0001097 - CULTURAL, POSTCOLONIAL AND DECOLONIAL STUDIES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

The course in Cultural, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Studies of the Mediterranean offers a new perspective on the relationship between societies and cultures, in connection with global phenomena and processes, as they unfold across the Mediterranean and contribute to its construction as a space for dialogue, conflict, exchange, and creativity.

The three analytical perspectives—Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Decolonial Studies—are reconstructed in their mutual interactions and applied to specific cultural objects ranging from music, poetry, literature, audiovisual products such as films and music videos, new media, and contemporary art. These three interconnected approaches provide the methodology for understanding the Mediterranean as a geocultural construction.

The course provides the fundamental tools for critiquing the colonial cultural construction of modernity, beginning with the relationship between the North and South of the Mediterranean and the encounter between civilizations since the circulation of premodern knowledge.

The course then focuses on the relationship between subcultures, center-periphery, and the contemporary postcolonial metropolis.

The course is structured into four modules, the first three of which consist of lectures and the last of which is a workshop. The indicated reading list complements the literary and audiovisual materials discussed in class, as well as any materials suggested by attending students during the last of the four modules.

1. Precolonial Mediterranean and Mass Society: Hegemony, Poetics, and Magic.

2. Orientalism and Occidentalismo: The Cultural and Political Construction of Colonial Otherness through Art, Literature, and Historical-Social Sciences.

3. From Culture to Subcultures: Styles, Rituals, and Resistance, in Contemporary Metropolis.

4. Underground: Decolonizing Practices, Non-Normalized Bodies, and Subjectivities.