Mediterranean Manifesto: : From Mashrabiya and the Doha Tower to Fortress Europe

This introduction frames and contextualizes six essays mapping the Mediterranean experience in late modernity—from the early 18th century until the present—within the notion of ‘Matrix’. We understand the Mediterranean Basin as a shared but contested space where notions of frontier, (in)security, policing, and identity are pitted against the desire to move to find work, safer political grounds, better opportunities across borders. We envision the Mediterranean Matrix as a hermeneutic tool that simultaneously refers to the migration dynamics and narratives traversing the Mediterranean in late modernity; the securitization and militarization of such dynamics through ever changing European Union migratory policies; the re-articulation ‘Fortress Europe’; the cultural products that attest to the ebbs and flows of populations across the Mediterranean Basin; and how these products reflect on patterns of exclusion, inequality, and domination. While there are innumerable ways in which one might visualize the Matrix, in this volume we propose three mapping strategies to concretize its image: memory, movement, and migration.