Third Text

ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

The Mediterranean

Iain Chambers

To cite this article: Iain Chambers (2004) The Mediterranean, Third Text, 18:5, 423-433, DOI:
10.1080/0952882042000251769

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0952882042000251769

Published online: 05 Aug 2006.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 193

View related articles

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ctte20

Download by: [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] Date: 19 August 2017, At: 01:42
 CTTE100154.fm Page 423 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 5, 2004, 423433

The Mediterranean
A Postcolonial Sea
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

Iain Chambers

Let me commence from the landscape of writing that mirrors and echoes
Third
10.1080/0952882042000251769
CTTE100154.sgm
0000-0000
Original
Taylor
502004
18
00000September
Text
and
&Article
Francis
(print)/0000-0000
FrancisLtd
2004
Ltd (online)

occidental design and desire and yet refuses to deliver up its secrets:
Joseph Conrads undecipherable jungle, the unfathomable echo in E M
Forsters caves, the reticent mountains of Assia Djebars Algeria. These
all reside in the postcolonial archive, in the stunted translations of alter-
ity, and the uneven politics of memory. The persistent testimony of such
intractable traces comes to mind in considering the shifting currents and
cultures of the Mediterranean. There is here, too, an excess that remains
as such, present but unrepresentable, that bleeds into the account, that
occupies the gaps between words, the space between lines, as the invisi-
ble support of the page. Here, too, there is the registration of the silence
that represents the end of the humanistic trajectory.1 This is not merely
the silence of the void but rather an interrogative silence that draws me
beyond the conclusion of my words. The insistent supplement of silence
challenges the fixity of the past and the reification of its authority in a
unilateral remembering and representation. I am invited to consider the
limits of historiography not so much in temporal terms what is seem-
ingly cut off from the present and irremediably lost but in the ontolog-
ical instance of an institutional refusal to consider other ways of being in
time. This is to unhook a particular language and its explanations from
the chains of authority, allowing it to drift, navigating in the dark
towards another shore from where the locality and provincialism of its
previous home can be registered if never completely abandoned.

THE HOUSE OF HISTORY

The realism of historical narration, the evidence of documents, and the

1. Edward Said, From Silence
verification of sources are tropes (Hayden White) that, once recognised
to Sound and Back Again, as such, invite us to breach the boundaries of the self-assured confirma-
in E Said, Reflections on tion of the self as the privileged subject of the historical tale. History
Exile and Other Essays,
Harvard University Press, continues to carry and propagate subjectivity in the name of a nation, a
Cambridge, MA, 2001. people, or an individual, even in its most radical and oppositional forms.

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online 2004 Kala Press/Black Umbrella
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000251769
 CTTE100154.fm Page 424 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

424

But that, as Walter Benjamin reminds us in his famous theses on the ques-
tion, is not history. It is merely the teleological triumph of historicism.
The fragments that flare up in a moment of danger to disturb this
account are far more than the afterglow of forgotten events those asso-
ciated with women, ethnic exclusion, and subaltern marginality to be
added to the institutional accounts of time and the subsequent securing
of the past to an invariably national and nationalist framing: the English
working class, Italian migration, the Algerian revolution. Faced with an
uncontrollable excess and the insistent silence of the unrepresented,
historiography is inducted into the conditional writing of the unresolved,
registering the persistent account of lives that refuse to conclude; lives
that continue to haunt the present, ghosting its verdicts on the past. Such
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

