The Mediterranean Sea has become a harrowing gauntlet for hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants each year. Through the intimacy and immediacy of fiction, poetry, photography and reportage, Mediterranean explores these turbulent journeys.
Lyric fiction by Edwidge Danticat, Maaza Mengiste, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Chika Unigwe hones in on the dislocation that marks individual passages. Mario Badagliacca’s haunting photos of found objects recovered from capsized vessels serve as a visual guide to communal tragedy. Poems by Jehan Bseiso and Ali Jimale Ahmed strain with memory and loss, while Hassan Ghedi Santur’s narrative reporting on African migration brings us inside Europe’s detention centers and camps through the eyes of those he meets there, holding the continent to blistering account for the systems it has built and the people it has failed. Evoking the sustenance of home, the book also includes recipes from migrants along with stories connecting them to the places they left behind.

Finally, Mediterranean offers an in-depth syllabus providing additional avenues for study through compelling literature, theory, art, and film.

Mediterranean is the first book by the editors of Warscapes.

Edited by Bhakti Shringarpure, Michael Bronner, Veruska Cantelli, Michael Busch, Jessica Rohan, Melissa Smyth, Jason Huettner, Gareth Davies, and Noam Scheindlin.

Warscapes is an open-access digital initiative that seeks to fill a void in mainstream media, offering deep and incisive perspectives on contemporary conflicts by featuring underrepresented voices grounded in literature, history, and activism. Warscapes was founded in 2011 and publishes fiction, reportage, poetry, interviews, reviews, art, and photography. The magazine is a tool for understanding complex political crises and serves as an alternative to compromised representations of those issues.