, and dotted along the streets occupying valuable parking space, are the rubbish bins. They are large metal containers, on wheels, and opened, if the rigid plastic cover has not been destroyed, with a foot pedal. Household rubbish is supposed to be deposited in these containers only after seven in the evening; this acquires a certain urgency in the summer months, when high temperatures and organic decomposition augment street smells. The rule is rarely respected. During the night, and quite remarkably nearly every night, the containers are individually hooked to the back of a large rubbish truck and then mechanically hoisted into the air to deposit their contents in the vehicle for crushing and eventual transfer to the tips. It is said, but also corroborated by investigative journalism, that this metropolitan rubbish, both its collection and the management of its disposal in often unauthorized landfills, is in the hands of local crime syndicates: the Camorra. Many of these illicit rubbish tips continue to operate, often accepting illicit toxic material from elsewhere in Italy. Naples: A Porous Modernity 97

Paradoxically, many of the official sites, owing to saturation, have been closed. For several months in the spring of 2001, this led to a crisis, with mountains of rubbish rotting in giant plastic bags on the streets. Subsequently, it was all dispatched by train to Düsseldorf, where its incineration supplied energy to the German city’s power grid. Since then, often amid an opposition that represents ecological, but perhaps also other, shadier, interests, the regional authority has begun to propose similar energy-recycling plants that will supply the local grid, provide employment, and guarantee an ecologically more sustainable disposal of rubbish. The sociological and historical explanation of the Neapolitan Camorra sets them apart from the Sicilian mafia. The latter initially emerged in a rural context. The Camorra is fundamentally an urban phenomenon, a product of the popular masses housed in the overcrowded and politically abandoned quarters of the city. The economic and social security of the street, its management and ‘‘policing,’’ fell into the hands of those willing to use the violence required to create an ‘‘order’’ amenable to their family and clan interests. From being a local counter-power, managing the hidden economy of organized street crime, prostitution, extortion, and price fixing of the fruit and vegetable markets, the Camorra—with its Sicilian and Calabrian cousins, and often in collaboration—has developed into a modern financial organization with significant social and political clout. After the closure of the free port of Tangiers and the subsequent shift of the contraband tobacco trade to the northern side of the Mediterranean, the Camorra in the Campania region grew in the 1970s in economic and organizational scale. The Neapolitan port of Mergillina, as elsewhere up and down the coast, was full of high-speed boats. With their cargo of cigarettes unloaded from ships in extraterritorial waters, these streamlined blue craft were able to outstrip the cutters of the local Customs in their dash for the shore. In Naples alone, more than four thousand boats were directly involved in the night trips offshore, and about fifty thousand persons operated in the contraband cigarette business. Organized crime made further gains in the early 1980s, above all in the construction industry, after the earthquake of 1980. The power of organized crime was rendered explicit with the 98 Chapter 4

direct intervention of the boss Raffaele Cutolo and his Nuova Camorra Organizzata on behalf of the Christian Democrat Party in obtaining the release of the local politician Ciro Cirillo from the Red Brigades. The Camorra simultaneously earned both half the ransom money and significant institutional and political goodwill. Four decades previously, toward the end of World War Two in occupied Naples, the English intelligence officer Norman Lewis had this to say: [Vito] Genovese, according to Edwards, was not, as described on our files, ex-secretary to Al Capone, nor was he even a Sicilian, but had been born in the village of Ricigliano, near Potenza. He had been second-in-command of a New York mafia ‘‘family’’ headed by Lucky Luciano, Edwards said, and had succeeded to its leadership when Luciano was gaoled, after which he had been acknowledged as the head of all the American mafia. Shortly before the outbreak of war Genovese had returned to Italy to escape a murder indictment in the US, had become a friend of Mussolini’s, and then, with the Duce’s fall, transferred his allegiance to Allied Military Government, where he was now seen as the power behind the scenes. Genovese controlled the sindacos [mayors] in most towns within fifty miles of Naples.∞π

On July 5, 1950, the twenty-eight-year-old Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano was killed, not in a shootout with the Carabinieri, as the official account announces, but in his sleep, betrayed and executed by his lieutenant and cousin Gaspare Pisciotta (later poisoned in prison after claiming his responsibility for Giuliano’s death). Giuliano’s death marks the closure of the initial chapter of postwar Italy, in which the complex political, cultural, and economic reassembling of national reconstruction is shadowed and permeated by the insertion of the mafia and the Camorra, not to speak of elements of the fascist regime recruited in the new ‘‘war’’ against communism, into the historical equation. In the same month seven years previously, Anglo-American troops had invaded Sicily. The Americans chose to reanimate their historical links with Italy (more than 4 million persons, predominantly from southern Italy, had permanently emigrated to the United States in the previous seventy years) by deploying Italo-American personnel in the Italian campaign and, above all, by cynically activating the interNaples: A Porous Modernity 99

national networking of the mafia (along with the Catholic church and the Masons) in preparing the invasion and the subsequent postwar administration. In January 1946, Charles ‘‘Lucky’’ Luciano was released from a U.S. prison and dispatched to Italy. Although Luciano, head of the New York mafia, had been condemned to more than thirty years of imprisonment in 1936, Thomas Dewey, governor of the State of New York, accepted the Board of Parole’s verdict, which has subsequently been revealed to have been motivated by secret collaboration between the mafia and the U.S. Navy in the preparations leading up to the Allied invasion of Sicily. Charles Poletti, a successful Italo-American lawyer, was dispatched to Palermo as military governor of Sicily. Among the mayors of the liberated towns Poletti immediately nominated were several noted mafia chiefs. In the turbulence of postwar southern Italy, characterized by feudal property rights and a disoriented and alarmed bourgeoisie faced with peasants hungry for land, reemerging unions, and the threat of the ‘‘reds,’’ the ‘‘trinity’’ (Pisciotta’s own term for this unholy alliance) of militarized policing, mafia, and banditry served to maintain an existing order all over the Mezzogiorno through the judicious dispersal of violence. In 1947, Giuliano and his band machinegunned the May Day march of peasants at Portella della Ginestra, leaving eight dead and thirty wounded. Three years later, his services were no longer required. Isolated from the concerns and councils of the mafia, by now a folkloristic embarrassment to the local oligarchy and the public face of government, Giuliano was an abandoned bandit with ninety-seven warrants for arrest, accused of three hundred crimes, and held responsible for the deaths of peasants, private citizens, and eighty-seven police officers. His ultimate undoing was his lack of integration in the postwar settlement. This has certainly not been the case of the capillary associations of the mafia, the Camorra, and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, with their ability to organize the economic and political control of rural territories and urban fiefdoms. Such organizations only give vent to highly publicized violence when the calculated logic of their economic, territorial, and political power is threatened. Violent deaths—and there have been hundreds over the past three decades—express the con100 Chapter 4

stant struggle between organized bands, associations, and alliances for territorial control and subsequent economic power. Codified in a perverse sense of ‘‘honor,’’ and respectfully serviced by a conspiracy of silence (omertà), the power of organized crime not only reaches far into the recesses of civic, political, and economic activities but has successfully transformed itself into becoming an integral and, implicitly, accepted part of their textures. In their own, very particular manner, they represent a specific contribution to the ongoing configuration of civil society. As a local building-industry boss intent on ‘‘sacking’’ the postwar city with illegal building projects and quick profits, Rod Steiger, as Edoardo Nottola, vividly captures in a suitably histrionic performance the tentacled reach of corruption and political interests in Francesco Rosi’s classic film Le mani sulla città (1963). Rosi has also graphically re-created the official and unofficial imbroglio of both the earlier Guliano and the Luciano affairs in his films Salvatore Giuliano (1962) and Lucky Luciano (1974). In this rhizomatic extension of power coursing through the gray areas of legality, a community of interests, favors, and unspoken collusion is stitched together. The details and denouncements of local corruption and criminal activity rarely come from resident journalists, who are themselves often imbricated in the context and the collusion of the community. If it does, it invariably concludes in death, as the young freelance journalist Giancarlo Siani, sometime contributor to the Neapolitan daily Il Mattino, discovered to his cost in 1985. Emerging out of the local logic of territorial control and a political spoils system, organized crime is today a complex global business. Its tentacles connect the heroin street fix in the Neapolitan periphery of Secondigliano, the nightly rubbish trucks passing down the street, to the building industry and such major state interventions as the massive reconstruction of housing and infrastructure in the Neapolitan hinterland after the earthquake of 1980 that left more than three thousand dead and thousands more homeless. Right now, organized crime is burrowing into the bids and contracting around the ongoing construction of the Italian high-speed-railway system and was all set for the proposed suspension bridge across the Straits of Messina before it was canceled. From here, the network reaches out to the international Naples: A Porous Modernity 101

commerce in drugs and contraband arms and the laundering of illicit gains in the financial paradises of global capital. Back in wartime Naples, here is Norman Lewis once more: What was to be done? Nothing, Edwards said. The cic [CounterIntelligence Corps] had soon learned to steer clear of any racket in which Genovese had a finger—and his finger was in most. Too many American officers had been chosen to go on the Italian campaign because they were of Italian descent. For this reason it was hoped that they might easily adapt to the environment, and this they had done all too well. The American-Italians in amg [Allied Military Government] reigned supreme and knew how to close their ranks when threatened from without. An American cic agent who had cottoned on to the fact that the notorious Genovese was in virtual control of Naples and set out to investigate his present activities, soon found himself isolated and powerless, and all the reward he had had for his pains was loss of promotion.∞∫

What ultimately emerges from this ‘‘dirty’’ landscape, from this monnezza of illicit power, is not merely the complex intertwining of mafia and politics, of crime, business, and government, but above all the external, Allied, and, in particular, American management of the postwar Italian scenario. Local authority, in the form of mafia power and earlier fascist officialdom, was promoted and protected by the Allied forces. In an emerging Cold War climate intent on containing and rolling back the ‘‘red’’ menace, such a strategy ensured that public and political institutions experienced a sustained continuity. The Fascist state and its personnel were neither dismantled nor reformed. The Office of Strategic Services (oss) officer James Jesus Angleton, a Republican Mason and later responsible for the cia desk for Israel and Italy, rushed north in the dying months of the war to save Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, head of the notorious X Mas squadron of the Fascist Republic of Salò, from execution by the partisans. Both Borghese and his lieutenants were recruited by the oss as agents of U.S. intelligence. Fifteen years later, Borghese attempted a right-wing coup. If in 1945 ‘‘liberation’’ and ‘‘democracy’’ were the official bywords, for the oss, incubator of the future cia, it would be a hidden league, forged in the symbiotic networks of mafia, masonry, Fascism, and the Catholic 102 Chapter 4

church, that was to secure the authority of order and an enduring political settlement. This ‘‘third force,’’ to evoke Graham Greene’s The Quiet America, subsequently cast its net over Italian civil and political society. That force has never been eradicated.

philosophical haunts From Vatolla, a small village perched up in the mountains of Cilento, some 80 kilometers to the southeast of Naples as the crow flies, one looks out of the studio window of Palazzo Vargas across the Sele plain, with its buffalo and mozzarella. Your eyes are drawn toward Capri and the Bay of Naples, a line of vision that traverses the Greek temples of Paestum and its striking depiction of the world beyond in the remarkable painted Tomb of the Diver. This was the view, no doubt tinged with nostalgia, that entertained the city’s most famous philosopher, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), in his eleven-year sojourn as tutor to the children of Domenico Rocca, Marchese of Vatolla. Unlike most Italian intellectuals of his own and subsequent generations, Vico had no other means than his own intellectual wits on which to survive. Very much a Neapolitan, Vico was obsessed with the problematic nature of historical processes. In his writings, a native sense of destiny, whether endorsed by religious or rationalist dogma, was challenged by the innovative idea that history was an ongoing cultural elaboration: the product of human imagination and labor. Further, Vico went on to radically extend the idea of ‘‘history’’ from a narrow concern with political figures and military events to include every aspect of human life. In his strikingly modern understanding of history as a symbolic and social construction, Vico reminds us, despite the irresistible faith in ‘‘progress,’’ that history is not an arrow slicing through empty time; it is, rather, the untidy and incomplete testament of lives lived in a worldly frame. Naples itself, in its buildings, streets, sounds, and prospects, is witness to the perpetual process of historical sedimentation, detritus, and contingent configurations; witness to lives that inevitably remain irreducible to the narrow concerns of a singular purpose or perspective. Here history slips beyond teleology into testimony; bearNaples: A Porous Modernity 103

ing witness, it does not present us with an implacable destiny but, rather, envelopes us in a persistent interrogation of our condition. The city is not a stable archive, housing the accumulation of dead documents and established facts. Instead, it proposes the unruly and unmapped (even unmappable) topography of time. In the immediacy of bodies and sense, of cultural traces and physical constraints, history as epistemology—that is, as a theory of knowledge and progress—is invaded, interrupted, and displaced by a complex, often indecipherable ontology that the discipline of history invariably fails or refuses to register. To experience Naples as a historical challenge, one that persistently queries the desire, design, and discipline of historiography, is in truth to query the very premises of representation and the assumed transparent relationship between language and event. (Once again, we are drawn into the Baroque and the layered folds of darkness that sustain Caravaggio’s art.) The experience of Naples suggests the translation of that tradition, and its institutionalized knowledge, into an engagement with the prospect that history occurs within language; that, in a profound sense, the language of history is the history of language. The very discourse that seeks to illuminate and render the world transparent, as though it were a beam of light, semantically produces the shadows that constitute its margins. If it is from a backward glance that future scenarios are constructed; then considering how the ‘‘past’’ is constituted becomes imperative in deciphering the sense we wish to bestow on this city. Walking its streets, seeking shade from the piercing rays of the sun, feeling the almost tangible qualities of the spiral of time, we are faced with the choice of either remaining prisoners of an implacable past and, hence, of time itself, or of returning to that inheritance to remember and interpret it in a manner that frees the present for further possibilities. This is a question that not only, and most obviously, invests modern historiography; it is a debate that has persistently contributed to the very making of modern, everyday Naples as a physical and metaphysical edifice. The city, after all, has been home to both Giambattista Vico and Benedetto Croce. In the respective works of these two thinkers it is possible to enumerate a divergence of historical under104 Chapter 4

standing that invests both the very sense of ‘‘history’’ and, as a consequence, of the city itself. Vico conducted a continual critique of Cartesian rationalism and its universal point of view, insisting on its circumscribed applicability to social and human affairs. Against the arbitrary insistence on an a priori truth articulated in our abstractions, Vico proposed a limited human consciousness unable to render nature fully transparent to its will. That Vico drew on an esoteric vitalism to contest the mechanical logic and triumphant rationalism of the then very actual Scientific Revolution does not diminish the pertinence of his critique of the will to universal uniformity that the new epistemology sought to secure. After all, his contemporary, Isaac Newton, was deeply inspired by the Cabbala and the magic of numbers in his own rationalizing endeavors. Where Vico’s arguments achieve their forceful synthesis is in his opus Principi d’una scienza nuova dintorno alla natura delle nazioni (1725), which, along with its various amendments, is generally known as Scienza nuova. In this work, Vico proposes a science of history in which human activity and truth are conjoined in the institutions of language, laws, and myths, and is authored by human beings. In this key, the distinction between abstract philosophical ‘‘truths’’ and immediate philological ‘‘facts’’ is overcome and absorbed in the socialized activities of humankind. Vico insisted on a poetic understanding, distilled in myth, magic, and non-rationalized understanding, that depends on the power of language and the centrality of metaphor in the articulation of knowledge and, hence, in the writing and reception of history. Such a perspective is destined to irritate and interrogate the heady rationalism of intellectual formations that are self-absorbed in proposing their doctrines and ‘‘civilization.’’ The Neapolitan philosopher persistently argued against the presumed superiority of rationalism confronted with ancient beliefs, as though the latter were without sense; hence, his rejection of the idea that the archaic is somehow external and foreign to modernity itself (a criticism that more recently has been effectively echoed in the anthropological work of Ernesto De Martino and in the cinema and poetics of Pier Paolo Pasolini). In his grounding of thought and truth in time, in his location of interpretaNaples: A Porous Modernity 105

tion within contingent, historical, and cultural framings, Vico evoked both interdisciplinary study and the concerns of modern cultural anthropology. Drawing critical attention to the precariousness of culture and reason, Vico’s work proposes a sustained critique of rationalism through excavating a reasoning that is not merely logical in intent or merciless in affect. So if, as Vico argues, history is the product of human activity and, therefore, only humans can ever ‘‘know’’ history, they can at the same time never fully know or ‘‘possess’’ it. At this point, there emerges the critical imperative of reading knowledge against knowledge; just as books are about other books, so knowledge emerges on a relational and contested terrain. Perhaps the most significant testimony to the modern pertinence of Vico’s thought is to be found in the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci and his incisive analyses of the formation of modern Italy, and, more recently, in the critical revaluation of historiographical thinking proposed in Hayden White’s excavation of the structuring tropes deployed in recovering and ‘‘representing’’ the past. After Vatolla, Vico returned to Naples to take up the Chair of Rhetoric at the University of Naples, where he taught after 1699. The original site of the University of Naples, founded to contest the power of Bologna and frequented by Thomas Aquinas, is unknown, but it was almost certainly in the historical heart of the city. Today, its main entrance is on Corso Umberto, a modern avenue created in the late 1880s as part of the ‘‘risanamento,’’ or cleaning up, of the city after the cholera outbreak of 1884 that struck down more than seven thousand Neapolitans. It was here, in a generalized European climate of ‘‘inventing’’ traditions, that Francesco De Sanctis, subsequently minister for education, elaborated and authorized an organic national literary canon with his Storia della letteratura italiana (1871). Here, too, one can view the plaque in the entrance hall to the university commemorating those ‘‘non-Aryan’’ teachers expelled from the education system in the wake of the racial laws of 1938. Ten minutes’ stroll away in Via Semmola (now Via Benedetto Croce), at number 12, is the fourteenth-century Palazzo Filomarino, with is massive Baroque doorway by the eighteenth-century architect Ferdinando Sanfelice. Here, Benedetto Croce lived much of his life. It is with Croce that we en106 Chapter 4