fragments transport us beyond the single passage of a monochromatic

History into the multiplicity of histories where they invite us to consider
the question of narrative, representation, and language itself as it criti-
cally folds back upon our understandings of the past and the present.
History does not arrive bleeding facts, dripping truths, flooding out of
the past; it is constructed, articulated, represented in language, organised
in discourse, disciplined in institutions, relayed in authorities.
The fragments of the past that erupt in the present direct us neither to
the conclusive verdicts of official accounts nor simply to the ineffectual
carnival of the unresolved and the inconclusive meanderings of the
multiple, but rather to a dense constellation of past lives that shadow
and query each and every attempt at telling. The fragment, the forgotten
voice, the ignored body, points to, even if it cannot represent, the distur-
bance and interrogation sedimented in the history that has consigned us
to our time and place.
For another way of telling to emerge, the very premises of the history
we have been told and inherited need radically to be re-evaluated;
perhaps it is less a question of correcting the record and rather of chang-
ing the music, that is of lending our ears to a very different manner of
scoring the past and orchestrating the present. The question now
becomes how to articulate a sense of the past that explodes the empty,
homogeneous continuum of historical time waiting to be filled by
progress, and to produce a different, more open, altogether less reas-
suring, historiography. Of course, a transverse cut or interruption of this
form of historical knowledge has already emerged with the challenge of
postcolonial studies and its proposed remapping of the past in the light
of what the history of the West has occluded, marginalised, culturally
repressed, and physically eradicated. Such studies have accustomed us to
the strategic sense of how the past is narrated via the simultaneous oper-
ation of representation and repression. Such studies, in contesting the
very premises of re-presenting the past, and with it the present, have also
alerted us to the workings of a nomad memory and intermittent voice
(Assia Djebar), and hence of the impossibility of a conclusive or defini-
tive account.
In this perspective the house of history where the West has tradi-
tionally secured its sense of mission on the world is no longer
conceived of as a finished edifice but rather as a ruin. We do not simply
open the door and walk into a well-lit archive, examining documents
and comparing evidence. As a ruin, exposed to the winds of the world,
history emerges from an untidy heap of rumble; beneath the official
 CTTE100154.fm Page 425 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

425

harmony of the past lie the vaster regions of sedimented traces and a
fluid topography of discarded memories and forgotten lives that reside
in time; a time that is always now.
This is why the metaphor of the sea with its waves, winds, currents,
tides, and storms, where the earth touches the sky in the infinity of a
horizon that promotes a journey, navigation, dispersal, provides an alto-
gether more suitable frame for recognising the unstable location of
historical knowledge than the restricted location of a landlocked world
and its dubious dependence on the fixity of immediate kinship, blood,
and soil. So, and turning to my immediate location, the Mediterranean
becomes the site for an experiment in a different form of history writing,
and, as such, an experiment in language and representation. The lands,
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

languages, and lineages that border and extend outwards from its shores
become accessory to its fluid centrality.
To be at sea is to be lost, and to be in such a state is to be vulnerable
to encounters that we do not necessarily control. History-writing
conceived in this manner is not the linguistic mirror of empirical facts or
an idealist teleology but rather an unfolding and incomplete composition
where the fragment, the trace, are notes that register the interval
between sound and silence, and where the pulsation of writing and the
restrictive politics of interpretation slide into the unexpected opening of
a poetics. It is here that the nature of art insists, unexpectedly yawning
open to revisit and rework the languages that contain us. The narrative
is a passage the passagenwerk for Benjamin, the working through of
an analytical journey for Freud a passage that commences without the
promise of a conclusion. History is not the site of a science or universal
truth, and its accompanying neutrality, but is rather the place of
re-membering and the fitting together of fragments that reside in an
interpretation that registers the limits of representation and the thresh-
old of silence. Incompleteness and dissonance hint at what is, but is
neither seen nor heard: like a blue note on the guitar or saxophone that
sends us elsewhere, beyond the limits of the narrative and the narrator.

