Literature of Mediterranean

Catalog description

This course explores the topic of migration across the Mediterranean Sea from multiple perspectives. It focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century narratives and theories of the multiple dimensions of Mediterranean identities and the multiple representations (literary, critical, filmic/documentary and musical) of the experience of physical and cultural displacement. We will discuss film, music, and study texts by and on novelists, poets, theorists, philosophers, essayists, musicians who have written about migration, exile and diaspora, or whose work and background represent such sensibility. One overarching theme seen through Amin Maalouf’s novel, Leo Africanus (1986) is the idea of encounters among people coming from different hybridized cultures, faiths, religions in the Mediterranean to form new spaces of meaning and create new opportunities for cross-cultural conversation.