Lessons of Belonging

"The profundity and scholarship of Baldacchino’s thoughts, coupled with the expanding horizons of his and other artist’s visual work ‘show’ us that belonging is always constituent, a force to originate or to instaur beyond established boundaries." – Dennis Atkinson, Goldsmiths University of London "As in previous works, John Baldacchino’s artistic and philosophical writing challenges the readers to exit into the world. This exit is profoundly implied with today’s politics but also with history and ways of unlearning and imagining other futures for the arts and education." – Catarina Martins, University of Porto"John Baldacchino’s latest work returns to familiar themes in his writings: the Mediterranean, longing, and art’s connection with the makings of possible pasts and futures. [He] take[s] readers on a journey in which art-making challenges us to grasp what we take for granted as the meaning of belonging." – Sandro Barros, Michigan State University

• AcknowledgementsList of Figures1 Nowhere: Recurrent Exits1 Art’s Pagan Intents2 Renegotiating Belonging3 The World, Autonomy, and Struggle2 Scotland, Malta, Palestine: Indirect Belonging1 Art’s Thirdness2 Living Somewhere3 Indirectness, Be-Longing3 Assumptions of Making3 Rummiena, Rummeenah, Pomegranates3 California, Armenia: A Métier for Living1 Presumed Space2 Finding Paradox3 Prosthetic Syntheses4 Shared Belonging(s)5 Exiting6 Impasse7 Synthetic Prosthesis8 The Dialectic’s Beyond9 Paradox’s Pedagogy10 Wounded by Water4 Ghana, Crete, Andalusia: Aesthetic Dissonance1 White Liberal Tolerance2 Beyond Tolerance3 Recognition, Specificity, Distinction4 Aesthetics Contra Aesthetics5 Harlem, Hellas, Yoruba, Auschwitz: Aesthetic Identity1 “We Have No Models”2 Learning to Pray3 ‘Our’ Contemporaneity3 The Child and the Tree6 Paris, Prague: Art’s Foreignness1 Beauty’s Polity2 Normalised Deadly Phenomena2 An Excuse for Bildung’s Attraction2 Remembering to Forget2 Avant-Nostalgia’s Inverted Belonging2 Kundera’s Excuse7 Alexandria, Monterosso: Nostalgic Salt1 Performances of Difference2 Before and after the Shipwreck2 Journey and Nostalgia2 Poetic-Pedagogical Hypotheses8 Al-Baħr al-Abyad, ħa-Yam ħa-Tikhon, Mesógeios, Mediterraneo: Thalassic Lessons1 Vantage Points2 “This ‘Inland Sea’ of Ideals”3 Doing, Undergoing, and Living Deliberately4 Culture, Revolt and Colonised Economies5 An Aesthetic Sense of Belonging6 Lessons of Belonging