Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean - (Mediterranean Perspectives) by Yasser Elhariry & Isabelle Keller-Privat & Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

Book Synopsis

Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean examines the embodied praxis of hospitality--whether through the ritual modes of religious history, the pages of literature, the visual arts, dystopian narratives of the future, or the realpolitik of shelter and asylum. It moves beyond dominant transit tropes of aporetic exchange (in the lineage of Jacques Derrida). The volume offers a fractal view of Mediterranean studies as inflected by the lived, aesthetic, and philosophical histories of hospitality.

This book brings together leading voices ranging from early-career to established scholars across the social sciences and the humanities to argue for a distinct focus on the Mediterranean pre/conditions and pre/histories of hospitality. To date, there has been no interdisciplinary intervention that takes up hospitality as a starting point to critical thinking about Mediterranean studies as an expansive, dynamic, and ever-evolving discipline. Against the inescapable backdrop of necropolitics and catastrophe, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean offers a rich, agentive alternative for Mediterranean worldmaking.

From the Back Cover

Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean examines the embodied praxis of hospitality--whether through the ritual modes of religious history, the pages of literature, the visual arts, dystopian narratives of the future, or the realpolitik of shelter and asylum. It moves beyond dominant transit tropes of aporetic exchange (in the lineage of Jacques Derrida). The volume offers a fractal view of Mediterranean studies as inflected by the lived, aesthetic, and philosophical histories of hospitality.

This book brings together leading voices ranging from early-career to established scholars across the social sciences and the humanities to argue for a distinct focus on the Mediterranean pre/conditions and pre/histories of hospitality. To date, there has been no interdisciplinary intervention that takes up hospitality as a starting point to critical thinking about Mediterranean studies as an expansive, dynamic, and ever-evolving discipline. Against the inescapable backdrop of necropolitics and catastrophe, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean offers a rich, agentive alternative for Mediterranean worldmaking.

yasser elhariry is Associate Professor of French at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation, and the Postfrancophone Lyric, and co-editor of Literature as Sound Studies.

Isabelle Keller-Privat is Professor of English at the University Toulouse Jean Jaurès. She is chief editor of Caliban, French Journal of English Studies, and has co-edited various collections of interdisciplinary papers on exile and migration, travel letters, and Mediterranean criticism. Her current research focuses on travel literature and poetry and on the ethics and praxis of hospitality in Anglophone literature.

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University and Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa. She is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean, and co-editor of several volumes, among them Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis and Water Logics (forthcoming). Her current research draws on biotheory, new materialism, and ecocriticism to theorize the drowning of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean. She is Editor of the journal Expressions maghrébines and a co-Editor of the Passagen book series with Georg Olms Verlag.

About the Author

yasser elhariry is Associate Professor of French, associated faculty in the Middle Eastern Studies Program, and affiliated faculty in the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation, and the Postfrancophone Lyric (Liverpool University Press, 2017), as well as editor and coeditor of several essay collections: Cultures du mysticisme (Expressions maghrébines, 2017), Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis (Palgrave, 2018), The Postlingual Turn (SubStance, 2021), Sounds Senses (Liverpool University Press, 2021), Abdelkébir Khatibi: Literature and Theory (PMLA, 2022), and the forthcoming edited volumes, Literature as Sound Studies and Water Logics. His essays appear in Yale French Studies, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New Literary History, L'Esprit Créateur, Contemporary French Civilization, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, Francosphères, French Forum, Parade sauvage: revue d'études rimbaldiennes, and several edited volumes. He is completing a new book on the cultural history of holes.

Isabelle Keller-Privat is Professor of English Literature and Poetry at the University Toulouse Jean Jaurès where she teaches British literature, poetry, and translation. She is the co-director of the LABEX research program "New Perspectives on Hospitality: Memorial, Artistic, Philosophical and Political Issues," and the chief editor of Caliban: French Journal of English Studies. She was awarded the International Lawrence Durrell Prize for New Scholarship in 2000 and has since contributed to many conferences and publications on Lawrence Durrell, V. S. Naipaul, Jon McGregor and David Gascoyne. She has published the first essay on Lawrence Durrell's poetry at Fairleigh Dickinson University Press--Lawrence Durrell's Poetry. A Rift in the Fabric of the World (2019). She has published over 30 papers and book chapters in national and international peer-reviewed journals and has co-edited four collections of papers on Durrellian studies, interdisciplinary studies on exile and migration, and Mediterranean criticism.

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is a New Orleans-based scholar of Maghrebi literature, Mediterranean Studies, and the Environmental Humanities. She is Associate Professor of French, and affiliated faculty in Environmental Studies and Middle East & North African Studies at Tulane University. She is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean (2017), and coeditor of several edited volumes--most recently, Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (2025) and Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Landscapes (forthcoming). She is currently at work on several projects that explore the materiality of water as a site of alternative epistemologies. Among them, her book in progress, The Residual Migrant: Water Necropolitics in the Anthropocene, theorizes the dissolution of drowned migrants whose remains are amalgamated into the deep sea. She is Editor of the journal Expressions maghrébines, and coeditor of the "Passagen" book series (Georg Olms Verlag). She serves as Professor Extraordinarius at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa.