Mobility and Displacement in and around the Mediterranean: An Introduction

Abstract

Human, material and intellectual exchanges in the Mediterranean have developed continuously over time. Historiography has privileged the analysis of conjunctures and structures in which these permanent relationships have ensued. However, scholarship is still shy of viewing, analysing and questioning the human experience of mobilities and immobilities in the Mediterranean from the perspective of those who actually moved. Movement and displacement burden individuals, their families and communities in different ways as their reach informs diverse scopes of identity formation. Experiences of exile, expulsion, solidarity and creation of “otherness” develop from the individual to the group as much as from host societies to “new comers”. Displacement, one of the many consequences of movement, marks, differentiates and defines social identifications in the Mediterranean and, in doing so, ultimately carries the seed of in- and exclusion over time and across different spaces. This text offers an introduction to the special theme section on Mobility and Displacement in and around the Mediterranean: A Historical Approach, guest-edited by the authors.