MONOTHEISM

I have chosen the geopolitical, cultural, and historical space of the

Mediterranean precisely in order to concentrate on the question of
cultural crossovers, contaminations, creolisations, and historical memo-
ries that reveals a stark absence, even structural failure, in a local critical
vocabulary. From where I am presently writing, this is a local, Italian,
problem, but I believe that it has far wider implications about how we
are to talk about, reflect on, and live the contemporary world.
To put it simply, here in Italy cultural and postcolonial studies
overwhelmingly exist within the academic framework of an elsewhere
and an other; for example, in the literatures, cultures, and histories of
the ex-colonial world that come to us in English, French, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Dutch. The postcolonial, as both site of analysis and
critical interrogation, is always located elsewhere, in another place and
in another language. This, I would suggest, is to operate with an
extremely truncated and muted understanding of postcolonial criti-
cism. It is, ultimately, to evade the insistent interrogations that are
 CTTE100154.fm Page 426 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM
426
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017
2. David Scott, Refashioning
Modernities: Criticism
after Postcoloniality,
Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1999, p 12.
3. Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of
the Difficult World, W W
Norton, New York, 1991.
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The
confronted community,
Postcolonial Studies, vol 6,
no1, p 23.
seeded in ones own national past, in its historical and cultural articu-
lation of occidental modernity, in the centrality of colonialism and
imperialism to that modernity. Above all, it is to avoid the postcolo-
nial insistence on a radical revaluation of that narrative and the
manner with which we have been taught to identify with it. The post-
colonial, in other words, is not out there, it is in here, and is central to
who I, you, we are.
This is not a criticism of those who in Italy study literatures in
English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch from a postcolonial
perspective. It is rather to register the institutional and cultural void
around which their work often orbits; a void in the academic and intel-
lectual heart of a culture and national formation that studiously avoids
an encounter with its own colonial past and its complex involvement in
the imperial realisation of modernity. As such, the other remains the
object of the academic gaze, an inert item seemingly incapable of
disturbing the unilateral mechanisms of cultural incorporation and the
silent hegemony of an apparently neutral knowledge.
Let me now briefly step back in time. Cultural studies, which for me
is certainly neither a fixed discipline nor a rigid methodology, was
historically born in a quarrel with the provincial prison house of a
particular national culture and its formation that of Britain. Not by
chance, it initially developed as a secession from English literature. This
is a literature that over the last 100 years increasingly speaks of other
places, and increasingly from the place of others in India, in the
Caribbean, in Africa. This has led to the negation that Britain is the
unique measure of the world, both politically and poetically. The very
sense of English literature, and the identifications it proposes, radically
changes connotation; aesthetics and ethics or, in another register, poetics
and politics, become one. The object reveals itself as a historical subject,
in the very languages that once reduced her or him to object-hood.
This is to evoke a critical work that goes well beyond the sociology of
literature or a multi-cultured literary history, for it is to reveal a radical
interrogation of ones own cultural formation. There is not merely the
addition of a context to the text, but rather the insistence on a historical
problematic and cultural constellation that seeks to register both the reso-
nance and the dissonance between language and land, between narration
and nation, both today and yesterday, all suspended in the ambiguous
density of the adjective English that precedes and defines this literature.
As a political-theoretical project, then, postcoloniality has been
concerned principally with the decolonization of representation; the
decolonization of the Wests theory of the non-West.2 To these words
by David Scott I think we need to add the supplement that we are clearly
also dealing with the revaluation of the West itself in the outraged light
of the history of such representations.3 Another quote, this time from
Jean-Luc Nancy:
What is coming upon us is an exhaustion of the thought defined by the
One and by a unique destination for the world: this thought is exhausting
itself through a unique absence of destination, through an infinite expan-
sion of general equivalence or, then again, and as a repercussion of this,
in the violent convulsions that reaffirm the all-powerfulness and the all-
presence of a One become or re-become its own monstrousness.4
 CTTE100154.fm Page 427 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017
5. Jean-Luc Nancy,
Deconstruction of the reactions it subsequently unleashed across the globe, has much to do
monotheism, Postcolonial with such a manner of perceiving and appropriating the world.
Studies, 6:1, p 37.
6. Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe,
Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 2000, p 255.
427
Against such monotheism, we might like to conceive of a complex and
multiple world in which the West can no longer call itself the West from
the moment it witnesses the spread, across the entire world, of the form
that could once have seemed to constitute its distinguishing features.5
The languages of technology, of economic exchange, of modernity, of
justice, of truth, are no longer simply the Wests to define and impose.
Strange as it may seem, we are deep within a religious discourse whose
inflexible credo is sharply mirrored in the moral righteousness of Blair
and Bush. For there emerges a direct challenge to faith in the unitary and
unilateral revelation of the occidental universal that ruthlessly represses
its own particular history in the ferocious pursuit of that faith. It is at
this point that the fundamentalism of occidental humanism is exposed to
reasons it cannot accommodate, reasons that simultaneously confront
and expose the violence seeded in its ambiguous clarity.
AT SEA
There is the Mediterranean, the sea itself, not so much as a frontier or
barrier between the north and the south, or the east and the west, but
rather as an intricate site of encounters and currents, involving the
movement of peoples, histories, and cultures, that underlines the contin-
ual sense of historical transformation and cultural translation that
makes it a site of continual transit. We can return to that history, not so
much with the idea of getting the historical record straight, as playing it
again in order to listen to its other, repressed, side.
The poly-linguistic and poly-cultural composition of the Mediterra-
nean, its poly-phemos formation, encourages a reshuffling of the usual
cards of national belonging and unilateral framing. Without the immedi-
ate explanations of nation and nationalism, there emerges a very differ-
ent configuration that proposes not so much the solace of cultural
relativism but a complex and unfolding historical complexity. This
encourages what Dipesh Chakrabary calls the creation of conjoined and
disjunctive genealogies for European categories of political modernity as
we contemplate the necessarily fragmentary histories of human belong-
ing that never constitute a one or a whole.6 This most obviously runs
counter to the temper of thought proposed by occidental humanism: the
monothetic perspective that enframes the world in a subject-centred
objectivity or world picture (Heidegger) which, in turn, reveals the
unsuspected relationship between the perspective of Quattrocento paint-
ing and later imperial design. From this we have inherited the centrality
of visuality as the hegemonic modality of humanist knowledge, leading
via cartography, writing, and visual representation to the continual
reconfirmation of the I/eye in every corner of the globe. The gaze is
rarely able to attend to listening; its unilateralism cannot accommodate
a reply. What occurred in downtown Manhattan three years ago, and
This is not necessarily to abandon the plane of the visual, but is
rather to insist on locating it on altogether rougher ground where no
single perspective is ever able to fully impose its vision. To insist on a
shadow in the retina that disturbs the smooth surface desiring to render
 CTTE100154.fm Page 428 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

