A Map of Words: Research-Creation Perspectives on Jewish Mediterranean Mobilities

If colonial legacies are not a new research interest in anthropology, in recent years anthropologists have engaged more and more in “exploring the various ways the colonial (and the pre-colonial) past is negotiated, contested, reinvented, reinterpreted, forgotten or denied by the various heirs” (De L’Estoile 2008: 277). In contemporary Jewish studies as well, the questions of “Where are Jews in colonial history? Where is colonialism in Jewish history?” (Katz E.B. et al., 2017) are attracting more and more the interest of scholars, including those working in the fields of Sephardi and Mizrahi studies, that is the fields that deal with the history, culture and traditions of North African and Middle Eastern Jews, both in their countries of origin and in their countries of resettlement. In the paper, I discuss research-creation practices in the context of Jewish migrations (and recollections thereof) from North Africa across the Mediterranean and beyond as a way to train our “Art of Listening,” “an imaginative attention [that] takes notice of what might be at stake in the story itself and how its small details and events connect to larger sets of public issues” (Back 2007: 7). Co-creation practices help ‘retuning our ears’ to the complex world of Euro-Mediterranean diasporas as trans-imperial connections points.