Serena Guarracino
University of L'Aquila, Department of Humanities, Faculty Member
- University of L'Aquila, Dipartimento di Scienze Umane (DSU), Faculty Memberadd
- Gender and Sexuality, Performance Studies, Literature and Music, Performance and performativity, Media Studies, Music and Literature, and 25 moreOpera, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Cultural Studies, Suniti Namjoshi, Acousmatic voice, Art History, Languages and Linguistics, Literature, Gender, Feminist Theory, Women's Studies, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Contemporary Poetry, Feminist Philosophy, (Italian) Colonialism and Postcolonialism, Letteratura Postcoloniale Italiana, Masculinities, Mediterranean Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Masculinity Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Edward Said, and Black/African Diasporaedit
- I received my PhD at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in 2005edit
La traduzione messa in scena nasce all’incrocio tra gli studi sul teatro e sulla traduzione, con particolare attenzione ai feminist translation studies, per offrire uno studio preliminare della traduzione del teatro britannico... more
La traduzione messa in scena nasce all’incrocio tra gli studi sul teatro e sulla traduzione, con particolare attenzione ai feminist translation studies, per offrire uno studio preliminare della traduzione del teatro britannico contemporaneo in italiano a partire da due testi della drammaturga Caryl Churchill, Seven Jewish Children (2009) e Cloud Nine (1979). Campo poco esplorato nella critica italiana, specie per quanto riguarda il secondo Novecento, la traduzione per il teatro permette di integrare la linguistica del testo con le specificità dell’espressione orale e il processo intersemiotico della messa in scena. L’intreccio tra il teatro e la traduzione femminista permette inoltre di riflettere contrastivamente sulle caratteristiche pragmatiche e discorsive dell’inglese e dell’italiano, utilizzando l’analisi traduttiva per approfondire le questioni linguistiche e culturali relative alle politiche di genere in relazione al carattere deittico del testo teatrale. La traduzione per il teatro si costituisce quindi come “traduzione senza originale”, che guarda alla rappresentazione del testo d’origine, ma anche alla traduzione messa in scena, che ha l’arduo compito non di tradurre, trasferire il testo da un contesto ad un altro, ma di metterlo in dialogo con la contemporaneità.
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Cosa fanno le donne all'opera? Partendo da questa domanda, e alla luce della triade genere-classe-razza ripresa dagli studi culturali, Donne di passioni invita lettrici e lettori a incontrare tre grandi eroine della lirica, ripercorrendo... more
Cosa fanno le donne all'opera? Partendo da questa domanda, e alla luce della triade genere-classe-razza ripresa dagli studi culturali, Donne di passioni invita lettrici e lettori a incontrare tre grandi eroine della lirica, ripercorrendo la storia di Traviata, Carmen e Madama Butterfly per ascoltarne di nuovo e più attentamente la voce. Violetta, Carmen e Cio-cio-san ancora riescono a creare un legame emotivo con il loro pubblico, ma mostrano anche come la lirica sostenga tuttora un senso patriarcale del mondo che le vuole sante e/o prostitute ma comunque sottomesse. Ribelli per passione e ancor più appassionate nel momento della morte, queste “personagge” sembrano cantare l'impossibilità di sopravvivere a uno spettacolo che pare creato per mettere in scena ripetutamente la loro eliminazione. Tuttavia, un ascolto attento alle diverse sonorità della passione al femminile fa echeggiare altre storie che le riscritture contemporanee propongono a teatro come al cinema, da Camille a U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, da Pretty Woman a M. Butterfly. Così, con la stessa voce con cui cantano la propria disfatta, le donne all’opera cantano anche il proprio potere, la propria fragile immortalità.
La primadonna all'Opera traccia le variazioni sul tema della cantante lirica nelle letterature in lingua inglese attraverso un approccio interdisciplinare: un viaggio che conduce l'opera lirica lontano dai luoghi conosciuti della critica... more
La primadonna all'Opera traccia le variazioni sul tema della cantante lirica nelle letterature in lingua inglese attraverso un approccio interdisciplinare: un viaggio che conduce l'opera lirica lontano dai luoghi conosciuti della critica musicale, nell'altrove di una controcultura in cui primedonne della musica e della letteratura celebrano il potere della propria voce. Se è vero che l'opera rappresenta il potere culturale europeo, la primadonna ricopre il ruolo di straniera esotica, affascinante e insieme pericolosa deviazione dalla norma. Essa può quindi incarnare figure dal margine della modernità occidentale, spesso strettamente legate a percorsi femminili e spesso femministi, come accade nelle narrazioni di George Eliot, Joan Anim-Addo, Willa Cather, Sujata Bhatt e molte altre.