428
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

J M W Turner, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homers Odyssey, 1829, oil on canvas, 132.5 203 cm, National Gallery,
London

the world transparent to its gaze, is also to supplement the limited poli-
tics of the eye/I with one of the ear, with a politics of reception and
listening.
The Mediterranean is set adrift to float towards a vulnerability atten-
dant on encounters with other voices, bodies, histories. This is to slow
down and deviate the tempo of modernity, its neurotic anxiety for
linearity, causality, and progress, by folding it into other times, other
textures, other ways of being in a multiple modernity.
We are accustomed to think of the Mediterranean, at least since
J M W Turner, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homers Odyssey, 1829, oil on canvas, 132.5 203 cm, National Gallery, London

1800, within terms overwhelmingly established by the cultural gaze that

arrives from northern Europe; that is, from the modern, industrialised
world with its progress and nation-states, for whom the northern coast
of the Mediterranean Sea (from Spain to Greece, but concentrated above
all on Italy) represented its now superseded historical origins and pre-
industrial past. Potently evoked in Turners canvas, the Mediterranean is
simultaneously the site of antique civilisations and the sublime excesses
of an untamed nature; all of which, of course, remains vibrant and
highly central to contemporary tourist appropriations of the region. This
is the privileged site of the Grand Tour and subsequently Romanticism.
Here the Mediterranean is largely represented only by its northern shore
largely as the cultural extension and historical periphery of modern
Europe north of the Alps. There is also the later extension to North
Africa I am thinking here of the paintings of Delacroix but that is
invariably exoticised and orientalised to such a degree as to almost
completely sever any sense of connection to a shared past and present.
 CTTE100154.fm Page 429 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

