The Refugee Tales Project as Transmedia Activism and the Poetics of Listening. Towards Decolonial Citizenship

The Refugee Tales project aims to raise awareness about the experiences of asylum seekers in Britain. It pivots around a walk through the British countryside, which becomes the occasion to share tales about immigration detention, subsequently published in a series of anthologies. In this essay, I frame Refugee Tales as a series of activist citizen media practices, engaging in prefigurative politics by providing refugees with a chance to perform a critical form of citizenship. Finally, I discuss how the tales themselves juxtapose forms of sympathetic and hostile listening

Sara Florian. Caribbean Counterpoint: The Aesthetics of Salt in Lasana Sekou

Si tratta di una recensione di Sara Florian. Caribbean Counterpoint: The Aesthetics of Salt in Lasana Sekou. Il libro è una momografia dedicata allo scrittore caraibico Lasana Sekou

An Introduction to RP-Testing

This paper reviews the concept of Reproducibility Probability and makes a brief introduction to RP-testing. The RP-based version of some common parametric tests is provided. Moreover, a particular attention is devoted to the well-known nonparametric Wilcoxon Rank-Sum test. A comparison between the properties of the RP and the p-value is made in order to evaluate the practical utility of these stability indicators. It turns out that the use of the RP to perform the tests and to interpret their results, requires more technical analysis, but it provides more interpretable direct information on the stability of the test results

Riots, Crowds and the Collective in Amitav Ghosh's Political Imagination. From The Shadow Lines to Gun Island

This article, using the riots in The Shadow Lines (1988) as a point of departure, maps a more general system of representations of multitudes within Amitav Ghosh’s work. Its implications, in turn, can shed light on Ghosh’s relationship with the idea of collectivity, which is more fraught with tensions and ambivalence than it may initially appear. More precisely, I argue that Ghosh’s work is deeply concerned with the various ways in which collectivities, masses and gatherings of different kinds can affect, enhance, diminish or threaten individual existences, and tries to find a reconciliation between the collectivity and the individual. As a result of these anxieties, Ghosh tends to represent crowds and multitudes chiefly in two modes: as an anonymous, dehumanized and threatening mass; or as a community of individuals bound together by spontaneous human solidarity. In turn, this tends to exclude from his imaginative horizon certain kinds of collectivities that do not fit in either of the two modes, such as various kinds of explicitly politically engaged movements. Besides The Shadow Lines – the moment in which Ghosh lays the foundations of this system of representations –, the article considers other works of fiction and non-fiction – most notably “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” (1995), In an Antique Land (1992), The Hungry Tide (2004) and River of Smoke (2011) – in order to show how the characteristics of this system have remained consistent throughout Ghosh’s career. The point of arrival, finally, is Ghosh’s recent work on climate change and migration – The Great Derangement (2016) and Gun Island (2019) – in which the shortcomings of this system of representations, as regards Ghosh’s intervention in current public debates, come to light with particular clarity

Reproducibility Probability Estimation and RP-Testing for Some Nonparametric Tests

Several reproducibility probability (RP)-estimators for the binomial, sign, Wilcoxon signed rank and Kendall tests are studied. Their behavior in terms of MSE is investigated, as well as their performances for RP-testing. Two classes of estimators are considered: the semi-parametric one, where RP-estimators are derived from the expression of the exact or approximated power function, and the non-parametric one, whose RP-estimators are obtained on the basis of the nonparametric plug-in principle. In order to evaluate the precision of RP-estimators for each test, the MSE is computed, and the best overall estimator turns out to belong to the semi-parametric class. Then, in order to evaluate the RP-testing performances provided by RP estimators for each test, the disagreement between the RP-testing decision rule, i.e., "accept H0 if the RP-estimate is lower than, or equal to, 1/2, and reject H0 otherwise", and the classical one (based on the critical value or on the p-value) is obtained. It is shown that the RP-based testing decision for some semi-parametric RP estimators exactly replicates the classical one. In many situations, the RP-estimator replicating the classical decision rule also provides the best MSE