counter another version of ‘‘history,’’ one that superficially pursues Vico’s concern with our temporal framing, but which ultimately delivers a radically different verdict on our historical state. It is Croce’s vision that has acquired the hegemonic status of critical common sense. The disquieting responsibility of registering a limited rationality, of acknowledging a circumscribed knowledge in writing history and evoking the past—bequeathed by Vico and sharply reinforced in Hayden White’s recent critical work—hardly finds an echo in modern Neapolitan and Italian historiography. Croce believed in an ‘‘absolute historicism’’ for which life and reality are nothing other than history. But here history is not so much the temporal articulation of social and symbolic life as the history of the individualized, and ultimately infinite, manifestations of the a-historical immanence of the human spirit. This vapid destination for historical sense, mediated through the thousand details, anecdotes, and principled lives that Croce lovingly evokes in his many histories of Naples, is cousin to Croce’s aesthetics. In both cases, ‘‘history’’ and ‘‘art’’ are presented in the idealistic determinism of self-regulating categories, impervious to radical problematization and critical appropriation. In both cases, we find ourselves conversing with what turns out to be a disembodied absolute. For Croce, the work of art is totally autonomous from all other human activities; art proposes an unconditional, disinterested, and self-sufficient image whose character is universal. Similarly, if for Croce historical consciousness is the unique form of theoretical validity, the problematic nature of what constitutes ‘‘history,’’ how it comes to be recognized, authorized, and narrated, is consigned to the implacable authority of a human ‘‘spirit’’ that sustains, in a sort of secular religiosity, what is ultimately an uncontestable framing of the world. The positivism of ‘‘progress,’’ guaranteed by the presumed linearity of time and the unfolding development of a ‘‘freedom’’ that is realized in the identity between history and spirit, seals historical explanation in an autonomous, self-sustaining semantics. This idealistic grammar, however, can be dispersed; the idea of ‘‘progress’’ can be put on ice; and the ‘‘logic’’ of ‘‘history’’ can be opened up to interrogation by those expelled from the account—that is, by those ‘‘without history’’ who Naples: A Porous Modernity 107

have been structurally excluded from, or simply obliterated by, ‘‘progress.’’ Here, as Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us, there emerges what is most profoundly ‘‘underdeveloped’’ in the Occidental awareness and elaboration of history and its ‘‘modernity.’’ Many, and invariably without choice, continue to live this temporality differently, inhabiting a plurality of histories and powers that constitute a more complex, ragged, heterogeneous, nonlinear modernity. Yet the ‘‘victims’’ of an inevitable ‘‘progress’’ are not only and most dramatically those who have paid, and are paying, with their lives. There are also those who continue to propose and live this stunted vision. Here history is not considered to involve interrogations; endings; beginnings; partial, partisan and always incomplete understandings—only the perpetual unfolding of a ‘‘passive revolution’’ (to adopt the eighteenth-century Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco’s critical warning) that continues to absorb and mollify change in a continual confirmation of the status quo. Moving now to a building in which this drama has been most vividly etched, we find ourselves in the octagonal courtyard of the Palazzo Serra di Cassano at Monte di Dio, with its external, winged staircase also designed by Ferdinando Sanfelice. The main door to the building opens on to Via Egiziaca a Pizzofalcone, where I live. Here, almost eight centuries ago, Frederick II hunted with his falcons (Pizzo Falcone/Falcon Peak). The massive metal portal, however, has remained closed ever since that fatal day in 1799 when the Duke of Cassano decided to close the palace doors that faced the Royal Palace in protest after the decapitation of his son Gennaro Serra, Duke of Cassano. Gennaro Serra, along with hundreds of other liberal aristocrats, intellectuals, and radicals who participated in the revolution and the subsequently short-lived Neapolitan Republic of 1799, lost his life following the bloody restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. After five turbulent months, the city had been retaken by a peasant army led by Cardinal Ruffo, while the reinstallation of the Bourbon regime was directly supervised by Horatio Nelson from the flagship of the British fleet at anchor in the bay. The short-lived republic is today still overwhelmingly discussed in terms of the errors, weaknesses, and characteristics of the local liberal bourgeoisie (brilliantly re-created 108 Chapter 4

around the figure of Eleonara Pimentel de Fonseca in Enzo Striano’s Il Resto di Niente). It is in the mummified logic of a missed moment and the tragedy of a ‘‘lost harmony’’ (Raffaele La Capria) that explanation is sought rather than in the broader light provided by the swell of revolutions that swept around both sides of the modern Atlantic world between the 1770s and the 1820s, from the United States to France, Ireland, and Naples, while simultaneously swelling up in the Caribbean in the successful slave revolt that led to the foundation of the black republic of Haiti, to crest in the subsequent wave that swept over Latin America. This was an epoch that was characterized by expanding colonialism, capitalism, and industrialism, all girded together by the political economy of the Atlantic slave trade. It was also a period dominated by the Napoleonic wars and a struggle for global hegemony that witnessed the simultaneous presence of the British fleet in the Indian Ocean, the North Atlantic, and Oceania, as well as in the Mediterranean and the Bay of Naples. The history of the Neapolitan Republic is also an integral part of this wider, contested world. Still, those doors, with the exception of a brief opening for the bicentenary one morning in 1999 in the presence of the left-wing mayor of the city, Antonio Bassolino, have remained closed ever since. Today, climbing the stairs up to the Italian Institute of Philosophical Studies on the first floor of the building, the visitor cannot avoid the massive tablet announcing the names of the ‘‘Martyrs of 1799.’’ (A similar commemoration flanks both sides of the main entrance to the Town Hall in Piazza Municipio.) In the gesture of the sealed doorway, time is frozen, like the names of the hundreds of martyrs etched in marble, as though it were a hermetically closed event that somehow devours the present and all possible futures. The revolutionary ‘‘failure’’ of 1799 has not only stained subsequent Neapolitan history but also effectively sealed the city’s destiny. The refusal to recognize its location in the historical dynamics of a wider, ultimately planetary, atlas of power condemns ‘‘1799’’ to being the site of a subaltern malaise, never the source of an alternative or counter-hegemonic history. It is as though Naples is left suspended in time, robbed of a future, unable to bury its dead and effectively elaborate its past in a manner that would transform what was once blocked and negated into a new Naples: A Porous Modernity 109

historical horizon. The abstract sentiments of Croce’s ‘‘absolute historicism’’ always lie in wait ready to propose a pact between a speculative conservatism and the resigned reception of the ‘‘passive revolution’’ that the present ushers in. In this manner, the identification of historiography with politics, and ideology with philosophy, is, as Antonio Gramsci pointed out in his sustained criticisms of Croce, forever avoided. The repressed logic of representation is lost in the disciplinary fog of self-regulating protocols that recognize only the abstract authority of a bloodless ‘‘scientificity’’ whose idealism sustains the positivist illusions of cultural and historical analysis. Returning to Vico, and drawing energy out of the past, perhaps something else could emerge at this point. The philology of revolutions and reaction that swept across Europe and the New World in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth century suggests that the ‘‘destiny’’ of Naples needs continually to be charted on a larger, yet always incomplete, map. As a Mediterranean, European, and world city, its time, its historical tempo and temper, is not merely of its own making. It speaks, and is spoken, in innumerable languages that are never simply autochthonous. Historically constructed and culturally construed, the city awaits further interpretations. It remains open to other forms of telling and is destined to accommodate a historical sense whose tragic import and greatness lie precisely in the inability to either fully arrest or control the compass of meaning.

progress In 1672, faced with a serious grain shortage in Sicily, the city of Messina armed three ships to intercede and capture merchant vessels carrying grain through the Straits of Messina from Puglia to Naples. In a few months, Naples, Campania, and Calabria were reduced to the same state as Sicily. To combat the situation, Naples hired two expensive Dutch war ships to escort the grain vessels from Puglia. In La questione meridionale (1926), the Sardinian intellectual Antonio Gramsci offered a lucid analysis of the structural impoverish110 Chapter 4

ment of southern Italy in terms of existing economic, political, and cultural forces. He spoke of stagnation characterized by the mass of peasantry in the economic and political clutches of large, often absentee, landowners. He spoke also of southern intellectuals supplying the administrative personnel of the Italian state, locally and nationally, and of the role of such intellectuals (he was referring in particular to Benedetto Croce) in reproducing the status quo. Ten years later, incarcerated in a fascist prison, he was to observe: The poverty of the Mezzogiorno was historically incomprehensible for the popular masses of the North; they could not comprehend that national unity was not achieved on the basis of equality, but as the result of the hegemony of the North on the Mezzogiorno and the territorial relationship of the city to the countryside; the North was an ‘‘octopus’’ that enriched itself at the cost of the South, its industrial and economic progress was in a direct relationship to the impoverishment of southern industry and agriculture.∞Ω

Much of what Gramsci had to say, then, continues to echo within the existing political economy of the south and in its onetime capital city, Naples. Yet the ‘‘sources’’ of this malaise perhaps lie not only in local economic and cultural peculiarities, but also in a deep-seated inheritance that today would be considered part and parcel of the processes of ‘‘globalization.’’ Naples was never a major port and commercial center in the manner of its northern cousins Genoa and Venice. Up to the end of the sixteenth century, Venice and Genoa were ‘‘world ports,’’ central to a trading system that stretched from Beijing to Lima. The port of Naples served mainly for the importation of foodstuffs from Sicily and Puglia to feed its metropolitan population and immediate hinterland. In 1615, Naples was buying pepper from Livorno that had arrived from London. By then the Mediterranean was no longer selling spices to England and northern Europe; spices arriving from London and Amsterdam were being sold to the Mediterranean in the ports of Livorno, Naples, and Istanbul. By the mid-seventeenth century, the cities of northern Italy had lost control of their commercial traffic; this was increasingly managed from Naples: A Porous Modernity 111

London through the English merchant community established in the free port of Livorno. By the end of the seventeenth century, virtually all of the seaborne commercial traffic of the Kingdom of Naples was transported on English merchant ships. In the second half of the century, the hegemony of English commerce in the Mediterranean, reinforced by the regular presence of the Royal Navy, supervised the structural undoing of the relationship between a commercial and industrial northern Italy and its complementary relationship to the agricultural south. Both the north, with its own commerce, cloth and silk industries subordinated to the needs of London and the emerging English textile industry, and the agricultural south were equally transformed into sources of primary materials for the markets and merchandising of northern Europe and the Atlantic seaboard. By 1680, the conditions of the ‘‘Southern Question’’—economic underdevelopment, social backwardness, and cultural isolation from northern Italy—had been established, not so much via Spanish domination of the Kingdom of Naples or northern Italian ‘‘progress,’’ where capital once invested in seagoing ventures was now conserved in the security of land and revenue, as by English mercantile hegemony in the Mediterranean.≤≠ Of course, the brutal clarity of such a picture needs also to be seeded with local conditions and contradictions. Against the stereotype of an agrarian south subordinated to an industrial north, it is worthwhile to recall that the first Italian railway line was opened in 1839, running from Naples to Nocera, followed four years later by the Naples– Caserta line. It is not by chance that the building that now houses the national Railway Museum, where from 1842 onward engines and railway stock were both built and repaired, is located at Pietrarsa on the outskirts of Naples. In 1861, the Pietrarsa works were also the site of the first spontaneous workers’ assembly in Italy, resulting in seven deaths and twenty wounded when troops were called in to break it up. The ‘‘industrialized’’ north, heavily financed by southern resources redistributed after 1860 through a newly centralized state, only really acquired shape after national unification when the hegemony of northern politics as much as ‘‘economic’’ factors played a major role in configuring its development. The more immediate woes of postwar Naples are invariably sought 112 Chapter 4

in the Allied occupation of the city and the subsequent flourishing of the black market, contraband, and organized crime. But these phenomena populated wartime landscapes all over Europe, from London to Berlin. More suggestive, as has already been noted, is the U.S.sponsored deployment of organized crime and compromised political and juridical hierarchies to insure local order. This was indeed one of the more disquieting symptoms of a cynical postwar settlement. Similarly, the decision to establish both the south European headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato), as well as that of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, in Naples, was the most visible confirmation of U.S. hegemony in the postwar world of Italy, western Europe, and the ‘‘free’’ world. So Naples found itself directly inserted in the national settlement Washington imposed and sustained via the hegemony of the Christian Democratic Party, the conservatism of the Catholic church, and the strategic wartime revival and deployment of organized crime. Preexisting modalities of power, whether drawn from the Camorra or from the local oligarchy, such as Achille Lauro (onetime fascist functionary and future mayor and overseer of the corrupt ‘‘hands on the city’’ of the postwar boom), were reinstalled just as the national state apparatuses returned to work largely unaltered from the experience of Fascism. It was as though Fascism was a historical accident, an unfortunate interlude, in a deeper and more democratic narrative. The illusions we live by have a cost, however, and sometimes an extremely high one. To blithely reduce twenty years of fascist government composed in racial laws, authoritarian popularism, savage colonialism, war crimes, and the suspension of parliamentary democracy to a temporary aberration is also to avoid confronting the sources of its popularity and the possibility of its return. Unlike Germany, Italy experienced no Nuremberg Trials, and apart from some summary executions by the partisans in the dying months of the war, no official war crimes were recognized either at home or in the once occupied territories of the Balkans and northern and eastern Africa. A new constitution was installed, but the state bureaucracy and its personnel and institutions remain unaltered; there was apparently no need for radical revision. The old order remained fundamentally intact; the prewar hierarchy, Naples: A Porous Modernity 113

now apparently purged of its fascist parvenus, returned. Treated as a historical exception, the cultural and historical sense of Fascism, together with the disturbing testimony of Italy’s longer-standing colonial empire (all those planes, concentration camps, aerial-bombing, and gas attacks on civilian targets in Ethiopia and Libya), was evacuated, abandoned to the dead landscape of the past, now a closed chapter. Yet the invention of Fascism as a political and cultural settlement did not fall out of the sky, and if initially it was violently asserted, it was also popularly sanctified and sustained. For Fascism was also the moment of a publicly orchestrated modernity. One only has to look at the architecture in Piazza Matteotti around Naples’s main post office. Once the eye overcomes the blunt, neoclassical imperial rhetoric of the police headquarters and local government buildings, there is the remarkable curvilinear post office, with its illuminated digital clock offering the time in Roman numerals, complete with the inscription announcing its completion in the ‘‘XIV Year of the Fascist Era.’’ The piazza is surrounded by the then contemporary residential blocks topped off by the same interrupted apex that Philip Johnson was to stick on top of the American Telephone and Telegraph building in New York fifty years later. All of this has something to do with the nature of democracy—not so much with its institutional rhetoric as with its presence, or its absence, in everyday life. It has also to do with the cultural attraction of secular authoritarianism, with rhetorical representations of ‘‘progress,’’ and with a deeply embedded idealism intent on rendering its will explicit. Has contemporary Italian culture really come to terms with all this? Has modernity? In a confessional culture, any crime, no matter how horrific, can ultimately be forgiven. No one is everlastingly damned. The transgression is not contested but absorbed. Forgiveness is further reinforced and extended through the pervasive creed of the family. With the weakness and sometimes absence of state institutions, the family becomes a primordial cultural and economic unit (and it is but a short step to extend this understanding to wider family networks and the ‘‘clan’’ in both its legal and illegal variants). This encourages the emergence of parallel structures—both voluntary and illegitimate—that supplant public forms of solidarity. In this context, the counter114 Chapter 4

institutions of favors, corruption, and crime—from street life to political patronage—become constitutive components of public life. To understand such phenomena is to acknowledge their structural formation; they are not simply ‘‘exceptions,’’ a few rotten apples in the barrel, but symptoms of a series of historical and cultural modalities. This is not merely a moral question, for those who do not accept the logic inevitably pay in economic and political terms, and sometimes directly with their lives. It is above all a profoundly historical issue with everyday consequences that sometimes stretch to include the political undoing of the legitimacy of democracy itself. To be cunning and cheat is not only to outwit another; it might also mean to cheat on oneself and reduce the fragile circumstances of liberty for everyone. The problem of the mafia, organized crime, institutionalized corruption, and the systematic abuse of power is the problem of the state and its particular historical and cultural formation. It is also important to recall here that despite all the media drama surrounding the Sicilian mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra, in the 1990s the real center of corruption and the criminal exercise of political power was Milan. Yet once again, however dramatically focused such questions have been in Italy’s recent political past and present, and no matter how easy it is to touch such ‘‘corruption’’ in one’s daily life, is this merely an Italian question? In considering the Machiavellian promotion of power and personal interests by whatever means, we should perhaps also be willing to turn the gaze elsewhere and consider the pervasive corruption of the lexicon of ‘‘democracy’’ and ‘‘freedom’’ in an increasingly mediadirected rhetoric throughout the Western world.

