The International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies (IJEMS), a joint project of UNAOC Research Network partner EMUNI and the University of Nova Gorica, invites papers on the topic of “Entangled Histories? Trans-Cultural Encounters and Social Mobility in the Arab Mediterranean,” for a thematic issue.
Papers are invited that offer new perspectives on the complex history of trans-cultural movements and social mobility within, and between, the (Ottoman) Arab Mediterranean and Europe in the pre-modern, modern and contemporary periods.
The guest editors for the issue are Nadia Al-Bagdadi and Adam Mestyan at the Central European University, Budapest.
It may be remembered that the UNAOC has undertaken a regional strategy for the Mediterranean, and one of the priorities involves the examination of histories of interactions between the Mediterranean and other regions of the world, as well as within the Mediterranean.
Taking as its starting point the view that movements across the Mediterranean were multi-directional — whether official, clandestine or unseen — this special issue seeks to make a contribution to innovative research, empirical/archival and/or conceptual, and thus to enhance present debates about the Mediterranean as a sea that unites rather than divides.
A multilayered picture and understanding of processes of exchange may challenge paradigms of historical explanation that are still premised on deterministic frameworks of colonialism, post-coloniality, and westernization, and hence to maintain unilateral and univocal modes of analysis.
Papers based on new historical research, that would offer critical insights into the contemporary fetishes of culture and mobility, or that give due weight to non-political agency in comparative or across histories, are of particular interest to the editors. They would especially welcome contributions that focus on institutions, various forms of agency, translations (in the widest possible sense), life experiences, re-conceptualizations and recastings of centre and periphery relations, or symbolic geographies of the Levant and the Arab world in their Ottoman and Mediterranean contexts.
Papers should be submitted by 15 September 2011 to ijems(at)emuni.si