A Mediterraneanist Utopia

A talk entitled ‘The Oxygen of the Future. A Mediterraneanist Utopia’ is being held today as part of the Utopia Anniversary Events Series. Delivered by Adrian Grima, the talk is being held on the 80th anniversary, to the day, of Albert Camus’s lecture to inaugurate the new Maison de la Culture in Algiers in 1937. The roots of Camus’s vision, steeped in “benign” French colonialism, lay in the ideas of the early 19th-century utopian socialist Claude-Henri Saint-Simon and the writings of Gabriel Audisio, founder of the École d’Alger. Grima will look at utopian narratives of Mediterranean unity as well as focus on the ideals of ‘Mediterranean synthesis’ and ‘Mediterranean humanism’ that Laurent Ropa, the pied-noir of Gozitan origin inspired by figures like Audisio and Robert Randau, wrote about passionately in Melita, the paper of the Maltese-North African diaspora. Grima questions whether this Mediterraneanist utopia which inspired Camus’s inaugural speech and which Audisio saw as “the oxygen of the future”, has anything to say to us today, in an increasingly cynical and xenophobic world? Grima teaches literature and representations of the Mediterranean within the Department of...