CFP: Mediterranean/Caribbean - a wayward comparison
Grace Monk
________
Call for Papers
mediterranean/caribbean - a wayward comparison
Princeton University, April 16th & 17th, 2026
In recent years, the Mediterranean and Caribbean have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Both are transnational regions born of empire, forged in extractive violence, and animated by enduring traditions of resistance and radical imagination. Yet, despite the clear resonances between the two archipelagos, there has been next to no sustained scholarly effort to bring the Mediterranean and Caribbean into direct conversation, or to theorize their relation. The Atlantic has marked both a geographic and epistemic divide; the few well-known attempts to bridge it, such as Alexander von Humboldt’s famous description of the Caribbean as the “American Mediterranean,” belie the embeddedness of the Northern European colonial vantage onto both seas.
This workshop proposes a dialogue between these two archipelagic worlds, suggesting that we view them not as stable and parallel geographies but as relational constellations in an unfolding map of dispossession, resistance, and survival. Rather than a search for equivalence, our invitation to comparison encourages a wayward method in the sense articulated by Saidiya Hartman: a mode of thinking and moving that disorients, that lingers in the errant and peripheral, that refuses the disciplinary impulse to align.
We envision this workshop as an interdisciplinary space for historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, geographers, and political theorists working in either the Mediterranean, the Caribbean or in both. Together, we will explore:
What happens when we bring together the submerged histories of the plantation and the phosphate mine? The necropolitical borders of Fortress Europe and the fenced tourist enclaves of the Caribbean?
What are the lines of relatedness and influence that connect these regions? What political imaginaries echo across the maroon community, the insurgent cartographies of Third Worldism and contemporary fugitive solidarities spanning migrant networks across the seas?
What methodologies have the humanities developed to study ships, wrecks, and other infrastructure of these seas, and how do we consider these infrastructures in relation to intangible history and its right to opacity?
What aesthetic and political practices surface from the maritime circulation of poison, from oil spills to the slow violence of agrochemical runoff, and how might we trace a “poetics of relation” through them?
This workshop wagers on the political and epistemic possibilities afforded by mediterranean/caribbean entanglements. We invite researchers not only to assess the generative potential of this comparison and to plot its outline as an emerging field of scholarship, but also to model forms of critical alliance across the colonial histories and contemporary crises they share.
Please submit a 300-word abstract and a short bio of up to 150 words to caribbeanme...@gmail.com by December 5, 2025. Notifications will be sent by early January 2026. Limited support for travel expenses will be available.
Organizers:
Runnie Ezuma, Anthropology, Princeton University
Chloe Howe Haralambous, Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Giorgia Mirto, Anthropology, Columbia University,
Grace Monk, Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Anthropology, Columbia University