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Palgrave Macmillan

Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean

  • Book
  • Sep 2025

Overview

  • Engages Mediterranean intellectual history to provide an overview of the complex historical concept of hospitality
  • Bridges an important gap in Mediterranean Studies by focusing on the embodied praxis of hospitality
  • Offers rich, agentive alternatives for Mediterranean worldmaking through transdisciplinary approaches to the region

Part of the book series: Mediterranean Perspectives (MEPERS)

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About this book

Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean examines the embodied praxis of hospitality—whether through the ritual modes of religious history, the pages of literature, the visual arts, dystopian narratives of the future, or the realpolitik of shelter and asylum. It moves beyond dominant transit tropes of aporetic exchange (in the lineage of Jacques Derrida). The volume offers a fractal view of Mediterranean studies as inflected by the lived, aesthetic, and philosophical histories of hospitality.

This book brings together leading voices ranging from early-career to established scholars across the social sciences and the humanities to argue for a distinct focus on the Mediterranean pre/conditions and pre/histories of hospitality. To date, there has been no interdisciplinary intervention that takes up hospitality as a starting point to critical thinking about Mediterranean studies as an expansive, dynamic, and ever-evolving discipline. Against the inescapable backdrop of necropolitics and catastrophe, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean offers a rich, agentive alternative for Mediterranean worldmaking.

Keywords

  • History of hospitality in the Mediterranean
  • Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and theories of hospitality
  • Poetics and politics of space
  • Environmental studies and ecocritical exchanges
  • Seascapes and memory
  • Cultural studies and literary approaches to the Mediterranean
  • Ethics of migration, refuge, and asylum in the Mediterranean
  • Mediterranean aesthetics
  • Queer and gender studies and Mediterranean identities
  • Cosmopolitanism in a Mediterranean context
  • Biopolitical formations and control at Mediterranean borders

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of French & Italian, Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA

    yasser elhariry

  • Département des Etudes du Monde Anglophone / CAS (Centre for Anglophone Studies) - UR 801, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse Cedex 9, France

    Isabelle Keller-Privat

  • Department of French and Italian, Tulane University, New Orleans, USA

    Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

About the editors

yasser elhariry is Associate Professor of French, associated faculty in the Middle Eastern Studies Program, and affiliated faculty in the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation, and the Postfrancophone Lyric (Liverpool University Press, 2017), as well as editor and coeditor of several essay collections: Cultures du mysticisme (Expressions maghrébines, 2017), Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis (Palgrave, 2018), The Postlingual Turn (SubStance, 2021), Sounds Senses (Liverpool University Press, 2021), Abdelkébir Khatibi: Literature and Theory (PMLA, 2022), and the forthcoming edited volumes, Literature as Sound Studies and Water Logics. His essays appear in Yale French StudiesOxford Research Encyclopedia of LiteratureNew Literary HistoryL’Esprit CréateurContemporary French CivilizationContemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITESFrancosphèresFrench ForumParade sauvage: revue d’études rimbaldiennes, and several edited volumes. He is completing a new book on the cultural history of holes.

Isabelle Keller-Privat is Professor of English Literature and Poetry at the University Toulouse Jean Jaurès where she teaches British literature, poetry, and translation. She is the co-director of the LABEX research program “New Perspectives on Hospitality: Memorial, Artistic, Philosophical and Political Issues,” and the chief editor of Caliban: French Journal of English Studies. She was awarded the International Lawrence Durrell Prize for New Scholarship in 2000 and has since contributed to many conferences and publications on Lawrence Durrell, V. S. Naipaul, Jon McGregor and David Gascoyne. She has published the first essay on Lawrence Durrell’s poetry at Fairleigh Dickinson University Press—Lawrence Durrell’s Poetry. A Rift in the Fabric of the World (2019). She has published over 30 papers and book chapters in national and international peer-reviewed journals and has co-edited four collections of papers on Durrellian studies, interdisciplinary studies on exile and migration, and Mediterranean criticism.

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is a New Orleans-based scholar of Maghrebi literature, Mediterranean Studies, and the Environmental Humanities. She is Associate Professor of French, and affiliated faculty in Environmental Studies and Middle East & North African Studies at Tulane University. She is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean (2017), and coeditor of several edited volumes—most recently, Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (2025) and Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Landscapes (forthcoming). She is currently at work on several projects that explore the materiality of water as a site of alternative epistemologies. Among them, her book in progress, The Residual Migrant: Water Necropolitics in the Anthropocene, theorizes the dissolution of drowned migrants whose remains are amalgamated into the deep sea. She is Editor of the journal Expressions maghrébines, and coeditor of the “Passagen” book series (Georg Olms Verlag). She serves as Professor Extraordinarius at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean

  • Editors: yasser elhariry, Isabelle Keller-Privat, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

  • Series Title: Mediterranean Perspectives

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: History, History (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-84042-5Due: 19 September 2025

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-84045-6Due: 19 September 2026

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-84043-2Due: 19 September 2025

  • Series ISSN: 2731-5592

  • Series E-ISSN: 2731-5606

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: II, 278

  • Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour

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