Mare Nostrum, Morte Nostra

 

Date: October 15-16, 2026​

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Venue: University of Montpellier Paul-Valery, Montpellier, France​

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Language: English​​​

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Workshop Organizer:

• Dr Marianne Drugeon, EMMA, University of Montpellier Paul-Valery

• Dr Karim Daanoune, EMMA, University of Montpellier Paul-Valery​

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Project Co-convenors:

• Dr Bidisha Banerjee, International Research Centre for Cultural Studies, the Education University of Hong Kong

• Dr Thomas Lacroix, CERI, Sciences-Po Paris 

• Prof Judith Misrahi-Barak, EMMA, University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry

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About Thanatic Ethics:

Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces, began with a single question: What happens to the bodies of migrants who perish on foreign shores, often while making perilous journeys across land and sea in search of better lives? The migration crisis in recent years has modified our perspective on the deaths in migration, at sea or on land. Recent works have sought to quantify the number of casualties (Heller and Pécoud 2017; Sapkota et al. 2006). Others strive to retrieve the identity of these people in the thin traces they left behind (Kobelinsky and Le Courant 2017; Cattaneo 2018). And when nothing material is left, what endures is the memory of tragic wrecking, commemorated by plaques, monuments or art pieces, in the wake of earlier dumping of bodies overboard in colonial and slavery contexts.

https://www.thanaticethics.com​

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About TE Workshop #6:​

Workshop #6 will follow up on Workshops #4 and #5, expanding their focus on accountability and on the Mediterranean while shifting the attention to connection and communication. By invoking the Latin expression mare nostrum—reframed here as morte nostra—as its title, Workshop #6 situates the question of death within the migratory space of the Mediterranean Sea, a space that can be described paradoxically as both open and promising as well as closed and deadly. From the perspective of the exile, the sea represents the realm of openness, offering the horizon of a better future. Yet, the sea is a claustrophobic space marked by its insurmountable nature, turning both still and ever-moving waters into a cemetery. The paradox also applies to European nations that may see the Mediterranean as an opportunistic expanse of water to be enjoyed in all the connections it offers, but also as a “liquid frontier” (Heller and Pezzani 2017) safeguarding them from the so-called “invasion” of the Other who has conveniently been further otherized and illegalized beforehand to be deemed dangerous.

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The possessive nostrum is no less paradoxical. To claim the Mediterranean as “ours” is not merely to name a geographical space which is by definition shared as it borders distinct regions or lands, but to impose upon it a symbolic gesture of appropriation, one that is bound to exclude populations and to reduce the complexity that characterizes the Mediterranean as “not one civilization, but a number of civilizations, piled one on top of the other [...]. [A]n ancient crossroads” (Braudel, tome I, p. 8-9). Such a claim turns de facto the Other into the same, within a common idea of shared heritage. Yet this appropriation is profoundly selective. While Europe lays claim to the Mediterranean as a cultural and historical space, it simultaneously refuses those who traverse it, illegalizing the very lives that embody its contemporary interconnectedness. The word nostrum thus reveals its contradiction: it designates a shared sea only insofar as sharing does not entail hospitality, political responsibility or, more simply, humanity. What is claimed as “ours” in symbolic and historical terms literally becomes a site of exclusion where the figure of the exiled is persistently constructed as an intruder. Indeed, when it comes to the body lost at sea or washed ashore, the question of appropriation is even more critical for whose dead are they and to what extent is the foreignness of the illegalized migrant increased by his or her death?

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In his chapbook entitled Mare Nostrum (2019) which deals with the migratory tragedies in the Mediterranean, the Arab American poet and translator Khaled Mattawa seeks to give a voice to the refugees who perished and those who, though they survived, “still fall into the sea” (Mattawa 2019). The title echoes the ancient imperial and colonial formula of the Romans but also the more recent Italian “military and humanitarian” sea rescue operation of the same name launched in 2013. Mattawa reappropriates the title of the operation and, in doing so, confronts Europe and the Western world at large with its responsibilities: if the Mediterranean is “ours”, implying Westerners, with all the neo-colonialist and nationalist connotations that the expression may carry, then the dead who litter its depths are also our dead. The “mare nostrum” is thus conceived as a “mortui nostri”. Mattawa intimates that art is more than ever needed to account for the dead and the disappeared, to ensure that their stories be told so that they can be kept alive in our memories and therefore resist against the oblivion brought about by the “desensitizing” (De Genova 2017) effect of mass media coverage of death in migration and its “border spectacle” (ibid.).

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Workshop #6 aims to explore the dialectics of sameness and otherness as they relate to both the Mediterranean Sea and the dead. Extending the work initiated in the previous workshops with the translation of Gaspard Njock and Félicien de Heusch’s Au-delà l’exil, translation remains one interesting point of entry in terms of connection and communication. Translating has often been and is sometimes still understood through liquid metaphors that are themselves indexed to the smooth processes of assimilation and appropriation. Whether the terms be “flow” (Jakobson 1959; Pynn 2010), “circulation” (Venuti 1995), or “flux” (Berman 1985; Venuti 1995), it seems fair to say that they defy any sense of stasis or impediment and that they suggest a pacifying and seamless operation. But is such a metaphor accurate and is its implementation tenable or even desirable? Typhaine Samoyault reminds us of “the extent to which [translation] has exercised the power to appropriate and diminish otherness throughout the history of cultural encounters, which are themselves also histories of domination.” Recognising that language can separate as much as it can unite and that translation is a site of conflict, she urges us to recognize its violent power, one that “bring[s] back the dead and everything that is being silenced” (Samoyault 2020). Considering translation as an art of the collective, an art that re-members and re-calls, does not imply we should erase or ignore it as a space of confrontation and conflict, one that can facilitate communication and / or foreclose it.

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