The Mediterranean alternative

Abstract

This paper is a critical review of Italian and French Mediterranean studies from a postcolonial and geographical perspective. It claims that the relationship between contemporary Mediterranean geographies and mainstream European modernities has been overlooked by the Mediterraneanist literature, a literature from which geography has been surprisingly absent. We hope to begin addressing this gap, rethinking the Mediterranean as a postcolonial sea. In its real and metaphorical ‘liquidity’, the Mediterranean represents a fertile ground for the exploration of ‘other spaces’, capable of recovering the ambiguities and plurality of voices that make it a source of inspiration for experiencing ‘alternative modernities’.

Towards a Polycentric Region? The Socio‐economic Trajectory of Rome, an ‘Eternally Mediterranean’ City

“…), the analysis presented here emphasises the role of demographic and economic factors affecting urban expansion. However, the picture is complicated by the unpredictability of territorial actors' behaviour which is focused on decision variables in turn influenced by broader forces (Giaccaria & Minca ).…”

“…The mix of socio‐economic forces and weaknesses that sediment in the present and that are projected in the future are part of the genetic heritage of Mediterranean urbanities (Gargiulo Morelli & Salvati ). Although this region is passing through a period of uncertain financial, political, and cultural transition at both national, regional, and even local level, the Mediterranean context is far from being crystallised as some studies were describing up to ten years ago (Giaccaria & Minca ).…”

The Mediterranean Metaphor in Early Geopolitical Writings

“…As Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca remind us, the influence 'of French geography (in particular, the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache and Lucien Febvre) is explicitly laid out by Braudel in the opening pages of his opus magnum on the Mediterranean'. 75 Thomas Schippers has even drawn a link between the German geographers of the early nineteenth century, such as Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt, and later French geographers, such as Elisée Reclus (a student of Ritter's), 'and even later historians like Fernand Braudel, for whom various degrees of cultural "continuity" and similarity existed among peoples living around the interior sea although they refused any form of (over)-simplifying Ratzelian determinism'. 76 If these scholars are right, we may conclude that, despite the undoubted originality of Braudel's corpus of historical investigation, earlier historians as well as geographical and geopolitical writers anticipated important conceptual traits of his Méditerranée.…”

Cosmopolitanism: the Mediterranean Archives†

“…The relationship between colonized and colonizers, between subaltern and hegemonic cultures, is nevertheless much more complex than it might appear from a classic postcolonial standpoint (Giaccaria and Minca 2011). European colonialism in the Mediterranean cannot be imagined without making reference to the search for modern Europe's roots in ancient Greece and to the fact that this quest actually took place as both a cause and a consequence of modernity/colonialism (Saïd 2005;Guthenke 2008).…”

“…Because the Mediterranean can be interpreted as a space where something relevant happened in relation to the making of cosmopolitan ideals and practices, a space where, at different times, differently nuanced cosmopolitanisms confronted, overlapped, and blurred into each other, and where cosmos and polis express an oxymoric tension between universalism and particularism. The Mediterranean itself is trapped into a tension between opposite interpretations (Giaccaria and Minca 2011). On the one hand, it is marginalized as a residual space, isolated from the great processes of modernity and modernization.…”