Mediterranean Modernism

Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development

Adam J. Goldwyn, Renée M. Silverman, Adam J. Goldwyn, Renée M. Silverman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137589279
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137586568
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

                               

© The Author(s) 2016

Adam J. Goldwyn and Renée M. Silverman (eds.)Mediterranean ModernismMediterranean Perspectives10.1057/978-1-137-58656-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Fernand Braudel and the Invention of a Modernist’s Mediterranean

Adam J. Goldwyn¹ and Renée M. Silverman²

(1)

North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota, USA

(2)

Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA

End Abstract

The Cosmopolitan Voice of Mediterranean Modernism

In 1923, the young French historian Fernand Braudel began working on a book about the Mediterranean policy of the sixteenth-century Spanish King Philip II. By the time it was published as La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II in 1949, ¹ however, Braudel’s views about the twentieth-century Mediterranean had changed so dramatically that Philip’s sixteenth-century Mediterranean had come to look decidedly different as well. So, too, had historiography, which, in Braudel’s view, could no longer be focused on narrow nationalisms, but instead had to be global in its scope. Thus, instead of a work on sixteenth-century Spain, Braudel’s new book encompassed the entirety of the Mediterranean and beyond, from pre-history to the author’s own day, with only a small section still devoted to the original premise. Like many other intellectuals and artists who came of age during the first half of the twentieth century, Braudel’s views of the past were forever changed by events on the global stage—the two world wars, the decline of colonial power, the increased movement of people across the borders of increasingly integrated nations, and the rise of competing political and aesthetic ideologies. These ideas are reflected in the new Mediterranean that he invented. This invented Mediterranean was deeply influenced by Braudel’s academic training and, perhaps more importantly, by his lived experience of the increasingly cosmopolitan region and his keen awareness of the interplay of cultures, the subtleties of the power dynamics among them, and the culture-specific strategies of appropriation and resistance to the hybridizing of the traditional with the imported. If culture and cultural geography are social constructs, ² then Braudel can be fairly said to have invented the modern Mediterranean.

In many ways, Braudel’s life can be considered a microcosm of the larger political, cultural, and aesthetic changes which would come to define modernism in Europe and the Mediterranean; indeed, the years between Braudel’s birth (1902) and the publication of La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II (1949) coincide with the peak period of modernism. Born in Luméville-en-Ornois, a small village in northeastern France, Braudel as a young man received his formal education in Paris. This early period of his life contains the seeds for his future development, particularly with regard to his conception of the Mediterranean. Braudel’s village roots on the margins of French and Mediterranean culture had a lasting impact on his development. A “historian of peasant-stock,” ³ as he would later describe himself, Braudel had experiential knowledge of life on the margins, far from the urban center of Paris where modernism first took hold. ⁴ In fact, he was himself a product of the urbanization sweeping France and the larger European and Mediterranean environs. In his autobiographical article entitled “Personal Testimony,” Braudel notes that his village had “roots go[ing] back for centuries: I imagine that its central square, where three roads and an ancient track come together, may correspond to the courtyard of an old Gallo-Roman villa” and that his house there, “built in 1806, lasted almost unchanged until 1970—a pretty good record for a village house.” ⁵ The same could not be said of the Paris to which he had arrived, which during the preceding half-century had been rebuilt almost from the ground up as part of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s controversial modernizing project. Braudel’s personal attachment and sensitivity to the deep temporal and cultural roots of the village in opposition to the city parallel the concerns of urbanism and its discontents ⁶ around the Mediterranean: for instance, the conflict between elite urban planners and the common citizens of cities such as Algiers with regard to Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus, or Thessaloniki during Ernest Hébrard’s reconstruction of the city after the Great Fire of 1917. ⁷ Like Haussmann’s Paris, Hébrard’s Thessaloniki dispensed with the winding streets and narrow alleyways of the medieval city and replaced them with broad boulevards, regular blocks, and square plazas.

The second important influence in Braudel’s formative education (and thus in his later construction of the Mediterranean) was his introduction to the academic historiography of the professors at the Sorbonne. These were divided into two camps: the more traditional Sorbonnistes and their critics, principally the Annalistes led by the historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch (the latter a Jewish intellectual murdered in 1940 by the Gestapo for his activities in the Resistance). In the same issue of The Journal of Modern History in which Braudel published his memoirs, J.H. Hexter’s “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien” outlines the academic battles between the Sorbonnistes and Annalistes:

The goal of the Annales [the journal edited by Febvre and Bloch and, later, Braudel] from the outset, therefore, was to undo the work of the Sorbonnistes, to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and the narrowly diplomatic, to turn them toward the new vistas in history. ⁸

Braudel’s early initiation into and subsequent leadership of the Annales school proved decisive for the new Mediterranean that he would invent: Braudel’s later experiences would convince him that the Sorbonnistes and their view of history—the view represented by Braudel’s early proposal to write on Philip’s Mediterranean policy—was “a mode outmoded, no longer adequate for coping with the issues which History must address itself, insufficient to capter l’histoire du monde. For the new History, a new sort of equipment is necessary, and a new organization of research.” ⁹ Peter Gay writes that “modernists considered Ezra Pound’s famous injunction, ‘Make it new!,’ a professional, almost sacred obligation.” ¹⁰ Though a historian, rather than an artist, Braudel’s emphasis on newness for its own sake shows his engagement with the broader aesthetic and theoretical trends of modernism: Braudel as avant-garde academic. In his commentary, Hexter rightly emphasizes the new aspects of Braudelian historiography without identifying those features which make it new; he rightly understands that the ideology of newness is more important than the specific form that such newness takes in Braudel’s work.

