Nahrain Al-Mousawi
(EUME Fellow 2015/16)

Chair: Leyla Dakhli
(Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin)

Abstract
The literature of undocumented migration reveals the way spaces of the Mediterranean border—the detention center, the checkpoint, the fence, the blockade, the boat—create their own place-narrative of the Mediterranean, not one of vague and unified multicultural contentment, but one of division, fragmentation, and irregular mobility. While the attraction of the Mediterranean has been associated with an appealing diversity and comsopolitanism, the repulsion of the Mediterranean comes from its more current identity as a “zone of conflict”, demanding containment. Both of these utopian Mediterranean narratives construct the clandestine migrant figure: uncanny, unfamiliar, un-belonging, unfitting, anachronistic. In this lecture, I argue that clandestine migrant characters make the Mediterranean a heterotopic space by creating a dialectical relationship between the inside and outside of their destination sites, simultaneously internal to, a part of norms regulating the cultural spaces they other, and external to them. I also explore how the clandestine migrant’s contemporary optic of the Mediterranean journey is juxtaposed against a predominant and ubiquitous view of an enduring Mediterranean that is romantic and nostalgic.

One of the main vehicles of performing the Mediterranean is the retrieval of a lost paradise, a cosmopolitan and liberatory frontier for “sensual pleasures,” “authentic heritage,” and “mythical vices”. Nostalgia is about reclamation of a time and place and a place in time, and thus concern with a suspended future stuck in the past. Nostalgia operates as a vehicle for territorialization—a commemorative landscape in service of a reclaimed future. Counter-nostalgia in the literature allows for an intertextuality that sets up older familiar tropes of Mediterranean adventure and carefree tourism with newer unfamiliar tropes of a Mediterranean increasingly fragmented, increasingly Other to Europe and the West. The importance of heterotopia in the “Mediterranean narrative” is not about its how its past and present places compare. But rather it is about how unfamiliar, marginal places of clandestinity perform in relation to familiar, visible, sites of nostalgia. The unfamiliar and liminal are not only effects of central and visible sites but (re)construct these sites upon which they reflect and form the dynamic heterotopia of the “Mediterranean narrative” in lieu of a suspended narrative that looks backward.

Nahrain Al-Mousawi received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in Comparative Literature, with a focus on Arabic and English literature. Her MA was from the University of Texas, Austin, in Middle East Studies. Her BA was in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation “Clandestine Mediterranean: Arab-African Migrant Literature” focuses on undocumented migrant narratives from North Africa across the Mediterranean, as well as conceptualizations of the Mediterranean from a geo-literary perspective. As a EUME Fellow, she will work on a book manuscript based on her dissertation and expand her analysis to include literary and other cultural productions from West Africa.

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