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The Mediterranean Institute is pleased to be hosting the next session on the Mediterranean Institute Seminar series. Our guest speak for the forthcoming MI Seminar is Dr Maria Ridda from the University of Kent, who will be discussing ‘Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City’.

The Seminar will take place online on Monday 20 February 2023 at 18:30 via Zoom (Meeting ID: 991 9677 6707, Passcode 945240). 

This Seminar focuses on Dr Ridda’s recent book, Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City: Mapping the Mean Streets of Mumbai and Naples, which has just been published by Routledge. The book explores the literary imaginings of the postcolonial city through the lens of crime in texts set in Naples and Mumbai from the 1990s to the present. Employing the analogy of a ‘black hole’, it posits the discourse on criminality as a way to investigate the contemporary spatial manifestations of coloniality and global capitalist urbanity.

Despite their different histories, Mumbai and Naples have remarkable similarities. Both are port cities, gateways to their countries and regional trade networks, and both are marked by extreme wealth and poverty. They are also the site and symbolic battleground for a wider struggle in which ‘the North exploits the South, and the South fights back’. As one of the characters of the novel The Neapolitan Book of the Dead puts it, a narrativisation of the underworld allows for a ‘discovery of a different city from its forgotten corners’. Crime provides a means to understand the relationship between space and society/culture in cities across the Global South, by tracing a narrative of postcolonial urbanity that exposes the connections between exploitation and the ongoing ‘coloniality of power’.

Maria Ridda is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent and convenor of the Centre for the Global Study of Empire seminar series. She specialises in contemporary South Asian writing, Mediterranean studies, and the intersection between the idea of Europe and Empire today. Prior to Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City, Maria published, Imagining Bombay, London, New York and Beyond: South Asian Writing from 1990 to the Present (2015). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Interventions, Postcolonial Studies and Postcolonial Text. She is the co-editor (with Birk Laursen, et al.) of ‘Decolonising the State’ (2020).

The Mediterranean Institute Seminar is free and open to the general public. Students are particularly encouraged to attend. Only participants with visible Zoom user names will be allowed into the session. For further information and to book your attendance to the online Seminar, kindly contact Ms Isabelle Abela by sending an email or the Mediterranean Institute Seminar Convenor, Prof. Norbert Bugeja by sending an email.