The New Mediterranean Studies

A Mediator between Area Studies and Global Studies

Bibliographic Data

ID12427654
AuthorsJohn Watkins (0000-0002-3518-8918, University of Minnesota, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume21
Issue2
Pages149-154
Publication date2013-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMediterranean Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1074-164X • E-ISSN: 2161-4741
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/mediterraneanstu.21.2.0149
OpenAlexW1920495492
LanguageEN
Citations received7

North Americans are witnessing an explosion of interest in the Mediterranean that is transforming their research, their teaching, and even institutional relations.1 In some ways, this is a strangely belated phenomenon. Area studies programs have been around for a long time. They first appeared in the United States after the Second World War and developed in clusters that followed the geographies of the Cold War: Russian and Eastern European studies, Uralic and Altaic studies, East Asian studies, African studies, Middle Eastern studies, Latin American studies. But since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the center of academic gravity has shifted. Scholars and administrators alike have exchanged the model of a world divided into discrete regions for one emphasizing it as a network of densely interrelated social, economic, political, demographic, and communications exchanges. Global studies initiatives are on the rise and, in many places, are receiving funding that once went to traditional area studies programs. The Mediterranean resurgence—marked by new courses, programs, conferences, and institutional initiatives from Kansas to Korea—comes at a strange time, and it seems to fly in the face of general academic trends. At this crucial moment in the development of our interdisciplinary field, we need to reflect on both our history and our future as Mediterraneanists in a global academy.The older area studies model rendered the Mediterranean all but invisible. As numerous scholars have noted, each of the older programs focused on a place that had either embraced communism or seemed poised to embrace it in the future.2 World War II had exposed the extent to which only a small cadre of specialists knew anything about East Asia. Americans were just as ignorant about Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, places where the Cold War might turn hot at any moment. Now perceiving the Western Eurocentrism of U.S. education as military unpreparedness, the government invited such organizations as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and similar organizations to form an Ethnographic Board charged with dividing the world into strategic areas suitable for interdisciplinary study. Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Act contributed millions of dollars into the development of such programs, as did private agencies like the Ford Foundation.3For some scholars, like the contributors to Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian's landmark collection, Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, the area studies paradigm was bankrupt from the start because of its origins in Cold War politics.4 It never transcended its original conception as the study of enemies and potential enemies. But their dismissal ignores a more complex story. These programs prospered because they could answer to multiple constituencies. Conservative legislatures and granting agencies were eager to support them as a weapon against Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro. At the same time, however, area studies programs attracted some of the most progressive PhD candidates because they offered an alternative to the emphasis on the European West in departments of history and the modern languages. As a result, the social and intellectual changes of the late 1960s enhanced the prestige of the same programs that had been founded to defend the capitalist West. Many of them had well-established PhD programs with alumni working around the world in colleges and universities, foreign offices, the United Nations, and numerous government and nongovernmental agencies.5Unlike their predecessors in the early Cold War period, graduates of area studies from the late 1970s on profited from the discussions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality that had begun to characterize curricula in the humanities and social sciences. That topic in itself is worth an essay. But my principal concern here is with geography. Even though 1980s and 1990s area studies programs were open to new methodologies, their Cold War geographies remained intact and prevented the creation of programs in Mediterranean studies. As far as Europe went, the division between the communist East and the capitalist West claimed precedence over the older division between the Roman, Mediterranean world of the South and the barbarian, primarily Germanic lands of the North. Yugoslavia and Albania belonged to one world; France and Spain to another. By the 1960s, even Greece was safely ensconced in NATO, its Balkan associations lost in the American imagination, and its Mediterranean ones subordinated to its identity as the birthplace of Western democracy.In the meantime, scholars treated North Africa and the Middle East primarily as places that Europeans had colonized, but rarely thought of them as part of a single regional system that followed the contours of the Roman Empire. In a series of influential books and articles that started as far back as 1895, the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne developed the argument that the Arab conquest of North Africa, Palestine, and southeastern Turkey in the seventh and eighth centuries had transformed the Mediterranean into an impermeable boundary between the Christian North and the Muslim South.6 Previous historians had argued that the Germanic invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries had destroyed Roman