de genere - Rivista di studi letterari, postcoloniali e di genere

Editorial

Marta Cariello — 2022-03-31

Transnational Identities and the Global South: Introductory Remarks

Silvia Antosa — 2022-03-31

By focusing on texts written between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the present day, this issue of de genere sets out to explore a multiplicity of written, visual, and intermedial texts by delving into writers’ experience of the Global South (in the widest sense of the term). It aims to show how they have grappled with issues of identity, difference, cross-cultural encounter(s), and belonging. In addition, it explores how the (de)construction of borders, social orders and strategies of control may be accompanied by a more nuanced, deeper understanding of the complex interconnections that link geographical and imagined spaces as well as identities.

Going South: Mary Shelley’s representation of Italy in "Rambles in Germany and Italy"

Giulia Bocchio — 2022-03-31

This article presents Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 as a key text for the perception of Italy in Britain in the nineteenth century. In the age of the Grand Tour, travellers from across Europe visited Italy for reasons of art, culture, leisure, religion and health. Il Bel Paese was regarded by foreign travellers as the emblem of the South and travel writing of the period drew on established patterns of tropes and metaphors to represent the Italian peninsula. This article shows that, in Rambles, Mary Shelley got rid of well-established prejudices related to British colonial sense of superiority and engaged in an authentic, often extremely personal, dialogue with the country and its inhabitants.

At Home in Southern Egypt: Lucie Duff Gordon’s life on the Nile

Claudia Capancioni — 2022-03-31

When Lucie Duff Gordon moved to Egypt in 1862, she had a distinguished career as an English translator of literary and scholarly texts from the French and German, including the popular and influential novel Mary Schweidler, The Amber Witch (1844). Brought up in Germany and France, as well as England, she was a polyglot with an atypical, rigorous education, who engaged with some of the most influential thinkers of the time in her parents’ salon in London, Bonn, and Paris, and the one she established with her husband in London. Her intellectual and linguistic talents and confidence meant that, as a Victorian woman, she was often singled out. Advised to journey south to improve her serious health conditions caused by tuberculosis, her skills found a renewed purpose in Southern Egypt, where she spent the last seven years of her life. In search of a warmer, dry climate, she created a meaningful Egyptian life: she learnt Arabic and studied the culture, traditions, and religions of her new country. She connected with the community in Luxor who valued her for her generosity, medical knowledge, and need to testify. Her perceptive letters bear witness to the controversial rule of the Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, to the poverty of the working classes, and to those forced to work on the Suez Canal.

L’égalité sexuelle et la crise de l’Universalisme français dans l’œuvre de deux voyageuses du XIXème siècle : Olympe Audouard et Hubertine Auclert

Ylenia De Luca — 2022-03-31

This article proposes to investigate how two 19th century French feminist traveling writers— Olympe Audouard and Hubertine Auclert — in the tale of their travels to the East, tried to circumvent the problem of sexual difference in the mission of civilizing other peoples. Both criticized the civilizing mission by calling it chauvinistic and misogynist so as to reveal how republican universalism had failed to resolve inequalities of sex and race. Despite their differing perspectives on French civilization and the plight of non-European women, Adouard and Auclert criticized the civilizing mission equally: recognizing the central role that the figure of the oppressed Eastern woman played in the justification of the civilizing mission, Audouard attempted to reveal how the orientalist discourse hid the subjugation of French women and Auclert condemned the hypocrisy of the French government in supporting the Arab woman as a justification for the civilizing mission.

