GEOGRAFIE MORE-THAN-WET DEL MEDITERRANEO NERO: MARGINALITÀ, ECCEDENZE, (RI)GENER-AZIONI

Abstract

More-than-wet Geographies of the Black Mediterranean: marginality, excesses, re-genera(c)tion. – Interweaving the production on the contemporary Black Mediterranean with the recent Oceanic Turn (Peters, Anderson, Davies, Steinberg, 2022), which repositions the sea from the margin to the centre of the geographic discipline, this specific sea-space emerges as a space co-composed of two fundamental elements: the trans-colonial (Sharpe, 2016) wake (Harrison, 2018) that connects the pre-modern Black Mediterranean to the Black Atlantic of modernity and the contemporary Black Mediterranean; the waves (de Spuches, Palermo, 2020; Palermo, 2023), matter and metaphor of moving bodies of challenge, resistance, conflicts. The latter, specifically, become re-genera(c)tions from the margin to imagine and practice possible trans-Mediterranean alliances, thus revealing how thinking with the sea can function as a decolonial tool for decentralising the gaze on a space of colonial margins production such as the Black Mediterranean.