'Haunting the Mediterranean? Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Its Politics of the Afterwardly’ is the title of Norbert Bugeja’s essay in the collection 'Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis’ which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. The collection, which is co-edited by Edwige Tamalet Talbayev and Yasser Elhariry, features an intriguing range of cross-disciplinary meditations on the current and historic Mediterranean, with essays by Peregrine Horden, Annika Döring, Isabelle Keller-Privat, Michal Raizen, Antonis Danos, Jonathan H. Shannon, Hakim Abderrezak, John Baldacchino, Claudio Fogu, Olivia C. Harrison, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Yasser Elhariry and Edwige Tamalet.
Norbert Bugeja’s essay takes up the question of the aesthetic of spectrality as a speculative limit-text to the representation of post-Republican politics in Turkey, and its broader implications for current narrative visualisations of the Mediterranean. Taking stock of his first-hand witnessing of the gutting of the celebrated Inci Patisserie in the district of Beyoglu in Istanbul in 2013, Bugeja then proceeds to a close reading of Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book. The essay suggests that Pamuk’s work intimates a charged political space in which the Mediterranean, and itsp olitical present, is assessed through a phenomenology of the aftermath.
The book has so far attracted some excellent reviews. Julia Clancy-Smith, Regents Professor of the Department of history at the University of Arizona has written that ‘Here at long last is a stunning set of critical essays and meditations that fills the void in Mediterranean Studies as currently practiced. As an ensemble, the volume engages the major conundrum of this field— the time-space-modernity nexus that has until now sundered the Sea along historical and historicist fault lines. In their prolegomena, the editors, Elhariry and Talbayev, bring the pre-modern scholarship into conversation with the aesthetic, philosophical, and literary production of the modern and contemporary periods.’
Iain Chambers, Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Mediterranean at the Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’ has also noted that ‘In its innovative interdisciplinary and transcultural approach this lively collection of writings brings us to the heart of the Mediterranean as an evolving critical concept and historical challenge. The multiplication of prospects and temporalities propose a constellation that remains irreducible to a single order of time and telling. Pushing the existing order of explanation out of joint, the Mediterranean here becomes the critical site and cultural promise of an altogether more significant historicity.’
In her review of ‘Critically Mediterranean’, Michele Hannoosh, Professor of French at the University of Michigan, has written that ‘‘Critically Mediterranean’ is an outstanding collection of essays. Transnational and cross-disciplinary, it refocuses fundamental issues of Mediterranean studies—mobility, interconnectedness, multiple or layered temporalities—on the modern and contemporary periods, demonstrating the importance of the Mediterranean for interrogating key concepts of modernity. At the same time, it makes a compelling case for the centrality of the modern and contemporary periods in defining the concept of ‘Mediterranean.’ A timely and valuable contribution to the field of Mediterranean studies.’
Norbert Bugeja is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the Mediterranean Institute.
More information about ‘Critically Mediterranean’ is available on the .
