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This article examines the interplay between distance and proximity through the maritime medium of the Mediterranean, today rendered immediate by the 'foreign' body of the migrant. What until recently was maintained at a physical and metaphysical distance: colonialism, racial hierarchies and historical amnesia, has suddenly acquired a dramatic presence with an alarming proximity. This postcolonial return operates a cut in the existing epistemological fabric. Understandings of space and time are radically reconfigured. Refused archives emerge. Other genealogies of the present enter the frame. The legal and political premises of Occidental modernity, together with the very idea of liberal democracy and rights, are violently exposed in their brutal limits. In this scenario distance and proximities are measured through mediations drawn from the area of contemporary art and visual culture; these evoke critical considerations on the limits of representation and the politics of registration.

Artists are mapping new itineraries of the Mediterranean, throwing into relief an incurable colonial wound that continues to bleed into the present. The so­ called contemporary migrant 'emergency' in the Mediterranean is the deliberate political and juridical construction of Europe. Refusing Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), all European states have decided that not everyone has the right to move and migrate. This violent exercise of European and First World power reopens a profound colonial wound. Migrants rendered objects of our legislation and laws signal once again the asymmetrical relations of power that produced the colonial world and its ongoing fashioning of the present.

In the light of events of 2011 in the Arab world – the so-called 'Arab spring – some critical considerations on the Occidental lexicon for explaining the processes that propose their conceptual limits and political agendas.

Considerations of the the accelerated hybridisation of Western society since the mid-twentieth century that has accentuated the continuing reformulation of such key concepts as identity, nation, citizenship, society, democracy and belonging in a review essay of Ash Amin's Land of Strangers (2012).

Introduction to the arts, culture, politics, and economics of contemporary Tijuana, Mexico. With many pieces translated from Spanish for the first time, the anthology features contributions by prominent scholars, journalists, bloggers, novelists, poets, curators, and photographers from Tijuana and greater Mexico. They explore urban planning in light of Tijuana's unique infrastructural, demographic, and environmental challenges. They delve into its musical countercultures, architectural ruins, cinema, and emergence as a hot spot on the international art scene. One contributor examines fictional representations of Tijuana's past as a Prohibition-era "city of sin" for U.S. pleasure seekers. Another reflects on the city's recent struggles with kidnappings and drug violence. In an interview, Néstor García Canclini revisits ideas that he advanced in Culturas híbridas (1990), his watershed book about Latin America and cultural hybridity. Taken together, the selections present a kaleidoscopic portrait of a major border city in the age of globalization.