Keynote speaker : Edwige Tamalet Talbayev from Tulane University (New Orleans)
Closed door event
Through the example of deadly migratory crossings in the Mediterranean, this seminar seeks to identify a material, sensory archive of maritime spaces that function as overdetermined sites of loss and necropolitical power—sites of disappearance, bodily dissolution, and ontological instability.
In maritime depths, the corrosive, lethal encounters between body and water reveal the multiple imbrications between the human and the aqueous. Amidst an ever-increasing incorporation of watery bodies into practices of border policing and surveillance, we will refocus our lens on the singularity of death by water—an intimately personal, lived event that cannot be experienced in its totality (Maurice Blanchot) but only evoked through imaginary projection—as it is represented through contemporary artistic practices. Through close readings of installation art by Berni Searle and Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, this lecture examines the sensory aesthetic regime mobilized to render the uniquely individual experience of drowning in the Mediterranean—a multisensory epistemology encompassing soundscapes, haptic exposure to the elements, and visual cues of anamorphism. The talk probes the ability of art to embody the ineffable, intimate absence-presence of the drowning in a resonant act of witness (a posture read here through Robert Harvey’s concept of “witnessness”), setting the stage for a memorialization of the migrant’s material remanence in longue durée cycles of Life.
Prof. Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is a literary scholar working at the intersection of Maghrebi literature, Mediterranean Studies, and Critical Ocean Studies. Her first book, The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean, was published by Fordham University Press in 2017. Studying a Mediterranean-inspired body of texts from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Gibraltar in French, Arabic, and Spanish, the book argues for a transmaritime deployment of the Maghreb across Mediterranean sites to which it has been materially and culturally bound for millennia. Through a reflection on allegory and critical melancholia, the book shows how the Mediterranean decenters postcolonial nation-building projects and breathes new life into Maghrebi claims to an inclusive, democratic national ideal yet to be realized.
She is the co-editor of Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in crisis (Palgrave 2018), which probes the critical relevance of the Mediterranean as a theoretical entity and an aesthetic, hermeneutic, and theoretical category for the interpretation of culture in the modern era. The critical Mediterranean outlined in the book is plural and performative—a medium through which subjects may negotiate imagined relations with the world around them in times of crisis. She is currently at work on several projects that delve into the materiality of water as a site of alternative epistemologies and experiences of being. Among them, her book in progress, The Residual Migrant: Water Necropolitics in the Anthropocene, draws on biotheory, border studies, and ecocriticism to theorize the dissolutive ontologies specific to drowned migrants whose submerged bodies are amalgamated into ecologically ravaged, deep-sea environments.
She is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University in New Orleans, and an affiliated faculty in Environmental Studies. Talbayev is also the editor of Expressions maghrébines, the leading peer-reviewed journal of the Coordination Internationale des Chercheurs sur les Littératures Maghrébines (CICLIM), which has been housed in the Department of French and Italian since 2014. She currently chairs the MLA CLCS Mediterranean Forum Executive Committee (2022).
