Traveling South: Naples as a Site of Crossing and Migration in the Mediterranean

What sorts of images and narratives of cosmopolitanism are circulating in our cultural discourse? Stories and ideas based on experiences of migration, travel, and exile are considered in relation to the Italian city of Naples, to propose an example of “South-centric” cosmopolitanism. Two different journeys in the Mediterranean, as narrated by Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun and by Neapolitan film director Vincenzo Marra, engage with the experience of travel through stories that in opposite directions—the first from North Africa to Naples, and the second from Naples to North Africa—cross territories and lines of logic of Northern and Southern boundaries and deal with notions of belonging and homecoming.