Migration and the Mediterranean Matrix

Abstract

This article considers the intersection of modern art practices and migration in the contemporary Mediterranean, interrogating understandings of citizenship and cultural belonging in a modernity that is clearly neither univocal nor homogeneous. A series of art works and curatorial practices, often by women, are examined in the light of modern migrations across today's Mediterranean. These enable the proposal of a critical cut that permits a disassociation from consensual understandings of both modern art and Africa and the implacable historical force of migration that here conjoins the two.

Notes

Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/rcin.

1 http://www.yinkashonibarembe.com/home/.

2 www.mela-project.polimi.it.

3 http://askavusa.wordpress.com/con-gli-oggetti/.

4 www.matriarchiviomediterraneo.org.

5 www.ilpaesedelleterredoltremare.wordpress.com.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Iain Chambers

Iain Chambers ([email protected]) teaches Cultural, Postcolonial, and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Naples “L'Orientale.” He is the author of Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (1990), Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994), Culture After Humanism (2001), and more recently Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008), and Mediterraneo Blues: Musiche, malinconia postcoloniale, pensieri marittimi (2012). He was also the Co-Editor of The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (1996) with Lidia Curti. He is presently Director of the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at “L'Orientale.”

Celeste Ianniciello

Celeste Ianniciello ([email protected]) holds a PhD in Anglophone Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, from the University of Naples “L'Orientale.” Her research analyzes the visual (auto)biography of female artists from the Mediterranean as a contrapuntal example set against existing geographical, cultural, and sexual borders. She is interested in public art practices emerging from the experience of migration as “living archives” of postcoloniality. She was appointed as a researcher in the European project MeLa* (European Museums in the Age of Migrations), has focused on rethinking museums and archives, and co-edited the volume, The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014).