This workbook has been conceived while I was teaching a course on “English Language” for the 2nd year students of a degree course called “Lingue, culture e istituzioni del Mediterraneo”. Its purpose is to offer students the critical... more
This workbook has been conceived while I was teaching a course on “English Language” for the 2nd year students of a degree course called “Lingue, culture e istituzioni del Mediterraneo”. Its purpose is to offer students the critical instruments to accept the challenge that learning ‘english’ entails today – not ‘just’ learning a language, but dealing with the whole, multifaceted heap of phenomena that go under the name of ‘english’ today, including those aspects informed by colonial and postcolonial dynamics. This work includes a number of texts from different media — writing, but also music and film. It must be considered as an attempt to create a common space of thinking in a language such as english that constantly challenges our attempts at grasping and framing it into either linguistic, literary or cultural syllabuses. This language, as a house that we inhabit (whether as ‘foreign’ or ‘native’ speakers) is haunted by the spectres of all the stories that are told in this language, and that shape its present form in the very moment when we are trying to teach it. To invite students in this haunted house also means to give them the keys to its closed rooms and dark alleys, to the shantytowns and skyscrapers where english is spoken today.
This essay provides a tentative mapping of the musical Africa emerging from Toni Morrison's two recent forays into musical theater, the opera Margaret Garner (2005) and the theatrical piece Desdemona (2011). Both works operate as... more
This essay provides a tentative mapping of the musical Africa emerging from Toni Morrison's two recent forays into musical theater, the opera Margaret Garner (2005) and the theatrical piece Desdemona (2011). Both works operate as affective events taking place in performance, and while neither is actually set in Africa, both enact a memory of pre-Middle Passage experience through music. Margaret Garner, set in the US, goes back to the slave woman who killed her children—an event that had already inspired Morrison's novel Beloved (1987)—and explores the echoes of Africa in the New World. In Desdemona, the afterlife encounter between the Shakespearean heroine and her former nanny, Barbary, contains numerous evocations of Africa, first and foremost suggested through Malian artist Rokia Traore's idiosyncratic singing. Hence, in both works memories of an African past haunt a present elsewhere by the persistence of sound; this allows for a different approach to Africa, one that is not "represented" as much as "staged" through aural flows enacting the experience of affective memory via the global musical landscape.
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This essay aims at tracing the intersection between literary production and multimedia textuality in the case of postcolonial writing through an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent novel Americanah (2013). Here the main... more
This essay aims at tracing the intersection between literary production and multimedia textuality in the case of postcolonial writing through an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent novel Americanah (2013). Here the main character Ifemelu, after leaving her native Lagos to study in the US, becomes famous as a blogger on racial issues from the point of view of a non-American black. Starting from Sandra Ponzanesi’s The Postcolonial Cultural Industry, the analysis of the novel takes into account recent debates on the public role of postcolonial writers, as the blog reflects Adichie’s own role in contemporary media and situates the novel in the global landscape of Afropolitanism and its predicaments. Blog entries inhabit the novel from its early pages, and blogging intersects fiction and contaminates it with social commentary. With its interweaving of creative writing and opinion making, novel and blog, Americanah comments on the public role of the writer and its viral exposure, offering a poignant example of the mutation of narrative forms in the information age.
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This paper investigates the theatrical stage both as a walled-in space where ethnic difference can be safely experienced and consumed, and as a gateway for black performers to achieve public visibility and recognition as appears in Caryl... more
This paper investigates the theatrical stage both as a walled-in space where ethnic difference can be safely experienced and consumed, and as a gateway for black performers to achieve public visibility and recognition as appears in Caryl Phillips’s novel Dancing in the Dark (2005). Phillips’s main character puts blackface on his own black skin to handle what Edward Said would name the “anxious power” of performance; this power becomes, in Phillips’s own postcolonial rereading, a device to expose the performativity of racial borders and gateways. Here, the theatrical curtain works as a gateway to acceptance and, in some cases, integration; yet it also becomes a wall enclosing the performer in her/his own performance of “the Other”.
