Pesaro, Nicoletta

English

Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università degli Studi di Venezia Ca' Foscari

 Viajes y escrituras: migraciones y cartografías de la violencia Edición Nicoletta Pesaro Alice Favaro 2  Comité scientifique : Elsa Cross, UNAM José García-Romeu, Université de Toulon Paul-Henri Giraud, Université de Lille Claudia Hammerschmidt, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität                 Illustration de couverture : Roy Palomino Maquette : Gerardo Centenera et Jérôme Dulou Mise en pages : Alice Favaro et Sofía Mateos Gómez Révision : Carmen Domínguez, Michelet Gondo, Marisol Luna, Enrique Martín Santamaría, Sofía Mateos Gómez, Victoria Ríos Castaño, Carlos Sifuentes Rodríguez  En application des articles L. 122-10 à L. 122-12 du code de la propriété intellectuelle, toute reproduction à usage collectif par photocopie, intégralement ou partiellement, du présent ouvrage est interdite sans autorisation du Centre français d’exploitation du droit de copie (CFC, 20 rue des Grands-Augustins, 75006 Paris). Toute autre forme de reproduction, intégrale ou partielle, est également interdite sans autorisation de l’éditeur. Droits réservés.  © 2019, Eduardo Ramos-Izquierdo  ISSN : 2605-8723 ISBN : en cours  3   Índice  Preface  Nicoletta Pesaro   7 De abismos y fronteras Alice Favaro  13 Migration to the United States and Challenges of Diversity Werner Sollors   19 Violenza simbolica e immigrazione nel discorso pubblico e nel paesaggio urbano Nicola Montagna   33 Donne, violenza e diritto internazionale delle migrazioni Sara De Vido  51 Accettare la violenza per integrarsi: dilemmi dell’immigrazione in Italia Luis Fernando Beneduzi   73 “Cosa succede ai corpi quando la storia li investe?” Alcuni esempi nella letteratura italiana contemporanea sulle migrazioni Silvia Camilotti   91 4  The Death of the Mother Tongue: the Inadequacy of Language and Body Representation in Chinese-American Writer Yiyun Li Nicoletta Pesaro   107 Escaping Bodies on the Dark Roads of China: Space and Displacement in Ma Jian’s Yin zhi dao Martina Codeluppi   125 Fragile and Powerful: Chinese Migrant Women, Body and Violence in Sheng Keyi’s Bei mei Federico Picerni   145 Ficción como refugio de la realidad violenta - Aquella noche la vi de Drago Jančar Branka Kalenić Ramšak  165 “Es dulce el amor de la patria”: la escritura del viaje y la identidad nacional en el lance de Ricote (Quijote, II, 54, 63 y 65) Adrián J. Sáez  Las “tecunas” en Hombres de maíz  Dante José Liano   Metáforas del poder: censura y violencia en Ganarse la muerte de Griselda Gambaro Adriana Mancini  Migración de los símbolos y de los imaginarios: el viaje detrás de una quimera en la trilogía de William Ospina Diana Paola Pulido Gómez  Cartografía de la violencia. Algunos cuentos de Princesa Aquino Augsten Ana Cecilia Prenz Kopušar  Ulises en París: la vida ante Santiago Gamboa Francisco de Borja Gómez Iglesias  181     195   209    219    231    247  5   Migrantes, desplazados, fantasmas: la circulación de los cuerpos en Samanta Schweblin Gabriele Bizzarri  261 De breves resonancias Eduardo Ramos-Izquierdo  273 Bibliografía  275 7  Preface Nicoletta Pesaro Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia xiaopei@unive.it   A symphony of  hate and violence, pity and compassion, understanding and reflections on the human condition emerges from this collection of  articles, written by a variety of  scholars, who differ in terms of  gender, ethnicity, nationality and field of  study, yet largely share the same interests and goals. The aim of  this volume is to bring together a range of  voices, ideas and stories in order to establish a cartography of  bodies and minds that are irremediably affected by powerful waves of  deliberate or forced migration. Human society has always been marked by uneven relationships between “hosts” and “visitors”, words with opposite meanings both contained within the same Latin word hospes. It has ever been suggested that hospes and hostis – respectively “guest” and “enemy” in Latin – share the same root. As Werner Sollors argues in the opening essay, human history has always been the background for these friendly or hostile encounters, and narrations of  the violent effects of  migration on individuals and communities can be found in the most ancient books, from the Bible to the Greek epic poems. In our time, when the voice of  populism and mistrust of  migrants are 8  stronger than ever in many different areas of  the world, it is indeed risky to stress concepts such as those of  ethnicity and identity – “lies that bind” to quote Appiah’s recent book. By contrast, it is appropriate to turn – as Lily Cho does – towards “the emergence of  subjectivities bound by the disparate geographies of  home and away, the past and the present” (“The Turn to Diaspora” 113). The articles gathered in