mediterranean . . . subterranean May 2002, and I find myself on the second floor of the National Archaeological Museum gazing at the maps, the objects, and the photographs of Kirghizstan, nomadic cultures from the Asiatic steppes where history was made on horseback. On the floors beneath me, lining the corridors, filling up the rooms, are the artistic triumphs of Rome: huge-limbed statues and exquisite mosaics that decorated the Naples: A Porous Modernity 115

urban lives of Pompeii and Herculaneum before it was all abruptly stifled by volcanic gas, ashes, boiling mud, and lava. Here, in the suggestive sparseness of the exhibition devoted to the dwellers of the grasslands of Central Asia, there are only the traces of what has been deposited by a few, privileged members of a steppe society in their burial mounds. The daily life of the nomad passed like the wind, leaving barely a trace. Only the millennium tracks of anonymous pastoral movement and seasonal migration add contemporary testimony to the chronicled passages of peoples arriving from the east. Downstairs, the accumulation of an imperial domus that stretched outward to incorporate the world, while here among the jewels and the ceremonial masks the only fixed point that is acknowledged when traveling beneath an endless sky is death. Yet if, as Bruce Chatwin argued, nomadism is the crank handle of history, there lies in this intriguing proximity all the seeds of our time. In 1287, Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian monk sent to Europe by the Mongols, witnessed a sea battle between the Neapolitans and the Aragonese from a rooftop.≤∞ Sauma had been sent by Ilkan Arghun, then Mongolian ruler of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and southern Russia. Argun was the grandson of Hülegü, who in the 1250s conquered Persia and the Arab Middle East and destroyed the sect of the Assassins in their mountain fortress the ‘‘Eagle’s Nest’’ at Alamüt near the Caspian Sea. Hülegü, in turn, was brother to Qubilai Khan, and both were grandsons of Chingiz Khan. Sauma’s account was written in Persian, but it has come down to us in an abridged Syriac translation. From the Mongol Empire to a Mediterranean city: orbits of influence and the unexpected overlapping of worlds that here seem strangely more immediate in their fluidity than those subsequently imposed via the rigid frontiers of a subsequent Western modernity. Such unexpected, subterranean links provide another cartography in which the sense of the city is no longer restricted to the strict environs of a single culture and place. Deposited in its language, in its fluctuating and indefinite space, are a multitude of traces that haunt the official narrative with other stories, further openings and interrogations. We could leave the museum and go underground, either to take the subway to the central railway station and then the light rail to 116 Chapter 4

Herculaneum and Pompeii, or else dally underground in the subway stations themselves. The latter are themselves the unlikely locus of unexpected encounters. Their obvious functionality has been overlaid and transformed by modern art. Descending the steps of the museum station designed by Gae Aulenti, and passing the photographs by Mimmo Iodice, Fabio Donato, Antonio Biasiucci, Raffaele Mariniello, and Luciano D’Alessandro that evoke the multiple memories of the city, I take a one-stop ride to Piazza Dante. Riding the escalator up to street level (the station is also by Gae Aulenti), I pass the conceptual art works of Joseph Kosuth, Jannis Kounellis, Michangelo Pistoletto, Nicola De Maria, and Carlo Alfano. The sternness of Kounellis’s arte povera—an untitled giant steel wall embossed with shoes and other objects clamped down and crushed beneath girders—contrasts with the twenty-meter colored mosaic by Nicola De Maria titled, ‘‘A Universe without Bombs, Kingdom of Flowers, 7 Red Angels (in Memory of Francesco De Maria).’’ Other stations offer other works: Sol Le Witt and Sandro Chia at Materdei; the sculptures of Mimmo Paladino, Augusto Perez, Perino e Vele, Lello Esposito, and Raffaella Nappo at Salvator Rosa; the light box of Betty Bee and the massive metallic panels of Umberto Manzo at Cilea. The stations themselves are frequently also architectural/artistic works in their own right. The public that passes through these spaces each day is no doubt an ‘‘absent-minded’’ examiner (Walter Benjamin), but if the movement of art and the art of movement here becomes temporarily indistinguishable, it also gives rise to a metropolitan event that is irreducible to either transport or aesthetics.≤≤ If it were Christmas, I could continue to stroll in this open-air gallery by wandering down Via Toledo from Piazza Dante to Piazza Plebiscito. On the way, I would pass on my left side the permanent, thirty-meterhigh ‘‘windmill’’ by Kounellis in the small square by the Feltrinelli bookshop and then, at Piazza Plebiscito, find a arresting example of contemporary art. Between December 2002 and January 2003, Piazza Plebiscito hosted a Rebecca Horn installation composed of numerous skulls emerging from the paving stones; at night, a trapeze of overhead neon illuminated these ghostly visitors. The Neapolitan cult of the dead, a paganism that has been sustained in the Catholic catacombs of Naples: A Porous Modernity 117

the Fontanella where traditionally one adopted and polished one of the thousands of skulls, together with the mortal insistence of Baroque aesthetics, are conjoined and displayed in a modernist art installation: the city returns to itself in order to go elsewhere. Every Christmas since the early 1990s, Piazza Plebiscito has witnessed an installation by a noted contemporary artist: Paladino, Kounellis, Kapoor, Horn, Serra. Like the skulls emerging out of the ground, the presence of art in public space has provoked debate, dissent, and discussion where previously there only reigned a public silence. Probably not since the Baroque period and the artistic exhibitionism encouraged by the Counter Reformation and its struggle to reclaim public space and private consent, has art become such a civic presence and concern in the life of the city. It has rendered more explicit the subterranean impulses behind the Terrae Motus exhibition of international artists (Buys, Gilbert and George, Kiefer, Haring, Mapplethorpe, Paladino, Rauschenberg, Richter, Twombly, Warhol, among others) put together by the curator Lucio Amelio in the wake of the earthquake of November 1980 that shook Naples and the Campania area. In these times, when contemporary art is increasingly accredited solely through being evaluated in the international art market, this public sponsorship, even if it may frequently only confirm such recognition, draws such works out of the secluded spaces of the art gallery, the collector’s living room, and the specialist review. In the return to a public space, such art escapes its increasingly exclusive location in the commercial art circuit. As an object—or better, as an event and an experience to be ‘‘consumed’’ in non-financial terms—the work comes to accommodate desires and directions that both stem from and exceed what Walter Benjamin once referred to as a ‘‘market-orientated originality.’’

migrating modernities All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To 118 Chapter 4

defend one’s home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession—to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership—is a joke.—neal ascherson

Naples is a port city. Historically, like every major port, it has witnessed the arrival of diverse peoples and cultures. Some took up residence in the city; others passed through; all have left their traces, from the Arabs, Normans, Angevins, Genoans, Pisans, and Catalans of the Middle Ages through the Spanish and French to the Anglo-American invasion of 1943 and the contemporary harbor chock-a-block with cruise ships. Once set off from the city by a barrier, the port in recent years has been opened up to become the visual and physical extension of Piazza Municipio. Standing in the square in front of the Town Hall, the eye is pulled across to the harbor, its ships and traffic, to the twin white towers of the passenger terminal of 1936 before coming to rest on the peak of Vesuvius. The square, dominated on the land side by the gardens and building of the Town Hall, flanked to the west by the massive moated Angevin castle and to the east by the imposing nineteenth-century building that once housed the Hotel de Londres, is now complimented by the open flank of the sea. The pedestrian and mechanical traffic that previously paralleled the hidden harbor, the sea, and the horizon is now intersected by this axis. This symbolic complication underlines the fundamental, if often repressed, history of the port in the social composition of the city, its hinterland, and southern Italy in general. Movement in and out of the port stretches over two millennia, and it is a movement that has not escaped the dramatic urgency that characterizes modern migration. Just before one crosses the road to enter the port itself, there is a more modern high-rise building. Its red-brick style betrays construction in the 1950s, no doubt to replace buildings destroyed by Allied and German bombing. The building is topped by billboards announcing the offices of the Italian–Slav and Ukrainian associations. Such a skyline acknowledgement of migration from the steppes of southern Russia Naples: A Porous Modernity 119

and Eastern Europe (often of professionally qualified women who are now employed in domestic service ) is, of course, only the most obvious signal of a far vaster movement. In fact, the largest transplanted community in Naples today is composed of migrants from Sri Lanka— overwhelmingly men who desperately seek in their free time to practice their cricket in the town’s squares on summer nights until the police arrive to declare the game over. The arrival of the immigrant announces a historical and cultural caesura that is invariably resisted, rarely considered in its complex resonances with local realities, and therefore never fully elaborated in a fresh cultural and political perspective. Most obviously, present migration—whether ‘‘illegal’’ or not—invites the comparison and compassion evoked by the earlier migration of millions of Italians overseas. Both moments reveal a wider, ultimately worldly, context that invites us to consider the earlier migration of the poor and the desperate in the vivid light of contemporary migration from the Third World. The unknown character and alterity of the stranger, the distrust of the ‘‘homeless,’’ the undocumented, and the migrant evoke the potential disturbance of a ‘‘deviancy’’ that overflows local coordinates of belonging as well as the policed perimeters of a ‘‘national’’ home and people. The foreigner is, above all, considered a potential enemy; his or her presence represents the simultaneous threat to, and reinforcement of, the present state by introducing a ‘‘them’’ against whom ‘‘we’’ measure ourselves. The modern migrant draws the unrecognized into the field of vision. The arrival of the stranger exposes the paradoxical political formation of the state when national rights are constituted explicitly by the negation of the rights of others; to be included, others have to be excluded. In the passage from the violent authoritarianism of the supposedly exceptional state of Nazism and the concentration camp to the ‘‘normal’’ insistence on the preservation of national and local identities, a harrowing proximity emerges that many of us would prefer to ignore. Faced with immigration, the state of emergency—with its controls, permits, camps, and deportations—reveals itself to be permanent. As the Italian sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago justly points out, nationstates do not recognize the universal rights of mankind, only those of its citizens.≤≥ In the daily surveillance of frontiers, documents, and identi120 Chapter 4

ties, the state remains deaf to appeals to human rights. Such rights are explicitly denied in the name of national laws and implicitly negated through defense of the imagined biopolitical unity of a homogeneous ‘‘people’’ and its citizenship. Those excluded are consigned to the incidental and indifferent category of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘‘bare life.’’≤∂ All citizens are human, but not all humans are citizens. The migrant, as the persistent reminder of an unrulier ‘‘globalization’’ than that proposed in official rhetoric, suggests far more than a political interrogation of the paranoid nature of the modern state. The very sense of ‘‘our’’ culture and history, and the institutional tendency to elaborate such concepts through principles of exclusion and ethnic exclusivity, is increasingly challenged by a configuration that surpasses existing explanations. The modern phenomenon of mass migration is a perpetual reminder that the liberal rhetoric of the free movement of goods, capital, and bodies has very real cultural, historical, and political consequences—consequences that certainly exceed such idealized settlements as the ‘‘melting pot’’ or ‘‘multiculturalism.’’ The physical presence of the migrant stubbornly insists that the world in its extreme diversity and complexity is indeed a global, unified, one. In this sense, the migrant undoes our ‘‘self.’’ The uninvited guest exposes our (arbitrary) rules of conduct and, in insisting on staying, drags into the light the ignored premises on which such rules depend for their authority. No longer external but internal, the foreigner, the stranger, the immigrant, like the space between our words—silent but essential for meaning—becomes integral, central, to another conception of the world we all inhabit. Inherited terms of reference—the state, the nation, the law, the people—are now revealed to be without stable or permanent foundation; hence, the arbitrary violence that their questioning unleashes, a structural brutality that irrupts into our world in the steps of the migrant. Fearful reactions, fueled by the resentment of being forced to face one’s own troubled history in a perspective that can no longer exclude the stranger, the foreigner, can rapidly lead to popular hysteria and the apocalyptic announcements of an immigration ‘‘emergency.’’ The fear of being ‘‘flooded’’ and ‘‘invaded’—even though the actual numbers of illegal immigrants in Italy is rather low by European Naples: A Porous Modernity 121

standards—suffocates wider reasoning in a provincial rage. Such fearful anger invariably falls back on the murderous defense of rigid localisms and everywhere is endorsed by the exclusionary logic of the modern state. In this situation, the migrant is already ‘‘framed’’ prior to his or her arrival, positioned in a public discourse whose reasons and conclusions powerfully constrain his movement and her possibilities. This is not merely about the marshaling of existing stereotypes, although that reservoir of ‘‘common sense’’ is certainly drawn on in the subsequent identification and legitimating of the question. It is, rather, in the performative realization of the question through the politically sensitized power of media coverage (which includes both popular outbursts and expert opinion), in the orchestration of public and political debate, that the immigrant is constructed as a ‘‘problem.’’ But this ‘‘emergency’’ is not constituted by immigration—itself the product and generator of ‘‘our’’ modernity—but by xenophobia, for it is ‘‘we’’ who feel ourselves the ‘‘victims’’ and who are in many ways the real problem. This excursus serves to remind us of the extensive sweep of mass migration, in terms of both the numbers and the diversity of cultures, histories, and ‘‘homes’’ involved along the whole arc of modernity: from chained black slaves boarding European ships in the Gulf of Guinea to those driven by poverty and hope drowning today in the Mediterranean. With this in mind, the port of Naples, and the city itself, proposes a site of both past and present migrant passages that continue to intercede and interrogate the present. In front of Piazza Municipio and dominating the port is the white, twin-towered, modernist Passenger Terminal. It was completed in 1936, in the heyday of Fascism. It would be tempting to treat this building as material witness to the massive migration that saw millions of Italian men, women, and children depart for another life in the Americas from the 1870s onward. But that would be a myth. Restrictive legislation in the United States (the draconian Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924) , fearful that ‘‘aliens’’ would dilute its ‘‘white’’ Anglo stock, together with fascist disapproval of the very idea of abandoning the ‘‘homeland’’ had already closed the classical chapter in the history of Italian migration toward ‘‘’Merica.’’ The more immediate connota122 Chapter 4

tions of the gleaming passenger terminal are to be found along the palm-lined avenues leading westward out of the city to the Mostra d’Oltremare (Overseas Exhibition Center), the architectural signature of a barely acknowledged imperial past that led to the proclamation of the empire in 1936. Here our gaze is drawn into the folds of the deeply repressed history of an Italian imperial and colonial past, and the official attempts to conquer ‘‘a place in the sun’’ from the 1880s onward: Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya (and then Rhodes, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Greece). Although structurally negated, this history has inevitably had a significant impact on the formation of Italian modernity. This, of course, is the case throughout the West: Although it exists in a profoundly repressed register, modernity is in many ways the colonial moment. The sculptured decorations on the front of the Passenger Terminal evoke the global reach of navigation stretching out from the Neapolitan seafront to embrace the world—Rome, Athens, Cairo, East Africa, New York, Calcutta, and Rio de Janeiro—once connected by the imperial galleys of the Roman Empire and today by the modern oceangoing steamship and the airplane. It is but a short step from colonial ‘‘reason’’ to the elaboration of the modern metropolis. In both cases, the territory is catalogued, defined, and dominated in order to be possessed by ‘‘progress.’’ The 1936 proclamation of the empire was the final chapter in a persistent series of colonizing expeditions in Africa and the Mediterranean. It was only in the postwar period that a new, but more minor, boom toward North America, South America, and Australia would take place, involving mainly skilled and intellectual labor and increasingly traveling by jet plane rather than the steamship. Migration is deeply entwined in the making of modern Italy, touching every corner of the peninsula. Money earned abroad was sent home, and eventually more than 12 million migrants also returned to their villages of origin. The radical uprooting from a local, rural culture and dramatic relocation to an urban environment constructed in another language was neither necessarily permanent nor always endurable. Peasants from southern Italy often had their first sustained experience of the city in New York or Buenos Aires, rather than in Naples: A Porous Modernity 123

