Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique(Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society)

This collection rethinks crisis in relation to critique through the prism of various declared ‘crises’ in the Mediterranean: the refugee crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the Greek debt crisis, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian question, and others. With contributions from cultural, literary, film, and migration studies and sociology, this book shifts attention from Europe to the Mediterranean as a site not only of intersecting crises, but a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, visions of futurity, and radical imaginaries shaped through or against frameworks of crisis. If crisis rhetoric today serves populist, xenophobic or anti-democratic agendas, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or partake in transformative languages by scholars, artists, and activists? Or should we forge different vocabularies to understand present realities? This collection explores alternative mobilizations of crisis and forms of art, cinema, literature, and cultural practices across the Mediterranean that disengage from dominant crisis narratives.  Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction.- 2. Dwelling in Noncrisis (Im)possibility: Transmigrant Collective Action in Greece, 2016.- 3. In the Refugee Machine: The Absence of Crisis and its Critical (Re-)Production.- 4. In Precarity and Prosperity: Refugee Art Going Beyond the Performance of Crisis.- 5. Crisis, Common Sense, and Boredom: A Critique of Neoliberal Hegemony in Turkey.- 6. Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Populism in Spain: Metaphors, Nation-branding, and Social Change.- 7. Palestine and the Migrant Question.- 8. Lampedusa in Europe; or Touching Tales of Vulnerability.- 9. Alternative Hospitalities on the Margins of Europe.- 10. Algeria Time and Water Logic: Image, Archive, Mediterranean Futurity.- 11. Greek Weird Wave; Or, On How to Do A Cinema of Biopolitics.- 12. Moving Images, Moving Archives: Fracturing the Crisis in Interactive Greek Documentaries.- 13. Ice-As-Money and Dreams-As-Ice: Christos Ikonomou’s “The Blood of the Orange” and the Critique of Liquidity.- 14. Rethinking Stasis and Utopianism: Empty Placards and Imaginative Boredom in the Greek Crisis-scape.

About the Author :
Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Assistant Professor in Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University, Netherlands. She is the author of Barbarism and Its Discontents (2013) and co-author of Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts (2018). Janna Houwen is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University, Netherlands. She is the author of Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images (2017) and co-editor of Legibility in the Age of Signs and Machines (2018). Liesbeth Minnaard is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University, Netherlands. She is the author of New Germans, New Dutch: Literary Interventions (2008) and co-editor of Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism (2014).

Review :
“The book … sets the ambitious goal to bring new meaning to this word and restore its semantic multiplicity. … it offers a rich overview of the most important theoretical scholarship on the subject … it concretely provides the reader with the means to reread and rethink contemporaneity under new points of view. In this sense, the book constitutes one of the most evident manifestations of the indispensable political role of cultural studies, and by extension, of contemporary humanities.” (Francesca Zaccone, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, Vol. 8 (1), 2022)