civilization and thus separated a highly urbanized classical past from the more agrarian, more provincial, and significantly less literate Middle Ages. By looking at the evidence of when long-distance trade and European urbanization actually began to decline, Pirenne argued that the real break with antiquity came two centuries later. According to his interpretation, Muhammad, rather than the Germanic barbarians, was responsible for destroying the earlier Mediterranean civilization. That civilization had depended upon commerce between Mediterranean ports. Once commerce became closed to Christians, with the expansion of Islam from the Middle East to southern Gaul, the culture it had created vanished as well. By postponing the date of Europe's alleged decline into the Middle Ages, Pirenne provided a double intellectual basis for belief in Europe as a coherent cultural space, distinct from the Muslim world on the other side of the Mediterranean. First of all, his revisionary treatment of the barbarian invasions minimized the cultural divisions between the Germanic North and the Mediterranean South by treating their interface less as a clash of civilizations than as a process of mutual assimilation. This left him free to declare the really destructive clash as that between European Christendom and the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa. In the process of this historiographic revision, Pirenne stigmatized the Arabs as the real barbarians who effectively destroyed the achievements of the classical past.Combined with the politics of the Cold War, Pirenne's thesis reinforced a sense of Europe as a sacrosanct Western space isolated by the Mediterranean from the barbarians of the Muslim South and by the Iron Curtain from the new barbarians of the communist, primarily Slavic East. As a result of these political and theoretical factors, the Mediterranean did not benefit from the kind of interdisciplinary investigations that other regions enjoyed.Scholars invested in the histories, societies, cultures, and languages of the lands that surrounded its shores carried out their careers primarily in traditional academic departments. Hispanists writing about Cervantes and Italianists studying Ariosto inhabited different worlds. They might have conversations with each other on the way to the MLA, but they were unlikely to attend the same sessions. It would certainly not have occurred to someone working on the Lombard invasions to organize a conference with someone researching nineteenth-century Italian settlements in Tunisia, even though both were dealing with questions of immigration, diaspora, and religious diversity in a closely integrated geography.During the 1990s, several developments occurred to challenge the traditional area studies programs. The collapse of the Soviet Union undermined interest in those parts of the world that were at the center of the curricular structures inherited from the Cold War. Russian enrollments plummeted, and programs in Russian and East European studies addressed an enemy who was no longer there. Czechs and Slovaks were quick to remind everyone that that they were never really part of “Eastern Europe” in the first place. In the meantime, the possibility of a more open international community combined with economic globalization, new immigration patterns, the communication resources of the Internet, and ever cheaper transoceanic flights encouraged a less compartmentalized view of the world. Around the turn of the millennium, North American universities marked this transition by developing programs, departments, and institutes of global studies.7Over the past decade, this new emphasis on global connectivity has complemented, reinforced, and sometimes resisted the older expertise in the history, culture, and current social experience of specific regions. In some cases, programs in global studies have incorporated older area studies into larger, more robust academic units. There are now numerous examples: International and Area Studies at Berkeley, the Global Studies Major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Program in Global and Area Studies at Michigan State University, the Program in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and numerous others. In a few institutions, however, the field of global studies has positioned itself as an ideological opponent of the older programs. A lot depends on the chemistry and ideological flavor of specific units and institutions. The emergence of the global need not signal the eclipse of the regional. Quite the contrary, regional expertise can ground global theorization in praxis at the same time that globalized perspectives can redeem area studies from academic provincialization.The Mediterranean has acquired a new visibility, even urgency, in universities' efforts to balance regional expertise against a global awareness of connectivities.8 One of the things that makes the Mediterranean distinct as a region is its diversity of languages, religions, cultures, and political systems within close, easily navigable proximity. We can talk about it as a single region with a common environment and long stretches of common history. But we can also talk about it as a paradigm for the modern world at large, which we now speak of as global system of diverse but increasingly interconnected societies. As a sea poised at the intersection of three continents, the Mediterranean invites approaches attentive both to regional specificity and global variation. Long before the jet age and the Internet, its waters drew radically diverse populations into close proximity. The hallmarks of modernity—long-range commerce, immigration, religious conflict and accommodation, and the exchanges between countless local languages and widely spoken lingua francas—have always been part of its history. Perhaps we are now devoting more of our scholarly and curricular energies to its past because it so closely resembles our present

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