Naples, Rome, or Milan. In an age before mass communication and mass literacy, the eventual journey for those crowded into unsafe and unsanitary ships was farther than the actual physical distance of Naples from New York might suggest. This, again, is a classical, almost stereotypical passage, frequently explored in the New World male bonding and mean streets of Martin Scorsese’s films. But there was also a significant migration from rural society to rural society, as in the case of Brazil and Argentina. After 1900, the major source of Italian emigration shifted to the south, and Naples become the principal port of departure. The year 1913 saw a peak in transatlantic migration, with more than two hundred thousand migrants departing through the port. In the city itself, the poor peasants, with their bundles and cardboard suitcases, would already be considered ‘‘foreigners’’ by the Neapolitans. Prior to boarding, they would have had to run the hostile gantlet of unsavory hostels, unscrupulous shipping agents, and a savvy street population of hawkers, crooks, and urchins ready to feed on their disorientation while they waited, huddled up on the quays, exposed to the elements, for the ship’s arrival. Italian emigration was only part of a far wider wave—Irish, English, German, Scottish, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Swedish—of European emigration, particularly toward the Americas, that characterized the second half of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. In fact, the number of those emigrating from Britain and Italy in the same period was roughly the same, but whereas the former overwhelming emigrated to a shared linguistic and cultural community, whether in North America or the ‘‘white’’ colonies of the British Empire (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), the Italians moved to a decidedly ‘‘foreign’’ environment destined to encourage nostalgia for ‘‘home’’ and national-community building abroad. Emigration from Italy was provoked by a generalized European agricultural crises that included plant diseases and, above all, the fall in prices provoked by cheap wheat being rapidly imported from the prairies of the Americas, Australia, and southern Russian. Added to this were the more immediate difficulties induced by the hereditary divi124 Chapter 4

sion of property, fiscal pressure, poor soil, and the growing demand for cash exchange. It all added to an increasingly unstable rural world that was further undermined by the decline in cottage industries, which were unable to compete with cheaper, factory production. This, in turn, led to changed perceptions of everyday life and its eventual possibilities. The rural world was never fully autonomous, and now, more than ever, it experienced the ingression of external forces and possibilities, increasingly represented by questions of capital and cash together with the largely uncontrolled velocity introduced by mechanization and modern transport.≤∑ The unwinding of an earlier rural society produced an emerging interchange with a far wider world that did not necessarily speak Italian or acknowledge Europe as its homeland, or Catholicism as its religion. When such emigration was also accompanied by a subsequent return in significant numbers to the region of origin then, and only probably then, did regional peasants become ‘‘Italians.’’ In the postwar period, such complex cultural itineraries were further intensified and concentrated in migration to northern Europe and the massive ‘‘internal’’ migration to the northern industrial belt of Milan and Turin that characterized the economic ‘‘boom’’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Swelling major urban centers, it involved more than 9 million Italians. Peasants from Lucana working in the Alfa Romeo factory, dreaming of their lost village life, and clinging to familial ties in the midst of urban indifference—this is the turbulent setting so dramatically evoked in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). By 1960, it had also become possible to register the closing of European emigration. Between 1945 and 1960, some 6 million British, Dutch, Germans, and Italians had emigrated toward the Americas and Australia. Immigration simultaneously grew from the ‘‘Third World’’ toward the Northern Hemisphere—initially toward the ‘‘Mother Country’’ of a dying colonialism, and then more simply toward the overdeveloped world. Three decades later, Italy, once a country of emigration, was becoming a country of immigration. In the subsequent decade, two shared histories come together to shadow and interrogate each other as the fate of yesterday’s migrating poor—la povNaples: A Porous Modernity 125

era gente—is increasingly overtaken by outbursts of xenophobia and increasingly rigid immigration legislation. The sea—yesterday the Atlantic; today, the Mediterranean—continues to give up its dead. Yet they are still far too few who are willing to listen to the ghosts that testify to the links in a migrant chain that stretch from Africa five hundred years ago to the beaches of southern Italy today, girding together the hidden, yet essential, history of modern migration. The denial of a memory evoked by the interrogative presence of the migrant is also the failure to consider one’s own past and its place in the constitution of the present. According to the great Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, emigration was considered the critical equivalent of death among the southern peasantry.≤∏ Such a death and departure into another life has, perhaps, yet to be mourned—that is, worked through and elaborated—in a manner that clears a space in the present for the living.≤π This latter possibility would transform mere negation, an absolute loss, into the potential acquisition of a further sense in which your home is no longer necessarily constructed on the denial of a home for the other. Since the beginning of the 1990s, public discourse in Italy has increasingly been concerned with the ‘‘immigration problem.’’ The tone is usually alarmist, if not apocalyptic, and has now acquired much political presence in the organization of right-wing political consensus. The dramatic arrival of ‘‘illegal’’ immigrants, often rescued from overcrowded and sinking hulks, not to speak of the hundreds, probably thousands, who have anonymously drowned, is something that is publicly denounced while privately absorbed to meet the growing requirements of the workforce: from minders of children and old people through domestic servants to agricultural laborers and skilled factory workers. It will be these very same workers, once officially ‘‘recognized,’’ whose taxes will fund the pension schemes and health services of an increasingly aging native population. In the wake of radical morphological changes in urban culture brought about by immigration from the Third World, there has also been discussion, usually in less bitter accents, of the development of a multicultural society, of the hybridization of cultural styles and languages and an emerging métissage world. This phenomenon, however, even when it 126 Chapter 4

is not viewed through a fearful lens, is invariably treated as something of recent origin, and certainly of no major importance in the historical formation of modern Italy. As opposed to the United States, Britain, or France, Italy officially represents itself as having never participated directly in the imperial sacking of the world, although it was clearly supportive of the racist slavery, colonial greed, and authoritarian imperialism practiced by others. The specters of this particular history, which every so often return to disrupt the urban scenes of Los Angeles, London, and Paris, are not considered part of the Italian national narrative. Or, rather, that is the story that continues to circulate, both in the popular medium of common sense as well as in the institutional versions of the native culture. Yet Italy is also part of Occidental modernity: Its famed espresso coffee, its ubiquitous tomatoes, not to speak of the richness of its Baroque architecture (and Naples is a summa of all three), are the explicit fruits of its participation in the colonial epoch. More obviously, there were the imperial projects pursued in eastern Africa and North Africa, first by the liberal state and then under Fascism. The palms that line so many roads and parks are not ‘‘native.’’ They symbolize the ‘‘overseas’’ dream that was eventually shattered with the defeat of Fascism. As Hannah Arendt noted, the modern, metropolitan interior was composed through imperial exploitation elsewhere.≤∫ Every time one drinks coffee (or tea), there is the unconscious confirmation of five centuries of global ‘‘progress’’ inaugurated by an Italian navigator’s setting foot in the New World. Similarly, yesterday’s emigrant who left Naples aboard a ship bound for Buenos Aires and today’s immigrant who sets out from Sri Lanka to be abandoned on a beach in Puglia are separated in time but unified in a shared history. This colonial and immigrant past is, of course, the site of a collective refusal to remember. In the public imaginary, colonialism, imperialism, the mass European migration of yesterday, and the global Third World migration of today continue to evoke only a series of marginal and discretely separated narratives. Yesterday’s colonialism and mass emigration remain in quarantine, locked up in the sepia tones of a fading past; they are rarely permitted to bear directly on a sense of the Naples: A Porous Modernity 127

national culture, its ‘‘problems,’’ and the quotidian structures of its everyday life. It is easier and more comfortable to forget. This is the limitless lesson of a modernity that is continually intent on ushering in tomorrow. That our electricity, our richness and power, is also someone else’s darkness, poverty, and powerlessness barely has time to register in the onward rush of ‘‘progress.’’ Yet the ‘‘modernity’’ that a language, a literature, a culture, a history reveals can never be considered simply autonomous or autochthonous. In this sense, we are always already global citizens and live in conditions where no culture, whether national or local, can ever pretend to separate its sense and formation from the surrounding world. The traffic between cultures and histories, however much it may be resisted and denied, is the very basis of our modernity. It is such a worldly location, frequently buried within a ‘‘colonial unconscious,’’ that today provides the critical key to re-membering and retelling the histories that our culture and our very selves have repressed. Interesting, you may say, but what has this really got to do with Italy, the Mediterranean, and Naples in particular? Very simply, it is to suggest that a culture, a history, a sense of one’s self that ignores the complex and disquieting making of modernity has chosen a path that is destined to remain imprisoned in the thickets of provincialism and the deathly verdicts of a moribund historicism. Of course, each and every culture seeks to impose a homogeneous vision of its past. Neapolitan culture is no exception; it, too, as we saw in the monumental presence of ‘‘1799,’’ continues to propose the self-assurance of its own historicized myths, even those myths that evoke disaster, defeat, and the ultimate stasis of death. Each and every culture seeks to impose a consensual and hegemonic vision of its past. Even if it is delineated in the melancholy tones of defeat, such a framing of the past permits a rapid and rational comprehension of the contemporary state of affairs and, subsequently, of proposed ‘‘solutions.’’ Formal education and the mass media here combine in diverse ways to ‘‘discipline’’ national and local understandings of one’s past and present, and in this sense, all histories and literatures tend inevitably toward a static sense of self-confirmation. Here, as a somber reminder, it is worthwhile to recall Walter Benjamin’s decisive 128 Chapter 4

phrase: ‘‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’’≤Ω The problem, of course, is that even if this disciplined repression of the past were to be recognized, cultural closure would continue to be popularly enforced in the name of national unity and cultural autonomy. The very idea of welcoming the interrogations that emerge from a repressed complexity, and to propose a polyphonic sense of the creolized cultures, literatures, and languages that pass under the presumed homogeneity of modernity, remains unrecognizable in the existing framing of the world. Each and every culture would have to let go, unlearn itself, and become a little less narcissistic as it rethought its formation in the wider, worldly, and more fragile constellation of a multilateral modernity. And yet walking the streets around Piazza Garibaldi near the central railway station, that other modernity is encountered in every step I take, in every voice I hear, in every street sign I observe. In Via Bologna, the shops owners are Arab or African; there are also some Chinese outlets. Middle Eastern fast food—kebabs and falafel—is readily available. It is all very reminiscent of the Barbès district of Paris. But if the first language one hears here is also French, it is a French that arrives via the colonial routes of North Africa and West Africa. The mix is not merely metropolitan—all Occidental cities have their ‘‘ethnic’’ communities—but now reaches into the farthest recesses of the shops themselves in a multinational collage in which local taste and foreign costume juggle for our attention in a display that wavers between ethnic kitsch and marketable exotica: Chinese foodstuffs and Italian pasta side by side on the same shelf; Native American dream-weaver amulets, Hindu deities, and North African leather goods; counterfeit sports clothing; pirated software; ‘‘Oriental’’ scarves; cds and videocassettes, mainly from Egypt. Farther down the street, a sign in English indicates one of the city’s many ‘‘Phone Centers’’ offering cheap connections to the rest of the world: India, 23 cent; Ghana, 20 cent; Morocco, 30 cent; Ukraine, 20 cent; Senegal, 20 cent. In its imitations, its popular prices, its cosmopolitanism, this, too, is modernity.

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chapter 5

Between Shores Cultural analysis seeks to understand the past as part of the present, as what we have around us, and without which no culture would be able to exist.—mieke bal For the phenomena that interest me are precisely those that blur these boundaries, cross them, and make the historical artifice appear, also their violence, meaning the relations of force that are concentrated there and actually capitalize themselves there interminably. —jacques derrida

Claudia Roden’s now classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food (first published in 1968) was written by a Sephardic Jew inspired by family memories of Cairo, her ‘‘home town.’’ It draws on recipes that continued to circulate in a community in exile ‘‘after centuries of integrated life in the Ottoman and Arab worlds.’’ Such food allows the author, her family, and friends ‘‘to summon the ghosts of the past.’’∞ The poignant presentation of recipes from a world that has fallen apart reads almost like a tragedy, and yet in the very details of gastronomic and cultural sustenance there is a constellation of being that continues to survive. Dishes that are the distillation of centuries of

cooking, of culture, of historical composition and combination not only evoke the aroma and tastes of a place; they also register what elsewhere has often been brutally canceled and institutionally ignored. The smells from the kitchen, like the sounds coaxed from an ‘oud or guitar, can suggest connections, collusions, and subsequent maps of meaning that the rigid grids of national geographies are neither able to contain nor recognize. Historically, an inordinate amount of this type of negation is concentrated in the southern, denied shore of the Mediterranean against which modern Europe has sought to define itself. This alterity— Arabic, African, Asiatic, Islamic, Jewish—is a supposedly expelled, separated exteriority, and yet, as we have seen, it is historically and culturally intrinsic to the making of modernity. The Mediterranean here continually ‘‘betrays’’ all attempts to freeze its composite components into a homogeneous image. If, as Gil Anidjar suggests, the Arab and the Jew are both the visible and invisible ‘‘enemies’’ that have historically and culturally constituted the conditions of Europe, then the reintroduction of the complexities of the Mediterranean—where the sea, as the site of multiple mediations and memories, is in Europe but not completely of it, despite all the attempts of Occidental modernity to colonize and control it—delivers us over to a fluid geography that ontologically challenges the very being and becoming European and modern. This is not, as I have already suggested, simply to overturn prevalent views and a Northern framing of the South (of Europe, of the world); it is, rather, to follow signs, suggestions, sounds, smells, and silences that propose a complex, open-ended narration of historical time and its cultural composition. It is where deceptively marginal details—drawn from a dish, a mosaic, a voice—give rise to an unsuspected cartography. Catching the Arabic letters on Christ’s cloak in Giotto’s Crocifissione (circa 1304–06) in the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua, the Tunisian poet and critic Abdelwahab Meddeb deciphers the presence of the shahdad (‘‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet’’) at the heart of the Christian celebration of Christ’s death.≤ In this doubling and displacement, the very closure sought by cultural monotheism (whether proclaimed in the omnipotent reach of reason or religion) is Between Shores 131

sundered and dispersed. The image, and what it narrates, is no longer possessed by a single mode of telling. History, the Mediterranean, returns, rewriting and rerouting the narrative, freeing it from the fixed moorings of a unilateral meaning, allowing it to drift into other accounts and there acquire a complexity that shatters the pretensions of a power that fears disturbance. Suspended in Giotto’s visual poetics are the signs of the material passage of Islam in the then peripheral medieval Christian world. Exquisitely worked silks from al-Andalus were luxury goods that circulated in Latin Europe, symptoms of a complex cross-cultural traffic: ‘‘Unlike Byzantine silks, the ‘soies d’Aumaire’ found in church treasures and noble wardrobes throughout the West had to cross a religious and cultural divide between Latin Europe and the Islamic world.’’≥ Many were adorned with the shahdad in stylized Arabic script. Such inscriptions, so frequently found on Andalusian silks, evoke the incongruous spectacle of ‘‘clergymen and crusaders’’ arrayed in ‘‘glowing ceremonial garments, where the praise of Allah was embroidered in the ‘tiraz’ (decorative silk bands), in words luckily unintelligible to most of the bearers of such a cloth.’’∂ This was also matched and extended by rather more deliberately self-conscious appropriations of Arab culture and power: for example, the tomb of Ferdinand III of Castile, realized in Seville in 1252, with its inscriptions in Arabic, Latin, Hebrew, and Castilian; or the cloak of Roger II, prepared, according to the Arabic calligraphy along its border, in the royal workshop of Palermo in the year 528 of the Egira. Palermo, or alMadina, was the ‘‘town of three hundred mosques’’ described by the tenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Haukal.∑ Sicily was also where pasta was developed using hard durum wheat; both ‘‘macaroni and vermicelli were known as siciliani, which in the upper strands of society was eaten with the newly imported forks from Constantinople.’’∏ This subtle, subterranean, and subversive presence is probably most highly concentrated in medieval Spain, where Christian knights fight for Muslim princes and Muslim nobles lend their arms to Christian kings.π On the Iberian Peninsula, centuries of intertwined histories challenge the stereotypical vision of a ‘‘grand ecumenical confrontation between Christianity and Islam.’’∫ The stereotypical vision of re132 Chapter 5

ligious difference and ethnic hostility seems to dissipate in the face of interactive interests and the inevitable overlapping of styles and tastes in which the Muslim world was frequently the trendsetter: An emblematic episode of inter-confessional aristocratic entente is that of the wedding of Sancha of Castile to Berenguer Ramon of Barcelona in 1016, an event hosted by Al-Mundhir of Zaragoza and attended by the Muslim and Christian nobility of the Pyrenees.Ω

In this more mutable archive, the seemingly intractable knots of history begin to unravel, proposing unexpected lines of enquiry and unsuspected overlapping and encounters. Here, for example it becomes possible to think, and read, Jacques Derrida, less as a member of the Parisian intellectual coterie than as a Mediterranean thinker, a philosopher from the Maghreb, a French-speaking Jew from colonial Algeria who, from the margins of the European logos, radically reconfigures its critical syntax.∞≠ This suggestive supplement—which could be extended to Frantz Fanon, Hélène Cixous, and Assia Djebar (all names associated with Algeria and the French colonial experience, as are those of Althusser, Bourdieu, Braudel, and Foucault)—is intended not to propose a new set of ‘‘origins’’ but, rather, to set such thought, writings, and criticism in movement: a crossing of routes that proposes transversal passages through the Western topos, leading to a wider and perhaps unfamiliar constellation.∞∞ In a similar vein, Edmond Jabès, from Egypt, writes in French after Auschwitz the book of questions that, like the visual trauma burned into the contemporary canvases of Anselm Keifer, collates the ashes, the cinders of a past, in the dust and flakes of a migrant language.∞≤ The language of Jabès proposes a possible narration of the deracinated Sephardic geographies of the Mediterranean that is punctuated by the pain of memory starred by an impossible return and bordered by an insistent silence laced up in the temporality of hope. The house of memory and the house of language are here sustained through the reterritorialization of meanings distilled into a dissemination of cultural forms—literary, musical, culinary, sartorial—and diverse enunciations. In a bright North African light, one is tempted to compare the provincial limits of a national canon with the obvious innovations in Between Shores 133

the literary languages of modernity proposed by Filippo Tomaso Marinetti and the Arabic-speaking Giuseppe Ungaretti as perhaps the apt expression of a cosmopolitan, polyglot city in which no single nationalism was able to hold sway: Alexandria, a city that was founded by a Macedonian; conquered by the Arabs, then by the Turks; and subsequently inhabited by much of the known world.∞≥ Refracted in the prism of a multifaceted Mediterranean, we are consistently introduced to the ‘‘importance of breaking the boundaries’’ of separated histories and cultures.∞∂ This is most profoundly caught in the now vicious connections between two peoples demonstrated in the common parentage of an alphabet, a language, and hundreds of years of coexistence. As the Zionist Chaim Weizmann was forced to note in 1940 of the neighboring Arabs: ‘‘They are to some extent our cousins.’’∞∑ To render proximate what is held apart is certainly to brush an official, nationalized history against the grain. It is also to consider what nascent nationalism and national self-fashioning exclude from the narration. In the exemplary case of Spain this would be to return to the founding gesture of Occidental modernity, where the ‘‘discovery’’ of the New World is darkly starred by the ethnic cleansing inaugurated in 1492 with the expulsion of Muslims, Jews, and Rom from the emerging national polity. The premium of the ethnic purity of the cristiano vieja was then continually monitored by the Inquisition, which occupied itself with cleansing the social body of potential contagion. In 1502, the Catholic monarchs sought further to annul corrupting influences by banning the importation of books. Students studying in the Spanish Netherlands at the University of Louvain in Philip II’s reign had to present themselves to the Inquisition on their return to Spain for debriefing. The subsequent absence of Spain—with a stifled humanism and an absent Enlightenment—from the parable of European modernity, an absence initially hidden by New World wealth, then increasingly exposed in the lengthy agony of decline—was considered with aristocratic disdain and subsequently absorbed and nullified in the metaphysics of a mystical ‘‘Spanishness’’ and the timeless chivalry of the defunct military caste of Castile, the hildago.∞∏ Here, a static, proud spirituality was continually replayed in the ritual narcissism of 134 Chapter 5

