Minority Mediterraneans Why the Mediterranean? Why, despite its seemingly marginalisation in the overarching narrative of modern politics and culture, does it persistently return to the discussion? To raise this question is to touch a profound tension that lies at the heart of a contemporary debate. If the Mediterranean is overwhelmingly claimed as the site of the ‘origins’ of Western culture, at the same time there is an increasing reluctance to be associated with its present-­‐day realities. Somehow, in order to be modern the existing Mediterranean has to be repudiated. Sun-­‐lit sloth, civic chaos and corruption, represent the distasteful under-­‐belly of a heritage that the incisive management of modernity north of the Alps and along the Atlantic shore has apparently overcome. Reduced to the leisurely pace of a time-­‐out in which to entertain the senses with food, wine, sea, sun and antiquated cultures, the rationality of modernity is apparently exercised elsewhere. However, if this is the repressed side of Occidental modernity it can never really be kept at a distance; it is always destined to return and disturb the procedures of a purified rationality. So, apart from signalling a banal escape to pleasure, the Mediterranean as a repressed alterity within modernity can also be re-­‐routed into a further, and altogether more disturbing, groove. As a line of flight into another unauthorised critical space, the present and past histories of the Mediterranean propose a radical revaluation of the very processes and powers that have led to its contemporary subordination, marginalisation and definition. Rather than simply clinging to some purported authenticity being threatened by modernity, there lies the altogether more complex issue of the latter being worked out, lived and proposed in transit and translation. Instead of the template there is transformation, the model is mutable and comes to be modified. Modernity is not an object to be possessed, defended and imposed, but the being and becoming of a dense network of shifting, interconnected, historical processes. Over the last few centuries the Mediterranean has come to represent a symbolic space against which Europe and its associated modernity has often elaborated its self identity: if both come from those shores, today both Europe and modernity are considered to have escaped that space. Yet as the site of a Greco-­‐Roman inheritance, of the cultural and historical formation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of the clash of the early modern European and extra-­‐European empires of Charles V and Suleiman the Magificent, and as testimony to the initial exercise of modern, systematic colonialism on its African and Asian shores, the Mediterranean is culturally and historically central to the structures and languages of European modernity. Suspended between the Orient and the Occident, and today increasingly between the North and the South of the planet, these multiple coordinates threaten to suck in and drown all attempts at arriving at a neat descriptive filiation. This suggests that beyond its geo-­‐political and morphological definitions, the Mediterranean is, above all a discursive space. It hosts a variety of cultural and historical regimes of truth, and sustains not only a desire for definition but also the perpetual elaboration of a problematic. Further, if we consider the historical