The Postcolonial Writer in Performance: J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime

This essay focuses on the elaboration of postcolonial literature as an event emerging from the interaction among the many and diverse agencies which allow the postcolonial work to come into being. This formulation both highlights the repetition of tropes in postcolonial literature and the variations to the tropes themselves, which can become ethically and politically relevant by creating an interruption in accepted notions of what a postcolonial work should sound like. Following this lead, the essay will outline a methodological approach which interprets the literary work as a performative act in the complex nexus of discourses constituting the postcolonial writer as a figure of the global collective imaginary, taking as case study J. M. Coetzee’s work with particular focus on his Nobel Prize lecture and the third instalment of his memoir series, Summertime (2009). His work, together with others, is taken as a symptom of how public lectures and statements, together with the literary work proper, have all become an expression of the writer’s own performativity as a writer; while these phenomena have an impact on literature as a whole, the essay focuses on the postcolonial writer figure as historically endowed with what Kobena Mercer has famously termed “the burden of representation.

The Dance of the Dead Rhino: William Kentridge’s Magic Flute

The article offers a reading of the staging of The Magic Flute by visual artist William Kentridge, focusing on his introduction of the rhino in the visual landscape of the opera as symbol for the silenced subject of violence. Operatic tradition has always been concerned with the staging of death, in particular with the death of its female protagonists, and recent scholarship has highlighted the complicity of the genre with the ideology of Western patriarchy and colonial violence. In this light, Kentridge's appropriation stages Mozart's opera as both voice of colonial Europe and place of resistance for the postcolonial artist. Kentridge moves the setting of the opera to colonial Africa, and the Flute becomes haunted with the massacre of the Herero people in South West Africa by the German army led by general von Trotha (1904-1907). The African white rhino, a species under the threat of extinction, works in this work as proxy for the missing corpses of the Herero people; in its being subject to humiliation and ruthless murder, it recalls Judith Butler's recent attempt at a different categorization of human life as both a continuous exposure to violence and what can be mourned after death. With its silence among the powerful sounds of Mozart's opera, the body of the dead, dancing rhino stands at the centre of Kentridge's work, which becomes a ceremony of mourning where the Western canon can be made to "resonate differently" (Trinh T. Minh-ha).&nbsp

Writing “so raw and true”: Blogging in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

This essay aims at tracing the intersection between literary production and multimedia textuality in the case of postcolonial writing through an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent novel Americanah (2013). Here the main character Ifemelu, after leaving her native Lagos to study in the US, becomes famous as a blogger on racial issues from the point of view of a non-American black. Starting from Sandra Ponzanesi’s The Postcolonial Cultural Industry, the analysis of the novel takes into account recent debates on the public role of postcolonial writers, as the blog reflects Adichie’s own role in contemporary media and situates the novel in the global landscape of Afropolitanism and its predicaments.  Blog entries inhabit the novel from its early pages, and blogging intersects fiction and contaminates it with social commentary. With its interweaving of creative writing and opinion making, novel and blog, Americanah comments on the public role of the writer and its viral exposure, offering a poignant example of the mutation of narrative forms in the information age.Questo contributo indaga l’intreccio tra produzione letteraria e testualità multimediali nella scrittura postcoloniale attraverso l’analisi del recente romanzo di Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2013). Qui la protagonista Ifemelu, trasferitasi da Lagos negli Stati Uniti, apre un blog che si occupa di questioni razziali dal punto di vista di una nera non statunitense. Partendo dalle argomentazioni proposte da Sandra Ponzanesi nel suo The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (2014), l’analisi del romanzo prende in considerazione il recente dibattito sul ruolo pubblico dello scrittore postcoloniale: il blog riflette il ruolo di Adichie nei media e situa il romanzo – non senza fratture – nel panorama globale dell’Afropolitanismo. I post del blog appaiono nel romanzo dall’inizio, e la sua scrittura interseca la fiction contaminandola con un ampio commento sociale. Con il suo intreccio di scrittura creativa e d’opinione, romanzo e blog, Americanah commenta sul ruolo pubblico dello scrittore e la sua presenza ‘virale’ nei media, offrendo un esempio pregnante sul cambiamento delle forme narrative nell’era dell’informazione

Fabio Vittorini,<i> Melodramma. Un percorso intermediale tra teatro, romanzo, cinema e serie tv</i>

Recensione di Melodramma. Un percorso intermediale tra teatro, romanzo, cinema e serie tv di Fabio Vittorini

Società Italiana delle Letterate

Identità, scritture, esperienze in relazione. Il Concorso Lingua Madre: da tredici anni per darevoce alle donne migranti     Paola MarchiGrafie del sé. Una rilettura nel tempo     Grazia CianiRicuciture, ricomposizioni e nuove narrazioni     Stefania Tarantin

Silvia Antosa, Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing Travel, Writing the Self

