This special session will explore the possibilities of conceptualizing Mediterranean connectivity through literature. The papers address themes such as borders and borderlands, identity formation, cultural interactions, and questions of belonging. “Mediterranean Literature,” a contested category, is the point of departure for this session. In recent years, the Mediterranean has become the focus of scholarship in multiple disciplines as a region with a rich history of connectivity and mobility; as a framework, Mediterranean Studies responds to anachronistic national historiographies by exploring issues that were typically neglected in traditional history, such as minority groups, women, and socio-cultural groups that do not align with modern nation-states. Disciplines such as history and art history have thrived in dialogue with Mediterranean Studies. Literary studies, however, despite efforts at globalization, remain largely fragmented across national divides in our academic disciplines. This session places Mediterranean Studies in dialogue with world literature and presupposes that literature—as much as history, climate, ecology, and economy—constructs a connected Mediterranean world that can be mapped through the movement of bodies, texts, and ideas.

Nasser Meerkhan (Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley) begins the session by exploring the work of the fourteenth-century Granadan scholar Ibn al-Khaṭīb in Islamic historiography and literature in the Western Mediterranean. Meerkhan argues that Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s rhetoric contains the germ of al-Andalus as it is widely imagined in both medieval and contemporary Islamic poetry, and he draws attention to the ways in which Granada is conceived as an exemplary metropolis with historical ties to Damascus, yoking together two sides of the Mediterranean in a single author’s work. Meerkhan concludes that Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s intertwining of his life and poetry with his theoretical texts made it impossible to separate his actual self from Andalusi history, literature, and politics.

In dialogue with Meerkhan’s conclusion, the second paper also examines the intertwining of self-fashioning and literary historiography. Baki Tezcan (Professor at UC Davis), explores Mediterranean connectivity through the movement of a single text and author across linguistic and confessional divides. His paper addresses the life and works of Ali Ufki/Albertus Bobovius (d.1670) who was born in Lviv and enslaved by Crimean Tatars. Tezcan specifically studies Ali/Albertus’s Turkish translation of The Golden Gate to assess the possibilities of producing cross-cultural literary works that could be read in the seventeenth century both in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, accounting for challenges of religious difference. These two papers address the movement of bodies and ideas across Mediterranean frontiers and provide a framework for analyzing Mediterranean connectivity facilitated though literature.

The third paper by Thari Ladeen Zweers (PhD candidate at Cornell University) complicates notions of Mediterranean connectivity by pointing to distinctions drawn by Boccaccio between Europeans and non-Europeans. Zweers explores Boccaccio’s De casibus in dialogue with Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory on borderlands and argues that the De casibus is concerned with conceptualising a European interior space, resulting in the formulation of a rhetoric of power that conceptualises Europe as a borderland with an impenetrable outer border, and fluid internal borders.

Finally, Giancarlo Tursi (PhD candidate at NYU) offers a diachronic consideration of the literary Mediterranean. Tursi uses Karla Mallette’s term “boustrophedon” (the name for an ancient script that runs from left to right and right to left again, as a metaphor for bridging cultures through writing). He explores the ways Algerian-Italian novelist Amara Lakhous’s self-translations embody such a vision of the “boustrophedon” from his bilingual Arabic-Italian The Bedbugs and the Pirates, in which Arabic and Italian meet in the middle of the text, to his Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, originally written in Algerian dialect and transposed into a dialectal Italian. This paper illustrates the fluidity of identity in which Europe and the Arab world are not at odds with each other, rendering the Mediterranean a connecting space rather than a border separating the two regions. Tursi’s paper also provides a vision of the Mediterranean world that counteracts frequent readings of Mediterranean connectivity that end in the early modern period with Europe’s “discovery” and colonization of the Americas.

The Mediterranean Sea, as a site of confluence, exchanges, mobilities, and connectivities, proves to be a versatile and malleable vessel in which identities dissolve and consolidate. Identities do not map onto tidy dichotomies, and this special session will show how borders can be spaces of textual and literary exchanges that delink literature and literary historiography from the confines of the nation-state. Each paper in this session will be allotted 12-14 minutes, which leaves at least 15 minutes for discussion.