Iain Chambers: Critical Shipwrecks … and thinking with the diver

This talk proposes a postcolonial framing and a decolonial undoing of received understandings of the Mediterranean. It involves shifting critical coordinates to engage with the interrogative insistence of other histories, cultures and lives. At this point, the ship of Occidental knowledge and power suffers shipwreck, goes adrift and begins to lose its bearings. Thinking with, rather than thinking of the Mediterranean as an object, brings into play further, often unsuspected, critical languages that provide another compass. Listening to literature and sound, responding to the visual arts, for example, involves a radical review of the concepts of critical distance, scientificity and neutrality. Habitual maps are torn, histories rerouted, and chronologies challenged in a contemporary historiographical operation. This promotes unauthorised accountings of the Mediterranean’s spacetime, conjoining past, present and possible futures. In this altogether less assured journey lies the critical challenge to our existing hold on the world.

Iain Chambers has taught cultural, postcolonial and Mediterranean studies for many years at the University of Naples, L’Orientale. He is now an independent writer and researcher. Among his publications are Mediterranean Crossings (2008), Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), Mediterraneo Blues (2020) and, with Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question (2025). In 2022, he was a member of the artistic collective «Jimmie Durham & A Stick in the Forest by the Side of the Road» at documenta 15. He writes for the Italian daily il Manifesto.

This evening conference is part of the workshop "Mediterranean Environments: History, Art, and Borders".