the bullfight: the endless, unchanging fiesta of libido and sacrifice, the popular and public interpretation of the (ethnic) purity of the cristiano vieja facing death in the Reconquista of the psychic homeland that is ‘‘Spain.’’∞π This immobile dignity which so attracted Albert Camus is, for Juan Goytisolo, the mask of an unacknowledged national trauma: the refusal to review a mutilated past and crippled present. Contrary to the obfuscation once sought by official narrative is the critical inheritance of Américo Castro (1885–1972). For Castro, the history of Spain begins in 711 with the Berber invasion of the peninsula, a thesis that he expounds in España en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judíos, published in 1948 in Buenos Aires. The book, with its then innovative insistence on the Islamic foundations of a subsequently multilateral métissage formation, was promptly forbidden in Franchist Spain. In the same period, philological research was excavating the hybrid makings of early lyric Romance poetry in the context of peninsular Arabic and Hebrew and the patois of mozarabico—a mix of vulgar Arabic and Romance language—revealing that ‘‘the whole romantic tradition in European literature owes an almost disproportionate debt to eleventh-century Spain.’’∞∫ However, the polarizing markers of race and religion persistently cleave illogical cuts in the national body. As Goytisolo notes, for the majority of Spanish historians the Arabs were never Spanish, while the Romans and the Visigoths who preceded them most certainly were. The ‘oud, like the contemporary guitar and tambourine, like flamenco, portrays a nomadology of sounds that stretch all over the map, from Baghdad and the North African coastline sweeping up into Spain and on into the Europe of the troubadours, or coming out of Asia and coursing through the Balkans toward central Europe. Along with the seepage of poetic innovation out of Arab Spain over the Pyrenees into the courtly love traditions of Europe, there is also the complex ‘‘relation between Arabic culture and Romance poetics’’ that engenders a Sicilian literary tradition.∞Ω Percolated into the Italianate vernacular of Giacomo da Lentini and other Sicilian poets, these voices were recognized by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia as ‘‘the originators of the Italian literary tradition.’’≤≠ The initial sequence of Tony Gatlif’s film Vengo (1998) contains a Between Shores 135

musical concert in a small monastery overlooking the Guadiana River in Spain. There are two groups of musicians, one led by the flamenco guitarist Tomatito (once the accompanist of Isla de Cameron); the other, by Sheikh Ahmad al-Tuni, master of Egyptian Sufi song. At the beginning, each group plays separately; then the guitar of Tomatito inserts itself into the Arab performance. A dialogue commences, an exchange between the two shores of the Mediterranean occurs, an overlapping past and present is temporarily conjoined.≤∞ To think along these oblique axes—from the eastern Mediterranean to North Africa, from the coast of Tunisia to Sicily, from the basin of the Senegal River to the walls of Valencia—is to deepen and disturb the cultural and historical mappings we have inherited. It is also to disrupt the usual chronologies of ‘‘progress’’ and their linear accumulation of sense. The historiographical accounting of the past is persistently overdetermined by the tussle to confirm the existing arrangements of powers and their explanation/justification. We are all held in this net, even while struggling to reach a wider sea; nevertheless, to register and resist existing conclusions is to cast the historiographical disposition into wider, less disciplined waters. It is to catch, even in the seemingly banal passage of a sound, a glimpse of the marginalized and the excluded that can lead us back into the heartlands of an inherited explanation equipped with a further compass. I pick up a taxi in Berlin and, conversing with my Turkish cab driver in English, receive his ironic comments about how many Europeans continue to refer to the metropolis on the Bosphorus as ‘‘Constantinople’’ more than five hundred years after its conquest by the Ottomans. What does the desire revealed in this refusal to register historical change suggest? Why the exclusion of the Turks, like that of the Arabs, from a European narrative that continually seeks to reaffirm a continuity with the Latinized lake of mare nostrum? After all, Istanbul was the Mediterranean metropolis of early modernity. At the end of the sixteenth century, Naples, with a population of 280,000, was with Paris the biggest city in Christian Europe, while Istanbul, with a population of around 700,000, was the biggest in both Europe and the Mediterranean: ‘‘It was not a town; it was an urban monster, a composite metropolis.’’ Every year, the city’s inhabitants consumed 4 mil136 Chapter 5

lion sheep and 3 million lambs. The city also permitted a widespread freedom of religious practices, ‘‘including the Italian procession of flagellants.’’≤≤ It was Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire that officially welcomed the Sephardic diaspora after 1492. To marginalize such dimensions is to insist on a unique axis along which to chart a single, seemingly implacable narrative: that of the ‘‘progress’’ of Europe. If we continue to listen to Braudel, however, we can also hear the echo of more complex routings in which, for example, prior to New World bullion the Mediterranean was dependent on sub-Saharan, gold which entered ‘‘general circulation from the fourteenth century, perhaps after the spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca of Mansa Musa, King of Mali, in 1324. North Africa with its supply of gold gradually became the driving force of the entire Mediterranean.’’≤≥ Mansa Musa was the founder of the first university in West Africa, established under the supervision of an architect from alAndalus around 1330 in Timbuktu. When the Arab traveler Hasan ibn Muhammed al-Wazzan al-Fasi (known in Europe as Leo Africanus) visited the city some two centuries later, it was still the major center of learning in West Africa, host to thousands of manuscripts and a book trade that he noted was more profitable than any other commerce. While European textile goods went south, across the Sahara, gold and slaves traveled north to the Mediterranean shoreline and European cities. This was in a period in which the traffic of the Sahara caravans was certainly on a larger scale and more lucrative than the maritime traffic of the Mediterranean.≤∂ Within a century, the axis begins to shift toward new coordinates: ‘‘In 1444 the first convoy of black slaves was landed at Lagos in Portugal.’’≤∑ Three years later, Portugal’s first gold currency was created, minted using African gold from the coast of Guinea. This, with the exclusion of the Arab intermediaries and the Mediterranean itself, was of course also the announcement of new avenues of appropriation, ones that would soon stretch out from the rocky coastline of Europe’s Atlantic seaboard to enclose Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The recovery of these more complex maps of the Mediterranean, of incomplete charts and discarded narratives, is pursued here not in an antiquarian rigor, but, rather, to catch the conditions of further interBetween Shores 137

pretations, other meanings. At such a juncture, a provocative and apparently unconnected affirmation by Gil Anidjar can acquire all of its historical and cultural potency: ‘‘The Jew, the Arab constitute the condition of religion and politics.’’≤∏ There exists within a millenarian formation the internal (the Jew) and external (the Arab) enemy against which ‘‘Christian’’ Europe honed itself. It was no accident that, before departing for the Crusades, German knights opened their campaign by slaughtering Rhineland Jews. Just as in the Song of Roland, Charlemagne destroyed ‘‘synagogues and mosques’’ to avenge Count Roland’s death.≤π This, as Anidjar subtly explores the question, suggests that it is impossible to avoid the connections and ‘‘forego explanations of the historical problem that enmity poses, failing to engage the ‘three’ elements at once (Europe, the Jew, the Arab).’’≤∫ Such searing encounters also bring together the usually separated spheres of anti-Semitism and Orientalism while simultaneously forcing us to reconsider an externalization (the Israeli–Palestine conflict, the Arab world, Islam) that is persistently ghosted by an indigenous presence: Arab Spain, European Jewry, Islam in the Balkans, Muslims in contemporary Europe. If al-Andalus most obviously, but not exclusively, represented the first seven hundred years of that repressed history, then the post-1400 Ottoman Empire and, subsequently, modern Turkey certainly occupy the next seven hundred years: Salonica, Sofia, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Budapest were also Ottoman cities; Vienna almost was. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman state was both financially and militarily among the most powerful states in the modern world. Writing from his Fascist prison in the early 1930s, Antonio Gramsci touches the dark heart of the question that has so persistently tortured the fashioning of modern Europe: It seems to me that the problem is much clearer than it is actually presented, given that ‘‘christianity’’ is implicitly considered to be inherent to modern civilization, and yet no one has the courage to pose the question of the relationship between christianity and modernity. . . . The Orientals see the antagonism which we do not see because christianity has molecularly adapted itself and become Jesuit; that is, widespread social hypocrisy.≤Ω 138 Chapter 5

Caught in the narrow vice of nationalism; squeezed outward and away from the incipient state; set apart in the non-regulated, amorphous territories of terror: All of this extraneous, alien matter legitimates the punitive powers of the state itself. Religion as a problem, an interrogation, is always elsewhere, is always the other. To contest and contrast this deadly logic, it is necessary, as Derrida put it, to resurrect an ethics of memory: Instead of a Christian Europe, one has to see the continent as penetrated by the three world religions (that is, written religions) that originated in the Near East and which indeed had a common mythology or sacred text; in order of arrival these were Judaism, Christianity and Islam.≥≠

Here, as Giorgio Agamben argues in Homo Sacer, it is ‘‘belonging’’ itself that is called into question: a belonging to what? How do we acquire critical, cultural, and historical honesty when recognizing a composite and always incomplete ‘‘home’’? Marshaled against the disquiet that such uncertainties breed, the state promotes itself as the unique harbinger of a continuity in which the new is only allowed to emerge from within an already authorized state of affairs. This is hegemony. It leads invariably to the naturalization of economical, social, political, and cultural injustice secured in the volatile language of race, ethnicity, and religion and collated in autochthonous solidarities and latent xenophobia. These are differences that are hard, durable, supposedly inescapable; they sustain no ambiguities: You are either with us or against us, you are either friend or foe, you are either good or evil. At this point, not only can anthropological and sociological argument be suspended, historical explanation exiled, philosophical discussion silenced, but the poetic inheritance of the arts and the unavoidable creolization of their provenance are instantaneously subsumed in an ineffectual aesthetics. To insist on the ambiguous, on the multifarious coming together, and on the diffusion of different lives, cultures, and histories in the artifact represented by a painting, a piece of music, a poem, a society, a culture, is to insist on a Mediterranean, a European, and a worldly becoming that is always in the making, never concluded, never settled once and for all. Against this prospect, all petty gods are destined to exhaust their ambitions. Between Shores 139

To recover that negated sense of the state of affairs, their potential and promise, means to bend, crease, and pierce the surfaces of everyday life. It means to soil the transparency promoted by the media via angles, accents, and argument that a hegemonic vision is unable to see and thereby frame. This is an argument about language, how it is accented and articulated. It is also an argument about aesthetics; that is, about realizing the possibility of elaborating a grammar able to hear the perpetual noise of the world while simultaneously registering its interrogative silence. Here, as aesthetics mutates into ethics, poetics transports us beyond the habitual, frequently leaving politics speechless. Here, for example, the history of the Mediterranean can be rewritten following the formation of sounds that both precede and exceed the limits imposed by national cultures and histories: from Oum Kalthoum to Almamegretta, the Euro-Mediterranean diaspora of raï, or the distillation of Arab, Latin, Jewish, and Rom itineraries in flamenco. This is a world not necessarily composed by the rhythms of institutional power or tempered by a unilateral time. It is a world of interruptions and intervals, in which the traveler Ibn Battutah can witness a Chinese porcelain dish being dropped in the street in fourteenthcentury Damascus or, journeying across the Sahara on his way to Mali, meet in the city of Sijilmasah Abu Muhmammad al-Bushris, whose brother he had encountered years before at Fuzhou in China.≥∞ Here, one’s time is constantly constellated by other times: It becomes multiple and multilateral, and it belongs to no one. These are lines of passages and lines of thought that can stretch out from the Mediterranean south across the Sahara to the Sahel (from the Arabic sahil, the southern shore of the desert), or northward to the grassy sea of central Asia. Such passages sustain syncretic worlds that were simultaneously connected and divided along the route: a Serbian princess marrying the Ottoman Bayezid I, or the Greek wife of Özberg, Mongol leader of the Golden Horde, who with her husband’s consent travels from southern Russia to Constantinople to give birth and along the way moves from Muslim practices to Christian ones, including drinking wine and eating pork.≥≤ To follow, like Claudio Magris, the three thousand kilometers of the Danube, snaking from its source in the European heartlands to the Black Sea and the Asian 140 Chapter 5

steppes, is to encounter a continual sedimentation and overlapping of tongues and territories marked by the violence of historical passage. It also leads to tripping continually over unexpected objects, events, and lives, such as that of the tomb of Gül Baba, the Muslim saint buried on a hillside among the roses overlooking Budapest.≥≥ Here we discover an altogether more uncertain terrain where a historical silence that can acquire the hardness of stones in language forces us to reconsider the path we are pursuing. Freud’s famous analogy of the archaeological stratification of Rome for the edifice of memory, in which things are forgotten but continue to resist the erosion of time, can be transposed to a marine environment, where the fluidity of currents, winds, and liquid solutions suggests a more mobile configuration of memory compared with the static layers of brick and bones deposited in the soil. Of course, the obvious objection is that no one lives for any length of time at sea; home is always constructed ashore. This is certainly true, but if the Mediterranean can propose a common measure, it is surely that of cultural and historical diversity washed by a shared marine medium. Perhaps it was to this sense of the Mediterranean that Jabès was referring when he suggested we should ‘‘listen to the lesson of the sea.’’≥∂ The shores of vertical rigidities—both recalled and forgotten—of locale and their sedimented memories are also washed by horizontal waves that render the distant proximate, the foreign familiar. This is to complicate and contaminate not only the frames of time and space as the elsewhere of another time leaks into one’s own appropriation of the world, but it is also to erode, disperse, and set adrift inherited bodies of analysis. If the Mediterranean insists, it insists with a differentiated communality destined to upset the neat enclosures of law, land, and lineage that a nationalized modernity has consistently sought to realize since. . . . If we must have a symbolic date, since 1492 and the beginnings of the Atlantic venture, the circumnavigation of Africa, the ethnic cleansing of Spain, and the printing of the first national grammars and dictionaries. This particular positioning of the Mediterranean is not proposed simply to recover a forgotten past and set the record straight, as it were; rather, in the resistance of a past that persists, even Between Shores 141

when it is deliberately forgotten and denied, there lies the drive or ethical aspiration for what Homi Bhabha has recently called a ‘‘global measure.’’≥∑ Rescued from the predictable confines of a narcissistic mapping in which the sea is merely an adjunct, an accessory, to the narration of a conceited modernity, the mobility of a marine view forces us to constantly change charts and take a measure of the shifting, interstitial crossings, encounters, and incidents that sea travel involves. The world, viewed from the heaving deck of history, can appear to be a very different place: more contingent in its forms, more transitory in its constructions, more modest in its pretensions, more dubious in its desire to claim the infinite as its own. What is deposited there, in the marine depths, is a solution: the traces and intertwining of different lives and histories, held in a suspension through which we ply our present-day routes. To the structural effects of a history instrumentally conceived and disciplined by the implacable linearity of ‘‘progress’’ is thus added the ambiguous, but affective, life of living a more unpredictable passage. To work this disjuncture between the planned and the provisional into a critical idiom that is able to intercede on behalf of the forgotten, dispossessed islands of history that lie in the currents of modernity is not simply to recuperate a negated past. It is also to puncture the hegemony of a humanist paradigm and realign its declared ethics in a more problematical critical space. This is not to overcome that history or simply to adjust it; it is, rather, to set it afloat so that its narration is stranded on the reef of other narratives, becalmed in unknown waters where it encounters unexpected landfalls while all the time its traditions are forced into becoming rafts of translation.≥∏ The measured discourse of the expert and the calm cartographies of area studies, in which crushing, asymmetrical differences of economic, political, and cultural power are flattened out in the ‘‘neutral’’ syntax of ‘‘information,’’ and racialized discrimination and inequality are translated into the unexamined premises of an ‘‘objective’’ perspective, are what come to be challenged by the turbulence of historical waves that wash over, smudging and saturating, such maps.≥π These are maps whose ‘‘objectivity’’ perpetually betrays the subjec142 Chapter 5

tivity of their makers. Their criteria, however universal the claim, is ultimately local, provincial, pertaining to the precise locations of existing hegemony. This location of power and knowledge, this ‘‘machinery of truth’’ (Timothy Mitchell) was announced in the implacable configuration of the colonial city. The distance and distinction between the ‘‘native quarters,’’ the Casbah, and the European district, between the presumed filth of the former and the declared splendor of the latter, is intrinsic to the genealogy of globalization. As Timothy Mitchell puts it in his study of colonial Egypt: Colonialism was distinguished by its powers of representation, whose paradigm was the architecture of the colonial city but whose effects extended themselves at every level. It was distinguished not just by representation’s extent, however, but by the very technique. The order and certainty of colonialism was the order of the exhibition, the certainty of representation itself. . . . Modern politics was to reside within a reality effect, a technique of certainty, order and truth, by which the world seemed absolutely divided into self and other, into things themselves and their plan.≥∫

