The Reading Warehouse

"Contested Mediterranean Spaces rescues a cultural geography from the essentialist circularities to which it was once often reduced. These authors examine how circum-Mediterranean identities, at every level from the clan to the nation-state, exhibit the complex impact of ideological and political manipulation. They show how this hothouse of Europe's self-ascribed cultural origins has been characteristically prey to spatial cleansing, gentrification, and bigotry; they also document a regional activism that seeks more tolerant and environmentally benign futures. By problematizing the political and intellectual manipulations as well as the ideological tensions that inform such revivals of the Mediterranean as category and concept, they persuasively refurbish a tired regionalism with refreshing critical and comparative interest." - Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University; Author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Rome

Maria Kousis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Crete. Her publications include a two volume special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on Mediterranean Political Processes in Historical-Comparative Perspective (with Charles Tilly and Roberto Franzosi, 2008).

Tom Selwyn is Professorial Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London. His publications include Thinking Through Tourism (2010).

David Clark completed his doctoral work at London Metropolitan University. He is on the editorial committee of Exiled Writers Ink, a magazine devoted to the writings of refugee writers currently living in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.