Humanist, Captive, Renegade: Three Modes of Displacement in the Ottoman Mediterranean

By |2021-03-01T21:05:05+00:00August 27th, 2019|Conference Programmes and Keynotes|

For the early modern period, it is virtually impossible to imagine an affective history of Mediterranean mobility without three essential bodies of sources: erudite travel accounts, captivity narratives, and inquisitorial apostasy trials. But as valuable as these sources are in documenting the experience of dislocation across the Mediterranean--and particularly between its Christian and Muslim halves--these are also distinctively European sources with no real equivalent in Ottoman Turkish. How can this apparent asymmetry be explained? What lessons does it hold? And what kinds of alternative sources does Ottoman history offer for reconstructing the experience of Mediterranean mobility "from the other side"? Giancarlo Casale is Chair of Early Modern Mediterranean History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. A specialist in Ottoman history, he is the author of numerous studies on the history of Ottoman trade, travel and exploration, as well as the comparative history of empires, and the history of geography and cartography. His most recent projects include "Did Alexander the Great Discover America? Debating Space and Time in Renaissance Istanbul," forthcoming in Renaissance Quarterly (Fall 2019), and Prisoner of [...]

Migration, the Mediterranean and the fluid archives of modernity

By |2024-01-22T13:50:57+00:00August 18th, 2019|Conference Programmes and Keynotes|

Professor Iain Chambers's talk will seek to use the centrality of the question of migration to the making of modernity, along with the fluid archives proposed and sustained in the Mediterranean, to open up a critical discussion on the colonial constitution of the present. It will then seek to suggest how such entangled and subaltern histories disturb and displace the coloniality of existing methods in the social and human sciences. Iain Chambers teaches cultural and postcolonial studies of the Mediterranean at the University of Naples, "Orientale". Among his recent publications areMediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008), Mediterraneo Blues. Musiche, malinconia postcoloniale, pensieri marittimi (2012),Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017) Location, borders and beyond. Thinking with postcolonial art (2018), and La questione postcoloniale (with Marta Cariello, 2019). Further information is available here: https://mediterranean-blues.blog яндекс