The New Mediterranean Studies: An Institutional and Intelluctual Challenge

In our last issue, I discussed the institutional history of the new Mediterranean studies as a mediator between area studies programs dating from the Cold War and the Global studies programs that began to appear in the 1990s (Watkins 2013). While preserving field expertise in a single region, new work on the Mediterranean shares many of the research interests of scholars interested primarily in the political, social, and aesthetic consequences of globalization: empire; migrations into, within, and from the region itself; trade and the movement of capital; piracy, captivity, and slavery; cultural diffusion; religious conflict and assimilation; the environment; scarcity technology; diplomacy; gender; cultural hybridity; and modernization. The new Mediterranean studies differs from earlier investigations of the Mediterranean in its emphasis on the region as a whole rather than on the histories of individual states within the region. This new focus on transmaritime connections has meant that even scholars who work primarily on single countries within the region are more likely to talk about those countries in relationship with other Mediterranean places. This approach has reinvigorated some of our oldest and best established disciplines. Classicists are developing a stronger sense of the complexities of works like the Odyssey by exploring analogues linking Homer to the writers of the Bible and ancient Middle Eastern epics. Hispanists are working more than ever on Spain’s imperial interests in North Africa, and Italianists are thinking a lot more about immigration and trade between Naples and Tunis or between Rome and the Horn of Africa. Some of the most innovative new work explores the diffusion of Mediterranean peoples and cultures far beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. A Venezuelan poet like Andrés Bello (1781–1865), who wrote in Spanish and drew heavily on ancient Greek and Roman models, has as much a place in an expanded history of the Mediterranean as Vergil does.

In this issue, I turn from our intellectual and institutional past to speculations about our future. As in my previous article, I am focusing especially on the North American experience because of the greater institutional volatility of Canadian and especially U.S. institutions, where administrations often place great value on the creation of new interdisciplinary programs.

On an intellectual level, the new Mediterranean studies begins with a critique of the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s thesis that the rise of Islam turned the Mediterranean into a de facto iron curtain separating Christian Europe from the Muslim lands of North Africa and the Middle East.¹ Recent scholars have modified or wholly rejected Pirenne’s claims by describing a web of commercial, demographic, and cultural exchanges that continued to link the three continents framing the sea long after the key seventh century. Cemal Kafadar’s Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State, for example, documents substantial trade and even intermarriage between Muslims and Byzantine Christians from the Ottomans’ first appearance in Anatolia (Kafadar 1995). Molly Greene’s A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean stresses the kind of productive interface between the Christians and Muslims that Pirenne denied (Greene 2000). Focusing on the transition from Venetian to Ottoman rule in Crete, Greene argues that even after the island’s 1669 incorporation into Dar al-Islam (the totality of the world’s territories that had submitted to Islam), “personal ties and conversion . . . blurred the lines among Latin, Orthodox, and Muslim communities” (Greene 2000: 109). Daniel Goffman’s The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe presents cities like Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica as crucial mediators between Christian Europe and the Islamic lands to the south and east (Goffman 2002). These works have helped scholars see the Mediterranean not as an insurmountable wall between Christendom and Islam, but as a medium of dynamic contacts that kept all questions of identity in the region open and unsettled in culturally enriching ways.

Within literary and cultural studies, scholars are looking at texts that have been written about for decades in an entirely new way by placing them along texts from other places in the Mediterranean world that were once cordoned off by Pirenne. A new literary...