Towards the (Im)Probable Ecocentric Encounter. Isabella Lucy Bird amongst the Tibetans

Emanuela Ettorre — 2022-03-31

The aim of this paper is to investigate the way in which Isabella Bird tries to overcome her preconceived ideas of what constitutes the South as exotic “other”; ideas that, at first, shape her response to her encounter with the Tibetan people. There is a sort of masculine, dominant voice at work in her writing that often pervades her descriptions of peoples and places, a voice that is entangled with culture-bound colonial discourses of Englishness, even though her travelling experience offers a compelling example of a woman who resists discriminatory ideas about class, race, gender and civilization. Among the Tibetans illustrates the dualistic tensions that inform Isabella Bird’s life and writing, and it embodies her continuing struggle to overcome a dominant perspective. Despite her initial difficulty in presenting Tibet and the Tibetans as anything other than a projection of conventional Western ways of seeing and thinking, there are moments in the travelogue when she cuts away the clichés, and provides the reader with less structured, more immediate insights into her sense of place, her entanglement with the reality around her, and her attempts to establish a vital relationship with the non-human. It is because of the importance she attaches to these “earthly sensuous” experiences in nature that she succeeds in challenging her own ethnocentric and anthropocentric bias, thereby rediscovering an open-minded capacity for wonder, and an ecocentric grasp of this world’s constitutive importance.

A Gypsy in the Maghreb: Nomadic Subjectivity in Rosita Forbes’s Travel Writings

Mariaconcetta Costantini — 2022-03-31

This article focuses on two travel writings by Rosita Forbes, based on two expeditions to the Maghreb she made in the early 1920s: The Secret of the Sahara (1921), a travelogue about her pioneering exploration of the remote oasis of Kufara; and El Raisuni: The Sultan of the Mountains: His Life Story (1924), a generic hybrid combining biography and adventure, based on her interviews of a Moroccan chief of bandits. Special attention is paid to Forbes’s representation of her complex identity of transnational subject crossing a multiplicity of borders, as well as to her portrayal of a global South to which she is irresistibly lured despite its many dangers. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s idea of “nomadic subjectivity”, Julia Kristeva’s theorization of strangerhood and postcolonial concepts, the article examines Forbes’s transnationality, offering evidence of her openness to, and fertile interaction with, otherness. The lure of the South is instead analysed through the polysemic noun “sun” which, insistently mentioned in Forbes’s 1944 autobiography, tropes an attractive, albeit unsafe, southern dimension of freedom and self-refashioning. Deeply imbued with Orientalist clichés, this South is the space in which Forbes decided to wander like a gypsy, “a nomadic subject” who, in Braidotti’s terms, rethinks her gender role and sexuality by “[r]elinquishing all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity”.

Colonialità dello spazio e inglesi nell’estremo sud europeo contemporaneo

Luigi Cazzato — 2022-03-31

Il tentativo del presente saggio è quello di intrecciare in maniera contrappuntistica scritture di viaggio o memoir di autori contemporanei (inglesi e italiani) nello spazio europeo meridionale (“della differenza imperiale interna”: Tlostanova 2018) e considerazioni sia sulla formazione dell’identità culturale (Hall 1990) sia sulla contrapposizione centro-periferia (colonialità dello spazio). Quest’ultima ha caratterizzato da sempre la storia imperiale europea, la storia della colonialità del potere (Quijano 2010) e, dunque, il presente postcoloniale. In altre parole, si tratta di affrontare la questione della periferia dal punto di vista dello spazio geografico e da quello dello spazio letterario, quando quest’ultimo viene considerato periferico come genere o quando prodotto da autori periferici, non appartenenti a nessun canone. Il tutto all’ombra dei movimenti del Sud globale.

“Voicing Creative Uprisings”: Women and the Nigerian Diaspora in Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Isabella Villanova — 2022-04-01

This article analyses two novels published by two writers of Nigerian-Igbo descent: Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen (1974) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), examining the connections between the authors’ and their female characters’ movements and mobilities. This essay first compares the two fictions and the different migration experiences of the two novels’ main protagonists, Adah and Ifemelu, in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively. Second, it shows how these texts can be read as what Carole Boyce Davies describes as “uprising textualities” (1997), that is, narratives of women’s resistance, reassertion, renewal and rethinking that simultaneously celebrate women’s creativity. Writing, indeed, plays a pivotal role for both the novelists and their characters. It is not only a tool to explore their personal experiences in the Global South and the complex relationships between their travels and the spaces of marginality in which they live, but it is also a political instrument to denounce social inequalities, challenge hegemonic representations, and Eurocentric and masculine epistemologies. This paper aims to demonstrate how the “South” also exists in the geographic North and how the novelists and their respective fictional characters, through writing, voice their “creative uprisings” and simultaneously negotiate their complex and multifaceted identities and subjectivities in different times and spaces.