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This essay focuses on the elaboration of postcolonial literature as an event emerging from the interaction among the many and diverse agencies which allow the postcolonial work to come into being. This formulation both highlights the... more
This essay focuses on the elaboration of postcolonial literature as an event emerging from the interaction among the many and diverse agencies which allow the postcolonial work to come into being. This formulation both highlights the repetition of tropes in postcolonial literature and the variations to the tropes themselves, which can become ethically and politically relevant by creating an interruption in accepted notions of what a postcolonial work should sound like. Following this lead, the essay will outline a methodological approach which interprets the literary work as a performative act in the complex nexus of discourses constituting the postcolonial writer as a figure of the global collective imaginary, taking as case study J. M. Coetzee’s work with particular focus on his Nobel Prize lecture and the third instalment of his memoir series, Summertime (2009). His work, together with others, is taken as a symptom of how public lectures and statements, together with the literary work proper, have all become an expression of the writer’s own performativity as a writer; while these phenomena have an impact on literature as a whole, the essay focuses on the postcolonial writer figure as historically endowed with what Kobena Mercer has famously termed “the burden of representation.”
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This essay considers Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida and the context of its production and reception on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. It starts from Edward Said’s insightful discussion in Culture and Imperialism describing Verdi’s work... more
This essay considers Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida and the context of its production and reception on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. It starts from Edward Said’s insightful discussion in Culture and Imperialism describing Verdi’s work as pivotal to an understanding of both cultural and economic relationships between Europe and Egypt. Yet, this essay also counterpoints Said’s reading, taking into consideration Aida’s role in the construction of both an Italian and “European” cultural identity inside and outside Europe, as opera was “exported” to the colonies, allowing colonial elites to recreate a “European” atmosphere at the heart of such burgeoning metropolises as Cairo or New York. In this context, the multifarious incarnations of Aida featured in the essay open operatic representation to the contested space of the Mediterranean and, more widely, to voices from the margins of European modernity. First, accounts of the reception of Aida show an osmosis between European and Egyptian cultural productions; second, Aida’s representation of Italy’s future colony, Ethiopia, conflicts with the opera’s own endorsement of the Ethiopians’ fight for freedom; and third, the heroine’s black skin troubles the representation of the racial Other in an opera that is not ostensibly about the protagonist’s race. Following these apparently diverging aural routes, this essay identifies Aida as one of the master narratives for the elaboration of racial issues both in Italy and beyond and explores its potential to subvert given representations of ethnicity and gender through performance.
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This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the production of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Sikh origin. Chadha’s work is located in what Marie Louise Pratt defines as ‘contact zones’, negotiating between US,... more
This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the production of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Sikh origin. Chadha’s work is located in what Marie Louise Pratt defines as ‘contact zones’, negotiating between US, European and Indian audiences. The result is a directing style that puts together ‘East’ and ‘West’, Bollywood and Hollywood, in an in-between space that has been radically reconfigured through hybridization. This happens in particular through her use of music and soundtrack, from the documentary I’m British but. . . (1990), up to the recent Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004). Here, many and diverse musical languages are put together through the representational strategies of parody and kitsch, deconstructing the idea of cultural identity in the very gesture that creates it.
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This essay explores how the operatic voice has been used both in critical and fictional writing to express desire beyond compulsory heterosexuality. The essay starts from Koestenbaum’s argument that opera, and singing in general, makes... more
This essay explores how the operatic voice has been used both in critical and fictional writing to express desire beyond compulsory heterosexuality. The essay starts from Koestenbaum’s argument that opera, and singing in general, makes the body oddly bisexual, as the throat, the locus of operatic desire, does not mark the body in terms of gender.
