Afterword: : Sea and City

Afterword: Sea and City 249 Copyright © 2015 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2015 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 24, No. 2: 249–252 AFTERWORD: SEA AND CITY IAIN CHAMBERS University of Naples L’Orientale If, as Pedrag Matvejević rightly claims, the Mediterranean is a ‘vast archive’, then eventual understandings of this historical and cultural space are clearly entwined with the complex claims of the archive itself (Matvejević 1999). Implicit in Matvejević’s assertion is the invitation not to leave this archive prisoner of a static definition, as though it were a crypt or a moribund museum. To follow Freud into the complex meanderings, blocks and repression of memory, to respond to Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the archive as the site of a justice yet to come, while all the time grappling with the disciplinary drive for closure and conclusions, is clearly to propose tangential, even unauthorised, crossings of a contested critical space (Derrida 1997). In particular, if historiography is invariably considered to be the privileged source for understanding the archive then an engagement with its authority is inevitable. In this manner, the Mediterranean also proposes a space that exceeds its immediate geo-political confines as we come to test and tune the claims of a planetary modernity in its Mediterranean singularities. What I wish to suggest here is that any engagement with the complex historical and cultural formation of the Mediterranean involves registering an emergent historiographical and political problematic. Contrary to the sequential and consequential representation of its chronology, we might be better advised to consider the depths and folds of time, the resonance and dissonance of its rhythms, that promote diverse modalities for remembering and assembling its complex inheritance. There are proximities of time and space that negate their seeming separation on a map or in a sequential history. These can exist in a resonance and a recall that does not necessarily obey a unique framing or logic. This is to uncover the critical role of unruly archives interrogating consolidated explanations secured in chronological causality. Insisting on the failure of history to ever fully conclude its analyses and establish its explanation once and for all, it perhaps becomes possible to consider the Mediterranean as the laboratory of another modernity. I feel that this is clearly the spirit in which the essays in this volume have been written. To be provocative, we could borrow a series of lessons from the Caribbean where, through the insistence that the ‘sea is history’ (Derek Walcott), the whole discussion is literally taken off shore (Walcott 1992). Suspended and sustained in a marine environment which, after all, permitted the transport and translation of the world into a European dominion, are altogether more fluid archives in which histories, cultures and lives are suspended. Listening to histories 250 Iain Chambers sustained in maritime waters identities go adrift. If this provides a dramatic analogy for modern day migration, it also draws us into the deeper histories of the political economy of migrations and the marine traffic in goods, war and colonialism that have formed our present. Opposed to the national narration of time, secured in territorial stability and apparently rooted in the soil of an immutable identity, this introduces us to an altogether more extensive and unstable space. No longer a dumb accessory to what is established and pursued on land, the sea acquires an unsuspected critical vitality and centrality. For indicating the maritime world is not merely to add islands, fisheries and sea journeys to the equation, it is also to query the territorial premises of understanding. Since the rise and triumph of European-styled nationalism in the nineteenth century in particular, it has tended to be customary to consider history in terms of national units and hence the modern history of the Mediterranean as an agglomeration of these isolated elements. Of course, there are distinctions marked by geopolitical divisions, linguistic confines, particular historical and cultural formations, and the history we have inherited emphasises and endorses this particular narration of the immediate past and its impact on the present. Still, this manner of representing time and space is also an instance of repression. What exceeds or disturbs the telling tends to be repressed...