Iain Chambers is Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the UniversitÀ degli Studi di Napoli, “l’Orientale,” Italy. He is the author of several books, including Culture after Humanism: History, Culture and Subjectivity; Migrancy, Culture, Identity; and Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity.

Mediterranean Crossings

THE POLITICS OF AN INTERRUPTED MODERNITYBy IAIN CHAMBERS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4126-0

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………….ix1 Many Voices………………………………12 A Postcolonial Sea………………………..233 Off the Map………………………………504 Naples: A Porous Modernity…………………715 Between Shores……………………………130Notes……………………………………..153Bibliography……………………………….163Index……………………………………..173

Chapter One

Many Voices The Mediterranean speaks with many voices. -FERNAND BRAUDEL

I would like to commence this book with a voice from the Mediterranean city in which I live:

My “territory” is not the local region of Campania, as it is for many chefs who say that they are “reflecting” the regional fare. I go to the market and my suppliers; there I collect material, and then, when I get here, I have to do something with it. It is here where I consider myself modern, in the subsequent combinations and mixture. Living in a multiethnic part of the city-the Quartieri Spagnoli, which today is increasingly stratified in ethnic diversity-where once I smelled the cooking of rag or grilled scampi, I now also smell curry and mint tea. Why shouldn’t I use these aromas and tastes that have now become part of my daily experience? It is not as though when I wake up in the morning I find sheep grazing on my doorstep. Nobody invents anything; everything is already in circulation in one way or another. The more experience you have with an ingredient, the more you understand it, and in the end you transform it. The recipes are the combination of such an approach, like established grids that allow you to combine and mix the ingredients, but the results depend on the ingredients. Without them … I don’t think I invent anything. I believe that I am simply developing an approach, a perspective. Right now in the menu, there are certain items that are almost fixed, but even those … for example, the roasted eggplant with smoked cod (melanzane arrostite con baccal affumicato): If sometimes I can’t find the right consistency of tomato, I will use a green, slightly bitter tomato, so you will always have the eggplant, but the components of the dish are variable. In the pomegranate season, I will add their seeds. I constantly seek to improve the dish without destroying it-that’s the point. For this dish, I use the round, fleshy Sicilian type of eggplant, which is different from the long, local variety. Or the sweet that I make with chocolate and ricotta cheese. Right now, after various attempts with diverse cocoa, I’ve found the cocoa that I really like. But, again, the proposal seemingly remains unchanged, although it has actually grown and developed.

With this sense of a mutable and diversifying locality, a kind of “changing same,” to borrow a term from Amiri Baraka and Paul Gilroy, my friend the chef Mario Avallone provides me with a strikingly apt metaphor for thinking a seeming stability-all those local traditions, cults, and customs secured in the timeless zone of the olive tree etched against a sunlit sea-that is mobilized and perforated by the manifold transformations of a Mediterranean simultaneously suspended, stretched, and stratified within a heterogeneous modernity. The establishment of the coordinates of modernity at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the world was framed for the first time by a unique point of view and the universal eye of God was transferred to the typographies and the cartographies of power and knowledge that charted a European expansion on a planetary scale, provides an initial time scale and cultural framework for this study.

Nevertheless the tributary histories that flow into the “modern” framing of the world, and the Mediterranean, also suggest deeper and more dispersive currents which draw us back in time while simultaneously projecting a radically different understanding of the present and its potential futures. The map becomes an altogether more fluid and fluctuating composition.

THE ARCHIVE OF THE ABJECT

To propose a different way to “world” the Mediterranean is to recommend a way that acknowledges the cultural and “historical” intimacy of its multiple and diverse currents and components. Rather than commence from the geometrically induced logic of barriers to be breached and differences to be bridged, Edward Said’s noted theme of overlapping territories and intertwined histories suggests a less rigid, more open comprehension of the making of a multiple Mediterranean. Such a perspective induces an important critical humility in the observer seeking to understand its complexities. Despite the attempts through ideological policing and national legislation to separate this multiplicity and diversity into quarantined realms, leading to a subsequent “clash of civilizations,” this mutability is profoundly pertinent for a contemporary Mediterranean where the Occident and the Orient, the North and the South, are evidently entangled in a cultural and historical net cast over centuries, even millennia.

