The Mediterranean Sea: Open Port or Border Wall?

Cultural studies and gender studies were essentially introduced to Italy by scholars working in the field of post-colonial and Anglo-American studies; accompanied by a few scholars in the field of German Studies, who found nourishment in different research areas, and a large sector of academics working in ethnological and social studies who, although developing a great interest for cultural studies and contributing to their enhancement, barely touched the gender issue.Being introduced to the output and analysis of cultural pluralism in post-colonial, postimperial areas such as Great Britain and US, but also in creolized complex post-colonial territories such as Africa, South America and the Caribbean, those of us who worked in Anglo- American, post-colonial, transnational and transatlantic studies inevitably came to learn of a different approach to sex/gender issues and learned to conjugate Italian-French thinking of difference with other categories such as race, gender/sex, class, age, cultural heritage, power, hegemony, etc.We learned to see/read/interpret national reality, national production through the lens of transnationalism created by post-colonized and de-colonizing realities located elsewhere, beyond our borders. Consequently, we started to develop theories and methodologies that were critical of the very idea of a hegemonic homogenizing national culture. At the end of the 1990s, as a result of the new diasporas produced by new wars and new forms of colonialism, boats, rubber dinghies and worn-out ships started sailing in the opposite direction to colonial times. When the departure harbor was located in North Africa, the sea became the route to the closest Mediterranean shores: Southern Italy, especially the island of Lampedusa, but also Sardinia, Calabria and Apulia; Malta; Spain. The Mediterranean, represented as a space of circulation and exchange whenever we Europeans want to sell goods to Africa and the Middle East, or import low-cost labor from those areas, has various walls and non-trespassing borders built by the laws each European state has created in the name of sovereignty, thus de facto emptying of sense and blocking the international agreement on human rights ratified by the European Court. Nowadays, mainly thanks to cultural artifacts, borderization has instead become a transnational style, a worldwide conscious choice that bridges the gap between Atlantic populations and the Mediterranean in their shared refusal of mainstream policy and culture in the name of a more complex, more intertwined, transcultural vision of the world which, nonetheless, does not renounce the local, memory, heritage. The borderization of the world entails a representation of the world as an endless border zone, where the borders are by choice unstable, if not erased; where languages are not national and pure, but culturally complex,35 intercultural, plurilinguistic; where cultures are the patrimony of humankind until there is no such a thing as a Western pattern of culture presenting itself as desirable and modern, pretending to homogenize and integrate differences in the name of a wor(l)d order that swallows up a “dis-ordered” multiplicity of cultures, tongues, bodies, genres and genders. In a research project titled “Walling up the Mediterranean? Artivism and translation as transnational politics and poetics of resistance to Italian rejection policies, European (en)closure into fortress and American and Israeli building of walls,” together with other colleagues I am trying to investigate differences and similarities with the liquid boundary created between the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo river dividing Mexico and the US. We want to test whether processes of transnational bridging and transnationalization performed by translation practice can act as a counter-discourse resisting the practices of building boundaries—real and legal walls. Finally, the essay deems translation as a shared political and cultural pathway to retrace and rethink the borderlands and the walls between/within our own territories.