Southern Thinking. Heritage, Migration and Mediterranean cultures (IGU Commission on History of Geography)
Chairs: Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg & Federico Ferretti
For this session, we welcome empirical or theoretical contributions that place heritage-related issues in the context of Mediterranean histories, cultures and circulations. The Mediterranean has disgracefully become a (disputed and violent) frontier, while in several historical periods it has been a "valley" putting different cultures in mutual communication and cross-pollination. These notions, which are expressed in a heterogeneous way, can be found in the works of classical geographers such as Carl Ritter and Elisée Reclus, of avant-garde artists such as Paul Signac and Henri Matisse and leading 20th-century European intellectuals such as Paul Valéry, Albert Camus and Gilles Deleuze. More recently, they have returned in the 'Southern Thinking' by Franco Cassano and in the concept of multiple 'Souths' by the Latin American authors of the Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality movement. Contributions refreshing the relations between these lines of thought and debates on geography and heritage, tangible and intangible, would be greatly appreciated. Interventions on other seas and maritime circulations are also welcome.
We would especially like to receive proposals on:
Decolonial thinking and geographies of the Souths;
Southern thinking and postcolonial, decolonial and anticolonial approaches in geography and cognate disciplines;
Southern thinking and decoloniality in their relation to feminism and gendered approaches;
Mediterranean worlds and metaphors in geography;
Historical geographies of Italy and other Mediterranean countries;
Historical geographies and geopolitics of land and sea;
Critical and radical geographies and their relations to heritage issues;
Works and lives of geographers committed to intercultural dialogue, anti-racism and anti-colonialism;
Geopoetics, artistic and literary geographies from/about the Souths;
Geography and geophilosophy;
Geographies of migration and culture's meetings;
Any other topic in the history and philosophy of geography
Essential bibliography:
F. Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano, Roma/Bari, Laterza, 1996.
J. Chabot, Albert Camus, la pensée de midi, Aix-en-Provence, Edisud, 2002.
G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? Paris, Les éditions de Minuit, 1991.
W. Mignolo, A. Escobar (eds.) Globalization and the decolonial option. London, Routledge, 2010.
E. Reclus, L'Homme et la Terre, Paris, Librairie Universelle, 1905-1908.