Imagination Besieged

Coloniality, Violence, and Feminism in "Mediterranean" Art and Literature
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-79542-3
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 120 Seiten, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 292 g

Reihe: Routledge Focus on Literature

Imagination Besieged records the silenced stories of a Mediterranean defined by loss, displacement, dispossession, violence, and its refusal. Drawing links and connections between Calabria, Athens, Ramallah, and Beirut, the book grapples with the legacies of histories of violence, criminality, and colonialism that define not only the past, but very much the present of a Mediterranean stuck in cycles of crises and death. This atmosphere of impossibility and immobility, as the author argues, debilitates and distorts imagination as much as it forces those subjected to it to find ways to express their dissent, sometimes in tragic ways.

The book invites to read with the “Mediterranean” as a space where violence can be “felt” and “breathed” in the air. It looks and makes connections between the works of artists and writers who have problematised and challenged existing ahistorical representation of the “Mediterranean” as an exotic tourist destination. In the works and words of the artists and writers discussed, the Mediterranean appears not as a mythical place, but in all its ambiguousness, paradoxes, dissonances, and the distortions on the bodies, the landscape, the environment, and the imagination produced by this persistent and invisibilised systemic violence. At the same time, Imagination Besieged listen to the refusal of this violence in the lives and practices of those who have rejected familial belongings, narrow definitions of identity, and their continuous dispossession.

Each essay taps into the depth of the archive of the modern Mediterranean to bring into the present what this present seeks to conceal.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bueti, Federica

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

0. Like Stubborn Fires

1. Sciarra (After Angela) I

2. Sciarra (After Angela) II

3. Movement I: From Grief to Grievance

4. Movement II: Even When They Are Dangerous, Examine the Heart of Those Machines You Hate

5. Colorless Knickknacks (After Fanon)

6. Living With Ruins

7. The Death Deal

8. Imagination Besieged

9. Movements at Sea: (Annotations on “Off You Shore Paper Trail”)

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Federica Bueti is the author of Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals: Voicing Dissent Across Differences (Routledge, 2022). She is a lecturer of anthropology at UniCal, Reggio Calabria, Italy, and a Writing Tutor at the MA of Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She has wide-ranging interests in decolonial, feminist, and Mediterranean literature, with particular focus on the decolonial feminist poetics and aesthetics of refusal.