Mediterranean Studies最新文献

{"title":"Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples","authors":"Meghan DiLuzio","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0256","url":null,"abstract":"This volume offers a bold and creative approach to recovering the experiences of women in the Roman world. The collection includes thirteen papers that were originally presented at the Third Annual Symposium Campanum at the Villa Vergiliana in October 2018. The authors demolish long-standing assumptions about the limitations of the material record, casting women as active participants in their communities.Following a brief introduction by the editors, Lauren Hackworth Petersen (chapter 1) argues that modern scholars have contributed to “silencing” Roman women by privileging certain kinds of sources and adopting the perspective of upper-class men. She calls on scholars to reevaluate what counts as a reliable source and shift their attention from elite men to the position and movements of women and other marginalized people. The remaining chapters take up this challenge.Molly Swetnam-Burland (chapter 2) shows that women of all socioeconomic statuses engaged in financial transactions of various kinds—counting money, keeping accounts, and lending or investing their money to generate interest—often without the intervention of a male intermediary and in spite of the claims of the jurists that women were prohibited from acting as bankers. Women in the Roman world could exercise significant financial agency.Lauren Caldwell (chapter 3) argues that the peculium—a fund allocated to children and slaves by the male head of household—may have enabled daughters from wealthy families to operate their own weaving businesses. Caldwell’s chapter helps us to imagine the spaces where weaving activities took place and pushes us to consider weaving both as a symbol of feminine virtue and as an activity with economic benefits for women and their households.Barbara Kellum (chapter 4) explores how the public priestesses Eumachia and Mamia employed an Augustan-inspired imagery of prosperity in their buildings in Pompeii’s Forum in order to highlight their own wealth and contributions to the economic life of their community. Based on an intriguing new identification of a pair of portrait statues, Kellum suggests that a third public priestess, Alleia Decimilla, may have been the patron of a restoration of Pompeii’s Macellum in the first century CE.Eve D’Ambra (chapter 5) offers a detailed discussion of the large entertainment and recreation complex owned by Julia Felix, whose role as manager of her own business affairs is confirmed by a painted advertisement on the building’s façade. D’Ambra suggests that Julia Felix’s gender and social status may have influenced the design and decoration of her complex, including especially the extraordinary Forum frieze, which depicts Pompeii’s working and commercial classes, both male and female.Brenda Longfellow (chapter 6) compares the honorific statue of Eumachia to earlier portraits from extramural tombs. Her fascinating analysis traces the ways in which funerary statues emphasized familial relationships and represented their subjects","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance","authors":"John M. Hunt","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0253","url":null,"abstract":"The Jews of Rome, like Jews everywhere in early modern Europe, faced tremendous legal and social constraints, endemic violence, and expulsion, ghettoization, and forced conversions. Most of these practices were rooted in anti-Jewish polemics dating to the Middle Ages. Yet, for Rome, two of these, the ghetto and systematic efforts to convert Jews through sermons at the Oratory of Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, were innovations of the sixteenth century. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson offers the first monograph in English to examine these sermons and their impact both on the Jewish community and on the religious life of Rome. Sifting through a plethora of sources, including papal bulls, treatises, and sermons of conversionary preachers, Michelson demonstrates that despite a few celebrated conversions of wealthy Jewish families, the sermons on the whole failed. Nevertheless, the sermons to Roman Jews persisted for close to two and a half centuries. Michelson argues that the longevity of the sermons owes more to their value to a “multi-layered” audience that, besides the Jewish community, included the clerical and civic elite of Rome, pilgrims, and travelers from beyond the Alps. Each of these audiences found different meanings in the conversionary sermons that ranged from annoyance and resistance (Jews) to a celebration of the globalizing mission of the post-Tridentine church (ecclesiastics and the faithful).The first three chapters explore the milieu that led to the foundation of the papacy’s first sustained attempt at converting Jews through preaching at the Oratory of the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini. Michelson locates the origins in heightened anxieties about Jews that had led to their expulsions from Spain and Portugal, respectively in 1492 and 1497. In Rome, these anxieties took the form of the establishment of its Monte di Pietà in 1539 in an effort to deter Christians from borrowing money from Jewish pawnbrokers, the burning of the Talmud in 1553 by the Inquisition, and the creation of the Ghetto in 1555 by Paul IV, with its aim, as Kenneth Stow has shown, of forcing the Jews to convert due to the misery of confinement.The papacy’s goal of converting Roman Jews culminated with Gregory XIII’s bull of 1577, Vice Eius Nos, which established conversionary sermons to the Jews and the College of Neophytes, and his bull of 1584, Sancta Mater Ecclesia, which prescribed precise rules for the sermons, including the required attendance of one-third of the Jewish population of Rome on every Sabbath. Michelson shows that the