Imagination Besieged records the silenced stories of a mediterranean defined by displacement, dispossession, loss, sexual and racial violence. Stories in which the protagonists find ways to express their dissent, sometimes in tragic ways.

The book grapples with the legacies of colonialism and the histories of violence that define the past and present of the Mediterranean in the regional artistic and cultural production. According to their viewpoints, artists and writers from the region have described a mediterranean deeply divided, where communities live alienated from each other's, and yet similarly affected by the violent process of modernization in the post-war, post-colonial world produced, and its effects on the bodies, the landscape, the environment. Each essay taps into the depth of the archive of the modern mediterranean to bring into the present precisely what this present seeks to conceal.