mediterranean literature 325
The profound cultural abyss that separated reformist officials and progressive landlords
in their respective “souths” from their local administrative charges can be observed in
Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli and the novels of Marcel Pagnol and Yashar Kemal.
But one finds similar suspicion and hostility in the experiences of colonial officials in
North Africa, Egypt, and Palestine. Here the writings of [the Francophone Lebanese
novelist and journalist] Amin Maalouf, [the Egyptian novelist] Abdel Rahman al-
Sharqawi, and [the Algerian writer and linguist] Mouloud Mammeri [writing in French
and Berber] provide a useful guide. (Burke, 2013: 927)Even as the Mediterranean loses its purchase as a category of analysis, Mediterranean
literature, paradoxically, helps us in the “effort to imagine the history of the modern
Mediterranean as a whole” (Burke, 2013: 924; see also Ben-Yehoyada, this volume).^12
More recently, the Mediterranean has been appropriated as something like a brand
name. Inspired by the writings of the Marseilles-based writer Jean-Claude Izzo, Europa
Editions and its founder, Sandro Ferri, have defined a subgenre of “Mediterranean
noir”—hard-boiled crime fiction, with a focus on contemporary violence and corrup-
tion, that takes the Bible, the Homeric epics, and Oedipus Rex as its antecedents. “The
Mediterranean Noir novel ... represents a search for truth in places characterized by
fratricidal violence; but also by beauty. While these novels offer us a vision of the dark
side, the underbelly of society, their settings are invariably places that are caressed by
bright sunshine, by blue skies and clear waters” (Black and Blue, 2007). As in the case
of the texts cited by Burke (above), the “Mediterraneanness” of this collection of works
by authors such as Izzo, Andrea Camilleri, Manuel Vásquez Montalban, and Batya Gur
would seem to reside more in the “family resemblance” they present than in being “of”
the Mediterranean in Horden and Purcell’s sense of pertaining “either [to] the whole
Mediterranean or [to] an aspect of it to which the whole is an indispensable frame-
work” (2000: 2). Meanwhile, it is perhaps in the realm of music more than literature
that the label “Mediterranean” has enjoyed greatest success. In recent years, as musi-
cologist Goffredo Plastino has shown, it has been enthusiastically embraced by musical
artists and producers in everything from album titles (Mediterranea, Mediterranean
Crossroads) to the promulgation of a “new Mediterranean sound.” Though sometimes
interpreted only as a geographical setting or a source of inspiration, the Mediterranean
is more often evoked as the place where heterogeneous styles, instruments, and tradi-
tions have been brought together by long histories of intense contact and exchange,
such that “every expression of Mediterranean music has, may have, or has previously
had an evident or concealed relationship with another expressive form or musical cul-
ture, and that this history may be revealed, reiterated, or for that matter invented ... by
means of collaboration, contamination, fusion, hybridization between various styles,
and by the simultaneous use of musical instruments employed in different Mediterranean
countries” (Plastino, 2003: 16–17). Within single tracks or the work of single artists,
vocabularies of hybridization and fusion abound; in other cases, the compilation (with
titles like Mediterranean Café Sound or A Mediterranean Odyssey) is the format of
choice for showcasing heterogeneity within a frame of commonality that might be
traced to shared roots or influences (“the Arab, Gypsy, Latin and Maghreb traditions
co-exist within each and every genre of the music”) or self-consciously ascribed to a
geographically-based essentialism of hot climates, exotic cuisine and sultry rhythms
(Plastino, 2003: 1–3).