429
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

Eugene Delacroix, Femmes dAlger dans leur appartement, 1834, oil on canvas, 180
229 cm, Muse du Louvre, Paris

Of course Turners painting, and its evocation of a particular framing

Eugene Delacroix, Femmes dAlger dans leur appartement, 1834, oil on canvas, 180 229 cm, Muse du Louvre, Paris

of time and place, remind us that it is Ulysses, and the abstract singular-
ity of No Body, who realises the unilateral intent of returning home,
thereby overcoming the challenge of heterogeneity announced in the
multiple language of poly-phemos. Yet, historically, the Mediterra-
nean, and Europe itself, has been dominated until quite recently by a
series of gazes and perspectives that have arrived from elsewhere, largely
from its southern and eastern shores. Simply to lend attention to these
permits us to reconfigure, in order to receive a more complex, and hence
more open, less domestic and habitual, understanding of both its past
and present.
A geopolitical area is transformed into a critical space, a site of inter-
rogations and unsuspected maps of meaning. A north viewed from the
south of the world does not represent a simple overturning, but rather a
revaluation of the terms employed and the distinctions that have histori-
cally constructed the contrasts and the complexities of this space. The
Mediterranean offers a composite historical space that interpellates,
interrogates, and interprets the potential sense of Euro-America, and the
modernity and progress it presumes to represent.
So, I am not speaking of a simple addition of the negated sides of the
picture the North African and Middle eastern shores of the sea that
constitute more than two-thirds of the Mediterranean seaboard; nor of
the addition of one national state unit to another; nor of a simple teleol-
ogy that commences with Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek civilisations
and develops over three thousand years to be deposited in our moder-
nity, unified by a common sea. I am proposing to think, rather, of the
 CTTE100154.fm Page 430 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

430

Mediterranean in an altogether more fluid and unsettled manner, as a

continual interweaving of cultural roots and historical routes.

THE ILLUSIONS OF HOME

This would be to consider the Mediterranean, for example, in the light

of Janet L Abu-Lughods book, Before European Hegemony. The World
System, AD 12501350, and in the light of the Jewish mercantile world
of the thirteenth century described by Amitav Ghosh: In An Antique
Land.10 Both texts evoke a world that stretched from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, from Arab Spain to southern India, a world system an econom-
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

ical, political, and cultural organisation that was centred on Baghdad

and Cairo, serviced by financial and mercantile systems established in
the Arab world from the eighth century onwards (later to be copied by
the Italian merchants of Venice and Genoa). Europe here was certainly
underdeveloped and in the periphery of a world system, a system, and
this should be noted, that was not dominated by any single power.
Alongside the reintroduction of its southern and eastern shores, there
also exists the continuing interrogation that arrives from the confines of
the fluctuating and floating state of the Mediterranean. As Ferdinand
Braudel famously reminds us, even the most generic of geopolitical defi-
nitions that seeks to register the limits of the Mediterranean (the famous
southern palm line and northern olive growth) finds its criteria super-
seded by the historical waves and cultural fluxes that roll outwards
towards the Baltic (registered in the presence of imperial Viking guards
in eleventh-century Constantinople), eastwards into the Levant and
beyond, west out into the Atlantic, and south, over North Africa into the
sub-Saharan part of the continent. This is to register Slav, German,
Arabic, and African histories as an integral part of the Mediterraneans
liquid state, its peoples, histories, and cultures. It is easy to forget that
the Nile is also a Mediterranean river.
There exists a scholastic image of the Mediterranean as the source of
European culture: a Greek poet plucks the strings of his lyre on the
shores of the Aegean Sea and chants the first lines of The Iliad. Behind
this image lies a constellation of histories that are certainly altogether
more confused, but also far richer, in which ethnically ambiguous
elements and cultural complexities pulsated without concern for the
later ideological cleansing exercised by modern European historiogra-
phy, classical aesthetics, and Hellenic scholarship, all jointly pursuing
their shared faith in the unique destiny of an apparently homogeneous
Europe.
In the Athenian agora, wheat and slaves from the colonies on the
edge of the nomadic world of the steppes bordering the Black Sea mixed
with urbane Egypt and cosmopolitan Persia. Fifteen centuries later this is
7. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, also the mobile world of the Jewish communities in the Arab universe
Before European described by Ghosh that stretches outwards from Cairo, westwards
Hegemony. The World
System, AD 12501350
towards Arab Sicily, and eastwards down the Red Sea and the port of
Oxford University Press, Aden to southern India.
Oxford 1989; Amitav The invasion of dar al-islam, the house of Islam, by the Crusades
Ghosh, In an Antique
Land, Granta Books, (10961250), and the subsequent colonisation of the Holy Land and
London, 1998. Syria, represented an attempt by the underdeveloped periphery to
 CTTE100154.fm Page 431 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