Beyond The Archives of Pain: Diasporic Memories of Ecstasy and the Black Feminine Divine in Beyoncé’s "6 Inch"

Giuseppe Polise — 2022-03-31

Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016) is an audio-visual album that intertwines the protagonist’s personal experience of betrayal with a history of black female abused sexuality. Journeying across Louisiana’s gothic landscapes, from its haunting bayous, swamps and plantations to the vibrant city of New Orleans, Lemonade exhumes the unwritten memories of black women’s pain from the oblivion of the official records of the Ante- and Post-bellum US South. It re-figures the South away from notions of white nostalgia and turns it into a counter-hegemonic space where memories of erotic expression survive the repeated forms of black female unfreedom and sexual exploitation. As several moments of Afro-diasporic rituality are projected on screen, Beyoncé accesses black diasporic mythology as a submerged epistemological archive for representations of ecstasy that disrupt the Western and Christian flesh/spirit dichotomy. Focusing on the “6 Inch” video, this article will look into the strategic ways its visuals entice readings of Beyoncé’s body as the reiteration throughout modernity of the normalized commodification of the hyper-sexualized mulatto women—the “irresistible” Victorian quadroons and octoroons. At the same time, the ritual dimension that saturates the video also discloses a complication of that history of abuse by establishing genealogies between mulatto women and mythical manifestations of black female erotics. Channeling Oshún and Pomba Gira—love goddesses from the West-African and Afro-Brazilian pantheons—Beyoncé’s body is deified and made into the recipient of black diasporic counter-memories that illuminate the triangular connection between flesh, erotic motion and ecstatic pleasure. Closing on a flames-engulfed brothel before which Beyoncé and other mistresses stand, the video’s Southern scenarios factually historicize black women’s experiences of deep-seated misogynoir. At the same time, they also become sites of black feminist theorizing through which Beyoncé reconfigures her relationship to the past by embracing and manifesting an unashamed black female erotic agency in the present.

Travelling “back” to the Caribbean: Female Transnational Identities and Linguistic Relatedness in Paule Marshall’s "Praisesong for the Widow" and Edwidge Danticat’s "After the Dance"

Federica Zullo — 2022-03-31

According to Barbara Korte, there is nowadays a “corpus” of postcolonial travelers such as V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Pico Iyer and Caryl Phillips who are engaged with colonial heritage and issues of belonging as well as new interactions of de-territorialization or extra-territoriality (2000). Central to this “canon” is the travelers’ efforts to underscore historical power relations forged through travel and to contest and protest their endurance. The travel narratives I investigate in my paper rightly belong to this canon, especially for the way they display processes of transculturation, linguistic relatedness, and cultural hybridity through the experience of travel.

In Paule Marshall’s third novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983), the protagonist makes a physical and emotional journey from the United States to the Caribbean, discovering her African roots and a new “homeland”. In Edwidge Danticat’s travelogue After the Dance. A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, the author/narrator reconstructs the carnival history of her country through the languages (English, French, Kreyòl), the cultural references and the artistic objects that represent the complexity of Haitian society. Across spaces and languages, I explore how the two female protagonists succeed in making the most important journey of their lives, against the fear of an unknown that becomes progressively familiar, embracing a transcultural and transnational renovated identity.

