Sicilian Encounters: Writing Migration and Displacement in the Premodern Mediterranean

Catalog description

In recent years, Sicily has often figured in the news as a frontline of the ongoing Mediterranean migration crisis. But this is only the latest iteration of a much older phenomenon. Poised between North Africa and the Italian peninsula, and athwart the sea lanes connecting the eastern and western halves of the Mediterranean basin, the island has long been a hub for the movement of peoples and populations around the Mediterranean world. In this course, we will examine the representation of this history of migration and displacement in ancient, medieval, and early modern literature and drama, from the Odyssey and the Aeneid, through the lyric poetry of Ibn Hamdis and the scuola siciliana, to Shakespeare’s late romances. Among the questions we will be considering are: how have Sicily’s own literary traditions been shaped by the island’s long history of contact and exchange between different linguistic, ethnic, and religious communities? How have writers beyond Sicily’s shores used the island as a stage on which to explore broader questions about dispossession and restitution, exile and homecoming? And how might this pre-modern and early modern cultural history enrich our understanding of, and our responses to the present-day politics of Mediterranean mobility? In addition to the texts and authors mentioned above, readings will include works by Pindar, Theocritus, Plautus, Ibn Jubayr, Boccaccio, and Ariosto.