Silvia Antosa, Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing Travel, Writing the Self (Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2018, 153 pp. ISBN 9788857548135) by Serena Guarracin

Sguardi della differenza: Anne MacDonell ed Estella Canziani nell’Italia di mezzo

Il contributo offre una lettura trasversale di due scritture di viaggio ad opera di viaggiatrici inglesi che all’inizio del Novecento attraversarono le terre d’Abruzzo: In the Abruzzi di Anne McDonell (1908) e Through the Apennines and the Lands of the Abruzzi: Landscape and Peasant Life di Estella Canziani (1928). Partendo da una ricognizione della letteratura critica sulla scrittura odeporica femminile e del suo intreccio con le cornici metodologiche che hanno indagato il panorama immaginario del Sud Italia, margine del margine e simbolica zona d’ombra tra l’Europa e l’Africa, l’analisi si concentrerà soprattutto sulle differenze nella strutturazione della voce narrante e della posizionalità dello sguardo in questi due resoconti, per disinnescare il rischio di appiattire queste soggettività in uno stereotipo che non renda merito delle stratificazioni che queste due scrittrici mostrano nei rispettivi approcci al territorio abruzzese. Il contrappunto tra elementi retorici come il commento politico e l’ironia per MacDonell e il linguaggio etnografico e favolistico per Canziani permettono a chi legge oggi di confrontarsi con le complessità dei territori raccontati e delle comunità che li abitano; l’intersezione di questi due sguardi femminili contribuisce ad una rappresentazione decisamente sfumata, che mette in questione facili binarismi come civilizzato/primitivo o tradizione/modernità.The contribution offers a transversal reading of two travelogues by English women who travelled through the Abruzzi at the beginning of the 20th century: In the Abruzzi by Anne McDonell (1908) and Through the Apennines and the Lands of the Abruzzi: Landscape and Peasant Life by Estella Canziani (1928). Starting from an overview of the critical literature on women's odeporic writing and its intertwining with the methodological frameworks that have investigated the imaginary landscape of Southern Italy, margin of the margin and contact zone between Europe and Africa, the analysis will focus on the differences in the structuring of the narrative voice and of the positionality of the gaze in these two accounts, in order to defuse the risk of flattening these subjectivities into a stereotype that does not give credit to the stratifications that these two writers display in their respective approaches to the Abruzzi territory. The counterpoint between rhetorical elements such as political commentary and irony for MacDonell and ethnographic and fable-like language for Canziani allows the reader to confront the complexities of the territories recounted and the communities that inhabit them; the intersection of these two positionalities contributes to a decidedly nuanced representation that questions easy binarisms such as civilised/primitive or tradition/modernity

Praticare il dissenso. Intervista a Giorgina Pi

Giorgina Pi is a theatre director, activist, video maker, and outspoken feminist. She is among the founders of the Angelo Mai collective, who transformed an abandoned warehouse in Rome into one of the city’s most active cultural hubs. Home of the artistic formation “Bluemotion”, Angelo Mai represents an uncommon form of grassroots initiative joining cultural experimentation and political commitment in a network expanding both nationally and internationally. Here, Giorgina Pi talks about practicing theatre and art as a form of dissent, and how this shapes creative relationhips and experiences

Review article: Identità, migrazioni e postcolonialismo in Italia. A partire da Edward Said, Brunetti B. and Derobertis R. (eds.), 2014, Bari: Progedit.

This contribution reviews Identità, migrazioni e postcolonialismo in Italia. A partire da Edward Said, a collection of essays edited by Bruno Brunetti and Roberto Derobertis, showing its topicality for contemporary cultural studies in Italy. By framing it in the wider debate on postcolonial or migrant writing in Italian, the review intends to assess how this volume starts from the legacy of Edward Said’s thought to offer some valuable insights on cultural criticism and the role of intellectuals in contemporary Italy

Silvia Antosa – Mirko Lino (eds.), Sex(t)ualities. Morfologie del corpo tra visioni e narrazioni

Review of the book Sex(t)ualities. Morfologie del corpo tra visioni e narrazioni edited by Silvia Antosa and Mirko Lino.Le raccolte di saggi sono sempre più oggetti eccentrici nel panorama della scrittura accademica contemporanea, in particolar modo italiana: i contributi non godono dello stesso credito di quelli pubblicati – spesso dopo lo stesso processo di revisione cieca – sulle riviste “scientifiche”, e meno ancora viene valutato il lavoro di cura, che con il tempo ha perso decisamente prestigio rispetto a quello, quantitativamente più semplice da valutare, della scrittura monografica. Eppure editare una collettanea è un lavoro delicato e complesso, che include la tessitura di relazioni (scientifiche e umane) e la cura della scrittura altrui, impegno che si caratterizza per generosità e abnegazione, in quanto appunto messo così poco a valore dagli attuali meccanismi di valutazione