this volume, focusing on the narration of  the body, attempt precisely to restore the subjectivity (the humanity) of  the migrants, seen as human beings rather than as mere victims. Women, are, often, but not exclusively, the main actors involved in these huge flows, where people move from one place to another for a variety of  different reasons while sharing the same precarious life and feelings. Actually, as stated by Cho, we should look at these “traumatic dislocations of  people” by differentiating diaspora from transnationalism and focusing on the subjective experience rather than on the “traversing of  national boundaries” (112). And what is more subjective and experiential than the representation of  the body and its universe of  sensory – that is, both physical and emotional – reactions? Sociology and literature thus seem like the most suitable fields to represent, observe, analyse and perhaps deconstruct these traumatic experiences. The introduction written by Alice Favaro, who is co-editor of  the volume, clearly points out the power and the responsibility of  literature to map the wide articulations of  this contemporary epic of  the margins, reminding us of  the risk of  becoming used to this “aesthetics of  horror”. Many of  the articles in this volume are devoted to literary works where the very essence of  the migrant body is presented to the reader from a range of  different perspectives. Within a multifarious geography of  violence (stretching from Slovenia to China, from South America to Italy), narratives of  abuses on migrants are analysed both as a phenomenon which is increasingly and disquietingly the object of  international law and 9  politics, and a profoundly significant space where all the contradictions belonging to the human race as such occurr. Referring again to Cho, this cartography of  violence not only unfolds across space – as the book covers many different ethnic and geographical areas – but also across time, the time of  history and of  memory. As compellingly demonstrated by Nicola Montagna, violence exercised on (travelling) human beings is not only physical, but can also acquire symbolic forms as it transforms and influences the existence of  people according to the gaze of  those who watch and label them. To label someone as black, foreign, female, weak, strange, different and therefore inferior is one of  the harshest kinds of  violence, and one to which migrants are more exposed than others.  In our societies, where the nefarious power of  words is running wild through the social media, the political discourse and the everyday chatter, we cannot ignore the importance of  analysing and debunking what Foucault calls “practices that systematically form the objects of  which they speak” (The Archeology of  Knowledge 49). To name or label someone means assigning them a role, an image, sometimes a destiny: that is the reason why many of  the articles in this volume deal with language. Sara De Vido, for instance, proposes an insightful analysis on the recent developments of  international law about female refuges, female genital mutilation and domestic violence and their legal definitions. My own essay on the Chinese migrant writer Yiyun Li reveals how the impact of the (rejected) mother tongue can affect the psyche and the very existence of a woman, whose new and apparently successful life in a new country is still haunted by the violent force of language and family ties. The importance of words and labelling is also the main issue raised by Luis Fernando Beneduzi, who presents an analysis of some interviews with a sample of migrants in Italy, highlighting the difference between 10  two words often used to define people’s and governments’ attitude towards migrants: integration and inclusion. The former conceals a forceful and dangerous ideal of equity, which effaces any subjectivity, while the latter may disclose new forms of understanding and coexistence. Although this geography of migration is made up of a plurality of places and languages, a particular attention is devoted to Italy and its experience as a country of both migrants and immigrants. In her article Silvia Camilotti focuses on the marks left by history on the migrants’ bodies, proposing some novels by female colonial writers as a case study.  