Fatti e Fabule. Geografie more-than-wet del Mediterraneo Nero

Abstract

This book is the outcome of a research on cultural geography and critical ocean geographies that explores the possibility of applying the challenges of the recent oceanic turn to the Mediterranean. In particular, the possibility of thinking-with the sea is here applied to a specific space, that of the contemporary Black Mediterranean. A trans-oceanic space, connected to the Black Mediterranean of the pre-modern era (Robinson, 1983) and to the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993), the site of the birth of capital through the triangular route of the Middle Passage, the contemporary Black Mediterranean is a space marked by the violence of the wake (Sharpe, 2016) that determines and disciplines the lives and deaths of the people who attempt to cross it. At the same time, like any space in which capital accumulates its forces of organisation, value extraction and labour-power production, this space of the sea is a space of possibilities: it is a space in which the turbulent materiality of the sea co-constructs, regenerates and incorporates possible counter-subjectivities, counter-practices, counter-narratives. The latter, specifically, become fabulations to re-inhabit the planet and imagine how it could be otherwise. Facts and fabulae thus represent a knot, intertwined and indissoluble, which, when placed at sea level, suggest other stories, other geographies, other relationships, other politics. Through E.C. Osondu’s novel When the Sky is ready, stars will appear, Laila Lalami's novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and the multiple fabulae of oceanic Afrofuturism, stories become a possible methodology for respons-ability: a feminist practice that, starting from the politics of listening and the recognition of intersectional positioning, tries to imagine alternative possible worlds and futures.