Yet if maps, movement, and mobility are clearly among the most obvious means for charting modernity, their contemporary restriction and blockage simultaneously also suggest another, darker and more disquieting account. The very right to travel, to journey, to migrate today increasingly runs up against the borders, confines, and controls of a profound “unfreedom” that characterizes the modern world. Of course, this does not touch the touted liberty of market forces and economic policies monopolizing the globe; rather, it refers to the gathering dusk that envelopes the refusal of rights and resources, leading to the eviction of so many into a no-man’s land without legal status or even recognition beyond that of being a nameless guest worker or “illegal” immigrant, condemned to inhabit the discarded regions of the abject. In the twisted, asymmetrical human economy in which so many are losing their rights-that is, the right to immediate liberties secured by food, health, and education, rather than to the anonymous abstraction of “freedom”-today’s walls, fences, surveillance, and detention announce discrimination, apartheid, exclusions, and new hierarchies. From the militarized U.S.-Mexico border and the Israel-Palestine wall to the internment camps dotted all over Europe, and increasingly over North Africa, we encounter macabre reminders of other “solutions” that sought to exclude and eradicate the outsider, the other. We are forced to take the measure of a world that is increasingly funneled into a one-sided management in which our “freedom” and “rights” are structurally dependent-not only economically but also politically and culturally-on their negation to others. It is not a question of a whim or bad faith or misunderstanding; it is a question of structural resources and their political management.

Hence, the increasing attention and weight applied to the legal framing and construction of the immigrant, for in his or her juridical status the state most assiduously articulates its frontiers: Border guards, visas, passports, and detention are merely accessory to the legal definition whereby the state authorizes its actions, and itself. Today, individual states and the European Union propose a complex system of filters and channels that stretch outward into extraterritorial space, both on the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and over the horizon into the Maghreb. So Europe and the Mediterranean-how they come to be defined and regulated-emerge from a legal configuration in which human rights go largely unrecognized in the elaboration of juridical confines and citizenship. It is these that establish the borders between the “inside” and the “outside,” between belonging and expulsion. The “illegal” immigrant lies beyond the law and is fundamentally without rights. The nation-state, far from withering away, here reasserts its authority in managing the flow not so much of private individuals as of labor, skills, and competences in a complex symbiosis with the “laws” of the “free” market and its planetary developments. Who is let in and who is excluded has little to do with personal biography, persecution, or requests for political asylum.

The apparently uncontrollable irruptions of the anonymous outsider, as immigrant but stretching away through shades of incomprehension to potential “terrorist,” become “events” that produce the pure and brutal inscription of power which configures decisions, governmentality, and “norms.” It generates the political environment and cultural ecology that seek to preempt and anticipate cultural and historical scenarios in order to colonize the world, its languages, its time, its becoming. As a preventive power structure, such a state of affairs seeks to direct and discipline the memories that you have not yet had. The future is already inscribed in the social, cultural, and racialized premises that police the present. Hence, what is past and what is to come is never safe from the law of the victors. It is precisely in reworking the historical archive in all its cultural complexities and details that further prospects have to be promoted in order to evade a colonization which, seeking to control memory, puts its claims on life yet to come.

To talk of the Mediterranean-of its past, present, and future-is to move in this disquieting space. Critical language travels along the lip between the known and the unknown, in transit between the familiar maps of a domestic interior and the hazy territories of the external world, between “our” way of life and that which exceeds its comprehension. Of course, such Manichean distinctions are merely place holders, simplified referents that serve to orientate thinking before the intricacy of the world. They are not, despite all the political, cultural, military, and legislative action they entail, necessarily real in any profound historical, epistemological, or ontological sense. They may, in a superficial manner, point to differences and diversity in a now acknowledged planetary complexity but not to absolute distinctions.

