Makings of the Sea

By John Baldacchino

Subjects: Art and society, Intellectual life, arts, Aesthetics, literature, Mediterranean National characteristics, Political culture, Civilization, Foreign public opinion, Popular culture, fil, aesthetics, Social conditions, Mediterranean region, history, History, Mediterranean

Description: In Thodor Angelopoulos’s *Ulysses’s Gaze* it is poetically claimed that God’s first creation was the journey after which came doubt and nostalgia. Anyone who knows the Mediterranean will recognise that claims of this sort go beyond their poetic packaging. *Makings of the Sea* presents the Mediterranean as a horizon of journey, doubt, and nostalgia. Readers are invited to follow the journey as that which casts the Mediterranean as a universal aesthetic imaginary; where through doubt, a hybrid imaginary emerges over a horizon stretched between utopia and crude fact; and where we are all invited to reconsider nostalgia as the ground without which no one might properly converse with the nuances of everyday life. Engaging with 20th century Mediterranean visual and performing arts, literature and music, this book invites the reader to consider how everyday aesthetics inhabit and define the Mediterranean as a common cultural horizon founded on difference. The author entertains no illusions on how this region is ‘shared’ between its peoples and their histories. Instead, he urges the reader to attend to what Albert Camus identifies as “the light” which Mediterranean men and women “have been able to keep.” Yet one must never forget that Camus’s statement is further qualified with a warning: “just as the Mediterranean sun is the same for all men, the effort of men’s intelligence should be a common inheritance and not a source of conflicts and murders.”