Mediterranean crossings:  refugees, migration, and displacements (1492-today) 

(Created for the fall semester of 2022) 

Scholars often characterize the Mediterranean Sea as a multicultural space of encounter, competition, and exchange. It is widely taught that the Mediterranean’s geographic placement affords it a significant degree of unity even amidst its racial and religious diversity. But there is another facet to this history that is missing from the narrative.  

This course aims to understand how human displacements in the premodern Mediterranean contribute to the narrative of a diverse, united Iberian Peninsula. In addition, we will use this history as a lens to study the phenomenon of human displacements more widely.  

This course focuses on the expulsion of religious minorities like Jews and Muslims, accounts of captivity and slavery, histories of European colonization and decolonization in North Africa, the rise of the nation state, and population exchanges.  Students will also study how modern wars, climate change, and economic instability and inequality have set off an unprecedented mass scale of contemporary population displacements.    

Learning objectives 

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 

• Demonstrate a basic level of competence in differentiating between periods in the history of the Mediterranean and articulating the significance of historical context. 

• Grasp how and why migrations have differed in time and space. 

• Read scholarship critically. 

• Read and analyze primary sources. 

• Interrogate maps as historical artifacts. 

• Think historically and critically about issues related to migrants, refugees, and displacements in the Mediterranean. 

• Learn to use digital tools for producing knowledge (such as historical and interactive maps of displacement in the Mediterranean). 

Required texts

Lalami, Laila. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (New York & Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005). 

Pearlman, Wendy. We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018). 

All other required readings will be online reading/viewing or supplied by PDF. 

Course schedule

Week 1 - Introduction and organization 

Week 2 - The Mediterranean: geographies, chronologies, boundaries 

Calvino, Italo, “On reading a wave” in Mr. Palomar, trans. by William Weaver (San Diego: Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 1983): 3-8.   

Diaz, Clarisa, “Where Afghan—and all other—refugees are going,” Quartz, 8/31/21 .

Film (in class)  

4.1 Miles, Daphne Matziaraki 

“In the Oscar-nominated short film 4.1 Miles, Daphne Matziaraki follows a day in the life of Kyriakos Papadopoulos, a captain in the Greek coast guard who is caught in the middle of the refugee crisis in which Europe is embroiled. Despite limited resources, the captain and his crew attempt to save thousands of migrants from drowning in the Aegean Sea. Nominated, 2017 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.” 

Secondary sources 

Chatty, Dawn, “Dispossession and Displacement within the Contemporary Middle East: An Overview of Theories and Concepts,” in Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 

Pessani, Lorenzo, “Liquid Violence: Investigations of boundaries at sea by Forensic Oceanography,” The Architectural Review, 4/10/19. 

Optional podcast 

“Roundtable on Narrating Migration: Emerging Methods and Cross-Disciplinary Directions” Ottoman History Podcast, No. 436 (11/24/2019). 

Unit I - The early modern Mediterranean

Week 3 - Expulsions and the creation of diasporas: Jews and Moriscos 

Primary sources 

“Charter of the Expulsion of the Jews,” trans. Edward Peters, in Medieval Iberia, ed. Olivia Remie Constable, second edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012): 508-513. 

“Jewish Account of the Expulsion,” in Medieval Iberia, trans. Jacob R. Marcus: 513-516. 

“Royal Edict of the Muslim Expulsion, 1502,” in Medieval Iberia, trans. Dayle Seidenspinner-Nuñez: 535-539. 

Philip III, “Decree of the Expulsion of the Moriscos,” in Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, ed. Jon Cowans (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 145-148. 

Secondary sources 

Ray, Johnathan, “The Long Road into Exile,” in After Expulsion, 1492 and the Making of a Sephardic Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 

Feros, Antonio, “Rhetoric of the Expulsion,” in The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: A Mediterranean Diaspora, ed. Mercedes García Arenal and Gerard Wiegers (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 60-101.   

Week 4 - Slavery and captivity in the premodern Mediterranean 

Virtual visit by Prof. Hannah Barker (Arizona State University).

Virtual visit by Prof. Daniel Hershenzon (University of Connecticut).

Secondary sources 

Barker, Hannah, The Most Precious Merchandise. The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019): selections.

Unit II - The modern Mediterranean

Week 5 - Disease and displacement 

Virtual visit by Prof. Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers University-Newark).

Secondary source 

Robarts, Andrew, “Nowhere to Run To, Nowhere to Hide? Society, State, and Epidemic Diseases in the Early Nineteenth Century Ottoman Balkans,” in Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 

Week 6 - Migration in the Ottoman Empire 

Virtual visit by Prof. Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular (Rutgers University-Newark).

