Mediterranean Encounters In The City

This book documents and analyzes how the contemporary Mediterranean city manages and negotiates its identity as a result of recent reconfigurations in its cultural, religious, and social landscape. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 have recast difference as a central trope of identification in urban borderland settings, unleashing heated debates about cultural convergences and animating anxieties about an arguable clash of civilizations in modern cities. These emerging uncertainties have also grown stronger as the homogenizing forces of globalization unsettle essential principles of the nation-state and nationhood and render fixed perceptions of distinctive and singular people and cultures more tenuous. Recent scholarship and public discourse have accordingly framed discussions of these encounters around concerns of geo-political security and international policy. Unfortunately, framed within these terms, our understanding of how various groups within the Mediterranean metropolis deal with the intensification of difference as a lived experience has remained regrettably thin. This volume transcends this limitation and explores new, interdisciplinary research paradigms that will help us gain a comprehensive perspective on how complex macro and micro tensions, contradictions and similarities are negotiated in building urban identities in the Mediterranean basin. The contributors to this volume explore the multi-faceted nature of Mediterranean cities and engage a critical discussion of identity production and consumption in the Mediterranean basin. By spanning two centuries and examining both the Northern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean, the chapters in this book provide a broad and comprehensive investigation of the ways in which recent cultural productions have framed and re-imagined the Mediterranean city as a locus of departures, arrivals and contested belonging. By focusing on cinema, photography, new media, magazines, music and literature as different stages for the performative representation of Mediterraneity, the authors highlight the vibrancy of the intercultural discourses taking place along the shores of the mare nostrum and provide new perspectives from which to explore the relationship between North and South, East and West.

Traversed by masses of migrants and wracked by environmental and economic change, the Mediterranean has come to connote crisis. In this context, Critically Mediterranean asks how the theories and methodologies of Mediterranean studies may be brought to bear upon the modern and contemporary periods. Contributors explore how the Mediterranean informs philosophy, phenomenology, the poetics of time and space, and literary theory. Ranging from some of the earliest twentieth-century material on the Mediterranean to Edmond Amran El Maleh, Christoforos Savva, Orhan Pamuk, and Etel Adnan, the essays ask how modern and contemporary Mediterraneans may be deployed in political, cultural, artistic, and literary practice. The critical Mediterranean that emerges is plural and performative—a medium through which subjects may negotiate imagined relations with the world around them. Vibrant and deeply interdisciplinary, Critically Mediterranean offers timely interventions for a sea in crisis.

Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads: A Sea of Voices explores the musical practices that circulate the Mediterranean Sea. Collectively, the authors relate this musical flow to broader transnational flows of people and power that generate complex encounters, bringing the diverse cultures of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East into new and challenging forms of contact. Individually, the chapters offer detailed ethnographic and historiographic studies of music’s multifaceted roles in such interactions. From collaborations between Moroccan migrant and Spanish Muslim convert musicians in Granada, to the incorporation of West African sonorities and Hasidic melodies in the musical liturgy of Abu Ghosh Abbey, Jerusalem, these communities sing, play, dance, listen, and record their diverse experiences of encounter at the Mediterranean crossroads.

Mediterranean Encounters traces the layered history of Galata—a Mediterranean and Black Sea port—to the Ottoman conquest, and its transformation into a hub of European trade and diplomacy as well as a pluralist society of the early modern period. Framing the history of Ottoman-European encounters within the institution of ahdnames (commercial and diplomatic treaties), this thoughtful book offers a critical perspective on the existing scholarship. For too long, the Ottoman empire has been defined as an absolutist military power driven by religious conviction, culturally and politically apart from the rest of Europe, and devoid of a commercial policy. By taking a close look at Galata, Fariba Zarinebaf provides a different approach based on a history of commerce, coexistence, competition, and collaboration through the lens of Ottoman legal records, diplomatic correspondence, and petitions. She shows that this port was just as cosmopolitan and pluralist as any large European port and argues that the Ottoman world was not peripheral to European modernity but very much part of it.

The Eastern Mediterranean is one of the world's most vibrant and vital commercial centres and for centuries the region's cities and ports have been at the heart of East-West trade. Taking a full and comprehensive look at the region as a whole rather than isolating individual cities or distinct cultures, Cities of the Mediterranean offers a fresh and original portrait of the entire region, from the 16th century to the present. In this ambitious inter-disciplinary study, the authors examine the relationships between the Eastern Mediterranean port cities and their hinterlands as well as inland and provincial cities from many different perspectives - political, economic, international and ecological - without prioritising either Ottoman Anatolia, or the Ottoman Balkans, or the Arab provinces in order to think of the Eastern Mediterranean world as a coherent whole. Wide-ranging in scope, Cities of the Mediterranean explores diverse topics, weaving together history, sociology, geography, cartography, politics and economics. Early chapters examine the impact of the 'Little Ice Age'; the global economy's shift from the Mediterranean to Antwerp and Amsterdam; early European perceptions of the Eastern Mediterranean; 19th-century harbour building practices and their impact on the cities; and the connections between Alexandria, Izmir and Thessalonica and their vast and diverse hinterlands. The book also explores political radicalism in Turkey and elsewhere as well as the illegal trade networks that linked the Balkans and Adriatic with the Mediterranean and the introduction of new technologies that led to the faster transport of people, goods and information. Through its penetrating analysis of the various networks that connected the ports and towns of the Mediterranean and their inhabitants throughout the Ottoman period, Cities of the Mediterranean presents the region as a unified and dynamic community and paves the way for a new understanding of the subject.

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities’ pasts live on in their presents.

First published in 1988. This is a collection of works where the Mediterranean provides the context for all the cities which appear in this volume: all are (or have been) port cities, and as such their harbours played a significant role in shaping their histories. In essence, the question of ‘interaction between man and sea’ is one of the influence of the maritime position on the human communities constituting the ‘Mediterranean cities’: the connections between them, and the link of each city with its hinterland, as well as the influence of its position on the city’s internal development and character.

From Simon & Schuster, Playing Away is Michael Mewshaw's experience on Roman holidays as well as other Mediterranean encounters. Playing Away includes a wide variety of chapters, including ones on traveling by train, enjoying summertime and alfresco living, the unique aspects of the different Mediterranean cities, and much more about exploring this magic region.