The Cosmopolitan’s Other through the Cosmopolitan’s Gaze: Refugee Representation in Helon Habila’s "Travellers"

Gabriela Alexandra Banita — 2022-03-31

The article tackles the problem of refugees’ representation by the cosmopolitans making up the postcolonial elite and the tension that such an operation engenders. Thereby, it offers a reading of Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019), which depicts the encounter between the cosmopolitan protagonist and a number of refugees trying to make a new life in the city of Berlin. Employing Gikandi’s critique of the cosmopolitan elitism characterising postcolonialism and its non-relation to the refugees’ life experiences in Between Roots and Routes (2010), it will be argued that the novel explicitly presents what Durrant (2020) calls “the failure of registration” of the refugee life from a position of privilege. By rendering this occlusion visible, the author’s representation tries to escape the danger of eliding the voices of the people represented.

Transnational Eruption: Moroccan Diaspora and Literary Disruption

Mohamed Baya — 2022-03-31

This article proposes a comparative reading of two works by writers of Moroccan descent that examine the phenomenon of migration and elaborate on what Ato Quayson has called the “diasporic imaginary.” Written as first-person narratives, Abdellah Taïa’s Une Mélancolie arabe (2008) and Saphia Azzeddine’s Mon Père en doute encore (2020) approach the migration experience from a gay man’s and a heterosexual woman’s perspective who both experience departures, arrivals, and nostalgic yearnings. Portraying a young man from a poor Moroccan family, Taïa’s fourth semibiographical fictional account tells of the narrator’s fascination for music and cinema that takes him to Paris and Cairo, and his coming to terms with a homosexual identity. Twelve years later, in her eighth novel, Azzeddine amalgamates the autobiographic and the fictional to tell the story of her father who arrived in France in the 1960s. Although the authors cover different geographical and historical contexts, both writers draw upon a common Moroccan heritage, and as diasporans they examine the constraints of diaspora life from different gender positions and through recourse to a variety of genres. While the interweaving of the autobiographical and the fictional in both texts complicate Taïa and Azzeddine’s literary approach towards truth-telling, the interpretive frameworks provided by the travelogue and patriography allow for a heightened reading experience.

The Route to Transnational Womanliness in Nina Berberova’s "The Italics are Mine" (1969)

Michele Russo — 2022-03-31

The Italics are Mine is not only an account of Berberova’s memories of her emigration from Russia through western Europe to the US. It is a narrative experiment which deconstructs social and literary conventions by using different narrative forms (see Russo 2020, 27; see also Todorov 1981, 95-6). The writer includes letters, essays, poems, and lists, so as to trace her past, as well as to relocate her self in western Europe first, and in North America later.

This study will dwell on Berberova’s emigration to western Europe and to the US and, in particular, on her memoirs of her journeys to the southern regions of the US. In her descriptions of southern lands of the US, she tends to show little reticence about her sexual orientations (see Peterson 2001, 503). By considering de Beauvoir’s remarks (1997, 20-34) on unequal relationships between men and women, and Kristeva’s theories (1994, 183-4) on the alienation of the self, this work aims to analyse Berberova’s physical and metaphorical transnational travelling (see Cronin 2009, 9; see Zaccaria 2017, 32-8), which leads her to look into her inner world and to re-explore her sexuality.

Finally, the paper will centre on the unpublished sequel to Berberova’s biography, “Deathbed Dialogues,” in order to give insight into the writer’s depiction of her achieved womanliness, of what being a woman means. It will delve into Berberova’s transcultural passage to her North American identity (see Kalb 2001, 141-46), bringing to light her subversive attitude and her sexual orientation.

Attraversamenti e intersezioni: il progetto "Lo sguardo delle viaggiatrici sull’Italia di mezzo"

Serena Guarracino — 2022-03-31

Serena Guarracino racconta il progetto Lo sguardo delle viaggiatrici sull’Italia di mezzo (UNIVAQ)

Queer Tidalectics: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature

Nabila Tavolieri — 2022-03-31