Reconfiguring Place and Identity in Roma Tearne's Narratives of War and Refuge

The article discusses the novel The Swimmer by Sri-Lankan English writer Roma Tearneand reads it against the contradictory rhetoric of tolerance and inclusiveness of millennium Britain. In this work, like other narratives revolving around issues of refuge and asylum, refugees and asylum seekers are portrayed as figures that are posited beyond the law of the nation. They embody new subaltern subjects, often confined to temporary and undefined internment in a “camp” situated beyond or in the proximity of the national borders, in those no man’s lands or new incarnations of the colonial “contact zones” (Pratt 1991) that reflect the residents’ insecure and fragile condition; or, as in the case of Tearne’s the Swimmer, they live hiding in precarious dwelling, shunning society for fear of deportation. In this way, they illuminate the “half-life” lived in the interstitial spaces of a “disseminated nation” that, in the words of Homi Bhabha, emerge out of “the scattering of the people […] in the nations of others” (Bhabha 1990: 291). Seen in this light, the novel The Swimmer projects an alternative vision of the nation and of national identity from its margins while elaborating on the insecure, unstable condition of migrant/exiled characters. The pain of exile along with the hope for a new home and identity is evoked by the characters’ negotiation with the loss of legal and geopolitical reference points and by highlighting the way they are reduced to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” (1998) In the exposure of the bare life of refugees, literary inscriptions and visual representations are crucial, as they on the one hand, draw attention to the dehumanized conditions of living in a state of suspension, while on the other tend to provide a counternarrative of the widespread depiction of “the tide threatening to breach national borders” (Tyler 2006: 192). Narratives centring on refugees often revolve around some recurring motifs that are teased out in the analysis of Tearne’s The Swimmer, such as the question of the ethical responsibility of hospitality, the relationship between hosts and strangers and the ways in which the idea of nation, home and belonging become increasingly problematic for both arrivants and “hosts”. Another recurring motif is represented by the critique of both the role of institutions and the handling of human lives, problematizing the idea of England as a desirable destination and a safe haven. As the article argues, the novel invites a revision of space and place through the presence of the “infrahuman”, who is stripped bare of any status or security and therefore becomes a “disquieting element”, “breaking the identity between the human and the citizen” (Agamben 2000: 21). The locations explored are often quintessentially English settings, such as the secluded spaces of the English countryside or the cosmopolitan London setting, embodying the epitome of contemporary metropolis of which refugee narratives represent the “underside”, in sharp contrast to “glossy tourist representations” (Gibson 2006: 699)

Visions of Home in British Asian Women's Writing: Leena Dhingra's Amritvela and Roma Tearne's Bone China

The articles discusses the ways in which the works by British Asian authors Leena Dhingra and Roma Tearne deal with the issue of "home" and "home making". In their works which are shaped by the diasporic experience, both authors deal with home as a contested terrain and construct it in ways that reflect their unhinged subject positioning. British Asian women’s writing has been shaped by the writers’ own experience of migration from the Indian Subcontinent to Britain. Over the last decades this thriving trend in contemporary English literature has grown to reflect the reality that “there are now three generations of Asian women living in Britain”, as sociologist Amrit Wilson has noted (Dreams, Questions, Struggles 129). Women writers have variously addressed issues of individual and group identity, and explored the link between gender and ethnicity. The search for a diasporic, cross-cultural identity, along with the quest for home and belonging, are crucial issues in British Asian women’s writing: the diasporic experience has engendered multiple linguistic and cultural relocations and the concept of home has become an increasingly contested terrain. In diasporic women’s literature home is poised at the intersections of being ‘unhomed’, as suggested by Homi Bhabha (Location of Culture 9), and feeling more or less comfortably at home in one country or more countries. British Asian women’s writing stems from a tentative negotiation of opposites such as freedom and confinement, uprooting and displacement and, as postcolonial critic Susheila Nasta has pointed out, offers an ongoing reflection on multiple ways of conceiving ‘home"

A stage under petticoat government : Italian international actresses in the age of Queen Victoria

