I.S. MED. - Interdisciplinary Studies on the Mediterranean

Interview with Baris Cayli Messina

Giovanna Summerfield — 2023-12-12

Gendered Bodies that Matter: Crossnature, Belonging and Writing in Nina Bouraoui’s Work

Zayer Baazaoui — 2023-12-12

In this article, I study Nina Bouraoui’s two auto fictional novels, Garçon manqué (2000) and Mes Mauvaises Pensées (2005). My intended task is to show the merit of Nina Bouraoui in highlighting non-normative female sexuality. Like in the works of several Maghrebian writers of French expression (Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar, Albert Memmi, etc.) and especially in the case of Nina Bouraoui, due to her dual nationality, there is a critical and deconstructive conversation about the notion of belonging, which will be read in the two novels here at stake. This conversation around citizenship is different from the one that can be found among other writers because it is supported by a discourse on non-normative female sexuality. I consider how belonging to France/Algeria shapes the configuration and appropriation of the space as queer, comparing metropolitan France to postcolonial Algeria. This essay then goes on to discuss the narrator’s negotiation of these two different spaces, examining issues around desire and (dis)comfort. Moreover, in both novels the narrator develops a special relationship with space in general and with nature and its elements in particular. These natural elements are present in an obsessive way, water particularly in the image of the sea. So how does the writer engage with her space? My intent is to critically examine the values, images, and tropes associated with the intersection of non-normative sexuality and nature, as presented in the two novels.

Subverting Male Gaze: Mediterranean Women in Contemporary Croatian Cinema

Etami Borjan — 2023-12-12

This article intends to explore how female filmmakers in Croatia have represented social transformation in the Mediterranean during the last twenty years, and how gender issues have shaped Mediterranean narratives and characters. Thus, dominant representations of Mediterranean women, femininity and gender relations in recent Croatian women’s cinema will be critically reviewed. This work traces articulations of gender issues in contemporary women-centric films set on Croatia’s Adriatic coast. The majority of films shot by female directors in the last decade were set in Mediterranean cities, or small villages, where gender roles are strictly defined by a conservative society in which women’s roles are reduced to domestic space. However, contemporary Croatian women directors subvert this paradigm by presenting active, problem-solving female heroes that both challenge and deconstruct traditional roles imposed upon Mediterranean women. Croatian women filmmakers take us away from the idyllic Mediterranean scenery and stress its confining nature. The settings are deeply anti-exotic, deviating drastically from the appealing tourist image of the Mediterranean coast in presenting the oppressive roles which women there are forced to take. Physical space speaks loudly for its protagonists, and these spaces often mirror the trauma of their female inhabitants. Recent films contest the historic domination imposed on women by patriarchy and tradition, which have always undermined the advancement of female characters. Women filmmakers speak openly about female sexuality, not neglecting body and pleasure, but they try to subvert the male gaze by de-eroticizing nudity and sexual intercourse.

“Il Gran Rifiuto”: The Mediterranean Exile of Ugo Foscolo and Constantine Cavafy

Cecily Cai — 2023-12-12

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym describes nostalgia as a yearning for an impossible return. Born on the Greek island of Zante (Zakynthos) in the Mediterranean, the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo finds himself in a state between land and sea, between languages and cultures. Foscolo’s attachment to the sea is both epic and unheroic. This paradox in Foscolo’s sea-oriented nostalgia is a preview of his fate as an exile. In his poems, Foscolo laments the impossible nostos to his native island by invoking the epic hero Ulysses (Odysseus). With its aura of myth, the sea becomes a symbol of Foscolo’s nostalgia. At the same time his fate as an exile is not defined by an epic homecoming but sealed by the irretrievability of home. A century later, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy also finds himself in a similar state of paradox. While he is attached to his native city Alexandria, Cavafy’s Alexandria is also detached from the present, as the poet descends into history to recreate a mythical city in his imagination. By drawing comparisons between Foscolo’s and Cavafy’s poems about home and displacement, exile and return, I argue that both poets’ uprootedness hinge on their wavering between land and sea, as their identity is pinned on the refusal of return, generating a sense of “transcendental homelessness” in the words of Georg Lukács and a “contrapuntal” awareness as defined by Edward Said. As an imaginary city out of time, Cavafy’s Alexandria reflects the poet’s own out-of-placedness as a Greek in Egypt. In comparison, Foscolo’s exile also reshapes his memory of home, making an anachronistic turn that Said identifies in Cavafy’s poetry and considers part of exile. In the end, these two poets of the Mediterranean follow the same path of “never return” as their great exilic predecessor Dante once did.

Photography and Heritage: Van Leo Black and White Studio Portraits, 1940s-1970s

Elisa Pierandrei — 2023-12-12

In this article, I focus on Van Leo’s photographic practice in the shadow of major political and social changes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Born in Jihane, present Turkey, in 1921 Van Leo was an Egyptian photographer with Armenian origins. Although Van Leo took photographs that were mainly of a commercial kind, he brought glamour to the practice of photographic portraiture in the MENA region, inspired by the cinema industry, particularly Hollywood black and white photography. It was in the early 1980s that the transition from black and white to colour photography took place in Egypt. This happened much later when customs restrictions and supply difficulties occurred due to regional conflicts. In those years, Van Leo’s clients were expatriates, Lebanese traders, culture personalities and above all a new generation of aspiring actresses and cabaret soubrettes, sometimes of humble origins, who dreamt of success in theatres or in the fast-growing cinema industry. In post- colonial Egypt, Van Leo embodied a newer generation of Armenian-Egyptian photographers who created glamorous black and white studio portraits, as well as self- portraits that pushed the style to new extremes and extravagances. He thus created a different narrative for his time, echoing and shaping the aesthetic of a nation, its sense of self and the perception of it around the world. This study was conducted researching Van Leo’s collection of photographs available on the Arab Image Foundation online digital archive, as well as through a selection of images from the archive of AUC’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSCL). This is in addition to examining a new, monumental publication released on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the photographer’s birth and realized by Karl Bassil in collaboration with Negar Azimi and Katia Boyadjian, titled Becoming Van Leo. Volume I-II-III (Arab Image Foundation and Archive Books, 2021): more than 600 pages of documents (300+), essays by Negar Azimi, Lara Baladi, and Karl Bassil, a few previously unpublished memoirs and interviews, as well as photographs (2380+), and film stills and transcriptions (250+).

Visual Inquiry of Symbolic Universes

Gaia Bobò — 2023-12-12

The article aims to retrace possible intersections between visual cultures and anthropology in the Mediterranean through empirical and critical research on the photographic practice of the Italian photographer Dario Coletti (Rome, 1959). In his massive body of work, Coletti established an archive of visual narrations of the living culture of the island’s inhabitants, from the working conditions of the miners and of the communities of fishermen to the traditional local celebrations, such as the Carnivals and the Holy Weeks. In particular, the photographic series Mana. Cronache dal carnevale barbaricino 1995-2015, focusing on the depiction of the Carnival of Barbagia, is here analyzed for its outstanding role within the author’s production. The appendix of the article includes the contributions of Antonio Cecere, Giulio Latini, and Paolo Quintili contextualizing Coletti’s practice within the field of Mediterranean studies, as well as providing its possible intersection with anthropology, philosophy, and media studies.

Gazing at the Mediterranean

Antonio Cecere — 2023-12-12

Shadows of the Sacred

Giulio Latini — 2023-12-12

Philosophy of the Symbolic Bodies

Paolo Quintili — 2023-12-12

Book Reviews

Anna Dini — 2023-12-12