CAT 2026 Slot 2 VARC Q6: Evidence based

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For early postcolonial literature, the world of the novel was often the nation. Postcolonial novels were usually [concerned with] national questions. Sometimes the whole story of the novel was taken as an allegory of the nation, whether Nigeria or Kenya. This was important for supporting anti-colonial nationalism, but could also be limiting – land-focused and inward-looking.

My new book “Writing Mediterranean Worlds” explores another kind of world of the novel: not the village or nation, but the Mediterranean world. The book describes a set of novels in which the Mediterranean is at the centre of the story. It focuses on the novelists Orhan Pamuk, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar and Lawrence Durrell [who have] centred the Mediterranean world in the majority of their novels. Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking – full of movement, border-crossing and north-south interconnection. They are all very different – from colonially inclined (Durrell) to radically anti-colonial (Djebar), but together draw on and shape a wider sense of Mediterranean space through themes, images, metaphors and language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the reader's mind, as centred in the interconnected coastal societies.

The Mediterranean world is a term used to describe the very long-lasting connections among the coasts of Southern Europe, the Levant, and North Africa. These connections were made possible by the geography of the Mediterranean Sea. For much of history, travel by sea was much easier than by land, which meant that port cities very far apart were often more easily connected to each other than to much closer inland cities. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that what we now call globalization first appeared in the Mediterranean. This is the interconnected oceanic world referenced and produced by the novels in my book.

For their part Pamuk, Ben Jelloun, Djebar and even Durrell reference a different set of histories and geographies than the ones most commonly found in fiction in English. Those [commonly found ones] are mostly centred in Northern Europe or the US, assume a background of Protestantism and whiteness, and mention places like London and Chicago. The novels in [my] book highlight instead a largely Islamic and Mediterranean space, feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of Alexandria, Tunis, Smyrna and Tangier. It is a densely imagined, richly sensory image of a coastal cosmopolitan culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place in the world.

This remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of North Africa. In the fiction, sailors and travellers are not all European. African, as well as Middle Eastern and Southern European characters, are traders, captains, runaways, villains, missionaries and activists. This does not mean that Mediterranean Africa is romanticised. Migration is often a matter of force; travel is portrayed as abandonment rather than adventure, freedoms are kept from women and piracy is rife. What it does mean is that the African part of the Mediterranean world plays an active role in its long, rich history and therefore in that of the wider world.