'Uteis a si e a sociedade': creolisation and states of belonging among urban women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia.

Recent scholarship from across the Americas has emphasized two general principles for framing interpretations about creolisation in the New World. First, is to understand creolisation as an uneven process of adaptation and change as opposed to a linear route to absorption and acceptance of Christian-European cultural hegemony. Second is the view that Africa was 'rediscovered' or 'recovered' by Africans (and their descendants) in the New World, as they inscribed (and then reinscribed) their own world view on a new and alienating environment. Within these frameworks analysis has addressed a range of issues about the mechanisms of creolisation (demographic, cultural and structural) as well as the pace and extent of creolisation.

Un ventre di donna. Romanzo chirurgico. A co-authored novel in Italian Futurism

This essay focuses on 20th-century Italian co-authored literature. I define co-authored literature as a literary practice that entails the active and conscious co-operation of two or more authors. This approach leads to an innovative, argumentative and unpredictable interpenetration (compensation), which is the result of the various authorial contributions. In the first part of the seminar, I will analyze the ways in which co-authored writing practice affects the authors' choice of genre. In order to effectively investigate this issue, I survey a set of literary works published by two or more authors in Western context from 1700 to 2013. This quantitative research led me to highlight some significant recurrent characteristics. In the second part, I will focus my attention on a co-authored novel in Italian Futurism entitled Un ventre di donna: romanzo chirurgico, who can help me underline the relationship between the concept of multi-authorship and Modernity

Becoming-Bertha: virtual difference and repetition in postcolonial 'writing back', a Deleuzian reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys’s novel as an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actual repetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys’s novel as an expression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming that Deleuze’s third synthesis depicts, Antoinette’s fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some of which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies

Visualizing Roots and Itineraries of Indian Ocean Creolizations: Project for a Museum of the Present

In this paper, I will discuss the methodological problems raised by the museography of a forthcoming museum on Reunion Island, the Maison des civilisations et de l'unité réunionnaise. One of the museum's goals is to retrace visually the itineraries of the processes of creolisation in the Indian Ocean that led to the creation of a singular culture, the Creole indiaoceanic culture. How to visualise the multiple layers of signification at work, the traces and fragments of languages, imaginaries, rituals, practices travelling throughout the ocean, the dynamic of loss, transformation, translation and recreation of forms, rituals, practices in the itineraries of people? I will first present the museum, its context and goals, then suggests ways of “making visual” elements of the Indian Ocean’s long history, and finally, discuss the challenges of imagining a museum of the present in the Indian Ocean world

Mãe Africana, Pátria Brasileira: negotiating the racial politics of identity, freedom and motherhood in nineteenth-century Bahia, Brazil

Margarida Ignácio de Medeiros was one of up to twelve million enslaved Africans brought to Brazil. She did not, however, remain enslaved all her life. Margarida’s trajectory from enslavement to freedom was typical of many enslaved African women labouring in urban centres of nineteenth-century Brazil. Although regarded as a domestic slave her enslaved working life, and day, was divided between house and street. Margarida’s work in the house provided her owner with domestic comfort, while her work in the street provided her with an income. Allowed to retain a portion of that income, Margarida was eventually able to purchase her freedom. While living with her owner, Margarida also (re)produced free born children over whom her owner tried to obtain custody. Through an intersectional approach this study attempts to disentangle the conditions of race, gender and status to understand how these conditions interfaced to shape African women’s lived experience as ‘domestic’ labourers and mothers in enslavement and in freedom, and how those experiences shaped ideas about resistance and identity. The very personal battle for the custody of Margarida’s children examined here is also understood as an ideological one about the shape of the nation, about rights and power vis-à-vis freedom, property, family and citizenship. Within this case, then, lies a political struggle for the control of labour as a pre-requisite for citizenship, a racial struggle for supremacy and hegemony of white over black, Brazilian over African, and a cultural contestation over the conditions of creolization. For Margarida, though, as a ‘domestic’ labourer, and in ways similar to her free counterparts in the U.S., her act of litigation against her former owner was an assertion of her right as a freedwoman to an independent economic and emotional existence

Mãe Africana, Pátria Brasileira: negotiating the racial politics of identity, freedom and motherhood in nineteenth-century Bahia, Brazil

Margarida Ignácio de Medeiros was one of up to twelve million enslaved Africans brought to Brazil. She did not, however, remain enslaved all her life. Margarida’s trajectory from enslavement to freedom was typical of many enslaved African women labouring in urban centres of nineteenth-century Brazil. Although regarded as a domestic slave her enslaved working life, and day, was divided between house and street. Margarida’s work in the house provided her owner with domestic comfort, while her work in the street provided her with an income. Allowed to retain a portion of that income, Margarida was eventually able to purchase her freedom. While living with her owner, Margarida also (re)produced free born children over whom her owner tried to obtain custody. Through an intersectional approach this study attempts to disentangle the conditions of race, gender and status to understand how these conditions interfaced to shape African women’s lived experience as ‘domestic’ labourers and mothers in enslavement and in freedom, and how those experiences shaped ideas about resistance and identity. The very personal battle for the custody of Margarida’s children examined here is also understood as an ideological one about the shape of the nation, about rights and power vis-à-vis freedom, property, family and citizenship. Within this case, then, lies a political struggle for the control of labour as a pre-requisite for citizenship, a racial struggle for supremacy and hegemony of white over black, Brazilian over African, and a cultural contestation over the conditions of creolization. For Margarida, though, as a ‘domestic’ labourer, and in ways similar to her free counterparts in the U.S., her act of litigation against her former owner was an assertion of her right as a freedwoman to an independent economic and emotional existence

«The Karma of Chicken Curry». Tibetan Masala films and youth narratives of exile

This essay offers a preliminary study of the cultural translation practices by young Tibetan exilic filmmakers in India, whose films, rather than rejecting the masala formula offered by Bollywood, have tentatively adapted it to the expectations of a Tibetan diasporic audience looking for a cinema capable of attending to the escapist needs of their minds while simultaneously catering to the intimate dreams of their hearts. I contend that Tashi Wangchuk and Tsultrim Dorjee’s first long feature Phun Anu Thanu (Two Exiled Brothers, 2006) is as an original film that presents a new offer on the menu of Tibetan diasporic films, a kind of spicy curry that has been advocated as a timely necessity and a yet-to-be-fulfilled desire

Review: Gender shifts in the history of English. Anne Curzan.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.pp. 223 + xii.

Herbert Schendl (2001:9) defines ‘the study of ongoing changes in a language’ as one of the fundamental goals of historical linguistics. Curzan’s book, which examines the historical development of the English gender system, is a work noteworthy not only for historical linguists, but also for experts of gender and language precisely because it attains the aforementioned objective. The book not only gives a well-argued description of the development of English linguistic gender – a fact that makes it a pivotal addition to earlier theories of the field (e.g. Corbett 1991) – but it also utilises its findings to contribute to the research on contemporary gendered language