The New Mediterranean Studies: A Mediator Between Area

Studies and Global Studies

John Watkins

Mediterranean Studies, Volume 21, Number 2, 2013, pp. 149-154 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

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 Mediterranean Forum

MS
The New Mediterranean Studies: A Mediator
between Area Studies and Global Studies
John Watkins, University of Minnesota

North Americans are witnessing an explosion of interest in the Mediterranean that

is transforming their research, their teaching, and even institutional relations.1 In
some ways, this is a strangely belated phenomenon. Area studies programs have been
around for a long time. They first appeared in the United States after the Second
World War and developed in clusters that followed the geographies of the Cold
War: Russian and Eastern European studies, Uralic and Altaic studies, East Asian
studies, African studies, Middle Eastern studies, Latin American studies. But since
the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the center of academic gravity has shifted.
Scholars and administrators alike have exchanged the model of a world divided into
discrete regions for one emphasizing it as a network of densely interrelated social,
economic, political, demographic, and communications exchanges. Global studies
initiatives are on the rise and, in many places, are receiving funding that once went to
traditional area studies programs. The Mediterranean resurgence—marked by new
courses, programs, conferences, and institutional initiatives from Kansas to Korea—
comes at a strange time, and it seems to fly in the face of general academic trends.
At this crucial moment in the development of our interdisciplinary field, we need to
reflect on both our history and our future as Mediterraneanists in a global academy.
The older area studies model rendered the Mediterranean all but invisible.
As numerous scholars have noted, each of the older programs focused on a
place that had either embraced communism or seemed poised to embrace it in
the future.2 World War II had exposed the extent to which only a small cadre
of specialists knew anything about East Asia. Americans were just as ignorant

Mediterranean Forum provides a space for articles focusing on issues of interest to those in the field of
Mediterranean studies, including informational articles, book reviews, and discussions of M­ editerranean
studies as an academic discipline.

Mediterranean Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2013

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
150 John Watkins

about Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, places where the Cold War
might turn hot at any moment. Now perceiving the Western Eurocentrism
of U.S. education as military unpreparedness, the government invited such
organizations as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science
Research Council, and similar organizations to form an Ethnographic Board
charged with dividing the world into strategic areas suitable for interdisciplin-
ary study. Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Act contributed millions of
dollars into the development of such programs, as did private agencies like the
Ford Foundation.3
For some scholars, like the contributors to Masao Miyoshi and Harry
Harootunian’s landmark collection, Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, the
area studies paradigm was bankrupt from the start because of its origins in Cold War
politics.4 It never transcended its original conception as the study of enemies and
potential enemies. But their dismissal ignores a more complex story. These programs
prospered because they could answer to multiple constituencies. Conservative legis-
latures and granting agencies were eager to support them as a weapon against Marx,
Lenin, Mao, and Castro. At the same time, however, area studies programs attracted
some of the most progressive PhD candidates because they offered an alternative
to the emphasis on the European West in departments of history and the modern
languages. As a result, the social and intellectual changes of the late 1960s enhanced
the prestige of the same programs that had been founded to defend the capital-
ist West. Many of them had well-established PhD programs with alumni working
around the world in colleges and universities, foreign offices, the United Nations,
and numerous government and nongovernmental agencies.5
Unlike their predecessors in the early Cold War period, graduates of area
studies from the late 1970s on profited from the discussions of race, ethnic-
ity, class, gender, and sexuality that had begun to characterize curricula in the
humanities and social sciences. That topic in itself is worth an essay. But my
principal concern here is with geography. Even though 1980s and 1990s area
studies programs were open to new methodologies, their Cold War geographies
remained intact and prevented the creation of programs in Mediterranean stud-
ies. As far as Europe went, the division between the communist East and the
capitalist West claimed precedence over the older division between the Roman,
Mediterranean world of the South and the barbarian, primarily Germanic lands
of the North. Yugoslavia and Albania belonged to one world; France and Spain
to another. By the 1960s, even Greece was safely ensconced in NATO, its Balkan
associations lost in the American imagination, and its Mediterranean ones
subordinated to its identity as the birthplace of Western democracy.
 Mediator between Area Studies and Global Studies   151