Yet, the purported ‘asexuality’ of classical music oddly clashes with the sexual signifiers crowding around the subject of operatic voice. This status of opera as the place where sexuality is ‘made’ (discussed, but also made object of a Foucauldian systematization) is mirrored in the highly sexually-charged narratives analyzed in the essay. Here, the writing of new musicologists like Wayne Koestenbaum, Terry Castle, and Elizabeth Wood, for whom opera is academic subject but also voice for their coming out, will be put in relation with ‘literary’ writing by Hélène Cixous and Sujata Bhatt. For them too opera is the way to cross the boundaries of gender, the way for a ‘female’ body (the body of the singer but also, in a powerful osmosis, the body of the listener) to acquire bi- or pluri-sexual characteristics. The point of these writings, I argue, is not to ‘give voice’ to homosexual vs. heterosexual desire, but to make the boundaries between genders and bodies fluid, to the point of attaining a joyous, playful (con)fusion of bodies and desires.
Yet, the purported ‘asexuality’ of classical music oddly clashes with the sexual signifiers crowding around the subject of operatic voice. This status of opera as the place where sexuality is ‘made’ (discussed, but also made object of a Foucauldian systematization) is mirrored in the highly sexually-charged narratives analyzed in the essay. Here, the writing of new musicologists like Wayne Koestenbaum, Terry Castle, and Elizabeth Wood, for whom opera is academic subject but also voice for their coming out, will be put in relation with ‘literary’ writing by Hélène Cixous and Sujata Bhatt. For them too opera is the way to cross the boundaries of gender, the way for a ‘female’ body (the body of the singer but also, in a powerful osmosis, the body of the listener) to acquire bi- or pluri-sexual characteristics. The point of these writings, I argue, is not to ‘give voice’ to homosexual vs. heterosexual desire, but to make the boundaries between genders and bodies fluid, to the point of attaining a joyous, playful (con)fusion of bodies and desires.
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This essay offers a path across some of the essays in this volume exploring the relationship between image and sound in cinema. Heeding different voices from film criticism (considered as criticism of mainly Western feature cinema) and... more
This essay offers a path across some of the essays in this volume exploring the relationship between image and sound in cinema. Heeding different voices from film criticism (considered as criticism of mainly Western feature cinema) and documentary filmmaking, where the voice is discussed in its narrative and technical function, the author aims at listening to cinema, rather than watching it, in order to hear the mechanism that makes this social and cultural technology work. Though cinema technology allows for a complete separation of the voice from the body that originates it, feature films suture image and voice to create a unitary body for its characters and stories. In documentary film, on the other hand, the audience is led by a voice apparently coming from outside the frame, sutured to no body at all; this voice can taint the representation of the ‘real’ with the uncanny voice of the machine, as in the work of experimental film- and documentary-makers from Lynch to David Cronenberg, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Chris Marker, plunging deeper and deeper into the displacing qualities of the voice of cinema.
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This issue of Anglistica, is the first dedicated to music in the long commitment of this journal to cultural studies and interdisciplinarity. Music here features first of all as a topic of study, a human activity with multiple social and... more
This issue of Anglistica, is the first dedicated to music in the long commitment of this journal to cultural studies and interdisciplinarity. Music here features first of all as a topic of study, a human activity with multiple social and cultural resonances; it also works as an access point to issues such as diasporic identities, subaltern writing, and contrapuntal reading of hegemonic narratives. Music is here considered as a peculiar human activity whose medium is sound, an “organization of noise” (Jacques Attali), which also works as site of resistance for subjects singing and playing from the margins of Western modernity. Following a strong commitment in the methodology of cultural studies, all the essays included here focus on the ability of a given genre, artist or performance to ‘give voice’ to marginal or eccentric subjects who live and elaborate the world ‘across borders’ – state borders as well as less tangible borders between metropolis and periphery, power and resistance, hegemony and subalternity.
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In this last contribution to the twin issues Anglistica dedicates to music and cultural studies, Guarracino draws some of the possible connections to be found among the various contributions. Starting from Judith Butler’s and Gayatri... more
In this last contribution to the twin issues Anglistica dedicates to music and cultural studies, Guarracino draws some of the possible connections to be found among the various contributions. Starting from Judith Butler’s and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Who Sings the Nation-state?, Guarracino elaborates on the use of music as a critical practice, while pointing out for further possibilities of reseach in the field.
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The article offers a reading of the staging of The Magic Flute by visual artist William Kentridge, focusing on his introduction of the rhino in the visual landscape of the opera as symbol for the silenced subject of violence. Operatic... more
The article offers a reading of the staging of The Magic Flute by visual artist William Kentridge, focusing on his introduction of the rhino in the visual landscape of the opera as symbol for the silenced subject of violence. Operatic tradition has always been concerned with the staging of death, in particular with the death of its female protagonists, and recent scholarship has highlighted the complicity of the genre with the ideology of Western patriarchy and colonial violence. In this light, Kentridge's appropriation stages Mozart's opera as both voice of colonial Europe and place of resistance for the postcolonial artist. Kentridge moves the setting of the opera to colonial Africa, and the Flute becomes haunted with the massacre of the Herero people in South West Africa by the German army led by general von Trotha (1904-1907). The African white rhino, a species under the threat of extinction, works in this work as proxy for the missing corpses of the Herero people; in its being subject to humiliation and ruthless murder, it recalls Judith Butler's recent attempt at a different categorization of human life as both a continuous exposure to violence and what can be mourned after death. With its silence among the powerful sounds of Mozart's opera, the body of the dead, dancing rhino stands at the centre of Kentridge's work, which becomes a ceremony of mourning where the Western canon can be made to "resonate differently" (Trinh T. Minh-ha).
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Born in Western Maharashtra and now living between Devon (UK) and India, Suniti Namjoshi does not comfortably fit into the frame of Black British/South Asian diaspora writers. As a matter of fact, her work heavily problematizes the... more
Born in Western Maharashtra and now living between Devon (UK) and India, Suniti Namjoshi does not comfortably fit into the frame of Black British/South Asian diaspora writers. As a matter of fact, her work heavily problematizes the current mainstream perception of Indo-English culture (as exemplified in British music and cinema as well as in the works of writers such as Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali) as a marketable commodity in the Western global imaginary in order to underscore the challenge Hindu culture offers to Western identity-making narratives. Her focus on the activity of ‘making stories’ produces a proliferation of signifiers where English may even become an ‘exotic’ language in relationship with the equally hegemonic Hindu milieu. In the face of both, Namjoshi takes a radical political stance, deeply ingrained in the construction of her writer persona, a point clearly made in her ‘autobiographical myth’ Goja: “I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is”.
This essay offers an overview of Namjoshi’s writing, focusing on her reworking of the English canon (from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Shakespeare’s The Tempest), but also on her dialogic and sometimes conflictual relationship with both feminist and postcolonial theory, as her idea of identity as ever-changing owes to Hindi beliefs on reincarnation as much as to Judith Butler’s theories on performativity. In her works, Namjoshi shapes a veritable ‘third space’ where Western theory does not assume primacy in the definition of herself as postcolonial subject and where cultural affiliation can be articulated only in brackets, through the reworking of the many narratives that make up Namjoshi’s multivoiced writing.
This essay offers an overview of Namjoshi’s writing, focusing on her reworking of the English canon (from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Shakespeare’s The Tempest), but also on her dialogic and sometimes conflictual relationship with both feminist and postcolonial theory, as her idea of identity as ever-changing owes to Hindi beliefs on reincarnation as much as to Judith Butler’s theories on performativity. In her works, Namjoshi shapes a veritable ‘third space’ where Western theory does not assume primacy in the definition of herself as postcolonial subject and where cultural affiliation can be articulated only in brackets, through the reworking of the many narratives that make up Namjoshi’s multivoiced writing.
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This article addresses the representation of difference in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Mark Dornford-May, 2005). It argues that through its use of different languages – musical and otherwise – the film deploys an aural strategy of... more
This article addresses the representation of difference in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Mark Dornford-May, 2005). It argues that through its use of different languages – musical and otherwise – the film deploys an aural strategy of representation that displaces the usual Carmen audience from the privileged place created by the structures of classical music. After looking into the way the original Carmen interpellated its (Western) audience via a ‘colonial ear’, it asks what happens when the opera is relocated in a different language, Xhosa, and so distant a setting as the South African township of Khayelitsha. What happens, in particular, to the supposed neutrality of its musical language, including the conventional exoticism encoded in Carmen’s own music, when it enters the fraught space created by the ‘postcolonial ear’?