History and historiography shape the idea of modernism embraced in this volume—as Braudel with his particular disciplinary background would have instinctively recognized. For as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane have pointed out in their seminal study, one of the predominant conceptions of “modernism” revolves around the significance of the “modern” as “the historicist feeling that we live in totally novel times…that we are derivatives not of the past but of the surrounding and enfolding environment or scenario, that modernity is a new consciousness, a fresh condition of the human mind.” ¹¹ This line of thinking draws on previous philosophical and historiographical notions about periodization, which privilege the idea of breaking with the past rather than finding continuity within it. Indeed, Matei Calinescu has argued that the idea of “modernity” and “modernism” have their roots in Renaissance philosophy and historiography: like the leading intellectuals of the Renaissance, Modernists saw themselves as the avatars of a fundamental change, a “revolutionary way of thinking” that rejects the immediate past while actually, perhaps, affirming a more distant past that is imagined as an utopia. ¹²

Keeping Bradbury and McFarlane’s observations about the modern and modernism in mind, the newness that is central to our vision of what we term “Mediterranean Modernism,” in a way similar to Braudel’s innovative approach to the Mediterranean, means a break from narratives that would circumscribe the Mediterranean within specific geographic spaces and determine its center and periphery, thereby prescribing and proscribing its identity/ies. Modernism in the Mediterranean arose from the same confluence of large-scale political, historical, and cultural factors in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as modernism—the decline of colonial regimes and the increase in national fervor, the mass migrations of peoples caused by such political realignments, as well as by new technologies and industrialization—but these factors were conditioned by the Mediterranean’s unique history and geography, in particular its colonial, postcolonial, and colonizing circumstances which, as Braudel knew, coexisted unevenly, uneasily, and simultaneously.

Likewise, this volume, paralleling Braudel’s methodology and in keeping with what Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have called “the new Modernist Studies,” ¹³ extends the geographic and linguistic bounds of modernism far beyond Anglo-American literary discourse and the usual European metropoles. Indeed, Mediterranean Modernism as a theoretical and historiographical construct includes formerly marginalized and circumscribed spaces, languages, and cultures. This methodological approach, with its blurring of margin and center, reveals the hybrid cultural and artistic forms which are the defining feature of the works examined in this volume. Mediterranean geography, as well as the peculiar socio-cultural and linguistic politics of this geography, thus constitutes the axis on which our study turns. At once spatial and temporal, Mediterranean Modernism excavates the archeology not only of the region but also of the very concept of modernism. Significantly, it reveals modernism’s complex layering of place and time, bringing to light the inherently historical and historiographical complexities of the colonial and postcolonial with respect to both modernism and the Mediterranean area. ¹⁴

Given the impossibility of separating the colonial and postcolonial strata of this archeology directs us, like Braudel in his day, and in keeping with a recent study by David James and Urmila Seshagiri that emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between modernism and Postmodernism, to go beyond the customary limitation of modernism to the period 1890–1930, the dates attributed to it in Bradbury and McFarlane’s study. In fact, those characteristics that define our vision of modernism in the Mediterranean began to emerge earlier than 1890. Articles by Defne Çizakça and Adam J. Goldwyn, for instance, find Modernist influences in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1860s and 1870s, while Rob Baum and Federica Frediani focus on late twentieth-century works that reimagine the Mediterranean during the Modernist period from a postmodern perspective. Broadening the time period conventionally attributed to modernism goes hand in hand with widening its geographical, cultural, and linguistic bounds; doing so permits the inclusion of various modernist iterations, ranging from Hispanic modernismo (1880s–1920s) to post-World War II explorations of modernity’s meaning and consequences from postmodern and postcolonial perspectives.

Returning now to Braudel, his particular shift from the old history to the new, from the old Mediterranean to the modern one, similarly relates to the interrelationship between the colonial and the postcolonial, modern, and postmodern. Braudel was galvanized by his move in 1923 to Algeria, then a French colony, where he taught history, first in Constantine and then in Algiers; he would stay for the next nine years. Braudel, like so many of the leading intellectuals of the period, became a product of the mingling of Mediterranean cultures which he himself would later study—a Frenchman living in Algeria, studying Spain and its imperial holdings in the Mediterranean and abroad. It was during his time in Algeria that Braudel first wrestled with many of the issues of cultural hybridity which The Mediterranean did so much to bring to the center of historiography. In “Personal Testimony,” a brief memoir published in 1972, Braudel describes the effect of his stay in Algeria on his thinking:

I believe that this spectacle, the Mediterranean as seen from the opposite shore, upside down, had considerable impact on my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Fernand Braudel and the Invention of a Modernist’s Mediterranean
• 1. Personal Reflections on the Multi-Cultural Mediterranean
• 2. Communal Reflections of the Postcolonial Mediterranean
• Backmatter