Who has the right to narrate, map, and explain the Mediterranean?
Untying thought from the sovereignty of so-called Western objectivity leads to repositioning it within interweaving currents composing a historical density and cultural complexity that challenges the existing state of knowledge. Our understandings can no longer be reduced to a single language or perspective, no matter how universal its claims may be.
Renegotiating the historical and cultural spaces of the Mediterranean leads us to confront a series of much broader questions, not necessarily authorised by European lexicons and Western spacetime.
Undoing, bending, and interrupting the linearity of the empty, homogeneous time of “progress”, we confront the colonial clock with other tempos and rhythms. These sustain other spaces, other histories, and lives.
Iain Chambers