431

appropriate the riches of the centre. This was most brutally exposed in
the Fourth Crusade of 1204, when the Franks, transported by the
Venetian fleet, sacked the Christian city of Constantinople and then
simply returned home with their booty leaving the Venetians to admin-
ister the city. In the same vein, after the fall of the Venetian state of
Constantinople in 1261, it would be the Genovese who sold slaves,
transported from the Black Sea and southern Russia, to the Mameluk
authorities in Cairo (the land route being blocked at the time by the
antagonist Mongol power ruling Persia and Mesopotamia). For the
Arab commentators of the time, the Franks were the barbarians who
destroyed the cities of Palestine in a series of massacres, acts of enslave-
ment, and cannibalism all in the name of their God.8 The symptoms
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

of another history, veiled behind the uniformity of classicism and

European nationalism, continue to emerge, however, in the strikingly
composite reality of the Mediterranean diet: the oranges and lemons
introduced by the Arabs from the Far East, as was rice, along with
aubergines from India, beans and potatoes and peaches from China via
Persia (Lucien Febvre). Such signs and flavours invite us to reconsider
the Mediterranean. A closed image, disciplined by the northern gaze
its Romanticism, classicism, nationalism, and progress can unex-
pectedly open up to exposure a series of interrogations that refuse to
disappear.
Much of this is obscured in the epistemological violence of liberal
thought, deposited in the implicit knot of race and civilisation, where it
is always the former that ultimately disciplines and defines the latter.
Whose civilisation becomes the measure of the world requires a compar-
ative measure in which the Darwinian progress of the race is always
lurking in the wings to provide the justification of an unjust power. It
bestows an inheritance of racialised recognitions that continue to oper-
ate even after the seeming conclusion of the colonial moment, even
within the new, postcolonial state and its own hierarchies of local
power.
Reading the great Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, I am always struck
by the historical slide her language traces from the tortured body of the
colonised to the body of the present-day torturer. Both reside in the
name Algeria: the ex-colonial state that becomes a state of emergency, a
regime whose acts are sanctified in the name of the nation that space
of identity that continues to be disciplined by a European inheritance.
Here the pedagogic and punishing logic of the nation returns to haunt
dreams of cultural and political freedoms in the manner of a nightmare,
where the long night of colonialism (Djebar) seems destined to last
forever.
To elaborate a sense of place, of belonging that of the Mediterra-
nean seemingly implies the registration of borders and limits; as a
minimum between an inside and an outside, between the cultivated place
of the domesticated scene and the strangeness and disturbance of the
external world. After Freud, but as Jean-Franois Lyotard reminds us, in
the wake of Greek tragedy, we know this home is illusory. The foreign,
the repressed, the unconscious, manages to infiltrate the domestic space,
8. Amin Maalouf, The the door is porous. As Georg Simmel noted in the case of the door, the
Crusades Through Arab
Eyes, Saqi Books, London, closed and the open touch each other, not in the dead geometry of a
1984. separation but in the sense of a continual exchange. The Mediterranean,
 CTTE100154.fm Page 432 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

432

too, is a historical and cultural hinge of this type. We live in the

uncanny, where the repressed and the negated complete the architecture
of our histories.
Read in this manner, the Mediterranean becomes the site of an ongo-
ing and unfolding critique of the modernity and progress that has
sought to enframe and explain it over the last 400 years.

