Mediterranean ARTivism

ISBN-13: 9783031059940 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023

Elvira Pulitano

Opis

This book is an interdisciplinary study aimed at re-imagining and re-routing contemporary migrations in the Mediterranean. Drawing from visual arts, citizenship studies, film, media and cultural studies, along with postcolonial, border, and decolonial discourses, and examining the issues from within a human rights framework, the book investigates how works of cultural production can offer a more complex and humane understanding of mobility in the Mediterranean beyond representations of illegality and/or crisis. Elvira Pulitano centers the discourse of cultural production around the island of Lampedusa but expands the island geography to include a digital multi-media project, a social enterprise in Palermo, Sicily, and overall reflections on race, identity, and belonging inspired by Toni Morrison’s guest-curated Louvre exhibit The Foreigner’s Home. Responding to recent calls for alternative methodologies in thinking the modern Mediterranean, Pulitano disseminates a fluid archive of contemporary migrations reverberating with ancestral sounds and voices from the African diaspora along a Mediterranean-TransAtlantic map. Adding to the recent proliferation of social science scholarship that has drawn attention to the role of artistic practice in migration studies, the book features human stories of endurance and survival aimed at enhancing knowledge and social justice beyond (and notwithstanding) militarized borders and failed EU policies. 

Spis treści

Entanglements: Some Reflections on Migrant Journeys

Fault-Lines: The Mediterranean’s “Burning” and the Human Rights Debate

Island(s): Lampedusa as a “Hotspot” of EU Border Policies

Stones and Water: Monuments and Counter-Monuments

Boats and Cemeteries: Landscapes of Memories

Eyes, Sounds, Voices: Cinematic Representations of the Lampedusa Borderscape

Heritage Spaces and Digital Archives: ARTivist Acts of Resistance

Watery Confluences: Toward a (Trans)MediterrAtlantic Discourse—Critical Reflections on The Foreigner’s Home (2018)

“La mia terra è dove poggio i miei piedi (My Land Is Where I Lay My Feet):” ARTivism and Social Enterprise in Palermo, Sicily

O autorze

Elvira Pulitano is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo where she teaches courses in Indigenous and Caribbean Studies, Critical Race Theory, Migration, and Human Rights. She is the author of Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean: Diasporic Literature and the Human Experience (2016) and editor of Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration (2012). A Fulbright scholar from Italy, she received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico, specializing in Native American and postcolonial studies. She previously held teaching positions at the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland.