"Editorial", From the European South: a transdisciplinary journal of postcolonial humanities, issue 2 (2017)

L'editoriale descrive il progetto che sottonde al numero 3 di FES, reperibile anche nel CfP online; individua il fil rouge dei contributi selezionati e discute il significato complessivo degli interventi rispetto al tema proposto

Editorial

The Editorial explains the choices and interests at the basis of issue 3 of the journal *From the European South*. FES 3 places language, literature,and the humanities at the centre of contemporary affairs and intervenes in the debate about how to produce new forms of understanding, conviviality and citizenship in a world ravaged by poverty, discrimination, racism, the (re)emergence of populism, and environmental dead ends. It opens with three contributions devoted to the question of migration and refugees, all discussing ways in which European political and cultural institutions react to the predicament of migrants, and ways in which the lenses of the humanities may contribute to reading reality differently, in search of spaces of understanding and survival

Sculptural eyewear and Cyberfemmes: afrofuturist arts

This article looks at forms of art and applied arts that straddle different times and cultural traditions and bring into view processes of African and African diasporic remaking of modes of seeing, looking and living in the continent from a futurist perspective. It shows how a combination of acts of self-representation and creative uses of waste and discarded objects may engender ways of seeing that reconfigure the world of the subject and of the watcher in a high-tech, afropolitan/afrofuturist direction, as in the innovative work of Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabiru. It also points to the creative ability of fashion design to produce imaginings of times ahead by locating the wearers \u2013 in this case women \u2013 in temporal frames that liberate them from the limitations of colonial/patriarchal traditions while also offering empowering links with the past, as in the productions of Senegalese fashion designer Oumou Sy. Afro\uacfuturism is also the main conceptual framework of the Marvel film Black Panther (2018), about a utopian high-tech African kingdom and its super heroes and heroines. I argue that a relevant part of this diasporic production\u2019s success rests on fashion and the enabling role of Afrofuturist costumes for African women characters

Homi Bhabha at the University of Padua

Homi Bhabha visited the University of Padua on 6 June, 2018 and delivered a public lecture entitled “Migrations, Human Rights, Survival: The Role of the Humanities,”of which an excerptappearsin the present issue ofFES.On that same occasion, Professor Bhabhawas kind enough to accept an interview with my PhD and MA students in contemporary literatures and postcolonial studies. We all sat around thespectacularGio Ponti table in the dining room of the Rectorate at Palazzo Bo, the University headquarters, and started an earnest, wide-ranging conversation, which juggled a series of ideas and comments we decided to sharewith our readers. What follows is a transcription of our dialogue. With deep gratitude for our guest’s generosity and thanks to all involved

Archiviare altrimenti: riflessioni \u2018postcolonialitaliane\u2019

My \u2018postcolonialitalian\u2019 reflections wish to offer a broad critical framework for the first issue of the journal From the European South, which contains a unique survey of the presence and the potential of postcolonial critical theory and practices in the Italian context. Archives of the future: Italy, the postcolonial and the time to come is thought of as a shared space of investigation and interaction among different forms of knowledge and of contemporary cultural and artistic production, which re-open and radically revise Italian archives from a postcolonial perspective. Following the aims of the postcolonialitalia research project (University of Padua, 2012-15) the contributions in this issue sound the epistemological impact of the postcolonial paradigm on canons and disciplinary borders, make visible the country's (post)colonial legacy, and produce fresh re-readings of our historical and cultural tradition. This complex work is premised on a review of the institution of the archive as proposed in this essay, and on recent reflections in \u2018archival discourse\u2019 that have affected the way we think of and produce knowledge through (what I have termed) \u2018postcolonialitalian\u2019 lenses. The essay also asks how we might bring to light the new faces of our country by means of a postcolonial perspective developed in/from the South that may offer alternative readings of the 'locations' of Italian culture

Editoriale

Mandel

French Profile and Silk Tresses, or the Trap of Convention

A critcal reading of the Caribbean historical romance *Ti Marie

The Legacy of Atlantic Crossings: Eslanda Goode Robeson\u2019s African Journey (1945)

The essay offers a new reading of African Journey by Eslanda Goode Robeson, who in 1936 set out on her first trip to the \u2018Dark Continent\u2019 \u2013 a three-month journey that took her from Cape Town to Cairo with her eight-year-old son. At the time Robeson was 40, and a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, specializing in anthropology with a focus on the colonized black people of the world. She had already published Paul Robeson, Negro (1930), a biography of her famous husband, who was a well-known actor, singer and political activist. The notes and photographs she took during her African experience became a volume published by John Day in 1945 as a diary-formatted chronicle of the visit. Differently from existing readings of Robeson\u2019s diary, the paper argues that Robeson\u2019s quest in African Journey is far less a search for personal roots, far less a pilgrimage in search of an ancestral home for herself as a Black American woman, than it is an offer of a powerful narrative of belonging\u2014a conscious legacy\u2014to her Negro son

Rejoyce. Giacomo Joyce all'Universit\ue0 di Padova

*Rejoyce* recupera i documenti conservati nell'archivio storico dell'Universit\ue0 di Padova relativi all'esame di abilitazione all'insegnamento della lingua inglese nelle scuole italiane sostenuto dallo scrittore irlandese James Joyce a Palazzo Bo nel 1912. L'intervento ricostruisce il contesto in cui si colloca il passaggio di Joyce a Padova e rilegge criticamente i temi d'esame, alla luce della nozione di archivio e del rapporto fra Rinascimento e Modernit\ue0, che lo scrittore discute mettendo a nudo le sue poetiche