'Columbia University Libraries/Information Services'
Abstract
My paper uses Latour’s models of network/worknet and of diplomacy to discuss the interactions between political exile and multilingual translation in writings by Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri. It explores how the exclusionary prefix ‘extra’, in medieval definitions of exile (extra solum) and in modern Italian descriptions of extracomunitari (non-European Union) migrants, can be recast to indicate supplement, expansion, and connection, using Latour’s model of a diplomatic engagement in which all sides agree to ‘speak well about things that really matter to them’. I argue that several of Brunetto’s and Dante’s vernacular works engage Latour’s openness of ‘speaking well’ as a means to negotiate the experience of exile and bring transtemporal and translinguistic worknets into being, in which their different actants assemble new material and textual spaces and forms in which to overcome the disruptions of exile by re-imagining [POL]itical and [FIC]tional modes of (co)existence
