Profile

Naor Ben-Yehoyada’s work examines unauthorized migration, criminal justice, political economy and the aftermath of development, and transnational political imaginaries in the central and eastern Mediterranean. His monograph, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Transnational Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago Press, 2017), offers a historical anthropology of the recent re-emergence of the Mediterranean. He is specifically interested in the processes through which transnational regions form and dissipate. He proposes to view such spaces as ever-changing constellations, and show how we can to study them from the moving vessels that weave these constellations together and stage their social relations and dynamics in full view. He has also written shorter pieces about the different phases of the dynamics of maritime unauthorized migration and interdiction, as well as on the role that the Mediterranean’s seabed plays in Italian political retrospection.

His current project follows perpetual debate about what the Mafia is and how anti-Mafia forms of inquiry (by magistrates, journalists, political activists, police investigators) encounter this dilemma. It follows the recent trial regarding the 1988 murder of a journalist and the several preceding key criminal cases that the trial has revived, all of which, people still assume, involved the Mafia. He focuses on the doubts, suspicions, and disputes that arise at the intersection of different forms of inquiry by magistrates, journalists, police investigators, and politicians.

Publications

2022     The Mediterranean Redux: Ethnography, Theory, Politics. co-edited with Paul Silverstein. London: Routledge, 2022.

2017     The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation between Tunisia and Sicily since WWII, University of Chicago Press. In Italian

2019     Incorporare il Mediterraneo: formazione regionale tra Sicilia e Tunisia nel secondo dopoguerra. Trans. Nicola Pizzolato. Milano: Meltemi. Refereed Journal Articles

2020     “Introduction: Remapping Mediterranean Anthropology.” History and Anthropology 31 (1): 1–21. With Heath Cabot (University of Pittsburgh) and Paul Silverstein (Reed College).

2019     “Di Altre Fratellanze?” VOCI Annuale Di Scienze Umane XVI: 65–88.

2018     “Where Do We Go When We Follow the Money? The Political-Economic Construction of Antimafia Investigators in Western Sicily.” History and Anthropology 29 (3): 359–75.

2016     “’Follow me and I will make you fishers of men:’ The moral and the political scales of migration in the Central Mediterranean,” JRAI 22:1, 183-202.

2014     “Transnational Political Cosmology: a Central-Mediterranean Example,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH 56 (4), 870-901.

2013     “The Men Who Knew Too Much: Sardines, Skills, and the Labor Process in Jaffa, Israel, 1948–1979.” Focaal (67): 91–106.

2011     “The Moral Perils of Mediterraneanism: Second Generation Immigrants Practicing Personhood between Sicily and Tunisia.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16:3. Book Chapters

2018     “Heritage Washed Ashore: Underwater Archaeology and Regionalist Imaginaries in the Central Mediterranean.” In Critically Mediterranean, eds. Yasser Elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, 217–39. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018.

2014     “Mediterranean Modernity?” in A Companion to Mediterranean History, edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita, 1st ed., 107–21. London: John Wiley & Sons.

2017     “A proposito di «A Companion to Mediterranean History».” With Fiume, Giovanna, Quaderni Storici 153 (3): 848–66.

2016     “L’economia della pesca di Mazara del Vallo in prospettiva storica.” Co-authored with Salvatore Cusumano, Vito Pipitone, Tiziana Polizzi, Raul Sanchez de la Sierra. StrumentiRes: Rivista online della Fondazione Res, Anno VIII, n° 1.

2011     “The Clandestine Central Mediterranean Passage.” Middle East Report, no. 261 (2011): 18–23.