The aim of this thesis has been to document the English careers of the two nineteenth-century Italian International actresses Adelaide Ristori and Eleonora Duse. The English careers of Duse and Ristori are discussed in the light of both the nineteenth-century debate which developed in England on the role and nature of the actress, and the reception of foreign stars on the English stage and the ensuing discussion on the way foreign theatre stars conformed to, or contravened, prevailing images of English womanhood. Chapter 2 looks into the role and status of the actress from the mid-nineteenth-century to the fin de siecle by deploying critical tools offered by feminist theatre criticism. It is an attempt to define the role of the nineteenth-century actress as a professional woman and draw attention to the voyeuristic nature of nineteenth-century theatre where actresses were put on display: on the one hand they were admired and visually possessed by their audiences, but on the other, they were doomed, as women who made a public show of their bodies, to be social outcasts. Chapter 3 attempts a chronology of foreign actresses on the English stage and focuses on their reception which provides a basis for comparison between English and foreign nineteenth-century actresses. Chapter 4 and 5 respectively, reconstruct Ristori's and Duse's English careers. Issues tackled in the previous chapters resurface here to provide a critical angle in trying to evaluate their reception in Victorian England. The conclusion endeavours to pull together the different lines of this study and points to possible lines of research to be pursed in the future in the field of women in theatre

Monitoring of Plant Species and Communities on Coastal Cliffs: Is the Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Suitable?

Cliffs are reservoirs of biodiversity; therefore, many plant species and communities of inland and coastal cliffs are protected by Council Directive 92/43/EEC (European Economic Community), and their monitoring is mandatory in European Union countries. Surveying plants on coastal cliff by traditional methods is challenging and alternatives are needed. We tested the use of a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as an alternative survey tool, gathering aerial images of cliffs at Palinuro Cape (Southern Italy). Four photo-interpreters analysed independently the derived orthomosaic and plotted data needed for the monitoring activity. Data showed to be not affected by photo-interpreters and reliable for the prescribed monitoring in the European Union (EU). Using the GIS analysis tools, we were able to: (a) recognise and map the plant species, (b) derive and measure the area of distribution on the cliff of habitat and species, and (c) count Eokochia saxicola individuals and gather quantitative data on their projected area. Quality of the images represented the main constraint, but incoming technological improvements of sensors and UAVs may overcome this problem. Overall results support the use of UAVs as an affordable and fast survey technique that can rapidly increase the number of studies on cliff habitats and improve ecological knowledge on their plant species and communitie

Glocal Routes in British Asian Drama: Between Adaptation and Tradaption

In the context of British Asian theatre and the search for a diasporic theatre aesthetics the practice of adaptation has emerged as a recurring feature. Over the last decades, British Asian theatre has sought to create a language of the theatre that can reflect the cultural heritage of Asians in Britain; this search has taken different directions testified also by the plurality of voices that today make up British Asian theatre and has responded to the need to challenge the conceptual binary of British and Asian, aiming to affirm South Asian culture on the stage as an integral part of British culture. As the article argues, adaptation also plays a role in highlighting the dialectic between local and the global particularly in those cases where regions of Britain such as the Northwest of England can be recreated on stage as South Asian British cultural spaces

Il tragico nel teatro di Sarah Kane: Blasted

Il saggio propone una lettura di Blasted, opera prima della drammaturga inglese Sarah Kane, come esplorazione del tragico nella contemporaneit\ue0. Il dramma \ue8 analizzato nel contesto della scena teatrale inglese degli anni novanta e alla luce della particolare vicenda umana dell'autrice. Inoltre, viene messa in luce la rete di rimandi interstestuali che colloca il dramma di Kane in una linea di ricerca drammaturgica sul tragico contemporaneo

Contesting Misrepresentations in British Asian Women's Writing

The article discusses shifting modes of representation in British Asian women's writing and focuses on the works of three authors (r. Randhawa, M.Syal, Y. Whittaker Khan) who have challenged received notions of female Asian identiti in Britiain by exploring the different strands of their cultural heritage, while actively seeking to enlarge the scope of representation of British Asian women