In the meantime, scholars treated North Africa and the Middle East
­primarily as places that Europeans had colonized, but rarely thought of them as
part of a single regional system that followed the contours of the Roman Empire.
In a series of influential books and articles that started as far back as 1895, the
Belgian historian Henri Pirenne developed the argument that the Arab conquest
of North Africa, Palestine, and southeastern Turkey in the seventh and eighth
centuries had transformed the Mediterranean into an impermeable bound-
ary between the Christian North and the Muslim South.6 Previous historians
had argued that the Germanic invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries had
destroyed Roman civilization and thus separated a highly urbanized classical past
from the more agrarian, more provincial, and significantly less literate Middle
Ages. By looking at the evidence of when long-distance trade and European
urbanization actually began to decline, Pirenne argued that the real break with
antiquity came two centuries later. According to his interpretation, Muhammad,
rather than the Germanic barbarians, was responsible for destroying the earlier
Mediterranean civilization. That civilization had depended upon commerce
between Mediterranean ports. Once commerce became closed to Christians,
with the expansion of Islam from the Middle East to southern Gaul, the culture
it had created vanished as well. By postponing the date of Europe’s alleged
decline into the Middle Ages, Pirenne provided a double intellectual basis for
belief in Europe as a coherent cultural space, distinct from the Muslim world
on the other side of the Mediterranean. First of all, his revisionary treatment of
the barbarian invasions minimized the cultural divisions between the Germanic
North and the Mediterranean South by treating their interface less as a clash
of civilizations than as a process of mutual assimilation. This left him free to
declare the really destructive clash as that between European Christendom and
the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa. In the process of this histo-
riographic revision, Pirenne stigmatized the Arabs as the real barbarians who
effectively destroyed the achievements of the classical past.
Combined with the politics of the Cold War, Pirenne’s thesis reinforced a sense
of Europe as a sacrosanct Western space isolated by the Mediterranean from the
barbarians of the Muslim South and by the Iron Curtain from the new barbarians
of the communist, primarily Slavic East. As a result of these political and theoreti-
cal factors, the Mediterranean did not benefit from the kind of interdisciplinary
investigations that other regions enjoyed.
Scholars invested in the histories, societies, cultures, and languages of the
lands that surrounded its shores carried out their careers primarily in traditional
academic departments. Hispanists writing about Cervantes and Italianists
152 John Watkins

studying Ariosto inhabited different worlds. They might have conversations

with each other on the way to the MLA, but they were unlikely to attend
the same sessions. It would certainly not have occurred to someone working
on the Lombard invasions to organize a conference with someone researching
nineteenth-century Italian settlements in Tunisia, even though both were deal-
ing with questions of immigration, diaspora, and religious diversity in a closely
integrated geography.
During the 1990s, several developments occurred to challenge the tradi-
tional area studies programs. The collapse of the Soviet Union undermined
interest in those parts of the world that were at the center of the curricu-
lar structures inherited from the Cold War. Russian enrollments plummeted,
and programs in Russian and East European studies addressed an enemy who
was no longer there. Czechs and Slovaks were quick to remind everyone that
that they were never really part of “Eastern Europe” in the first place. In the
meantime, the possibility of a more open international community combined
with economic globalization, new immigration patterns, the communication
resources of the Internet, and ever cheaper transoceanic flights encouraged a
less compartmentalized view of the world. Around the turn of the millennium,
North American universities marked this transition by developing programs,
departments, and institutes of global studies.7
Over the past decade, this new emphasis on global connectivity has comple-
mented, reinforced, and sometimes resisted the older expertise in the history, culture,
and current social experience of specific regions. In some cases, programs in global
studies have incorporated older area studies into larger, more robust academic units.
There are now numerous examples: International and Area Studies at Berkeley, the
Global Studies Major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Program
in Global and Area Studies at Michigan State University, the Program in Global and
International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and numerous
others. In a few institutions, however, the field of global studies has positioned itself
as an ideological opponent of the older programs. A lot depends on the chemistry
and ideological flavor of specific units and institutions. The emergence of the global
need not signal the eclipse of the regional. Quite the contrary, regional expertise can
ground global ­theorization in praxis at the same time that globalized perspectives can
redeem area studies from academic provincialization.
The Mediterranean has acquired a new visibility, even urgency, in universities’
efforts to balance regional expertise against a global awareness of connectivities.8
One of the things that makes the Mediterranean distinct as a region is its diver-
sity of languages, religions, cultures, and political systems within close, easily
 Mediator between Area Studies and Global Studies   153