It is surely no accident that Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre, published in 1963, already announced ‘‘a critique of the configurations of contemporary globalization.’’≥Ω The perforation of such maps, where the question of culture is rethought within a planetary economy, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy have persistently insisted, suggests a sense yet to be considered. Through this potential aperture it becomes possible to convey a human dimension that is not so much to come as yet to be thought. It is to touch something that is already with and within us—not something that is ‘‘othered’’ and critically distanced but, rather, something that is integral to the world we inhabit. It is this negated and hidden dimension that queries the translatability and transparency of a humanist constituency. The insistence of ‘‘bare life,’’ of immediate survival and living on, is consistently excluded, rendered opaque, by the drive and desire for the sovereignty of the subject, for a possession that only recognizes the ‘‘human’’ in its universal reflection. One can consider the interruption of this paradigm and its historical Between Shores 143

formation in the poetics, for example, of Mahmud Darwish or Assai Djebar and in the widespread postcolonial insistence on a disjunctive temporality. This is not merely to register the return of the repressed; it is also to conjoin knowing and not knowing within the same time and place: not a new, renovated knowledge, but an always incomplete narrative. From such a poetics it is possible, and necessary, to draw a politics. Such lines of writing and critical thought induce a series of traversal cuts in the body of modernity, deviating its insistent linearity and dispersing its sense. Further, such voices and interrogations also invite us to reconsider an immediate inheritance and the languages that we consider to embody our self-understanding of the world. There is not simply an alternative, a counter-narrative able to replace the existing one, but, rather, a reconfiguration that precisely brings into consideration what already exists but has been persistently overlooked, ignored, and denied. With this in mind it becomes possible to return to the modern— and, in particular, to the nineteenth-century—construction of the Mediterranean and rewrite the terms of its exposition and subsequent explanation. From the French expedition of Bonaparte in Egypt, the seizure and colonization of Algeria, and the opening of the Suez Canal to the English occupation of Egypt and the Italian occupation of Libya, the Mediterranean is violently transformed into a European lake: ‘‘Somewhere about Suez there is always a social change: the arrangements of Asia weaken and those of Europe begin to be felt.’’∂≠ The African and Asian shores, from Morocco to the Lebanon (and then stretching eastward into Syria, Iraq, and Iran and on to India), were a fully colonized space. Modern, planned imperialism, as opposed to the haphazard accumulation of territories, began in the Mediterranean with Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798–99. This systematic, imperial control of territory also concluded in the Mediterranean with the withdrawal of France from Algeria in 1962. The southern and Oriental shores are ravaged by European warfare for over two hundred years: Egypt, Algiers, Libya, Mesopotamia, El Alamein, Suez, Israel/Palestine. It is a sea whose entrance and 144 Chapter 5

exit—Gibraltar and Suez—were directly controlled from London until 1956 and the nationalizing of the canal by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. For Italy, the return to the Mediterranean and mare nostrum occurs in the aggressive language of colonialism and its ‘‘civilizing mission’’ (already rehearsed in the Piedmont colonization of the Italian Mezzogiorno in 1860–61 and its subsequent military ‘‘pacification’’) and the evocation of a ‘‘Third Rome’’ (after that of the empire and the Catholic church). The colonization of Libya and East Africa also suggested a ‘‘solution’’ to rural, southern poverty and the marginal status of the new nation in international affairs. The search for a ‘‘place in the sun’’ commenced with the liberal government of Crispi (1887–91, 1893– 96) and the renewal of the ‘‘Roman eagle that returns to spread its wings between the sea and the mountains . . . with screams of joy over the Mediterranean for the third time Italian’’ (Giosué Carducci). This trajectory, and its language of modern, European redemption, was certainly not inaugurated by Fascism; it was only accentuated and more finely focused in the realization of a national ‘‘destiny’’ through the declaration of the ‘‘empire’’ in 1936 and the explicit revival of the rhetoric and imagery of imperial Rome and the resurrection of a ‘‘Latin’’ Mediterranean. The foundation of the modern, fascist townships of Latina and Sabaudia, or the redevelopment of the local government center of Naples, were the architectural affirmation of a direct link to the greatness of Rome, in which the ‘‘Greek inheritance was merely a premise for the imperial sequence.’’∂∞ In the postwar period, Italian colonialism, bundled together with Fascism, is rapidly forgotten, and the Mediterranean is increasingly considered antimodern: the site of poverty, underdevelopment, archaic rites, a brake on the ‘‘progress’’ of modern Italy. It is now something to complain about or flee from, abandoned to tourists, holidays, and a ‘‘time-out’’ from modern, metropolitan realities. The Italian critic Franco Cassano suggests that present-day Italy has installed an ‘‘unhealthy relationship’’ with a ‘‘repudiated Mediterranean’’; that is, an ‘‘unhealthy relationship’’ with its own cultural and historical formation, including its colonial past, now overdertermined Between Shores 145

by the fundamentalism of the ‘‘modern.’’∂≤ Cassano’s suggestion is that this negative verdict actually reveals a more profound but abjured cartography in which Occidental modernity would be forced to confront its limits in a space, a sea, that is irreducible to its design. There is no simple adjustment to be made here. The critique of inherited modalities for perceiving and receiving the Mediterranean certainly requires more than a ‘‘humanist’’ rendition, now only belatedly beginning to accommodate diversity and difference. Historically and structurally, this very same humanism has failed to acknowledge the intertwining African, Arabic, Islamic, Jewish, and Asiatic contributions to its formation: all elements consigned to a footnote in the unfolding narrative of Occidental progress. Humanism has invariably been oblivious to the differentiated expression of the ‘‘human.’’ Jean Desthieux rightly pointed out at the Congress of L’Humanisme et la Méditerranéen in 1935 that humanism, as generally understood, has contributed to restricting an understanding of the origins of civilization, to the degree that it has largely overlooked the Semitic, Christian and Islamic contributions in its over-valuation of its Greek–Latin baggage. This means that we have arrived at any antigeographical and unjust sense of the Mediterranean, reduced simply to the dimensions of a Latin lake.∂≥

Between 1923 and 1932, Fernand Braudel taught in Algeria, initially at Constantine and then at Algiers. If Braudel undoubtedly constructs the modern understanding of a composite and stratified Mediterranean, his language still resonates with a restrictive appreciation of the historical and cultural space that he did so much to elaborate: Istanbul remains Constantinople, and Islam is an anti-Occidental, antiMediterranean force, that stretches away into the desert.∂∂ Yet, as has been noted, it is from the very same desert that the faiths of the West all arrived—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—just as the Ottoman Empire has been integral to the conflictual making of the Mediterranean and, consequently, to the formation of Occidental modernity since the late fourteenth century. The Ottoman Turks had already made significant inroads into the Balkans by the 1370s. Prior to Istanbul, the Ottoman capital had been Edirne (Adrianople) in Thrace, and when in 1453 146 Chapter 5

Constantinople fell, it was from its Occidental, not Oriental, perimeter that Byzantium was successfully conquered. The sea constantly mocks the erection of such barriers, exposing the pretensions of territorial premises and cultural prejudices. The noted thesis of the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne that conjoined presumed European particularity with a desire for historical purity argued that the spread of Islam in the seventh century broke up and dispersed the earlier ‘‘unity’’ of the Mediterranean. As we have already seen, another argument exists which suggests that the fragmentation of the Mediterranean world after the fall of Rome is in part reunified by Arab conquest as the whole gravity of commercial and cultural power moves to the east. The shift of the caliphate from Damascus (only eighty kilometers from the Mediterranean) to Baghdad in the eighth century is here perhaps symptomatic. Similarly, the treasure hoards found in Russia and Scandinavia, amounting to over a million silver dirham that were minted in central Asia from silver mined in Afghanistan, register the far-flung reach of Islamic commerce between the eighth century and eleventh century, when the dirham was the universal, and often unique, currency of the time.∂∑ The prevalent, stereotypical version, however, operates a divisive cut in a complex fabric and consigns Islam and the Arab and Ottoman world to the margins of a Mediterranean modernity, isolating them from the history of ‘‘progress’’ that subsequently elaborates the ruthless evaluation of their (under)development and diversity.∂∏ The potentially shattering effects of the universalizing drive of Occidental humanism is most subtly registered in Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red, where in Istanbul in the dying decades of the sixteenth century a complex engagement between diverse aesthetics in Islamic miniaturist art, caught between the repetitive respect of a tradition and innovative, individual style, registers the impact of Renaissance pictorial perspective. Like the modern debate in Arabic poetry between the classical school and the innovative meter of Gibran and Adonis, again induced by Occidental modernity, there is the rehearsal of a critical indeterminacy between the power to illustrate and the power of the image that ‘‘inhabits the horizon’’ (Adonis). We come away from Pamuk’s novel not with the certainty of Occidental superiBetween Shores 147

ority, but with the invitation to navigate the history of a more heterogeneous passage in which the excluded continues to interrogate and inform the represented.∂π To abandon the certain shores of a historical configuration that has acquired the authority of orthodoxy can mean to be piloted by other currents. In a ‘‘Scheherazadian’’ style that multiplies the narratives to defer any obvious conclusion or unilateral possession, the Mediterranean can also become a laboratory that produces a new historical and cultural script.∂∫ From 1800 to 1945, the Mediterranean was both militarily and politically a ‘‘French lake’’ of colonial ambitions and imperial design. In both Pirenne and Braudel, there is a pronounced failure to register and work through the subsequent ‘‘loss’’ of that world, compensated in their writings by a self-assured possession of the historical space represented by the Mediterranean. The failure to recognize in the political and conceptual colonization of that particular history the lineaments of new critical prospects coincides with an unwillingness to come to terms with a once racialized rule of the world. It fuels a trauma that is unrecognized and, hence, destined to disseminate its disquieting presence in histories that retreat from a complex and uncertain—and thus responsible—encounter with both the past and the present.∂Ω This refusal cast its long shadows over the Mediterranean in the bitterly contorted decolonization of its African and Asian shores: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and the countervailing European colonization of Palestine in the name of the new nation of Israel: ‘‘The new settlers were motivated by Western concepts of the unbreakable link between race, nation and territory.’’∑≠ The Mediterranean lies between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Despite the pedagogic powers of nationalism, the Tunisian writer Emna Belhaj Yahia insists there exist ‘‘marine memories . . . fused in blue’’ that navigate between the ‘‘delusions’’ of modernity and the ‘‘sirens’’ of identity.∑∞ In this more fluid space, it becomes possible to reassess who defines the Mediterranean, how and why, and the languages in which it is figured. The views that arrive from Istanbul, Alexandria, Venice, Algiers, Athens, Barcelona, Naples both intersect and diverge, creating a net in which a communality is suspended and differences pass through its multiple holes. 148 Chapter 5

The space of the Mediterranean, both as sea and combinatory territory, remains elusive: a perpetual interrogation. The sea is not something to possess; rather, it proposes a ‘‘passage of wisdom.’’∑≤ Historical memories consigned to the custody of the sea are the very opposite of those systematically catalogued in a national museum. In this multiple Mediterranean, the insistence of the sea returns us to a state that circumvents territorial claims. The distinction between the ‘‘White Sea’’ of the Mediterranean (as opposed to the ‘‘Black Sea’’ inherited in Arab cultures from the Ottoman Empire), opens up a diverse understanding of space. As a luminous geography, it proposes a lighter, more fluid mapping charted by writing and the transforming powers of the metaphor that evade and erode the grim realities of purportedly immovable beliefs and positions. It is through such cultural configurations, argues Muhammad Barrada, that it becomes possible to overcome the structural racism and implacable calculation of interests that existing powers exercise in positioning the Mediterranean locally and globally.∑≥ The deeply ambiguous poetics of Albert Camus, caught between the brilliance of the Mediterranean midday and the darkness of the midtwentieth-century European midnight, relays the colonial trauma that envelopes the modern Mediterranean, both for its colonized and for its colonizers. In this key, it becomes possible to appreciate Edouard al-Kharrat’s definition of a ‘‘disquieting sea’’ that harbors an ambiguous, stratified, invariably repressed ‘‘unity,’’ in which the colonial project framed and directed the brutal explication of an expansive and universalizing modernity.∑∂ Here, in the ‘‘extreme languages of the sea,’’ where the ‘‘waves turn to flesh’’ and continue ‘‘to echo in long nights of memory,’’ I am brought to a home in which I do not yet know how to live.∑∑ If there is a unity in the Mediterranean, it is perhaps a hidden, critical ‘‘unity’’ where the sea itself, as the site of dispersion and drift, exposes the fragility of inherited configurations. Here distinctions do not lie in the false constitution of civilizations clashing along the shorelines but are sedimented in the daily concentration of the structural and racialized division between the rich and the poor, pinpointed in an overloaded boat of ‘‘illegal’’ immigrants reduced to a blip on a Between Shores 149

European radar screen. Stripped of ideological alternatives, there only remains the South. In this unequal and unjust framework, the real barbarians, as Vázquez Montalbán rightly points out, are the citizens of the North.∑∏ It is they who close their eyes and ears to a poverty induced by their brutal appropriation of the riches of the planet in the consumption of ‘‘progress.’’ Accumulated in a ‘‘way of life,’’ it is this manner of self-realization that becomes the measure to be defended and the impossible goal for the rest of the world to attain. The barbarians of the ‘‘free market’’ lay waste to all they encounter. After all, everything can be economically colonized, from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to the water we drink, the health we aspire to, and the ideas we formulate. All can be possessed, patented, and legally appropriated. The logic is literally ‘‘infinite,’’ and its ‘‘economy’’ is a universal language whose ‘‘freedom’’ is guaranteed by the endless expansion of the market. The historical, political, and ethical problem, which today is increasingly militarized in the blunt Esperanto of security and terrorism, is that the vast majority of the world’s population is structurally excluded and historically exiled from that scenario. All of this is present and pulsates in the present-day Mediterranean. Such a complex but largely negated condition perhaps requires a poetics for its interpretation; a poetics which, like lightning over water, illuminates in a flash (Heidegger’s aletheia) the profile of a landscape, is able to promote a language of historical and cultural justice within the existing relationship between the exploiter and the exploited, the North and the South. The Renaissance idealization of the Greek and Latin world, which resulted in a humanist intent on classical purity (frequently translated into a racialized lexicon), has persistently excluded the momentous historical and cultural contamination of the interceding centuries and, in particular, the centrality of Arab and Islamic culture in treasuring and transmitting that very same inheritance. If Renaissance self-representation, with its subjective sovereignty and the universalism of autonomous ‘‘man,’’ historically led to a nascent nationalism and the subsequent framing of the modern Mediterranean, it urgently needs to be read again; encouraged to speak in the more flexible and less conclusive prospects of a critical journey on a sea subjected to multiple currents and winds. 150 Chapter 5

In the end, even the myths promoted by Renaissance culture and nineteenth-century Hellenism fail to contain the hybridizing forces of the Mediterranean. If the classical Greco-Roman world provides the ‘‘origins’’ of Europe, then Virgil’s Aeneid frankly tells us a more transgressive tale. After the fall of Troy in Asia Minor at the hands of Agamemnon and the Greeks, the Trojan Aeneas—the desertor Asiae, the refugee in flight, the opposite of Ulysses—traveled to Italy via North Africa to become the ancestor of the Romans: an Oriental adventurer whose successors would come to rule much of the known world. The same hybridized formation was reactivated 1,400 years later when Mehmed II (el-Fatih, ‘‘the Conqueror’’) claimed the Trojan ancestry of the Turks in advising the pope, after the capture of Constantinople, that he would soon be in Rome to claim his inheritance.

Between Shores 151

Notes 1 many voices Source of the chapter’s opening epigraph: Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 13. 1. Mario Avallone, chef, La Stanza del Gusto, Naples, March 2005. 2. Bono, Il Mediterraneo. 3. Berger and Mohr, A Seventh Man. 4. I am drawing here on a series of observations made by Luciana Parisi, Steve Goodman, and Brian Massumi at the conference MateriaFutura: Comunicazione, biopolitica, razzismo, Naples, May 26–27, 2006. 5. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. 6. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks. 7. Walcott, ‘‘The Migrants.’’ 8. Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’’ 9. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholy. 10. Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘‘Sviluppo e Progresso,’’ in Pasolini, Scritti corsari, 175–78. 11. This draws directly on Carl Schmitt’s notorious 1932 essay ‘‘The Concept of the Political,’’ in which he argues that the autonomy of the state and its sovereignty is articulated through an antagonistic figure—the ‘‘enemy.’’ The enemy may be anything that serves to coalesce state power and unify civil society. The resonance between this chilling machinery of unilateral identification and contemporary democracies waging wars—both real and imaginary—against demonized alterities is most subtly brought out in the work of Giorgio Agamben: Schmitt, The Concept of the Political.

12. Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 53. 13. Sandro Mezzadra, in Bojadˇzijev and Saint-Saëns, ‘‘Borders, Citizenship, War, Class,’’ 17. 14. Said, Culture and Imperialism. 15. Carter, The Lie of the Land, 302. 16. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 17. This baroque-like folding of the semiotic field into the mortal insistence of the historical archive is most suggestively explored in Bal, Quoting Caravaggio. 18. Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ 235. 19. Documented by a young Arnold Toynbee: see Cohen, Global Diasporas, 45. 20. Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence, 7. 21. In turn, the model for Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). 22. Calchi Novati and Valsecchi, Africa, 236. 23. Chow, Ethics after Idealism. 24. Cacciari, L’Arcipelago, 83–85. A similar argument is made in Latouche, The Westernization of the World. 25. This is an explicit criticism of such ‘‘expert’’ viewpoints as found, for example, in Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds. 26. Deleuze, The Fold. 27. Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 28. Butor, The Spirit of Mediterranean Places, 15. 29. Guha, History at the Limit of World-History. 30. Adonis, ‘‘The Desert,’’ quoted in Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs, 101. 31. Fabian, Time and the Other. 32. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear. 33. Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartments, 44. 34. I treat this question more extensively in Chambers, Culture after Humanism. 35. Pasolini, Scritti corsari. 36. Miglio, Vita a fronte. 37. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another.

