Issue #123 Technology, Postcoloniality, and the Mediterranean

Technology, Postcoloniality, and the Mediterranean

Tiziana Terranova and Iain Chambers

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Film still from Alessandra Cianelli and Opher Thomson's All'aldilàdiqua (2020). Courtesy of the artists. 

Issue #123
December 2021










Notes
1

Iain Chambers and Marta Cariello, La Questione Mediterranea (Mondadori, 2019), all translations from Italian are by the author; Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question, trans. Pasquale Verdicchio (Guernica, 2005).

2

Chambers and Cariello, La Questione Mediterranea, 2.

3

See Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket Books, 2015).

4

Luciana Parisi and Ezekiel Dixon-Román, “Recursive Colonialism & Cosmo-computation,” Social Text Online, 2020.

5

Parisi and Dixon-Román, “Recursive Colonialism & Cosmo-computation”; for a definition of racial capitalism see Cedric Robinson, On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H. L. T. Quan (Pluto Press, 2019).

6

On cultural difference, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” in 32nd Bienal de São Paulo: Incerteza viva (Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 57–65 .

7

Da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability.”

8

Chambers and Cariello, La Questione Mediterranea, 13.

9

See Angela Balzano, Per farla finita con la famiglia: Dall'aborto alle parentele postumane (Meltemi, 2021).

10

Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (Pluto Press, 2019).

11

Yuk Hui, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics,” e-flux journal, no. 86 (November 2017) .

12

Parisi and Dixon-Román, “Recursive Colonialism & Cosmo-computation.”

13

Hui, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics.”

14

Parisi and Dixon-Román, “Recursive Colonialism & Cosmo-computation.”

15

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press, 1997).

16

See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, ed. Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1981).

17

Chambers and Cariello, La Questione Mediterranea, 21.

18

Da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability.”

19

Edward Said, “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories,” in Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, 1994); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacy of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015); and da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” where she writes: “What if, instead of The Ordered World, we could image The World as a Plenum, an infinite composition in which each existant’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all the other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time” (58).

20

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).

21

Salvatore Iaconesi, “The Principles of Nuovo Abitare,” Medium, June 6, 2021 .

22

Parisi and Dixon-Román, “Recursive Colonialism and Cosmo-computation.”

23

See Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1970), 3 and 37.

24

Rasheedah Phillips, “Counter Clockwise: Unmapping Black Temporalities from Greenwich Mean Time,” The Funambulist, no. 36 (July–August 2021).

25

Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Indiana University Press, 1987).

26

Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Stanford University Press, 1987). Actually, the use of zero had been developed far earlier in ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Chinese cultures, as well as in Mesoamerica. It was the Arab route that brought it to Europe.

27

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, “Why Is Mainstream International Relations Blind to Racism?” Foreign Policy, July 3, 2020 .

28

The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga (Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983).

29

Naveeda Khan and Hasan Azad, “The Anthropology of Uncertainty,” Taseel Commons, June 22, 2020, YouTube video .

30

Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2017).

31

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Northwestern University Press, 1973), 5.

32

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).

33

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

34

The concept of the Black Mediterranean was initially elaborated in the context of the study of racial capitalism and a deep history of the Mediterranean by Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed Press, 1983) and underlined by Robin D. G. Kelly in his Foreword to the 2000 edition. It has subsequently been revitalized by Alessandra Di Maio with “Mediterraneo Nero: Le rotte dei migranti nel millennio globale,” in La città cosmopolita: Altre narrazioni, ed. Giula De Spuches (Palumbo, 2012). Clearly indebted to Paul Gilroy’s path-breaking work on the Black Atlantic, the concept has recently been well summarized by Gabriele Proglio in his chapter “The Black Mediterranean,” in Gabriele Proglio, The Horn of Africa: Diasporas in Italy: An Oral History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

35

See Brian Rothman, “Topology, Algebra, Diagrams,” in “Topologies of Culture,” ed. Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova, special issue, Theory, Culture & Society 29, no. 4–5 (2012): 256; Xin Wei Sha, “Topology and Morphogenesis,” in “Topologies of Culture,” 220; Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014); and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “1 (Life) ÷ 0 (Blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value,” e-flux journal, no. 79 (February 2017) .

36

Luciana Parisi, “Automation and Critique,” in Reinventing Horizons, ed. Václav Janoščík, Vit Bohal, and Dustin Breitling (Vice Versa Art Books, 2016), 104.

37

Warren Sack, The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019), 1–2.