Mediterranean Humanities II

What is the Mediterranean and how was it constructed and canonized as a space of civilization? A highly multicultural, multilingual area whose people represent a broad array of religious, ethnic, social and political difference, the Mediterranean has been seen as the cradle of western civilization, but also as a dividing border and a unifying confluence zone, as a sea of pleasure and a sea of death. The course aims to enhance students’ understanding of the multiple ways this body of water has been imagined by the people who lived or traveled across its shores. By exploring major works of theory, literature and cinema since 1800, it encourages students to engage critically with a number of questions (nationalism vs cosmopolitanism, South/North and East/West divides, tourism, exile and migration, colonialism and orientalism, borders and divided societies) and to ‘read’ the sea through different viewpoints: through the eyes of a German Romantic thinker, a Sephardic Ottoman family, an Algerian feminist, a French historian, a Syrian refugee, an Italian anti-fascist, a Moroccan writer, an Egyptian exile, a Bosnian-Croat scholar, a Lebanese-French author, a Cypriot filmmaker, an Algerian-Italian journalist, and others. In the final analysis, Med Hum II is meant to arouse the question of what it means to stand on watery grounds and to view the world through a constantly shifting lens.