2 postcolonial sea 1. Edward Said, ‘‘From Silence to Sound and Back Again,’’ in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 515. 154 Notes to Chapter 2

2. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 167. 3. Cacciari, L’Arcipelago, 35. 4. Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 5. 5. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. 6. Casarino, Modernity at Sea, xxi, xxv. 7. Jabès, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book. 8. Del Boca, L’Africa nella coscienza degli Italiani. Del Boca’s innumerable writings on Italian colonial Africa have been crucial in re-elaborating a sense of ‘‘Italy’’ in the implacable light of the colonial experience. 9. Ponzanesi, ‘‘Il postcoloniale italiano,’’ 26. 10. Scott, Refashioning Modernities, 12. 11. Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World. 12. Nancy, ‘‘The Confronted Community,’’ 23. 13. Idem, ‘‘Deconstruction of Monotheism,’’ 37. 14. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 255. 15. Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano, 3. 16. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony; Ghosh, In an Antique Land. 17. Bresc, Arabi per lingua, 31. 18. Ibid., 22. 19. Although the term ‘‘zero’’ was in use in Babylon many centuries before the Christian era, the first unambiguous use of the zero as a number in its own right was by the seventh-century Indian mathematician Brahmagupta. The use of the zero, imported from the Hindi system of astronomical arithmetic to Baghdad in the eighth century, arrived in Europe, prevalently through al-Andalus, via Arab merchants and mathematicians in the eleventh century. Subsequently, the Italian mathematician Leornado Pisano, or Fibonacci, who had acquired direct experience of the system through his father’s trading connections in North Africa and then in his studies with Arab mathematicians, became a central figure in bringing the Hindi– Arabic numerical system into European mathematics around 1200. 20. Salvatore Bono, who mentions a figure between 4.5 million and 9 million Christian and Muslim slaves, provides an excellent survey of the question in Bono, ‘‘La schiavitù nel mediterraneo moderno.’’ 21. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 116. 22. Ibid. 159. 23. Ibid., 139. After the victory of Lepanto, Venice demanded that all of the experienced seamen among the Turkish prisoners be put to death. Notes to Chapter 2 155

Istanbul lacked neither timber nor money—only seamanship was indispensable. 24. Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes. 25. Sayad, Algeria. 26. Lyotard, ‘‘Domus and the Megalopolis.’’ 27. Simmel, ‘‘Bridge and Door.’’ 28. Scarnecchia, Musica Popolare e Musica Colta. 29. Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ 30. A similar concentration of cultures ‘‘distilled in sound’’ is documented in Fatih Akin’s film Crossing the Bridge (2005) on the contemporary music scene in Istanbul. 31. Almamegretta, Figli di Annibale, compact disc, Anagrumba, 1992.

3 off the map Sources of the chapter’s opening epigraphs: Mahmud Darwish, ‘‘We Travel Like Other People,’’ in al-Qasim et al., Victims of a Map, 31; Farinelli, ‘‘E l’uomo creò il mondo,’’ 23. 1. Butler, Precarious Life. 2. Mbembe, On the Postcolony. 3. Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société. 4. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam. 5. Menocal, The Ornament of the World. 6. Said, Covering Islam. 7. Fanon, ‘‘Algeria Unveiled,’’ 85. 8. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 244. 9. Scarnecchia, Musica Popolare e Musica Colta, 70. 10. Phillips, The Nature of Blood. 11. Mahmud Darwish, ‘‘The Wandering Guitar Player,’’ in al-Qasim et al., Victims of a Map, 45. 12. Derrida, Archive Fever. 13. Naseer Shamma, Maqamat Zíryáb, Compact disc, Pneuma, 2003. As Claudio Lo Jacono points out, Abu 1-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Nafi‘ was clearly a dandy. Along with the music, he is reputed to have introduced chess and the use of crystal drinking glasses, as well as other refinements in dining and men’s personal hygiene, to al-Andalus: see Lo Jacono, Il Vicino Oriente, 325–26. 14. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear. 15. Gibson, ‘‘Oublier Baudrillard,’’ 137. 16. Camus, The Stranger, 122 . 156 Notes to Chapter 3

17. Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartments. 18. Çelik, ‘‘Colonial/Postcolonial Intersections,’’ 71. 19. Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartments, 22. 20. Ibid., 145. 21. Ibid., 150–51. 22. Ibid., 16. 23. Idem, Fantasia. 24. Idem, Women of Algiers in Their Apartments, 2. 25. Khleifi and Sivan, Route 181. 26. For an extremely sensitive appropriation of this problematic within the historical formation of a Levantine poetics, see Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs. 27. Bassi, ‘‘Resisting Jews,’’ 217. 28. In this emerges the disquieting slippage of the figure of the Muselmänner, or ‘‘Muslims,’’ in the Nazi death camps—a term applied by fellow inmates to those who were dying and considered to be beyond hope, destitute, doubled up like ‘‘Arabs praying,’’ destined for the gas chamber (Primo Levi)—to modern-day Israel, where the ‘‘only good Arab is a dead one’’ (expressed by a Jewish construction employer in the opening sequence in Khleifi and Sivan, Route 181). This pinpoints the extreme frontier rhetoric of the colonizing power and its brutal logic of simultaneously seeking to identify and annihilate the enemy: see Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab; Levi, If This Is a Man. 29. Segal, ‘‘The Hidden Powers of Injury,’’ 182. The figure of $3 billion of annual U.S. aid is also taken from this essay. In 1971, Teddy Kolech, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, admitted that Israel had expelled thousands of Arabs from Arab Jerusalem since it forcibly took control of the city in 1967 and that more would be expelled to transform Jerusalem into a Jewish city. These details are drawn from Ahdaf Soueif’s intricate novel In the Eye of the Sun. 30. Rose, The Question of Zion, 83. In this courageous book, the author only briefly considers the formation and gestation of Zionism in the context of fervent nineteenth-century nationalism and European modernity. Here genetic exclusivities, seeded in the mythical purities of a national soil, language, and culture and trapped in the pseudo-theological web of ‘‘manifest destiny,’’ ‘‘progress,’’ and ‘‘civilization,’’ secured the moral right to establish colonies in a non-European world. While the twentieth century provides terrifying testimony to this demented logic, contemporary Israel threatens to become the latest, abject product of that history. 31. Shohat, ‘‘Staging the Quincentenary,’’ 101, 104. Introducing the world Notes to Chapter 3 157

of the Sephardic Jews into the contemporary composition of a Jewish and Israeli becoming, Shohat’s important article shatters the homogeneous category of ‘‘one people’’ framed by a Euro-Ashkenazim hegemony. 32. Mayer, ‘‘Elogio di Cassandra.’’ 33. Quoted in Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs, 48. 34. Pappe, ‘‘Violenza e memoria in Israel,’’ 151. 35. Khleifi and Sivan, Route 181. 36. www.multiplicity.it. 37. Marconi, Reti Mediterranee. 38. Ghosh, In an Antique Land, 287–88.

4 naples: a porous modernity Sources of the chapter’s epigraphs: Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 177; Burns, The Gallery, 148; Matvejevi´c, Mediterranean, 24; Rea, Mistero napoletano, 29; Montesano, Nel corpo di Napoli, 27; Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘The Gay Science,’’ idem, A Nietzsche Reader, 208; Ascherson, Black Sea, 28–29. 1. Malaparte, La pelle, 34. 2. Bruno, Street Walking on a Ruined Map. 3. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 4. Sohn-Rethel, Napoli, la filosofia del rotto. 5. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 177–78. 6. Buci-Glucksmann, La raison baroque, 71. 7. Chambers, Culture after Humanism, 129. 8. For a literary re-creation of the life of Muhammad al-Idrisi in Siqilliya and the court of Sultan Rujar (the Norman Roger II) in Palermo, see Ali, A Sultan in Palermo. 9. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. 10. Benjamin, The Arcades Project. 11. Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano, 25. 12. This Caravaggesque sensibility and aesthetic is brilliantly evoked in Derek Jarman’s film Caravaggio (1986). 13. Deleuze, The Fold. 14. Marin, To Destroy Painting, 15. 15. Ibid., 102–3. 16. Ibid., 164. 17. Lewis, Naples ’44, 137. 18. Ibid., 137–38. 158 Notes to Chapter 4

19. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, 2021–22. 20. Pagano de Divitiis, Mercanti Inglesi nell’Italia del Seicento. 21. Morgan, The Mongols, 188. 22. Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ 242–43. 23. Dal Lago, Lo straniero e il nemico, 12. 24. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 25. Bevilacqua, ‘‘Società rurale e emigrazione.’’ 26. De Martino, La fine del mondo. 27. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholy. 28. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 29. Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ 258.

5 between shores Sources of the chapter’s opening epigraphs: Bal, The Practice of Cultural Analysis, 1; Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, 9. 1. Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, 12. 2. Meddeb, ‘‘L’Europa come estremo,’’ 47–48. 3. Kinoshita, ‘‘Almería Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary,’’ 167–68. In the same article, we read that at ‘‘Durham, the remains of the Anglo-Saxon Saint Cuthbert were enveloped in a purple silk brocade embrodied in Arabic, with the first half of the Muslim profession of faith’’: ibid., 170. 4. Ibid., 169. Kinoshita is quoting Lopez, ‘‘Mohammed and Charlemagne.’’ 5. Goody, Islam in Europe, 105. 6. Ibid., 77. 7. Catlos, ‘‘Mahomet Abenadalill.’’ 8. Ibid., 294. 9. Ibid., 287. 10. Young, Postcolonialism, esp. chapters on ‘‘Foucault in Tunisia’’ and ‘‘Derrida in Algeria.’’ 11. Apart from the extensive discussion ibid., the Algerian insurgency within Parisian theory is also the topic of Ahluwalia, ‘‘Out of Africa.’’ 12. Jabès, The Book of Questions. 13. Re, ‘‘Alexandria Revisited.’’ 14. Shohat, ‘‘Staging the Quincentenary,’’ 98. 15. Rose, The Question of Zion, 121. 16. Goytisolo, La Spagna e gli spagnoli. Notes to Chapter 5 159

17. Ibid., 125–37. 18. N. Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1975), as quoted in Goody, Islam in Europe, 126. 19. Mallete, The Kingdom of Sicily, 11. 20. Ibid., 81. 21. Angrisani and Tuozzi, Tony Gatlif. 22. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 348, 350. 23. Ibid., 467. 24. Calchi Novati and Valsecchi, Africa, 79. 25. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 469. 26. Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, xi. 27. Ibid., 34. 28. Ibid., xvii. 29. Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, 247. 30. Goody, Islam in Europe, 14. 31. Mackintosh-Smith, The Travels of Ibn Battutah, 40, 281. 32. Olivera was daughter of Prince Lazar of Serbia, who perished in the defeat of Kosovo in 1389 by the Ottomans led by Bayezid’s father, Murad I. (In addition to his Turkish troops, he was aided by the Bulgarian and Serbian rivals of Lazar.) See Bernardini, Il mondo iranico e turco, 214. The details of the Greek wife of the Mongol Özberg come from the noted Arab traveler Ibn Battutah (1304–68/9), in Mackintosh-Smith, The Travels of Ibn Battutah, 129. 33. Magris, Danube. 34. Jabès, The Book of Questions, 2:138. 35. Bhabha, ‘‘A Measure of the World,’’ presented at the Scuola Europea di Studi Avanzati, Università di Napoli, Naples, 23 November 2005. 36. Carter and Lewis, Depth of Translation. 37. Chow, ‘‘Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Studies.’’ 38. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, quoted in Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs, 35. 39. Bhabha, ‘‘Foreword,’’ xiii. 40. Forster, A Passage to India, 249. 41. Cassano, ‘‘Contro i nuovi fondamentalismi,’’ 47. 42. Ibid., 55. 43. Quoted in Izzo and Fabre, Rappresentare il Mediterraneo, 101. 44. While it is true that the city’s Byzantine name, ‘‘rendered in Turkish as Kostantiniyye, continued to be used alongside the newer ‘Istanbul,’ ’’ the 160 Notes to Chapter 5

Occidental insistence on ignoring the new name and ownership after the ‘‘fall’’ of the city in 1453 is highly indicative. Istanbul was also ‘‘punningly rendered as ‘Islambol,’ . . . abounding with Islam’’: see Finkel, Osman’s Dream, 57. 45. Shatzmiller, Labour in the Medieval Islamic World. 46. Jean-Louis Triaud, in Izzo and Fabre, Rappresentare il Mediterraneo, 125–26. 47. Pamuk, My name Is Red. The connection between Islamic visual art and modern Arabic poetry was suggested to me by reading Corrao, ‘‘Adonis.’’ This argument is also explored in the context of Pamuk’s novel in Groys, ‘‘The Politics of Equal Aesthetic Rights.’’ 48. Barrada, ‘‘Progetto per un sogno,’’ 27. 49. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholy. 50. Cohen, Global Diasporas, 14. 51. Yahia, ‘‘Costruire sul Paesaggio Marino,’’ 18. 52. Cassano, ‘‘Contro i nuovi fondamentalismi,’’ 49. 53. Barrada, ‘‘Progetto per un sogno.’’ 54. al-Kharrat, ‘‘Il mio Mediterraneo,’’ 17. 55. Ibid. 56. Montalbán, ‘‘Mediterraneo Invertebrato,’’ 36–37.

Notes to Chapter 5 161

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Index Abu-Lughod, Janet L., 35 Addis Ababa, 29 Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sai’id Esber), 147 Aeneas, 151 Afghanistan, 116, 147 Africa, 10, 35, 37, 39–40, 51–52, 68–69, 87, 113, 129, 136, 151; European colonialism and, 13– 15, 29–30, 123–26, 144–45, 148; Mediterrranean trade and, 137 Agamben, Giorgio, 121, 139 Albania, 123 Alessandria, 49, 134, 148 Alexander the Great, 24 Alfano, Carlo, 117 Algiers, 38, 45, 61, 144, 146, 148 Algeria, 6, 8, 13, 14, 15, 23, 29, 41, 53, 59–62, 133, 144, 146, 148 Allied Forces, 45 Allied Military Government, 99, 102 Almamegretta, 46–49, 140 alterity, 8, 9, 10, 12, 23, 28, 120, 131 Althusser, Louis, 133 Amelio, Lucio, 118

Americas, 37, 95, 122, 124–25, 137 Amsterdam, 111 al-Andalus, 132, 138 Angevins, 119 Angleton, James Jesus, 102 Anidjar, Gil, 9, 131, 138 apartheid, 3, 66 Arab culture, 9–10, 14, 24, 35–37, 40–42, 69, 82–83, 130–32, 135– 38, 140, 146–47, 150; music of, 55–58; Neapolitan song and, 42, 45, 47–49 Arabic-Hebrew dialect, 35 architecture, 39, 96; colonial city and, 143; Naples and, 77–79, 114, 127 Area, 49 Arendt, Hannah, 127 Argentina, 124 Arghun, Ilkan, 116 Armenian genocide, 13 Ascherson, Neal, 119 Asia, 9, 37, 38, 51, 52, 69, 91, 116, 135, 137, 140, 144, 147, 148, 151 Athens, 45, 123, 148

Aulenti, Gae, 117 Auschwitz, 66, 133 Australia, 13 Avallone, Mario, 2 Badoglio, Pietro 29 Baghdad, 12, 24, 35, 36, 57, 65, 69, 135, 147 Bal, Mieke, 130 Balkans, 9, 29, 37, 40, 113, 135, 138, 146 Baraka, Amira, 2 Barbary coast, 37–38, 91 Baroque, 18, 72, 77, 79–80, 88–89, 94–96, 104, 118, 127 Barra, Peppe, 45 Barrada, Muhammad, 149 Basques, 38 Bassolino, Antonio, 109 Beijing, 69, 111 Belgrade, 138 Bellu, Maria, 68 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 11, 25, 27, 56, 71, 72, 79–81, 89, 93, 117–18, 128–29 Berber, 7, 37, 61–62, 82, 135 Berlin, 14, 113, 136 Berlusconi, Silvi0, 16 Bernal, Martin, 48 Betty Bee, 117 Bhabha, Homi, 142, 143 Biasiucci, Antonio, 117 Black Atlantic, 55 Blanchot, Maurice, 58 borders, 3–8, 20, 66–67, 132 Borghese, Junio Valerio, 102 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 133 Braudel, Fernand, 1, 24, 34, 38–39, 69, 133, 137, 146, 148 Brazil, 124

174 Index

Bresc, Henri, 36 Britain, 13, 15, 29, 30, 124, 127, 148 British Empire, 124 Bruni, Sergio, 46 Buber, Martin, 64–65 Bucharest, 138 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 80 Budapest, 138, 141 Buenos Aires, 123, 127, 135 Butler, Judith, 50 Byzantium, 9, 38, 52–53, 69, 82, 132, 147 Cabbala, 105 Cacciari, Massimo, 16, 24 Cairo, 24, 35, 40, 45, 68, 78, 88, 123, 130 Calcutta, 123 Camorra, 97–101, 113, 115 Campanella, Tommaso, 86 Campania region, 1, 98 Camus, Albert, 59, 135, 149 Cape Verde, 87 Capone, Al, 99 Capri, 72, 79, 103 Caracciolo, Battista, 94 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 94–97, 104 Carducci, Giosué, 145 Caribbean, 30, 55, 109, 148 Cartesian rationalism, 96, 105 Caruso, Enrico, 49 Cassano, Franco, 34, 108, 145, 146 Castro, Américo, 135 Catalans, 119 Cathedral of Otranto, 35 Catholicism, 53, 113, 125 Celan, Paul, 18 Cerreta, Maria, 77 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 32, 108

Charlemagne, 38, 69, 138 Chatwin, Bruce, 116 Chia, Sandro, 117 Chiesa delle Anime del Purgatorio, Naples, 95 Chiesa Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples, 94 China, 15, 24, 36, 37, 68, 87, 90, 140 Chingiz Khan, 116 Christian Democrat Party, 99, 113 Christianity, 7, 13–14, 20, 36, 38, 40, 57, 69, 72, 83, 131–33, 138– 39, 146 cia (Central Intelligence Agency), 16, 102 Cirillo, Ciro, 99 ‘‘clash of civilizations,’’ 3, 54, 149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 54 Conference of Berlin (1884–85), 14 Congo, 29, 148 Conrad, Joseph, 23 Constantinople, 9, 39, 40, 82, 132, 136, 140, 146, 151 Cordova, 9, 57 corsairs, 37–38, 91 Counter Reformation, 95–96, 118 creolization, 28, 46, 49, 55, 83, 129 Crete, 39 Crispi, Francesco, 145 cristiano vieja, 134 Croce, Benedetto, 104, 106–7, 110, 111 Crusades, the, 40, 69, 138 cultural relativism, 32 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 108 Cutolo, Raffaele, 99 Cyprus, 37, 39, 91 da Lentini, Giacomo, 135 D’Alessandro, Luciano, 117

