Like the Mediterranean Sea basin, miriam cooke’s corpus of writing is not marked by sharp boundaries. For example, in my reconception of the Mediterranean region and its associated academic specialization of Mediterranean studies, I remain indebted to miriam’s imaginative pursuit of meaning and scholarly summons to “Mediterranean thinking”:
What happens when all of the shores are simultaneously considered and the many faces of the mirror meet? At some point, they encounter negative space, which becomes the determining source of civilizational influences and residues that are marked as Mediterranean and not as European or North African or West Asian. It is this third space of negative reflection, where civilizations touch, dialogue, interfere with each other, move on, or stop, that interests me. (cooke 1999, 294)
cooke formulates concepts of many Mediterraneans to define human movement multidirectionally across the sea and transcontinentally across sovereignties. Despite the twenty-first century’s deployment of the...