So the borders are porous, particularly so in the liquid materiality of the Mediterranean. The outcome of historical and cultural clash and compromise is that borders are both transitory and zones of transit. They repeatedly draw our attention to the labor of translation: to confronting what arrives from abroad while simultaneously announcing the historical trauma of time that refuses to solidify in the existing state of knowledge. In this sense, critical thought as a border discourse is consistently haunted and interpellated by the invisible, by what fails to enter the arena of representation, by what is veiled or simply falls out of the field of vision of a predictable consensus. Borders (including those of knowledge and the disciplines) are patrolled. They inevitably reveal the essential violence on which the authority of the modern state ultimately depends to secure its legitimacy. Once inside, at least in the First World, this dimension usually slides out of view, and the more civil institutions of law courts, policing, education, and the media circulation of ideology take over. But the violence is always there, ready in exceptional moments to bloody and brutalize the tissues of everyday life. If the unwarranted police execution of a suspected terrorist in the London underground is the shocking signal of this paranoid patrolling exposing itself, then the militarization of everyday life in the most border-conscious nation in the world, Israel, is also the foretaste of our future.

Before the decolonization of the 1950s, the southern boundaries of Europe were traced along the edges of the Sahara Desert: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt. This, today, has been transformed into a virtual space by European legislation, both in terms of the criteria imposed for the growing of foodstuffs for its markets and in the internment camps and surveillance installed to monitor illegal migration from the southern to the northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. For the border is not a thing but, rather, the materialization of authority.

Here, then, something new is clearly emerging, a definitive sharpening in the rhetoric and tools of control: perhaps also the symptom of a certain, nervous recognition of the exhaustion of the liberal repertoire to absorb and annul the stranger. Of course, frontiers are not merely national or military; subtler ones exist that run inside the polity. They are the patrolled distinctions constituted by racism, by poverty, by gender, by dispossession and marginalization. If Marx’s concept of class once served to indicate this nation within the nation, today the complex articulations proposed by the Gramscian concept of the subaltern, subsequently reworked by postcolonial historians and critics, perhaps better serves to identify this constituency in both its immediate specificity and its global resonance.

What is left out of global calculation and lives on as residue, refuse, and remnant, the world’s poor-the living dead seeking to survive on less than a $1 a day-is what comes to be socially, culturally, and racially classified in the abject pathologies of the subaltern. Whether it is the migrant and refugee blotching the global imminence of Occidental whiteness, or, contra the noise of progress, the unfathomable echo of a silent South, the consistent fear and terror that yesterday constituted the colonial space today infiltrates and haunts the modern metropolis. In the insistence of what is considered a dead matter (the world of the colonized) but is very much alive, metropolitan space is increasingly zoned, categorized, cut up, and controlled by surveillance and policing. What for centuries, as Frantz Fanon pointed out, had been the characteristic of the colonial world-framing, objectifying, and alienating the “native” in the bestial categories of violence, savagery, and underdevelopment-is belatedly accredited as the space of a universal modernity. The unacknowledged and unrecognized helots of a planetary order now jeopardize the boundaries, disrupting the desire for controlled difference and distance and rendering the management of multicultural public space both problematic and paranoid.

It is the modern migrant who most acutely constitutes this constellation. Suspended in the intersections of economic, political, and cultural dispossession, she carries modern borders within herself. If the migrant’s body is directly inscribed in punitive legislation, her mobility exposes the instability of abstract distinctions and confines. This dramatic figure is not merely a historical symptom of modernity; she is, rather, the condensed interrogation of the very identity of the modern political subject. Her precariousness is ultimately also ours, exposing the coordinates of a worldly condition:

the dark stain spreading on maps whose shapes dissolve their frontiers.

Here race, racism, patriarchy, social discrimination, cultural hierarchy, caste, and class are concentrated in the continuities and discontinuities that emerge from the clumsy movement of the modern nation as it pushes its way through the uneven and unjust complexities of modernity. Today’s xenophobia-increasingly concentrated in the West on the fear of militant Islam (once exotically evoked in Hollywood images of swarms of Berber warriors storming Charlton Heston’s Christian Spain in El Cid; these days secured by tabloid photos of British passport holders attending a madrasa in Pakistan)-has much to do with the failure and unwillingness to work through a still largely unconscious European past in which colonialism and empire were (and are) distilled into national configurations of “identity,” “culture,” “modernity,” and “progress.”

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Mediterranean Crossingsby IAIN CHAMBERS Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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