Paper short abstract:

Through the case of Sicily and its complicated relation to different Mediterranean shores, this paper attempts at situating the contemporary Mediterranean within the current context of "migration crisis" in Europe.

Paper long abstract:

A prominent criticism of "area studies" is the way the scholars lump distant geographies and diverse societies together and claim expertise over them (Guyer 2004). So, why the Mediterranean? Based on ethnographic research, I attempt at both historically and ethnographically informed ways of understanding this (human) geography through Sicily's complicated relation to Mediterraneanness, Italianness, and Africanness. To understand how the “migration crisis” simultaneously divides and unites the shores of the Mediterranean, I offer an approach to the Mediterranean not as a mere body of water where events take place, but as the very stake of power. Within this context, I see the ‘return’ to Mediterraneanist anthropology as a search for potential sites that may unsettle the idea of Europe (as well as Africa and Asia) as a coherent region. Against the European representation of itself as a historically incomparable continent (Ben-Yehoyada 2017), I centralize the Mediterranean in my analysis to underscore both the connections and the inconsistencies within and between the continents surrounding this body of water.