Suchergebnisse

Inspired by the Deleuzian imperative to think with, rather than of, cinema, this article considers Mediterranean musics less in terms of historical and cultural testimony and more as an ongoing composition of a mobile critical syntax. The southern and subaltern sounds that are heard and registered permit travel in the musical archive and there configure a critical cartography that continually exceeds and interrogates habitual understandings imposed by national boundaries and limited linguistic communities. Ultimately these sounds come to chart the limits of a modernity, and its framing of the Mediterranean, that turns out not to be merely ours to control and define.

Considerations of the deep interrelationship between race, modernity and democracy that considers the exercise of the latter for the few in the light of those racially excluded from the polity of modernity.

In this article, the author criticizes the consensual cultural configuration of present-day Italy by displacing concerns of historical and intellectual identity onto a wider Mediterranean map. Elaborating an interdisciplinary and intercultural position that looks to languages and histories that Italian academic life and institutional culture tends to ignore, or repress, the disparaged sides of modernity – the South, the Mediterranean, the Muslim world – become the sites of a diverse critical understanding. Drawing upon the metaphorical powers of the sea itself, this "Mediterranean" view of modern Italy, of the formation of its cultural and critical languages, proposes a more unsettled and fluid cartography that renders inherited questions and "solutions" vulnerable to an inquiry that a national culture is unable to authorize. In particular, the desire for cultural and critical continuity, sustained in a diffuse historicist syntax and policed by moribund disciplinary protocols, is challenged via a "postcolonial" elaboration of Italy as both a Mediterranean and modern formation. This leads to a proposed rupture with the mold of a fundamentally patrician and provincial understanding of native culture. In particular, the contemporary figure of the so-called illegal migrant announces the hidden colonial histories that planetary process return to disturb the surfaces of everyday life. It is the unwelcome turbulence of migration, as one of the central chapters of modernity itself, which now cuts into the historical, political, and cultural body of Italy, exposing it in a global frame that can only be registered in "worldly thinking" (Antonio Gramsci). Precisely at this point, it becomes imperative to draw up another map, narrate another history, and seek another modernity.

In this article, the author criticizes the consensual cultural configuration of present-day Italy by displacing concerns of historical and intellectual identity onto a wider Mediterranean map. Elaborating an interdisciplinary and intercultural position that looks to languages and histories that Italian academic life and institutional culture tends to ignore, or repress, the disparaged sides of modernity – the South, the Mediterranean, the Muslim world – become the sites of a diverse critical understanding. Drawing upon the metaphorical powers of the sea itself, this "Mediterranean" view of modern Italy, of the formation of its cultural and critical languages, proposes a more unsettled and fluid cartography that renders inherited questions and "solutions" vulnerable to an inquiry that a national culture is unable to authorize. In particular, the desire for cultural and critical continuity, sustained in a diffuse historicist syntax and policed by moribund disciplinary protocols, is challenged via a "postcolonial" elaboration of Italy as both a Mediterranean and modern formation. This leads to a proposed rupture with the mold of a fundamentally patrician and provincial understanding of native culture. In particular, the contemporary figure of the so-called illegal migrant announces the hidden colonial histories that planetary process return to disturb the surfaces of everyday life. It is the unwelcome turbulence of migration, as one of the central chapters of modernity itself, which now cuts into the historical, political, and cultural body of Italy, exposing it in a global frame that can only be registered in "worldly thinking" (Antonio Gramsci). Precisely at this point, it becomes imperative to draw up another map, narrate another history, and seek another modernity.

The ongoing collective effort to turn historical sociology into a globally oriented research programme implies a profound reconsideration of its conceptual and terminological premises, as well as a constant critical gaze over the colonial geopolitics of knowledge sociological thinking draws legitimation from. Three strategies are here discussed canonization, re-signification and re-conceptualization.

Il Mediterraneo è un'entità spettrale per la "Modernità" europea; è il suo rovescio irrazionale che porta con sé il disordine, la violazione dei confini, i fantasmi del colonialismo e un richiamo perturbante a un'antichità mitica e gloriosa. Questa complessa figurazione culturale, a lungo relegata dalla narrazione della Modernità a fantasie romantiche e orientaliste di opulenza e irrazionalità, oppure a esempi riprovevoli di corruzione e arretratezza, è recentemente divenuta il fulcro molto visibile e inevitabile dell'attenzione e dell'azione politica, con le strategie militari, umanitarie e culturali di securitizzazione messe in atto lungo i confini europei a fronte della crescente pressione delle migrazioni e dei conflitti disseminati nel Medio Oriente.Le tragedie che oggi si consumano nelle acque del Mediterraneo e il concomitante riassestamento delle politiche sociali e culturali in Europa richiedono una discussione urgente sugli usi e sui significati delle "crisi umanitarie", sulle (connesse) politiche identitarie, limitate e restrittive, prodotte dal nazionalismo moderno, e sulla stessa politica identitaria europea. Leggere lo spazio mediterraneo come una molteplicità di "località composite", riconoscendo allo stesso tempo che esso "esemplifica gli schemi globali di incontro condiviso, colonialismo e ambizione imperiale" (Chambers), significa occuparsi dei diversi livelli di riflessione politica e culturale necessari per aprire il campo all'instabilità delle visioni critiche. Arjun Appadurai, di cui parafrasiamo per questo numero della rivista il titolo del saggio Modernità in polvere, parla dell'insostenibilità delle narrazioni nazionali, sostituite da ciò che lo studioso chiama "sfere pubbliche diasporiche". È questo uno dei possibili modi di pensare oggi il Mediterraneo: uno spazio dell'immaginario in cui le diaspore hanno creato e creano narrazioni multiple di appartenenza culturale e di identità politiche, radicate in una mappa di incontri condivisi e violenza coloniale.