Caption: Re-Visiting the Mediterranean / Marketing and Communications at UM / James Moffett
Prof. Norbert Bugeja’s concluding chapter to Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean, the major new Mediterranean Studies volume edited by yasser elhariry, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev and Isabelle Keller-Privat, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Prof. Norbert Bugeja’s concluding chapter to Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean, the major new Mediterranean Studies volume edited by yasser elhariry, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev and Isabelle Keller-Privat, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.
In his chapter, titled ‘An Anomaly Between Chapters’: Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena and the City’s Art of Hospitality’, Bugeja meditates on the city's unreconciled aesthetic through Massimo Cacciari’s vertiginous question—which comes to be sublimated in Hisham Matar’s own memoir of Siena—Che cosa chiediamo dalla città ? What do we ask of the city?
To pronounce one’s own zone of hospitality, Bugeja argues, is to potentially alter something within the psychic cartography of grief itself—hence allowing for the ‘civitas augescens’, the ever-growing city, to emerge. The chapter also suggests that the prerogative to name such a space draws on a legitimacy unique to the cataclysm— of Blanchotian scope, sometimes—the memorial subject carries within them.
Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean brings together leading international voices to examine the embodied praxis of hospitality and to argue for a distinct focus on the Mediterranean pre/conditions and pre/histories of hospitality. The volume offers a rich, agentive alternative for Mediterranean world-making, and sets an important cornerstone for future research.
Prof. Bugeja is Associate Professor within the Department of English and Director of the Mediterranean Institute.