SOUNDS

On this threshold, and witnessing the journey of language, the transit

of history, and the always incomplete constructions of home, I would
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

like to conclude with a further, telling, symptom of unrelenting

cultural and historical hybridisation: that bequeathed by music. Musi-
cal languages invariably signify and sound out the composite realisa-
tion of a differentiated communality; they give voice to the invisible.
Listening to Oum Kalthoum, the great Egyptian singer discussed by
Edward Said in Musical Elaborations, we can tune in to an overarch-
ing trajectory that weaves together the Mediterranean inheritance of
Arab music and, for example, Neapolitan song. Naples is a Mediterra-
nean city that has known more than its fair share of strangers, of
rarely invited foreigners: from the Arabs to the Allied Forces. Its
culture, its language, its music, its historical identity, is a product of
this complex inheritance. The melisma and quarter notes so crucial to
the lamenting tonalities of the Neapolitan voice historically owe far
more to the musical scales of the Arab maquamat than to the school
of bel canto. Lived and heard in this manner, Naples is a city whose
historical script can be re-read to expose a mixed heritage in the light
of the hybrid considerations of a postcolonial world and its invitation
to rethink radically our modernity.
Why deny this richness to preserve the monotony of monotheism? We
all know why, of course. We all cling to the familiar, to the homely and
domestic understandings of the world. Yet music reveals another pros-
pect, where sounds travel without the neurosis of preserving a homoge-
neous identity. To follow the sound, rather than the dictates of local
identity, opens up an altogether more intricate historical composition.
In the opening up of the interstices between locality and sound, an
immediate legacy, both musical and cultural, comes to be relocated on a
more extensive map. Here a sense of ones past, today also approached
through sounds and suggestions that arrive from elsewhere Jamaican
reggae and dub, New York rap, London drum n bass is reworked in
the light of an ongoing musical elaboration of the appropriation and
translation of both a multiple past and present. It is in this context, for
example, that the arabesque vocalisation of Neapolitan in the larynx of
Raiss of the group Almamegretta over the sparse bass riddims of dub
(that comes from Jamaica via London), acquires its potent historical
sense and direction.
The Mediterranean here becomes a complex echo chamber where
the migrancy of music suggests histories and cultures sounding off and
sounding out, transforming, and transmuting each other. Here the soci-
ology of music is transformed into music as sociology. But then this
was already clear from Almamegrettas first release in 1994, Figli di
 CTTE100154.fm Page 433 Monday, September 6, 2004 8:10 PM

433

Annibale/Hannibals Children and its announcement of the continua-

tion of identity in the charged grammar of hybridity:

Africa, Africa, Africa, Africa

Hannibal, Hannibal, great black general

Hannibal, Hannibal, great black general
With a host of elephants you crossed the Alps and came through in one
piece
Back then Europeans couldnt even cross them of foot
But you Hannibal, great black general, were able to cross them with a sea
of elephants
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 01:42 19 August 2017

Do you know how big and slow elephants are?

Do you know how big and slow elephants are?
And yet Hannibal got them across the Alps with ninety thousand African
men
Hannibal defeated the Romans, remaining in Italy as a ruler for fifteen or
twenty years

Thats why many Italians have dark skin

Thats why many Italians have dark hair
Thats why many Italians have dark eyes
Thats why many Italians have dark skin

The genetic mapping and empirical details may well be faulty, but the
historical imperative remains impeccable.