Mediterranean Ecocriticism

The Mediterranean is not only a place on maps. It is a category, indicating crossings, the inevitability of hybridization processes, the intersections of imagined pasts and possible futures, and a material-discursive site for new Orientalisms—something which involves all places where lands and seas are used to connect as well as to divide. In a time when ecocriticism is hardly imaginable without a reference to matters of environmental justice, postcolonial studies, elemental materialism, more-than-human biopolitics, trans-corporeality, and trans-locality, these issues—an idealism of the roots and an unparalleled eco-humanitarian emergence—reveal new disclosures for our discipline, and demand to be conceptualized. This essay examines these theoretical principles, proposing new interpretive keys to read Mediterranean literatures, with particular emphasis on a comparative perspective.