navigable proximity. We can talk about it as a single region with a common

­environment and long stretches of common history. But we can also talk about
it as a paradigm for the modern world at large, which we now speak of as global
system of diverse but increasingly interconnected societies. As a sea poised at the
intersection of three continents, the Mediterranean invites approaches attentive
both to regional specificity and global variation. Long before the jet age and the
Internet, its waters drew radically diverse populations into close proximity. The
hallmarks of modernity—long-range commerce, immigration, religious conflict
and accommodation, and the exchanges between countless local languages and
widely spoken lingua francas—have always been part of its history. Perhaps we are
now devoting more of our scholarly and curricular energies to its past because it
so closely resembles our present.

Notes

1. Mediterranean studies is thriving around the globe. In North America, the greater fluidity
of departmental boundaries and the existence of multidisciplinary centers and programs have
given the field a more interdisciplinary flavor than elsewhere. As I suggest in this article, that
character derives in part from a long history of area studies programs that, at least in the United
States, were supported through government initiatives.
2. My comments draw on a substantial literature on the Cold War context of area stud-
ies programs. See especially Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie
Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Bruce
Cummings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after
the Cold War,” in Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the
Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York: New Press, 1999), 159–88; Martin W. Lewis and
Karen Wiger, “A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies,” Geographical Review 89 (1999):
161–68; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003), 1–24; David L. Szanton, “Introduction: The Origin, Nature and Challenges of
Area Studies in the United States,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines,
ed. David L. Szanton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 10–11.
3. See Robert A. McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the
Enclosure of American Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) and the Szanton,
“Introduction,” 10–13. See also the other studies cited in note 2.
4. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, eds., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
5. See McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise, 249–55; Szanton,
“Introduction,” 12–13; Paul Z. W. Drake and Lisa Hilbink, “Latin American Studies: Theory and
Practice,” in Szanton, Politics of Knowledge, 38–39.
6. See especially Henri Pirenne, Charlemagne and Mohammed, trans. Bernard Maill
(New York: Norton, 1939); Pirenne, A History of Europe from the Invasions to the XVI Century,
trans. Bernard Miall (New York: New York University Books, 1956).
7. For further discussion of the transition to global studies, see Harootunian and Miyoshi,
Learning Places; Arjun Appadurai et al., “Area Studies, Regional Worlds: A White Paper for
154 John Watkins

the Ford Foundation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Globalization Project, 1997), available
at http://regionalworlds.uchicago.edu/areastudiesregworlds.pdf; Lewis and Wigen, “A Maritime
Response to the Crisis in Area Studies,” Geographical Review 89 (1989): 164–65.
8. See the essays collected in the “Oceans Connect” special issue of Geographical Review 89
(1999) on the place of ocean and thalassic perspectives as an alternative to the older area studies
model. See especially Miriam Cooke’s “Mediterranean Thinking: From Netizen to Medizen,”
290–300. The new Mediterranean studies has grown up alongside and in dialogue with a rich
new body of scholarship on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. For an introduction to the
field of maritime history, see the volumes in Routledge’s Seas in History series, such as Michael
Pierson’s The Indian Ocean (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003) and David Kirby and ­Merja-Liisa
Hinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000). The bibliography on
the Atlantic, especially with a focus on the slave trade, is now massive.