Iain Chambers Read Bio Collapse
Iain Chambers lives in Naples where he researches on the Mediterranean. His most recent book in English is Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).
# 123
If we are to think with Mediterranean archives and the challenge their recursivity poses to the conceptualization of the present and possible futures, we cannot avoid registering the formation of the basin as a “colonial lake.” This conception foregrounds that since 1900, and until quite recently, the Mediterranean was directly ruled from London, Paris, and Rome. To consider what escapes this coloniality, and to insist on the incalculable slipping through the nets of a still hegemonic positivism—secured by a faith in the European human and social sciences—is to encounter that we, Occidentals, do not know what we thought we knew.