The Mediterranean and Caribbean: A Wayward Comparison

In recent years, the Mediterranean and Caribbean have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Both are transnational regions born of empire, forged in extractive violence, and animated by enduring traditions of resistance and radical imagination. Yet, despite the clear resonances between the two archipelagos, there has been next to no sustained scholarly effort to bring the Mediterranean and Caribbean into direct conversation, or to theorize their relation. The Atlantic has marked both a geographic and epistemic divide; the few well-known attempts to bridge it, such as Alexander von Humboldt’s famous description of the Caribbean as the “American Mediterranean,” belie the embeddedness of the Northern European colonial vantage onto both seas. This workshop proposes a dialogue between these two archipelagic worlds, suggesting that we view them not as stable and parallel geographies but as relational constellations in an unfolding map of dispossession, resistance, and survival. Rather than a search for equivalence, our invitation to comparison encourages a wayward method in the sense articulated by Saidiya Hartman: a mode of thinking and moving that disorients, that lingers in the errant and peripheral, that refuses the disciplinary impulse to align.

Discussions will examine entangled histories of extraction and border regimes, shared political imaginaries and solidarities, maritime infrastructures and their submerged histories, and the aesthetic and political practices that emerge from environmental violence across these seas. Together, the workshop seeks to trace new lines of relation and to open a space for critical alliances across the Mediterranean and Caribbean worlds.

• Department of Comparative Literature
• Princeton Institute of Regional Studies
• Humanities Council
• Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies
• University Center for Human Values
• Effron Center of the Study of America
• Department of Anthropology
• Department of English
• Department of French and Italian