A PRAISE OF THE IMPURE. THEORETICAL OUTLINES OF A MEDITERRANEAN ECOCRITICISM

A sea defined from its relationship with the land, the Mediterranean is the cradle of modern natural-cultural imagination and discourses. A Mediterranean ecocriticism, however, is something more than a literary travel across picturesque areas of the planet, in search of ancient glories and of “traces on the Rhodian shore.” Rather, a Mediterranean ecocriticism is the exploration of the main intellectual categories that this historically and geographically "impure" sea/land--with all of its innumerable encounters of elements, cultures, societies, and bodies--brings in the general discourse of ecocriticism. Among these categories, hybridity, along with “Mediterraneanism” (a “proximal” version of Orientalism), is the most relevant one. Reflecting on the experience of a special issue of Ecozon@ expressly devoted to this topic, which I have recently guest-edited, I will sketch in this paper the coordinates of a “Mediterranean Ecocriticism.” My proposal will be that of pathway toward a “post-terrestrialism” in which the material-conceptual dynamics of land and sea, like all the different forces involved in this naturalcultural scenery, co-emerge and co-evolve.