John Baldacchino. Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt and Nostalgia [book review]

Abstract

Book reviewed: John Baldacchino. Makings of the Sea: Journey, Doubt and Nostalgia, Gorgias Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-61719-940-0. -- To speak of the Mediterranean is to speak of migration. From the start, hence, any discussion of this geographical region is characterised by mobility, flux, and by an internal tension that defies the levelling tendencies of any generic definitions of cultural identities. Fernand Braudel’s classic study of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II spoke of the sea in relation to the routes that crossed land and water: the sea’s networks and connections transformed it into a transnational geographical space that made any singular perception of this sea sound unbefitting to such a perpetually evolving region. This fluidity in our understanding of the region and its multiple groupings of inhabitants, is not only perpetually incomplete—because it is always on the move—but our reasoning must also take account of the undeniable fact that the region is criss-crossed by an influx of currents from outside the peripheries of the area that challenge its political and cultural stability. Iain Chambers reminds us of this as he writes of the characteristic fluctuations in the Mediterranean that affect people all over the region despite the sharing of a common sea: Today’s immigrants from the south of the planet, however feared, despised, and victimized by racism and social and economic injustice, are the historical reminders that the Mediterranean, firmly considered the origin of Europe and the ‘West’, has always been part of a more extensive elsewhere. If its ‘internal’ constitution has...always depended on ‘external’ forces, its histories, cultures, and peoples...have also consistently abandoned its shores for other places. If Ulysses is the mythical figure of the traveller, the stranger, with which that history commences, it is once again with the traveller and the stranger that this history continues (Chambers, 2008, p.39). [excerpt from the review]