Imagination Besieged records the silenced stories of a Mediterranean defined by loss, displacement, dispossession, violence, and its refusal. Drawing links and connections between Calabria, Athens, Ramallah, and Beirut, the book grapples with the legacies of histories of violence, criminality, and colonialism that define not only the past, but very much the present of a Mediterranean stuck in cycles of crises and death. This atmosphere of impossibility and immobility, as the author argues, debilitates and distorts imagination as much as it forces those subjected to it to find ways to express their dissent, sometimes in tragic ways.

The book invites to read with the “Mediterranean” as a space where violence can be “felt” and “breathed” in the air. It looks and makes connections between the works of artists and writers who have problematised and challenged existing ahistorical representation of the “Mediterranean” as an exotic tourist destination. In the works and words of the artists and writers discussed, the Mediterranean appears not as a mythical place, but in all its ambiguousness, paradoxes, dissonances, and the distortions on the bodies, the landscape, the environment, and the imagination produced by this persistent and invisibilised systemic violence. At the same time, Imagination Besieged listen to the refusal of this violence in the lives and practices of those who have rejected familial belongings, narrow definitions of identity, and their continuous dispossession.

Each essay taps into the depth of the archive of the modern Mediterranean to bring into the present what this present seeks to conceal.