Migrations Arts And Postcoloniality In The Mediterranean

This book is focused on the transcultural memory of the Mediterranean region and the different ways it is articulated by contemporary art practices and museum projects linked to migrations, exile, diaspora and transnationality. The artistic and curatorial examples analysed in this study articulate a critical relationship between the cultural representations and the sense of heritage, property and belonging, offering the opportunity of a more problematic and stimulating vision of the preservation of the European arts, traditions and histories. Artists and projects examined include the project Porto M in Lampedusa, Zineb Sedira, Ursula Biemann, Lara Baladi, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Kader Attia and Walid Raad.

This book is an interdisciplinary study aimed at re-imagining and re-routing contemporary migrations in the Mediterranean. Drawing from visual arts, citizenship studies, film, media and cultural studies, along with postcolonial, border, and decolonial discourses, and examining the issues from within a human rights framework, the book investigates how works of cultural production can offer a more complex and humane understanding of mobility in the Mediterranean beyond representations of illegality and/or crisis. Elvira Pulitano centers the discourse of cultural production around the island of Lampedusa but expands the island geography to include a digital multi-media project, a social enterprise in Palermo, Sicily, and overall reflections on race, identity, and belonging inspired by Toni Morrison’s guest-curated Louvre exhibit The Foreigner’s Home. Responding to recent calls for alternative methodologies in thinking the modern Mediterranean, Pulitano disseminates a fluid archive of contemporary migrations reverberating with ancestral sounds and voices from the African diaspora along a Mediterranean-TransAtlantic map. Adding to the recent proliferation of social science scholarship that has drawn attention to the role of artistic practice in migration studies, the book features human stories of endurance and survival aimed at enhancing knowledge and social justice beyond (and notwithstanding) militarized borders and failed EU policies.

This book investigates Jimmie Durham’s community-building process of making and display in four of his projects in Europe: Something ... Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy (2005); two Neapolitan nativities (2016 and ongoing); The Middle Earth (with Maria Thereza Alves, 2018); and God’s Poems, God’s Children (2017). Andrea Feeser explores these artworks in the context of ideas about connection set forth by writers Ann Lauterbach, Franz Rosenzweig, Pamela Sue Anderson, Vinciane Despret, and Hirokazu Miyazaki, among others. Feeser argues that the materials in Durham’s artworks; the method of their construction; how Durham writes about his pieces; how they exist with respect to one another; and how they address viewers, demonstrate that we can create alongside others a world that embraces and sustains what has been diminished. The book will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, animal studies, new materialism research, and eco-criticism.

This is a compilation of the abstracts of papers presented at the Migration Conference 2021. Please visit migrationconference.net for more details.

Translation and Objects offers a new and original perspective in Translation Studies, originating from the conviction that in today’s world translation is pervasive. Building on the ideas of scholars who have expanded the boundaries of the discipline, this book focuses on the analysis of objects that migrants carry with them on their journey of migration. The ideas of displacement and constant movement are key throughout these pages. Migrants live translation literally, because displacement is a leitmotif for them. Translation and Objects analyzes migrant objects—such as shoes, stones, or photographs—as translation sites that function as expressions as well as sources of emotions. These displaced emotional objects, laden with meanings and sentiments, tell many stories, saying a great deal about their owners, who almost never have a voice. This book shows how meaning is displaced through the materiality, texture, smells, sensations, and forms of moving objects. Including examples of translations that have been created from a no-nlinguistic perspective and exploring linguistic issues whilst connecting them to other fields such as anthropology and sociology, Vidal sets out a broad vision of translation. This is critical reading for translation theory courses within Translation Studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared ‘crises’ in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of futurity, and radical imaginaries shaped through or against frameworks of crisis. If crisis rhetoric today serves populist, xenophobic or anti-democratic agendas, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or partake in transformative languages by scholars, artists, and activists? Or should we forge different vocabularies to understand present realities? This collection explores alternative mobilizations of crisis and forms of art, cinema, literature, and cultural practices across the Mediterranean that disengage from dominant crisis narratives. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

“Plunges the reader into a tour de force across radically divergent artistic responses to Mediterranean migration.” —Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies Ex-Centric Migrations examines cinematic, literary, and musical representations of migrants and migratory trends in the western Mediterranean. Focusing primarily on clandestine sea-crossings, Hakim Abderrezak shows that despite labor and linguistic ties with the colonizer, migrants from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) no longer systematically target France as a destination, but instead aspire toward other European countries, notably Spain and Italy. In addition, the author investigates other migratory patterns that entail the repatriation of émigrés. His analysis reveals that the films, novels, and songs of Mediterranean artists run contrary to mass media coverage and conservative political discourse, bringing a nuanced vision and expert analysis to the sensationalism and biased reportage of such events as the Mediterranean maritime tragedies. “Ex-Centric Migrations is crucial reading for scholars and students of contemporary Maghrebi, French, and Spanish literatures and cultures. It breaks new ground by encompassing the literature, film, and music of ‘return migration’ and examining the trajectories of Maghrebi migration outside France.” —H-France “Hakim Abderrezak convincingly illustrates how politically committed artistic practices serve to humanize the challenges of human migration, and in the process dramatically improves our understanding of the complex cultural, economic, political, and social realities that shape 21st-century existence.” —Dominic Thomas, author of Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism

Insightful and interdisciplinary, this book considers the movement of people around the world and how contemporary artists contribute to our understanding of it In this timely volume, artists and thinkers join in conversation around the topic of global migration, examining both its cultural impact and the culture of migration itself. Individual voices shed light on the societal transformations related to migration and its representation in 21st-century art, offering diverse points of entry into this massive phenomenon and its many manifestations. The featured artworks range from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, and sound art, and their makers--including Isaac Julien, Richard Mosse, Reena Saini Kallat, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Do Ho Suh, among many others--hail from around the world. Texts by experts in political science, Latin American studies, and human rights, as well as contemporary art, expand upon the political, economic, and social contexts of migration and its representation. The book also includes three conversations in which artists discuss the complexity of making work about migration. Amid worldwide tensions surrounding refugee crises and border security, this publication provides a nuanced interpretation of the current cultural moment. Intertwining themes of memory, home, activism, and more, When Home Won't Let You Stay meditates on how art both shapes and is shaped by the public discourse on migration.