The female body is particularly meaningful and compelling as a specific perspective on migration. This body often becomes a space of political resistance, as is the case with one of the most relevant female writers in contemporary Paraguay, Princesa Aquino Augsten, and her female characters, analysed by Ana Cecilia Prenz Kopušar. In Aquino’s novels, women are subejcted to all kinds of abuse and violence, but the force of their body conveys a message of unexpected resilience to the reader. A similar view on female migrants is the one proposed by Martina Codeluppi, who reads the novel The Dark Road by Chinese dissident (and migrant) writer Ma Jian as a “provocative account that highlights the hardships endured by those who are forced to leave their homeland.” The paper focuses on the figure of the escaped woman, which returns with the fascinating image of the “tecunas”, the fugitive women described in Dante José Liano’s essay. The latter reverses the perspective, though, by delving into the experience of the “abandoned men” featured in the 1949 novel Hombres de maíz by Guatemalan Nobel Literature laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias. Another radical change of perspective is applied by Diana Paola Pulido Gómez, who builds her analysis of the migrant and his/her subaltern condition from the viewpoint of the winners, the colonisers embodied by Pedro de Ursúa, the narrator and protagonist of William Ospina’s trilogy. 11  A peculiar figure which recurs in many of  the articles is that of  the travelling writer, who recounts from a very subjective and sometimes autobiographical viewpoint the experience of  “translated being”, to borrow the expression coined by Michael Cronin (Translation and Identity) on the basis of  Salman Rushdie’s definition. One of  the most representative and iconic examples of  a migrant writer is Cervantes, who – just as the protagonist of  his masterpiece – represents the ontological condition of  the wandering being. Focusing on the episode of  Ricote (wich concerns the expulsion of  the Moriscos from Spain), in his essay Adrián Saéz reconstructs a range of  travel options available at the time – from exile to escape, from missionary work to pilgrimage – and presents the character of  Ricote as a symbol of  some key feelings of  the migrant, such as nostalgia, anxiety, and frustration. Despite the diverse origins and geographical destinations mapped in this cartography, if we compare the different events and circumstances of the protagonists scrutinised in the articles, we find a striking correspondence between them in terms of life and bodily experiences. For instance, the desperate struggle waged by the immigrants against the hostile metropolis is much the same in Paris (see Francisco de Borja Gómez Iglesias’s article) and in Shenzhen, depicted in Federico Picerni’s analysis of the novel Northern Girls by Chinese female writer Sheng Keyi: male but especially female migrants have to cope with alienation and the loss of identity, often resorting or submitting to sexual encounters in order to escape isolation. The experience of  immigrants is depicted by many authors in this volume as “a mosaic of  experiences and cultures” – to borrow Gómez Iglesias’s words – where each story, each case represents the “scandal” of  the precarious state of  the migrants, and attempts to free them from their condition of  invisibility.  The act of  telling tales of  migration can be a “shelter” for the migrants themselves: Branka Kalenić Ramšak and Gabriele Bizzarri – respectively introducing the works by the Slovenian 12  writer Drago Jančar and the Argentine novelist Samanta Schweblin – shift the focus on the representational forms adopted by the writers in narrating the violence of  migration. The former scholar suggests that fiction could be the only means of  salvation thanks to the cathartic power of  memory; the latter reflects upon the possibility of  reacting to the loss of  meaning produced by contemporary globalisation and the deterritorialisation of  human beings, by crossing the borders of  the imagination, just as migrants constantly cross the borders of  countries and cultures. Also concerned with the narrative strategies adopted to describe violence is Adriana Mancini’s article on the Argentine writer Griselda Gambaro and her ways of  coping with political censorship in her novel Ganarse la muerte: irony, absurdity, and grotesqueness constitute the approach she adopts in order to show political and personal violence (as in the feminicide described in the novel) in all its ruthlessness.  From the ancient past as much as from this restless present, the stories of  and reflections on migration contained in this book form an extraordinarily vivid and at the same time frightening representation of  our world and the unbearable fragility of  our condition. They urge us to rethink and question our claim to a single and stable identity, the dream of  a sharable and inclusive territory, and the attachment to values and beliefs about gender, homeland, culture and language that all too often lead to misunderstandings and violence.  

Viajes y escrituras: migraciones y cartografías de la violencia

https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3720721/2/Pesaro_preface.pdf

Viajes y escrituras: migraciones y cartografías de la violencia

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università degli Studi di Venezia Ca' Foscari