Secondary source 

Chatty, Dawn, “Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Late Ottoman Empire: Distinct Cultures and Separated Communities,” in Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).  

Week 7 - Forced population transfers, membership and belonging 

Virtual visit by Prof. Joseph Viscomi (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).

Primary source 

Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed at Lausanne 

Documentary 

Aljazeera, “The Great Population Exchange Between Turkey and Greece,” 2/28/18. 

Secondary sources 

Shields, Sarah, "The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange: Internationally Administered Ethnic Cleansing," Middle East Report 267 (2013): 2-6. 

Nail, Thomas, “Introduction” and “The Figure of the Migrant,” in The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015): 1-17. 

Bosma, Ulber, Gijs Kessler, and Leo Lucassen, “Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective: An Introduction,” in Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective: An Introduction, eds. Ulber Bosma, Gijs Kessler and Leo Lucassen (Brill, 2013): 1-20. 

Graphic novel 

Solúp, Aivali. A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922, trans. Tom Papademetriou (Boston: Somerset Hall Press, 2019): selections. 

Film 

Dedemin Insanları (My Grandfather’s People), Dir. Çagan Irmak, 2011.   

Week 8 - The colonial Mediterranean  

Primary sources 

Clancy-Smith, Julia and Charles D. Smith, eds., “Algeria: French Colonization and the Algerian Response,” in The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 29-32. 

Secondary sources 

Manuel, Borutta and Sakis Gekas, “A Colonial Sea: the Mediterranean, 1798-1956,” European Review of History - Revue européenne d'histoire, 19/1 (2012): 1-13. 

Blais, Hélène, “The Mediterranean. A Territory Between France and Colonial Algeria: Imperial Constructions,” European Review of History 19/1 (2012): 33-57. 

Podcast 

Ottoman History Podcast, France and Algeria: Origins and Legacies (episode 409, 4/7/19).  

Week 9 - Migration and displacement after the two world wars 

Primary sources 

Arendt, Hannah, “We Refugees."

UNHCR, The Refugee Convention, 1951: excerpts.

Secondary sources 

Gatrell, Peter, "Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermaths of Two World Wars," in The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, eds. J. Reinisch & E. White, 1944-49 (London, 2011): 3-26. 

Eley, Geoff, “A Disorder of Peoples: The Uncertain Ground of Reconstruction in 1945,” in The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944-49 (London, 2011): 291-314. 

Week 10 - Decolonization and repatriation in the 20th Century 

Secondary sources 

Ballinger, Pamela, “Entangled or ‘Extruded’ Histories? Displacement, National Refugees, and Repatriation after the Second World War,” Journal of Refugee Studies 25/3 (2012): 366-386. 

Viscomi, Joseph John, “Pontremoli’s cry: Personhood, Scale, and History in the Eastern Mediterranean,” History and Anthropology (2019). 

Week 11 - Postcolonial migrations and the multicultural Mediterranean 

Primary sources

“Les Pieds Noirs,” The New Yorker, 11/18/1972. 

‘Oranîmes’ - Susan Slyomovics’ interview with Pierre Claverie.

Secondary sources 

Jordi, Jean-Jacques, “The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs: Arrival and Settlement in Marseilles,” in Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea L. Smith (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003): 61-74. 

Cooper, Frederick, “Postcolonial Peoples: A Commentary,” in Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea L. Smith (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003): 169-184. 

Week 12 - Childhood and dispossession: Palestine 

Secondary sources 

Chatty, Dawn and Gillian Lewando Hundt, eds., Children of Palestine. Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005): Introduction, chapter 2, and chapter 6.   

Week 13 - “Burning the Sea”: North African migrants in the Mediterranean   

Reading 

Lalami, Laila, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (New York & Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005). 

Video reports 

Aljazeera, Spain-Morocco migrants hope to leave Ceuta for European mainland, 5/23/21. 

Aljazeera, “Hundreds of children stranded at Spanish enclave of Ceuta,” 5/20/21. 

Secondary source 

Ciucci, Alessandra, “Performing l-ḥrig: music, sound and undocumented migration across the contemporary Mediterranean (Morocco–Italy),” Journal of North African Studies (August, 2019). 

Week 14 - War and displacement in the contemporary Mediterranean 

Secondary source 

Pearlman, Wendy, We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018). 

Film

Cassel, Matthew and Aboud Shalhoub, “The Journey from Syria” (2016).