Introduction: From Crisis to Critique

Taking the recent omnipresence of crisis rhetoric around the Mediterranean as a starting point, the introduction lays out the main terms of this collection—crisis and critique—in their interrelation, as it emerges through the matrix of various declared crises in the Mediterranean. If today’s crisis rhetoric often works to restrict political choices and the imagination of alternative futures, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or produce alternative modes of representation that can voice marginalized subjectivities and liminal experiences? Can crisis become part of contrarian or transformative languages by scholars, activists, and artists or should we forge different grammars to understand present realities in the region? Boletsi, Houwen, and Minnaard unpack the concept crisis and its operations alongside the concept of critique in our professed “postcritical times.” Underscoring the diagnostic rigor of critique in approaches to crisis-frameworks, they plead for critical practices that unravel through forms of translation and comparison rather than through hierarchical models or intellectual detachment. The authors finally revisit the Mediterranean as a cultural, political, and imaginary space and call for a de-centering of discussions around recently declared crises from Europe to the Mediterranean. By outlining each contribution to this collection, they project the region not only as a hotbed of crises, but also as a breeding ground for new cultures of critique, decolonization, resistance to the governmentality of crisis, and alternative visions of futurity.