mediterranean

The workshop “Travelling matters: rereading, reshaping, reusing objects across the Mediterranean” intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways. We intend to discuss a most diverse array of objects flowing in all directions and to concentrate on the “second-handedness” of displaced objects: how and why moving objects acquire new functions and new meanings, and with what consequences for the relations between the communities involved? These perspectives demand a broad chronology, extending from antiquity to the present-day, and for the intersection between different time frames, from the relatively narrow scale of individual objects being displaced across the Mediterranean to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing.

Continuer la lecture

Attention : Date limite de candidature le 15 septembre

Abstracts (300 words) are due by September 15, 2019 to Yasser Elhariry (yasser.elhariry@dartmouth.edu), Isabelle Keller-Privat (isa.kellerprivat@gmail.com), and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (etamalet@tulane.edu).

Contributors will be notified of acceptance by September 30, 2019.

A selection of papers will be published in an edited volume in the wake of the conference.

Hospitality is a complex, paradoxical concept whose etymology foregrounds an aporia. Derived from hostis, the foreigner and potential enemy, the hospes or host welcomes the guest, implying an intricate relationship between receiver and received, insider and outsider, as well as a compensatory relation since both hospes and hostis derive from the Latin verb hostire: “to treat as equal,” “to compensate,” “to pay back” (Grassi 35). The foreigner shifts from the position of an endangered, alienated subject to one who is included within the protective folds of the polis and the home. In welcoming the other, the host not only shares his home and power, but also entitles the guest (if only temporarily) to his own power as despot—etymologically, “the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality” (Derrida 149)—while reasserting his own domination. As a result, the commutative essence of the relationship between host and guest—whereby, as René Schérer argues, the host “acknowledges, through and thanks to the figure of the guest, his own exilic self” (40)—is perpetually jeopardized. In Claude Raffestin’s formulation, “hospitality is a right that warrants the transgression of limits without entailing violence” (166; qtd. Grassi 23).

Continuer la lecture

Étiquette : mediterranean

Call for paper – Travelling Matters: rereading, reshaping, reusing objects across the Mediterranean, Workshop, Haïfa, 8th September 2022 (deadline : april 10th 2022)

Call for proposals for Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean – International Conference – Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès – March 26-27, 2020 Convened by Yasser Elhariry, Isabelle Keller-Privat, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev