Adriatic Forum: A Comment

Abstract

At first glance, the three essays that make up this forum dedicated to the Adriatic appear to chart a fairly standard course for scholarship on the region, depicting the area as one transected by conflict and contest or, alternatively, as a site of cultural mixing and coexistence. The reader quickly realizes, however, that all three authors offer innovative analyses that challenge, even as they build on, the body of work exploring the political and cultural contours of the Adriatic in the modern era. Much of this scholarship reiterates a reductive view of the Adriatic that sees it principally through the narrow prism of competing Italian and Slavic nationalist claims. Although Dominique Reill, Igor Tchoukarine, and Borut Klabjan address Italo-(South)Slav tensions and dialogues, they locate them in much broader frameworks that oblige the reader to rethink understandings of both the contents of these nationalisms and the contexts within which they developed. In different ways, for example, these papers highlight a seemingly obvious but little explored fact: The object of so much contestation and desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not just land, but also the sea that lapped the shores of the Adriatic territories.