Title: The Black in the Mediterranean Blue
Year: 2022
Issue: 132
Cover: St. Benedict of Palermo (1526-1589) © Omar Victor Diop/MAGNIN-A GALLERY
Guest edited by Nobel laureate and longtime chairman of the magazine’s editorial board, Wole Soyinka, alongside Black Mediterranean scholar, Alessandra Di Maio,T132 examines the Mediterranean as a crossroads for migrants, both past and present, willing and unwilling—with careful attention to the human rights abuses that have arisen in the past decade and the cultural miscegenation (sometimes referred to as metissage) that has shaped the region for thousands of years.
In addition to the poetry of Warsan Shire and ground-breaking historical fiction by Cristina Ubah Ali Farah, “The Black in the Mediterranean Blue” presents an anthology of canonical work that has come to define the Black Mediterranean, including excerpts from Ella Shohat’s essay on black and white cultural claims to Cleopatra and Pap Khouma’s memoir I Was An Elephant Salesman. With sections on the arts, history, and activism, and one entitled “Crossings”—which includes tales of a Cuban slave rescued by English abolitionists and a desert explorer’s drive across the Sahara in the sixties, as well as current quixotic crossings of that desert—any reader can experience the long reach of the Mediterranean—which extends not only across the Sahara, but as far as the heart of ancient Nubia and across the Atlantic to Brazil.
Don’t miss theorist Paul Gilroy’s contextualization of the migration crisis amidst the climate catastrophe or Iain Chambers’s essay on the Mediterranean blues. T132 builds on the legacy of ReSignifications, by including much of the artwork featured at that historic conference with notable additions, such as Fabrice Monteiro’s photographs of eerie Black goddesses–avatars of the most polluted places in Africa–and stills from Maria Magda Campos-Pons illegal performance at the Venice Biennale. At nearly four hundred pages, several dedicated to the history of the magazine, this issue is sure to prove a collector’s item.