Dal Lago, Alessandro, 120 Damascus, 140, 147 D’Angelo, Nino, 46 Daniele, Pino, 46 Dante Alighieri, 117, 135 Darwish, Mahmud, 50, 56, 144 de Certeau, Michel, 18 Delacroix, Eugene, 60 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 95; Félix Guattari and, 10 De Maria, Nicola, 117 De Martino, Ernesto, 105, 126 democracy, 17, 31, 51, 54, 102, 113– 14; freedom and, 3, 19–20, 115; modern state and, 5, 13, 121–22 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 12, 18, 53, 56, 130, 133, 139 De Sanctis, Francesco, 106 Desthieux, Jean, 146 deterritorialization, 11, 61 Dewey, Thomas, 100 diaspora, 63–64, 140; Sephardic, 63, 130, 133, 137 dirham treasure hoards, 147 Djebar, Assia, 20–23, 27, 41, 60, 61, 133, 144 Doktor Faustus, 23 Donato, Fabio, 117 Düsseldorf, 98 earthquakes, 77, 83–84, 98, 101, 118 Edirne (Adrianople), 146 Egypt, 6, 12, 13, 15, 24, 29, 34, 36, 37, 40, 49, 129, 133, 143, 144, 148 El-Alamein, 144 El Cid, 7, 38 Eritrea, 29, 123 España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos (1948), 135

Index 175

Esposito, Lello, 117 Ethiopia, 29, 114, 123 ethnic cleansing, 63–64, 134, 141 Europe, 9, 10, 18, 24, 33, 57, 72, 83, 151; imperialism of, 14, 28, 127, 144; Middle Ages and, 35–40, 131–32, 135; migration and, 120–25; modernity and, 33, 41, 52, 64–69, 88, 111–13, 116, 136– 39 European colonialism, 6–7, 9, 12– 14, 19, 28–30, 41, 53, 59, 61, 65– 66, 109, 113–14, 123, 125, 127, 143–45, 148–49; atrocities and, 29; civilizing mission and, 15 European Union, 4 fado, 45 Fanon, Frantz, 7, 16, 53, 67, 133, 143, 152 Fanzago, Cosimo, 95 Farinelli, Franco, 50 Fascism, 29–30, 99, 102, 113–14, 122, 127, 145 Fatimidi, 82 flamenco, 28, 45, 135, 136, 140 Forster, E. M., 23 Foucault, Michel, 47, 133 France, 13, 15, 29, 61, 109, 127, 144, 148 Frederick II, 83, 108 Freud, Sigmund, 28, 41, 84, 91, 141 gastronomy, 1–2, 129, 130–31 Gatlif, Tony, 135 Genoa, 35, 111 Genoans, 40, 119 genocide, 10, 13, 20, 63 Genovese, Vito, 99, 102 Germany, 13 Ghosh, Amitav, 35

176 Index

Gibraltar, 35, 145 Gibran, Khalil, 147 Gilroy, Paul, 2, 8, 55, 143, 152 Giordano, Luca, 94 Giotto, 131, 132 Gitai, Amos, 64 Giuliano, Salvatore, 99, 100 Glissant, Edouard, 55 globalization, 24, 111, 121 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 72 Goitein, Shelomo Dov, 35 Goytisolo, Juan, 135 Gramsci, Antonio, 6, 106, 110, 138; on hegemony and the subaltern, 6, 8–9; on modernity, 8–9; on religion, 138; on the ‘‘southern question,’’ 17, 111 Granada, 36, 52 Grand Duchy of Tuscany, 38 Graziani, Rodolfo, 29 Greece, 123 Greek civilizations, 33–34, 52–53 Greene, Graham, 103 Guattari, Félix, and Gilles Deleuze, 10 Guinea, 122, 137 Gül Baba, 141 Hagia Sophia, 9 Hasan bin Muhammed al-Wazzan al-Fasi (Leo Africanus), 137 He, Zheng, 37 Heart of Darkness, 15 Hebrew, 35, 52, 53, 62, 132, 135 Hebrew communities, 36 hegemony, 8, 21, 29, 30, 69, 91, 95, 109, 111–13, 139, 142–43 Heidegger, Martin, 19, 32, 80, 150 Herculaneum, 116–17 Heston, Charlton, 7

hildago, 134 Hindu Kush, 24 history, 12, 39, 50, 65–66, 83, 88, 115, 121, 128, 133–35, 138, 142, 147–48; as archive, 5, 9, 10, 23, 27, 39, 43, 56, 59, 70, 90, 91, 104, 133; as language, 27, 79, 104; as narrative, 40, 59–61, 90, 92, 107, 110, 132; problematic nature of, 8–10, 18, 23–28, 32–37, 80–81, 103–9; as ruin, 27, 79; trauma of, 5, 62–66, 133–35, 148–49 Hollywood, 7 Holocaust (Shoah), 63–64, 66, 76 Hong Kong, 87 Horn, Rebecca, 15, 29, 117, 118 Hülegü, 116 humanism, 19, 21, 31–32, 68, 134, 143, 146–47, 150 human rights, 4, 121 al-Idrisi, 82 Iliad, 40 India, 24, 30, 35, 37, 40, 68, 90, 129, 144, 148 Indian Ocean, 36, 69, 70, 109 Internet blogs, 12 Iodice, Mimmo, 117 Iran, 116, 144 Iraq, 15, 65, 116, 144 Islam, 7, 9, 13–14, 24, 37–38, 40, 57, 132–33, 138–40, 146–47; veil and, 52–54 Israel, 6, 15, 52, 62–67, 102, 144, 148 Istanbul, 9, 38, 39, 43, 45, 91, 95, 111, 136, 146–48 Istituto Universitario Orientale (Oriental University), 82, 90 Italy, 15, 75, 145, 151; colonialism and, 29–30, 145; Fascism and,

113–14; literary canon and, 106; migration and, 118–28; postcolonial studies and, 28; postwar settlement and, 99–103, 113–15; Romanticim and, 33; ‘‘southern question’’ and, 110–13 Jabès, Edmond, 18, 28, 133, 141 Jews, 9, 35–36, 63, 64, 130–33, 138 Jordan, 15 Judaism, 57, 139, 146 al-Kabir, Yusuf, 65 Kalthoum, Oum, 42, 45, 49, 140 Kamikaze, 16 Keats, John, 55 Keifer, Anselm, 52, 133 al-Kharrat, Edouard, 149 Khleifi, Michel, 62–63, 66 Kirghisistan, 115 Knights of Malta, 38 Kosuth, Joseph, 117 Kounellis, Jannis, 117–18 Kuhn, Thomas Samuel, 19 Lacan, Jacques, 84 La Capria, Raffaele, 86, 90, 109 Lacis, Asja, 81 Lagos, 88, 137 language, 10–12, 21, 27, 42, 75, 105, 128–29, 133, 135, 140, 145; art and, 27, 55, 58, 75, 85, 96, 104, 107, 117, 118, 147; as history, 27, 79, 104; land and, 30, 59; as ‘‘linguistic emergency,’’ 21; poetics and, 10, 27, 30, 55–56, 58–59, 62–63, 86, 105, 135, 140, 144, 149–50 Lasswell, Bill, 49 Latin America, 13, 51, 109 Lebanon, 15, 144, 148 Le mani sulla città (1963), 101

Index 177

Lepanto, 91, 152 Lewis, Norman, 99, 102 Le Witt, Sol, 117 Libya, 6, 15, 29, 114, 123, 144–45, 148 Lima, 111 limpiezza de sangre, 9 Lion of the Desert (1980), 29 Livorno, 111, 112 Lombard League, 83 London, 6, 14, 33, 43, 47, 49, 86, 88, 111–13, 127, 145 longue durée, 34, 69 Los Angeles, 49, 86, 88, 127 Luciano, Lucky, 99–101 Lucky Luciano (1974), 101 Lyotard, Jean-François, 42 Macedonia, 24 Madrid, 95 mafia, 98–102, 115 Maghreb, 4 Magris, Claudio, 140 Malaparte, Curzio, 72 Mali, 137, 140 Mann, Thomas, 23 Manzo, Umberto, 117 maps, 2–3, 7, 15–18, 24–25, 30, 47, 50, 62–64, 66, 110, 135, 137–38, 142–43; as imaginary geographies, 10: uprooted geographies and, 17–22, 68, 131 maqám, 45, 55, 57 Marconi, Silvio, 69 mare nostrum, 14, 69, 136, 145 Marin, Louis, 96, 97 Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso, 134 Mariniello, Raffaele, 117 Marseilles, 45 Marx, Karl, 6, 19, 88

178 Index

masons, 100 Massive Attack, 49 Matvejevic, Predrag, 76 Mbembe, Achille, 51 Meddeb, Abdelwahab, 131 Medyán, Abu, 57 Mehmed II, 151 memory, 5, 56, 60, 62–63, 74, 84, 91–92, 130–31, 148; ethics of, 139–41; politics of, 23 Merola, Mario, 46 Mesopotamia, 40, 144 métissage, 126, 135 Mezzadra, Sandro, 10 Middle East, 14–15, 53, 63, 65, 69, 116 migration, 3–4, 7–10, 20, 39, 68–69, 87–88, 118–28, 149–50; modern political subject and, 7 Milan, 49, 67, 88, 115, 124, 125 militant archaeology, 65 Mitchell, Timothy, 143 Mongols, 38, 40, 116, 140 monotheism, 28–32, 57, 131 Montalbán, Vazquez, 150 Montesano, Giuseppe, 82 Morocco, 6, 15, 37, 129, 144, 148 Moscow, 38, 86 mozarabico, 135 al-Mukhtar, Omar, 29 multiculturalism, 121 Multiplicity, 67–68 Mumbia, 88 Murolo, Roberto, 46 Musa, Mansa, 137 music, 21, 42–49, 55, 63, 135–36; aesthetics and, 46–47; Arab, 42, 55–58, 135–36; Neapolitan, 43– 49; technology and, 46 Mussolini, Benito, 99

Naghrîla, Samuel, 36 Namibia, 13 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 31 Naples, 38, 45, 71–129, 136, 145, 148, 152 Napoleon Bonaparte, 12, 14, 144 Nappo, Raffaela, 117 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 145 National Archaeological Museum (Naples), 115 nationalism, 13, 15, 25, 30, 32, 37, 41, 64–68, 134, 145, 148, 150 nato, 113 Nazism, 120 ‘ndrangheta, 100 Neapolis, 72, 82 Neapolitan Republic, 108–9, 128 Nelson, Horatio, 108 Nestorian, 36, 116 Newton, Isaac, 105 New York, 47, 49, 88, 99, 100, 114, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 88 99 Posse, 46 nomadic cultures, 115 Normans, 35, 68, 82–83, 119 Notari, Elvira, 74 Native Americans, 13 organized crime, 98, 101, 113 orientalism, 12, 118 Ortese, Anna Maria, 87 Ostend Company, 91 Ottoman Empire, 9, 12–13, 15, 39, 63, 69, 91, 130, 137–38, 140, 146–47, 149, 151 Paestum, 103 Paladino, Mimmo, 117, 118 Palaepolis, 82 Palermo, 36, 83, 100, 132

Palestine, 3, 15, 36, 40, 52, 57, 62– 68, 138, 144, 148 Pamuk, Orhan, 147 Pappe, Ilan, 66 Paris, 14, 73, 88, 95, 127, 129 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 9, 21, 75, 105, 152 Pentagon, 16 Perez, Augusto, 117 Perino e Vele, 117 Persia, 37, 40, 53, 116 Philippines, 87 Phillips, Caryl, 55 Phoenician civilization, 34 Pimentel de Fonseca, 109 Pirenne, Henri, 69, 147, 148 Pisans, 119 Pisciotta, Gaspare, 99, 100 Pistoletto, Michangelo, 117 plagues, 84 Poe, Edgar Allan, 90 Poletti, Charles, 100 Pompei, 116–17 Ponzanesi, Sandra, 29 Portella della Ginestra, 100 Portugal, 137 postcolonial, 10, 29, 58; melancholy, 8 Poussin, Claude, 96 Principi d’una scienza nuova dintorno alla natura delle nazioni (1725), 105 progress, 7–10, 20, 26, 31, 33, 41– 42, 53–54, 56, 59, 64, 80, 87–89, 93, 103, 107–8, 112–15, 123, 127, 128, 136, 142, 145, 147, 150 psychogeography, 79 Puglia, 110, 111, 127 Pulcinella, 75 Punic wars, 69

Index 179

Quattrocento painting, 32 Qubilai Khan, 116 racism, 6–7, 9, 39, 63, 66, 149 raï, 45, 47, 140 Rea, Ermanno, 78 rebétiko, 45 Reconquista, 9, 69, 135 Red Brigades, 99 Renaissance self-representation, 150 representation, 5, 20–21, 25–27, 31–32, 76, 90, 96–97, 143; limits of, 17, 23, 28, 52, 81, 104, 110; subjectivity and, 11; transparency and, 11, 17–18, 89, 96, 140, 143 Republic of Salò, 102 reterritorialization, 11 Rhodes, 82, 123 Rich, Adrienne, 31 Ricouer, Paul, 21, 25 Rio de Janeiro, 78, 123 Ripa, Matteo, 90 Risorgimento, 15 Road Map, The, 67 Robb, Peter, 95 Rocco and His Brothers (1960), 125 Roden, Claudia, 130 Roger II, 83, 132 Rom, 9 Romance poetry, 135 Roman Empire, 36, 90, 123 Romanticism, 33, 41, 54, 72 Rome, 14, 38, 53, 69, 82, 115, 123– 24, 141, 145–47, 151 Rosi, Francesco, 101 Route 181 (2004) 62, 66 rubbish, 73–74, 97–98, 101 Russia, 40, 116, 140, 147 Rwanda, 20

180 Index

Sahara, 6, 69, 137, 140 Sahel, 69, 140 Said, Edward, 3, 10, 23, 42, 53 Salonica, 138 Salvatore Giuliano (1962), 101 Sanfelice, Ferdinando, 106, 108 Sao Paolo, 88 Sauma, Rabban, 116 Sayad, Abdelmalek, 41 Schmitt, Carl, 9, 67 Scholem, Gershom, 64 Scientific Revolution, 105 Scorsese, Martin, 124 Scott, David, 31 Scrovegni Chapel (Padua), 131 Senegal, 69, 129, 136 Serao, Matilde, 74 Serra, Gennaro, 108 Serra, Richard, 118 Sette opere di misericordia (1606), 94 shahdad, 131–32 Shamma, Naseer, 57 Sheik Ahmad Al Tuni, 136 Sherwood, Adrian, 49 Sicily, 24, 35, 37, 40, 45, 68, 82, 99– 100, 110, 132, 136 Simmel, Georg, 42 Sini, Giancarlo, 101 Sivan, Eyal, 62, 66 slavery, 38–40, 95, 122, 127, 137 Sofia, 138 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 72, 78–79 Solid Sea, 67 Somalia, 29, 87, 123 Song of Roland, 38, 138 Spain, 7, 24, 33, 35, 37, 40, 48, 57, 68–69, 91, 132–36, 138, 141 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 143 Srebrenica, 20 Sri Lanka, 68, 87, 120, 127

Steiger, Rod, 101 steppes, 24, 36, 40, 69, 86, 115, 119, 141 Storia della letteratura italiana (1871), 106 Stratos, Demetrio, 49 sublime, the, 33, 54, 58, 72, 90 Suez canal, 144 Syria, 13, 15, 40, 144, 148

Ubn Battutah, 140 ughniyna, 45 Ulysses, 12, 33, 39, 72, 151 Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus— Homer’s Odyssey (1829), 33 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 134 United States, 3, 13, 42, 64, 99, 102, 109, 113, 122, 127 urban life, 43–44, 80, 85, 88

Tagore, Rabindranath, 18 Tangiers, 98 terrorism, 4, 20, 51, 63, 67, 150 Third-Worldism, 17 Thomas Aquinas, 106 Timbuktu, 137 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 45, 85 Tomatito, 136 Totò, 75 tradition, 44–47, 59, 93, 104, 135, 147; modernity and, 8 Tripoli, 38 Trojan, 151 Al-tuni, Sheikh Ahmad, 136 Tunisia, 6, 68, 136, 148 Turin, 125 Turkey, 13 Turks, 9, 13, 38, 90, 134, 136, 146, 151 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 33, 72 Twin Towers, 20

Vatolla, 103, 106 Venice, 35, 91, 111, 148 Vesuvius, 79, 84, 87–88, 119 Vico, Giambattista, 82, 103–10 Vienna, 91, 138 Vikings, 39 Virgil, 82, 151 volcanic eruptions, 84 Walcott, Derek, 7, 21, 55, 152 Weizmann, Chaim, 134 White, Hayden, 25, 106–7 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 54 world system, 24, 35, 69 xenophobia, 7, 122, 126, 139 X Mas squadron, 102 Yahia, Emma Belhaj, 148 Yugoslavia, 123 Zionism, 63–66, 134 Ziryãb (Abû 1-Hasan ‘Ali b. Nãfi’), 57

Index 181

iain chambers is professor of cultural and postcolonial studies at the Università degli Studi di Napoli, ‘‘l’Orientale,’’ Italy. His previous books include Culture after Humanism: History, Culture and Subjectivity (2001); Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994); and Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (1990).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chambers, Iain. Mediterranean crossings : the politics of an interrupted modernity / Iain Chambers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4126-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4150-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mediterranean Region—History. 2. Mediterranean Region—Civilization. I. Title. d973.c51 2008 909%.09822—dc22 2007033495