Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of An Interrupted Modernity (review)

In this challenging, informative, and provocative book, Iain Chambers asks: Who gets to call the Mediterranean “home”? Who is entitled to make that claim? As the title suggests, Chambers’ Mediterranean is a space of transitions, movements, migrations and all that ensues: inter-culturalism, multi-confessionalism, complex historical layerings. This is a Mediterranean that enters modernity in the early sixteenth century, and has become today a site of new controls, new nationalisms, and newly lost rights: the dilemmas of the migrant and the unemployed. But the Mediterranean is also a body of water and the spaces those waters separate and join; a space of “liquid materiality” rendered into “porous” borders (5). To Chambers, the Mediterranean enters modernity politically, both a site and a staging of colonialisms past and imperialisms to come. Via Gilles Deleuze, Chambers seeks to unravel the hegemonic languages that have constructed and sedimented into a Mediterranean of folded absences, subaltern silences and aporetic cartographies.

The opening chapter, “Many Voices,” formulates the problem of “worlding” the Mediterranean after Fernand Braudel within colonial and imperial frames. The next chapter, “A Postcolonial Sea,” addresses the watery mass as an “intricate site of encounters and currents,” of “roots and routes” (32, 34), across which claims of home have ever been little more than claims. Yet those claims have generated literary and musical cultures that are shared amidst the great cities that those waters have linked—“Naples, Algiers, Seville, Istanbul, Marseilles, and Cairo” (45). How have democracy and civilization come to mean in these places, these diverse Mediterraneans? Chapter three, “Off the Map,” pursues this question by pondering those who have been displaced, from and within Algeria, or by the so-called “Road Map” plan for the borders of Israel/Palestine, and discovers various ways that displacement re-articulates cultural memory of place. He examines how a language of “belonging” serves in the writings of both Albert Camus and Assia Djebar, and is left asking if language, any language or writing, can serve to re-present or to unravel the “democracy” being acted out in Israel/Palestine.

In the fourth and longest chapter, “Naples, A Porous Modernity,” Chambers intellectually wanders his adopted city and considers those with whom he has shared the experience of living “under the volcano” by reflecting on the built structures of the city. An outsider himself, he unsurprisingly finds everywhere the traces of migrancies ancient and modern: in the stonework and architectural varieties, in the songs and folkways redolent of many lands and many times. Homi Bhabha doubtless had this chapter in mind when he called Chambers “a gifted and spirited cultural flaneur” (backcover blurb). But Chambers writes without the performative self-absorption associated with the flaneur. Apart from an occasional stroll along the alleys of his adopted Naples, he seldom brings himself into the picture. Rather he offers something else: an exuberant and, at times, intense meditation based on extensive knowledge, and careful thinking about what he knows about how life has been lived in this city and the ways it serves as a Mediterranean type. We learn that Chinese students in early eighteenth-century Naples were known as “Turks,” and that contemporary Neapolitans speak of being “taken by the Turks” when they speak of suffering from panic (90–1). A gripping section describes how US post-war policy set in place the conditions for organised crime to flourish throughout, and eventually control most of, metropolitan Naples. Chambers will doubtlessy have fascinating things to say about Matteo Garonne’s film, Gomorrah (2008), which so vividly portrays Comorrah violence filmed amidst the squalor of the urban architecture and waste spaces of the Neapolitan suburb of Scampia.

Chambers’ short final chapter, “Between Shores,” meditates tendentiously on the ways that Christians, Jews and Muslims have variously rubbed shoulders and come to blows in the Mediterranean. Yet, he writes: “The stereotypical vision of religious difference and ethnic hostility seems to dissipate in the face of interactive interests and the inevitable overlapping of styles and tastes in which the Muslim world was frequently...