This article explores the elaboration of a post-punk and queer performativity by US indie group Gossip. In particular, it elaborates on Angela McRobbie’s concept of ‘post-feminist masquerade’ in relation to the group’s frontwoman, Beth... more
This article explores the elaboration of a post-punk and queer performativity by US indie group Gossip. In particular, it elaborates on Angela McRobbie’s concept of ‘post-feminist masquerade’ in relation to the group’s frontwoman, Beth Ditto. The group has from the start claimed affiliation to the punk underground, and in particular to 1990s riot grrrl, a movement of women’s punk bands who entwined punk strategies of reversal in clothing and musical codes with a feminist awareness of the need for women performers to rewrite accepted notions of female performativity and musicianship. Ditto in particular has engaged in a dialogic relationship with the punk legacy of riot grrrls via her femme persona and her fat-affirmative statements. Engaging with post-feminist landscapes of femininity, from nude photo shoots to advice columns in G2, Ditto’s public image embodies the complex legacy of feminist struggles for public representation interpreted through the representational strategies of punk; at the same time, Gossip also engage in a refashioning of the language of women’s punk in a post-feminist era.
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Editorial for the first issue of t"de genere. Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies".
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in Silvia Albertazzi, Francesco Cattani, Rita Monticelli and Federica Zullo (eds.), (Post)Colonial Passages:Incursions and Excursions across the Literatures and Cultures in English (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), pp. 80-92
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in Giuseppe Balirano e Paul Baker (a cura di), Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 127-148
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This paper intends to investigate the theme of clinical depression as emerges in two recent short stories by Nigerian diasporean writers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chika Unigwe. Adichie’s story, editorially titled “Mornings Are Dark,... more
This paper intends to investigate the theme of clinical depression as emerges in two recent short stories by Nigerian diasporean writers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chika Unigwe. Adichie’s story, editorially titled “Mornings Are Dark, And I Lie In Bed, Wrapped In Fatigue. I Cry Often”, was published in The Guardian in February 2015 and almost immediately removed because the author had apparently denied her permission to publish; yet the piece did not disappear from the web, as by the time of its withdrawal many blogs had already picked it up and reblogged it. The dispute around this event – with both the newspaper and the writer’s publisher issuing official statements about how and why the story had been published and withdrawn – echoes the role of depression as an unreadable and yet widespread theme in Nigerian (and more generally “black”) women’s fiction: it threatens received notions of black female empowerment, and highlights the difficulties of interweaving depression as a Western medical concept with the complexities of diasporic subject formation. A similar preoccupation emerges in Chika Unigwe’s short story “Bethlehem”, where postpartum depression emerges in the dark corners of medical and cultural narratives about motherhood that do not fall intro the traditional/modern binary, but are culturally situated in contemporary Nigeria. Both short stories disengage with the female black body as a site of unrelenting strength in the face of trauma; yet its vulnerability to hegemonic discourses on race and gender results in uncompromising acts where illness itself is articulated as resistance. This is particularly evident in Unigwe’s tragic ending, but also in Adichie’s more nuanced story (which also bears the burden of being presented as a piece of life writing). The two short stories appear to speak at each other across different literary genres and cultural positionalities, to articulate an innovative way to tell stories about illness, vulnerability and the black female body.
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in Nicoletta Vallorani (a cura di), Introduzione ai Cultural Studies. UK, USA e paesi anglofoni (Roma: Carocci, in corso di stampa), pp. 105-121 ISBN: 978-88-430-8480-7
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The body of the opera singer, and especially of the woman singer, has always been an object of speculation – both spectacular-ized and speculated upon, as the source of a voice able to become in its turn object of desire. This paper... more
The body of the opera singer, and especially of the woman singer, has always been an object of speculation – both spectacular-ized and speculated upon, as the source of a voice able to become in its turn object of desire. This paper focuses on the size and weight of the diva’s body, which has always been considered as massive, as the quotation in the title, from The Rough Guide to Opera, shows. The line refers to the size of 19th century opera star Fanny Salvini-Donatelli, first performer of the title role in Verdi’s Traviata, whose performance was heavily booed as the singer’s 130 kilograms made the heroine’s death by consumption completely unbelievable. More recently, the vicissitudes of Maria Callas’s body are well-reported by pictures that show her at first as the usual well-built soprano, and then metamorphosed as a play-role of Audrey Hepburn. Still, even today opera is one of the few media where bodies differing from the accepted norm of thinness are proudly displayed. The power of Monserrat Caballé’s voice not only allows her to ‘get away’ with her bulky appearance, but it also ‘shows off’ her body as the source of this powerful voice; the notorious case of Deborah Voigt is also discussed.
