I saggi di Coetzee lettore

Si recensisce il volume di J. M. Coetzee "Lavori di scavo. Saggi sulla letteratura 2000-2005" pubblicato da Einaudi (2010)

Enkosi kakhulu, Madiba / Thank you very much, Madiba

Questo contributo ripercorre il pensiero di Jacques Derrida su Nelson Mandela così come il decostruzionista franco-algerino lo ha articolato nel suo saggio del 1986 intitolato Admiration de Nelson Mandela, ou Les lois de la réflexion. Pubblicato quando il celebre leader era in carcere, ma già si muoveva in suo sostegno la comunità internazionale, il saggio di Derrida si sofferma sull’auto-difesa di Nelson Mandela al processo di Rivonia e sulle considerazioni che ne derivano rispetto al rapporto tra Mandela, la legge e il concetto di giustizia nella tradizione occidentale e in quella africana. L’articolo rilegge la disamina di Derrida delineando in particolare alcune significative tappe nella costruzione del carisma di Nelson Mandela

'Paving ground': donna e strada nella poesia di Amy Levy

Scopo di questo articolo è la contestualizzazione di alcune poesie su Londra della scrittrice ebrea, femminista, queer Amy Levy (1861-1889). Pubblicate nella raccolta A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889), uscita dopo il suicidio di Levy, le poesie spianano la strada per la rappresentazione della flâneuse, rappresentazione particolarmente originale nel coevo ambito letterario inglese. Si tratta infatti degli anni in cui Londra offriva nuove possibilità alle New Women e Levy coglie l'opportunità di localizzare il soggetto femminile fuori della casa, luogo di cui sino ad allora aveva costituito 'l'angelo'. Nata e cresciuta in un ambiente intellettuale, laico e progressista, levy sviluppa un particolare rapporto con le nozioni di femminilità riflesse nel legame donne/città, anche attingendo dalla tradizione dell'Ebreo Errante, con il quale condivide in parte la percezione della sua stessa alterità. La flâneuse londinese di Levy è una figura del tutto nuova e spicca come eccezione nella tradizione poetica stabilita da autori canonici come Blake, Wordsworth e Wilde perché non rientra nelle rappresentazioni manichee del femminile dell'epoca, cristallizzato nelle polarità di preda sessuale o predatrice sessuale.The aim of this article is to contextualise some poems on London by Jewish, feminist, queer poet Amy Levy (1861-1889). Featuring in the collection titled A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889), which came out right after Levy’s suicide, the poems lay the ground for the representation of a flâneuse, a particularly original one in the English literary scenario of the time. These are the years when London was offering new chances to the New Women, and Levy took the opportunity to locate the female subject outside the house, where it had so far played the part of its angel. Born and raised in an intellectual, lay and progressive surrounding, Levy developed a particular relationship with issues of femininity, reflected upon the bond between women and the city, also drawing from the tradition of the Wandering Jew, with whom she partially shared the perception of her own otherness. Levy’s flâneuse in London is a ground-breaking exception in the poetical tradition established by canonical writers such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Wilde because she does not fit the typical Manichean representations of women of the time, as either sexual preys or sexual predators

Mandela in/and Poetry

In 1994, in his first speech to the parliament of South Africa, Nelson Mandela quoted the Afrikaner poet Ingrid Jonker and read The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga. This unorthodox choice was in fact politically fine-tuned and had an emotional impact both on the new-born Rainbow Nation and on Mandela’s stature as a 20th century-icon. A passionate reader of poetry, Mandela is one of the contemporary figures to whom the highest number of lines has ever been dedicated. Poets have celebrated him in in the forms of elegy, song, ballad, epistle, epic, ode, tribute, sonnet, rap, dub poetry, haiku and so forth. Poets started fashioning his public persona as early as the mid-Sixties when, banned and sentenced to life imprisonment, he became the world’s most famous invisible prisoner. Transformed into metaphors, blended with virtues, identified with private and collective historical events, associated with specific spaces, Mandela is above all identified with the prison where he spent eighteen years: Robben Island. In poetry, the osmotic intercourse between Mandela and Robben Island is a persistent topic with a strong symbolic function as the island catalyses issues which makes it a synecdoche of South Africa itself: a segregated place where brutality and injustice ruled but also a laboratory where resistance and hope developed. This article will examine a series of poems on Mandela and Robben Island starting from Dennis Brutus’ compositions on the subject, the first of which dates from 1963, up to post-apartheid lyrics

From Chaos to Canon: Some Reflections on South African post-Transitional Novels

Starting from the concept of ‘ordinary’ as it is outlined in Neville Alexander’s collection of essays, An Ordinary Country (2002), this paper reflects upon some common traits emerging from the bulk of the recent flourishing of novels by new black writers in South Africa. The aim of the paper is a first, tentative sketch of the relationship between these writings (and their authors) and the South African tradition, with a view to exploring whether there is a new canon struggling to emerge from this post-transitional wave of fiction. This essay aims at raising some reflections around authors such as Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe, Kopano Matlwa, Renesh Lakhan, etc. and on their liaison with the South African/African literary cano