Weaving Cross-cultural Narratives: Hybrid Forms and Historico-political Discourse of the Anglophone Indian Novel

As the anglophone Indian novel exists in the in-between space between transnational and local cultures, it has repeatedly staged the encounter between a variety of cultural dimensions while remaining acutely aware of the way they interact with historical and political discourse. This essay examines four novels—Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Anita Desai’s In Custody and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide—that have conceived their narratives as a site of encounter between cultures in response to articulations of Indian national identity. The essay stresses the authors’ shared concerns but also the different formal solutions and ideological positions they adopt. Rao—a pre-Partition author—deals with otherness within a nationalist paradigm. Rushdie, Desai and Ghosh, on the other hand, tackle otherness in different modes that are dependent on their writing after Partition and in a climate of growing violence and fundamentalis

A born-translated fairy tale: transcultural readership and anti-exoticism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp”

The six years Robert Louis Stevenson spent in the Pacific region offer a particularly stark contrast with his received image as an uncommitted romancer (and hence, in the context of British colonialism, as a tacit supporter of imperialism). His Pacific writings are the work of a powerfully realist writer, with strong interests in ethnography and local history, engaged in the political life of the region, and an active supporter of the native populations in their opposition to imperial rule. In this article I focus on "The Bottle Imp", a short story that, at first sight, constitutes a less confrontational, more accommodating literary project if compared with most of Stevenson's production on the Pacific. However, not only does this text encapsulate several elements of the poetics that characterize Stevenson's Pacific writing, but it is also the only work of Stevenson's career to be conceived for a Polynesian audience, which adds a significant layer of complexity to its analysis. I argue that with this work Stevenson creates a "born-translated" fairy tale, which results in the adoption of specific narrative techniques and in a particular declination of Stevenson's political agenda and anti-exoticist strategies. This, in turn, means to frame "The Bottle Imp" within some of the current debates on the global circulation of literature and its effect on the politics, ethics and aesthetics of literary texts

The playwright, the moralist and the poet: a Brechtian reading of Stevenson’s writings on François Villon

The paper compares two works by Robert Louis Stevenson: the essay ‘François Villon: Student, Poet, Housebreaker’ and the short story ‘A Lodging for the Night’, both written in 1877, at a very early stage of Stevenson’s career. Both works deal with the fifteenth century poet François Villon, the first poète maudit of French literature. Stevenson was both attracted and repelled by Villon, and in both texts the poet stands out as a highly ambivalent figure. A comparison between these two works allows us to observe with clarity the different attitudes, literary strategies and narrative voices that Stevenson deploys in his essays and in his fiction respectively. More importantly, the close relationship between the essay and the short story allows us to make some guesses as to why Stevenson decided to interrogate a complex figure such as Villon by using two different approaches simultaneously, and on the contrasting imperatives of morality and ambiguity that characterise Stevenson’s writing as a whole. In addition, the short story and the essay bring to light some revealing analogies with Bertolt Brecht, an admirer of both Stevenson and Villon

Exploring the Ethnographic Encounter: an Anthropological Approach to World Literature in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Through a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide, the article proposes a preliminary attempt to combine anthropology with world literature, a concept that has recently attracted significant attention from the fields of postcolonial studies and comparative literature alike. Firstly, I argue that world literature is best seen as a number of overlapping and/or divergent projects, and that it thrives if tackled through a plurality of approaches. Secondly, I suggest one possible approach to world literature, employing John Comaroff’s definition of anthropology as a discipline characterised by a few closely interrelated epistemic operations that qualify ethnographic fieldwork. Lastly, I map Comaroff’s epistemic operations onto The Hungry Tide to unpack the levels of anthropological sophistication of this novel. I advocate the revised concept of ethnographic novel that results from this reading – the idea of a novel of the ethnographic encounter – as a useful point of departure for a project of world literature