The paper will support its argument through the considerations on the topic by scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon, who have explored the role of the body in opera in this ambiguous relation to the normativity of bodily spectacle, as well as through Jon Stratton’s study on the body as object of consumption in the 19th century. Here it is the mouth, the place where food and the voice get in and out of the body, that is overcharged with meaning, coming to represent the Freudian vagina dentata. Yet these negative stereotypes are overturned in Wayne Koestenbaum’s analysis of the power of the diva as object of desire, reversing all dominant discourses of beauty and femininity, and seriously putting into question the ‘power-knowledge’ supported by them. It is this discourse that may represent an alternative way of perceiving and living the body, the sexualized body as well as (and in relation to) fat.
The paper will support its argument through the considerations on the topic by scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon, who have explored the role of the body in opera in this ambiguous relation to the normativity of bodily spectacle, as well as through Jon Stratton’s study on the body as object of consumption in the 19th century. Here it is the mouth, the place where food and the voice get in and out of the body, that is overcharged with meaning, coming to represent the Freudian vagina dentata. Yet these negative stereotypes are overturned in Wayne Koestenbaum’s analysis of the power of the diva as object of desire, reversing all dominant discourses of beauty and femininity, and seriously putting into question the ‘power-knowledge’ supported by them. It is this discourse that may represent an alternative way of perceiving and living the body, the sexualized body as well as (and in relation to) fat.
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In their Unthinking Eurocentrism, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam trace the overlapping of the cultural and political meaning of ‘representation’ by remarking the contamination between the ideal of representative government in Western... more
In their Unthinking Eurocentrism, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam trace the overlapping of the cultural and political meaning of ‘representation’ by remarking the contamination between the ideal of representative government in Western democracies and the struggle for cultural representation faced by ethnic minorities. In an argument focusing on US cultural politics but having resonances for the wider American context, the authors observe how the ethnic Other is excluded from the system of representative politics as well as from cultural visibility, as s/he is subject to stereotyping and to the burden of representing ‘difference’ in the terms dictated by hegemonic discourses.
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While Western opera has been traditionally devoted to the staging of the exotic Other on show for the pleasure of European ears and eyes – as first argued by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism – the politics of such representation... more
While Western opera has been traditionally devoted to the staging of the exotic Other on show for the pleasure of European ears and eyes – as first argued by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism – the politics of such representation have scarcely been explored in relation to British comic opera. Considered a minor genre both in relation to Western grand opera and British stage drama, Victorian comic opera enacts the deep contradiction
between the purportedly ‘authentic’ representation of an exotic setting and the paradigmatically non-naturalistic conventions of musical theatre. The travelling of these works to different Anglophone locations further complicates this paradox: in the (former) colonies, performers who were themselves considered exotic came to inhabit a fictional exotic body, thus staging a different claim to whiteness.
This essay will explore these issues by reviewing the stage history of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera The Mikado (1885), with particular reference to its 1939 Chicago all-black restaging, the Swing Mikado. William S. Gilbert’s obsession with making this opera ‘authentically Japanese’ offers some of the most telling anecdotes of London stage history, as well as an opportunity to investigate how the purported whiteness of the singer under the make-up
of the exotic character works within the context of comic opera. It may be argued that The Mikado stages fictional Japanese bodies over British bodies for British audiences, which are subsequently identified as hegemonic against the subaltern, exotic, and fictional
Other. However, this fictional exotic body opens a performative space where previously subaltern, non-white bodies can access a claim to whiteness and normativity: across the Atlantic, The Mikado was staged by an all-black company, re-set in the South Pacific and renamed Swing Mikado. A performance that was met with huge success, it left white audiences disappointed by the lack of stereotypical blackness, and opened the operatic stage to African American performers in a time when opera (comic and otherwise) was still inaccessible to black singers.
between the purportedly ‘authentic’ representation of an exotic setting and the paradigmatically non-naturalistic conventions of musical theatre. The travelling of these works to different Anglophone locations further complicates this paradox: in the (former) colonies, performers who were themselves considered exotic came to inhabit a fictional exotic body, thus staging a different claim to whiteness.
