Seawork, language, coffee and tomatoes
Iain Chambers
Abstract
How to write and research in the light of migration, genocide and decolonial imperatives? This short essay proposes a way of moving through such questions while seeking to avoid their reduction to disciplinary objects and to a discursive regime of representation. Writing in the Mediterranean as a site of intersecting histories, cultures, and migrations, and insisting on the fluidity of the maritime world and the drifting nature of language itself, the deliberate inconclusiveness of the writing seeks the critical opening of a mobile methodology. This means registering how language is inflected and loses its illusions of transparency and neutrality when confronting the brutal fashioning of the modern world, ultimately prompting us to change our language and infuse it with another register of affects and sensibilities.
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Maritime archives, language, opacity, mobility, creolisation, criticism
Pages
11-21
DOI
10.25430/2531-4130/V18-002