foundation of the conversionary sermons was met with enthusiasm by Rome’s clergy and papal officials. The sermons took place in the oratory of the most prestigious Roman confraternity, the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, founded by Philip Neri. The sermons quickly attracted the patronage of cardinals and prestigious religious orders, all keen on seeing the conversion of the Jews as part of the papac","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sectoral Realism at the Junction of the Partition Plan of Palestine","authors":"Maysoun Ershead Shehadeh","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0180","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article applies qualitative dynamic content analysis to archival sources to demonstrate that religious identity was the primary motivation for Orthodox Greek Palestinians to join the Communist Party in 1948. Abandoned by the local Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, this sect of Palestinians hoped to gain the patronage of the Russian Orthodox Church. This was also their motive for supporting the plan of the United Nations to divide Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, in contradiction of the national consensus at the time. Marxist theory, depicted as cosmopolitan, multinational, and multisectoral, helped this group camouflage its sectoral organization within the party’s higher echelons. The article stresses the importance of examining time and place when investigating historical decisions of political groups, such as those of the Palestinian communists in Israel, that have a significant impact on the process of shaping collective identity.","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cosmopolitan Discourse in Amin Maalouf’s <i>Les Échelles du Levant</i>","authors":"Ferma Lekesizalın","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0204","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates the cosmopolitan discourse of Amin Maalouf’s novel Les Échelles du Levant, published in English in 1996 as Ports of Call. Centered on Ossyane Ketabdar’s memories, the novel reconstructs the history of the Levant from the viewpoint of the oppressed and portrays the devastating effects of nationalism and national struggles on the Levantine cultures and societies. Born to a Turkish father and Armenian mother, Ossyane grows up in the cosmopolitan and multicultural atmosphere of Beirut, where he learns to question parochialisms. His cosmopolitan agency is based on the moral principle of recognition and respect for the other. Centered on an uprooted and liminal protagonist with a mixed identity, Les Échelles du Levant explores cosmopolitan agency as a form of resistance against homogenized and consolidated subject positions produced by the modern nation-states.","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Introduction","authors":"Susan L. Rosenstreich","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0135","url":null,"abstract":"This year, the MSA celebrated its twenty-fifth annual meeting. Executive Director Ben Taggie opens Mediterranean Studies 31.2 with a tribute to the host institution of the meeting, Masaryk University in the Czech Republic’s city of Brno. Holding the 2023 conference in Brno had everything to do with the association’s mission to promote the scholarly study of the many cultures of the Mediterranean in their interactions with greater forces in and beyond the region, a mission the articles and reviews in this issue assiduously carry out.In “War and Peace in the Elephant Mosaic from Huqoq: Synagogue Art, Classical Historiography and Roman Imperial Monuments,” Karen Britt and Ra‘anan Boustan bring to light an unparalleled example of ancient synagogue art that memorializes a nonbiblical event, demonstrating the extent to which even a small rural village could engage with the cosmopolitan literary and artistic movements of the ancient Mediterranean world. This interplay of local and global forces can be seen in Maysoun Ershead Shehade’s article, “Sectoral Realism at the Junction of the Partition Plan of Palestine.” The author confronts totalizing assumptions often applied to this critical moment in the history of the Middle East, analyzing in disciplined detail the tumultuous events that led the Orthodox Greek Palestinians to join the Communist Party in 1948 and to support the United Nations plan to divide Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. “Cosmopolitan Discourse in Amin Maalouf’s Ports of Call” by Ferma Lekesızalın examines the Lebanese author’s empathetic story of the tremendous toll narrowed identities take on those who embrace ideals of peaceful coexistence for differing social and political groups. As an appropriate closing study in this array of views on the ongoing tension between local and global forces, “Performing Mediterraneanness in the American South: An Ethnography of Mediterranean Solidarity in Chapel Hill, North Carolina” offers the real time experience of Christina Bananopoulou, who adopts the position of a participant observer to study the evolution of solidarity among local immigrants from different and sometimes historically hostile regions of the Mediterranean.The book reviews in this issue are good evidence that scholars of the Mediterranean are revisiting long-held views on material and print culture, paying close attention to the push and pull of local and global forces. Cory Crawford reviews Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean by Carolina López-Ruiz, noting the book’s ambitious scope to advance both a critique of Hellenocentrism and a synthesis of archeological data. Maria Georgopoulou points to the literary expertise of Roderick Beaton—Byzantium and modern Greece are his specialties—as the foundation for his three-and-a-half-millennium study, not of Greece, but rather of Greeks around the globe, The Greeks: A Global History. Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance by E","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tribute to Masaryk University","authors":"Benjamin F. Taggie","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0137","url":null,"abstract":"By any measure, the 25th Annual Congress of the Mediterranean Studies Association at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, was a resounding success. From the gracious welcome of Dr. Irena Radová, dean of the university’s Faculty of Arts, to the generous feeding of our minds and bodies, overseen for the five days of the event by Congress President Dr. Katarina Petrovićková, Professor of Classical Studies at Masaryk University, this milestone congress was a rich reward for the dedication of MSA scholars to the field of Mediterranean studies.His Excellency Mr. Athanassios Paressoglu, Ambassador from the Hellenic Republic to the Czech Republic, phrased it eloquently in his remarks at the opening session of the congress: the Mediterranean is a space with many origins. We were fortunate to have Mgr. et Mgr. Tomás Weissar of Masaryk University’s Office of External Relations as our guide to Brno’s role in those origins, his walking tour of the city a reminder of the ways the Mediterranean reaches well beyond its shores.Thanks to Dr. Petrovićková’s students, Adéla Svobodová, Lenka Josefina Sládková, Eliška Bumbová, Veronika Nagyová, Martin Můčka, Jaroslav Herzig, Markéta Galbová, and Benjamin Juráň, conference attendees never lost their way to any of the seventy-nine congress presentations or lacked information on using the amazingly efficient trolley system in Brno. And who will ever forget the performance of pianist Eva Hubáčková, flautist Hana zemVlasáková, and violinists Kristýna Petrová and Kateřina Šrabalová, interpreters of the quartet Krásné ty země, v tobě i ve mně, composed especially for the congress by Matouš Dvořák? The poetic sentiment of that title, “Beautiful Lands in Your Hands and Mine,” brought us into the heart of the Czech Republic.The association could not have marked its twenty-fifth conference any more memorably than with these remarkable individuals. The MSA appreciates the courtesy and kindness shown to all of us during our stay in Brno. On behalf of our entire membership, I thank Masaryk University for opening its doors to us, and hope doors continue to open to conferences that bring scholars together to listen to, and learn from, each other.","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"War and Peace in the Elephant Mosaic from Huqoq: Synagogue Art, Classical Historiography, and Roman Imperial Monuments","authors":"Karen Britt, Ra‘anan Boustan","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0139","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Excavations in the late fourth-century synagogue at Huqoq in lower eastern Galilee have revealed a mosaic depicting a subject that is unparalleled in ancient synagogue art. In the view of the authors of this article, this panel (known as the Elephant Mosaic) portrays an episode of military conflict and diplomatic encounter between Jews and Greeks in the Hellenistic period. The memorialization of a non-biblical event in a late ancient synagogue indicates that Jewish knowledge of—and engagement with—the past was not circumscribed by the horizons of the biblical narrative. The article shows that the mosaic represents one localized iteration of a broad discourse of warfare that traversed the permeable boundaries between linguistic, literary, and religious traditions and between various artistic genres and media. This remarkable work thus attests to the degree to which the residents of even a modest rural village like Huqoq participated in the cosmopolitan literary and artistic trends of the broader Mediterranean world of late antiquity.","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean","authors":"Cory Crawford","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0248","url":null,"abstract":"The past two decades have seen a marked increase in the number of monographs relating specifically to Phoenician identity and material culture. Even in such a context, the work under review stands apart for its ambitious, comprehensive scope that advances both a critique of persistent disciplinary Hellenocentrism and a synthesis of archaeological data. Together those objectives prompt a revision of persistent narratives about Phoenician colonial presence, influence, and agency in the first-millennium-BCE Mediterranean.The volume is divided into two parts, with an introduction that lays out the study’s approach, which is (part 1) a critical examination and diagnosis of the historiographic problems confronting the study of Phoenician identity and (part 2) a comprehensive Mediterranean survey of mainly archaeological evidence for Phoenician presence and activity. In chapters 1 and 2, López-Ruiz shows how the study of the Phoenicians both falls between historical disciplinary boundaries and has also been distorted by historiographic tendencies that focus on identities (such as Greek) that survive into the modern period, or on networks that collapse individual agency. This asymmetry between Greeks and Semites can be seen in the ways evidence has been interpreted in light of their later histories: colonies established by Phoenician city-states are dismissed as haphazard and eclectic, while Greek city-states are seen somehow to advance a coherent, overarching pan-Hellenic identity. Yet recent evidence collapses what was once asserted to be the distance between Phoenician versus Greek colonial activity: Phoenicians were the earliest colonists and built on their inheritance of Bronze Age technology and tradition; they were not solely maritime merchants but engaged in agriculture, metallurgy, and urban planning.López-Ruiz develops an approach in chapter 3 to remedy these disciplinary and historical obstacles by attending to a cluster of mainly material remains (e.g., pottery, architecture, visual motifs, metalwork, burial forms) that she calls an “orientalizing kit.” This allows one to account for transmission, variation, and hybridity, since the cluster was adaptable to local contexts and tastes. She extends and reframes well-established areas of inquiry, such as the “orientalizing” trend in early Greek art, to describe the active adaptation and marketing of prestige cultural items and markers far beyond the Aegean. She argues that it is only Phoenician agency that can explain the rapid and thorough spread of these sorts of pan-Mediterranean cultural remains.Part 2, “Follow the Sphinx,” is a detailed scan and analysis of the Mediterranean and the (mostly) archaeological evidence for Phoenician presence and agency. Innovative here is the choice to move from West to East, a strategy that fronts the new archaeological evidence less affected by the distortions cataloged in part 1. Chapter 4 deals with recent archaeological evidence from southwest Spain, as we","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Greeks: A Global History","authors":"Maria Georgopoulou","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0251","url":null,"abstract":"Roderick Beaton’s book The Greeks: A Global History provides a great synthesis of a complex history of three and half millennia written by an “outsider,” that is, not a native of Greece. Beaton, a (literary) historian of Byzantium and modern Greece, makes use of current scholarship in areas outside his own academic expertise to offer a global history not of Greece (a place) but of the Greeks. In addition to the longue durée, this global view encompasses both the classic achievements of the Greeks (intellectual, technological, and scientific) and their physical diaspora around the globe.Shedding light on major literary works, the book is a tribute to the longevity of the Greek language, spoken continuously from 1500 BCE to the present, and its most admirable creations, deftly highlighted in each chapter. The Persians of Aeschylus (472 BCE), for instance, is shown to echo the new moral and geopolitical universe of Hellas, where the Greeks fought for their liberty (p. 114). More than 2000 years later, the poem Erotokritos, written in seventeenth-century Crete by Vincenzo Cornaro in the vernacular Cretan dialect, reflects the new ideas of the Renaissance that shun classical education in favor of theatrical immediacy, not unlike the contemporary plays of William Shakespeare (p. 373–75).Thanks to their achievements, the Greeks managed to transcend the limits of their homeland to form colonies, networks, empires, and diasporas. Beaton’s use of the archaeological record to flesh out the entrepreneurial activities of the Greek-Mycenean world that stretched through the whole of the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to Gibraltar, should be applauded, as it opens new perspectives. The Mediterranean was repeatedly “conquered” by Greek merchants, not only in antiquity but also in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.The conquests of Alexander the Great went even further to usher in the global spread of Greek civilization, scholarship, and language to Asia and Africa. Becoming Greek (hellenismos) was the fashion everywhere, not only in the second century BCE but also during the Roman era and in Byzantium, where it evolved as the very identity of the state along with the Orthodox Church. Even under Ottoman rule, the Greek commercial diaspora and intelligentsia that had arisen by the eighteenth century created a palimpsest of the Hellenistic world where the Greek speakers were not the rulers but the ruled (p. 392). A similar diaspora of educated Greeks, such as the poet C. P. Cavafy, and successful shipowners, whose mental horizons and patriotic pride in belonging to a much more broadly based Hellenic nation, have made contemporary Greece a global nation (p. 425).If the connecting tissue of the book is the Greek language and its achievements, at the very core of the work is Greek identity as it was formed, understood, and modified through time. The author clearly espouses the definition of Greekness provided by Isocrates: “people [are] to be called Greek if","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Performing Mediterraneanness: Mediterranean Diaspora and Solidarity Politics in Chapel Hill, NC","authors":"Christina Banalopoulou","doi":"10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0230","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Mediterranean diaspora in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, provides an excellent vantage point for the examination of solidarity economies that challenge inequalities and nexuses of power relations on both local and international levels. Despite its sociopolitical and cultural significance for the study of diasporic negotiations of nationalism and the constitution of transnational bonds, however, Chapel Hill’s Mediterranean communities are unrepresented in the literature. Combining participant observation with anecdotal cross-cultural encounters and oral histories, this article demonstrates that Chapel Hill’s Mediterranean diaspora creates alliances in ways that exceed the nation-state. Once uprooted from their geopolitical context, Chapel Hill’s Mediterranean communities, which consist of first-generation immigrants, refer to their shared Mediterraneanness in order to enhance and make sense of their bottom-up world-making practices and their subversive capacities. Performance, both as formally aestheticized cultural practices and as everyday expressive acts, is of key significance for the ways in which these communities negotiate the politics of solidarity and develop alliances within and beyond the nation-state. Therefore, the author draws upon the “performative turn” in ethnography and proposes a methodology that utilizes performance as both research content and a way of knowing.","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136152447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}