John Baldacchino

Developing a theme in dialogue with Maxine Greene's philosophy, this book introduces the reader to what animates Greene's passionate work: the self and the imaginary. It illuminates how Greene empowers us all as learners of the possible, by identifying learning with the power of the imagination. Greene's work promises hope beyond the impasse that often occurs when learning is reified by educational systems. Education Beyond Education illustrates how Greene redefines the notion of the imaginary and with it, that of the imagination as that which expands the possibilities of learning beyond the boundaries by which education is often narrowly defined and practiced. Tracing Greene's key arguments, Education Beyond Education offers a strikingly original and empowering way to see and re-position education beyond its customary limits.

Avant-nostalgia brings together textual and visual narratives scattered around four themes: knowledge, memory, touch, and return. The text starts where the image ends. The image originates where the text is fulfilled. These are after-images of a reading of art and literature on the grounds of polity, history and geography. The narratives that emerge within the visual arts and literature chart the grounds of polity. Such grounds manifest a history that is ‘contemporary’ — in that it takes serious account of ‘our’ time — where democracy and freedom must be regarded as moral imperatives. Equally, grounds express a geography that is specific to physical and ontological spaces, where: (a) location emerges from the choices that are intended to facilitate a visitation of art; and which (b) provide grounds for a discussion of matters like anamnesis, nostalgia and aporia. The discussion retains a ‘fragmentary’ format by way of excusing the discussant from epistemological compartments.

In Thodor Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’s Gaze it is poetically claimed that God’s first creation was the journey after which came doubt and nostalgia. Anyone who knows the Mediterranean will recognise that claims of this sort go beyond their poetic packaging. Makings of the Sea presents the Mediterranean as a horizon of journey, doubt, and nostalgia. Readers are invited to follow the journey as that which casts the Mediterranean as a universal aesthetic imaginary; where through doubt, a hybrid imaginary emerges over a horizon stretched between utopia and crude fact; and where we are all invited to reconsider nostalgia as the ground without which no one might properly converse with the nuances of everyday life. Engaging with 20th century Mediterranean visual and performing arts, literature and music, this book invites the reader to consider how everyday aesthetics inhabit and define the Mediterranean as a common cultural horizon founded on difference. The author entertains no illusions on how this region is ‘shared’ between its peoples and their histories. Instead, he urges the reader to attend to what Albert Camus identifies as “the light” which Mediterranean men and women “have been able to keep.” Yet one must never forget that Camus’s statement is further qualified with a warning: “just as the Mediterranean sun is the same for all men, the effort of men’s intelligence should be a common inheritance and not a source of conflicts and murders.”