This essay will explore these issues by reviewing the stage history of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera The Mikado (1885), with particular reference to its 1939 Chicago all-black restaging, the Swing Mikado. William S. Gilbert’s obsession with making this opera ‘authentically Japanese’ offers some of the most telling anecdotes of London stage history, as well as an opportunity to investigate how the purported whiteness of the singer under the make-up
of the exotic character works within the context of comic opera. It may be argued that The Mikado stages fictional Japanese bodies over British bodies for British audiences, which are subsequently identified as hegemonic against the subaltern, exotic, and fictional
Other. However, this fictional exotic body opens a performative space where previously subaltern, non-white bodies can access a claim to whiteness and normativity: across the Atlantic, The Mikado was staged by an all-black company, re-set in the South Pacific and renamed Swing Mikado. A performance that was met with huge success, it left white audiences disappointed by the lack of stereotypical blackness, and opened the operatic stage to African American performers in a time when opera (comic and otherwise) was still inaccessible to black singers.
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Including a work such as The Beggar’s Opera in syllabuses on Eng-lish literature represents a challenge that this chapter wants to meet by tackling the many and diverse competences necessary to interpret this text. By using recent... more
Including a work such as The Beggar’s Opera in syllabuses on Eng-lish literature represents a challenge that this chapter wants to meet by tackling the many and diverse competences necessary to interpret this text. By using recent musicological and cultural studies as meth-odological backgrounds, I mean here to argue for the impossibility to reduce the complexity of this work to a single reading, but also to show how The Beggar’s Opera benefits from one and more contra-puntal readings, as the polyphony of signifiers and their respective traditions in British culture often makes them work ‘contrapuntally together’, to use Edward Said’s formulation.
Starting from the role of music within the history of cultural studies, the aim of this article is to promote an awareness of how the signifying fluidity of the literary and theatrical text becomes a fertile point of hearing from which to explore both a canonical and a multimodal text whose multidisciplinary challenges have been curbed by its inclusion into the canon of English literature. By over-lapping different critical traditions, from literary history to early music studies, I mean to prove how the study of a text written for performance benefits from a methodological framework foreground-ing the performativity of the literary, the theatrical, and the musical elements in the text. Spanning many different traditions, contempo-rary studies of The Beggar’s Opera may be enabled by a focus on performance and, consequently, on the transient nature of theatrical and musical language. Songs in particular emerge here as both con-templative and social moments, especially devised to elicit audience response and offering experiences of collective subjectivity across the centuries.
Starting from the role of music within the history of cultural studies, the aim of this article is to promote an awareness of how the signifying fluidity of the literary and theatrical text becomes a fertile point of hearing from which to explore both a canonical and a multimodal text whose multidisciplinary challenges have been curbed by its inclusion into the canon of English literature. By over-lapping different critical traditions, from literary history to early music studies, I mean to prove how the study of a text written for performance benefits from a methodological framework foreground-ing the performativity of the literary, the theatrical, and the musical elements in the text. Spanning many different traditions, contempo-rary studies of The Beggar’s Opera may be enabled by a focus on performance and, consequently, on the transient nature of theatrical and musical language. Songs in particular emerge here as both con-templative and social moments, especially devised to elicit audience response and offering experiences of collective subjectivity across the centuries.
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In Dell’ambivalenza. La dinamica della narrazione in Ferrante, Otsuka e Sapienza, a cura di Anna Maria Crispino e Marina Vitale (Roma: Iacobelli, 2016), pp. 78-92.
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L'idea di questo numero speciale di Altre Modernità nasce dal desiderio di raccontare il rapporto tra la metodologia conosciuta come Studi culturali e l'università italiana. Già a partire dagli anni Settanta nella nostra accademia hanno... more
L'idea di questo numero speciale di Altre Modernità nasce dal desiderio di raccontare il rapporto tra la metodologia conosciuta come Studi culturali e l'università italiana. Già a partire dagli anni Settanta nella nostra accademia hanno operato figure di spicco, che hanno dato vita a scuole di formazione, dottorati e gruppi di ricerca. Queste si sono mosse nel solco della tradizione italiana di pensiero critico inaugurata da Gramsci, non a caso una delle figure ispiratrici dei Cultural Studies anglosassoni, e in costante dialogo con gli scenari internazionali nonché con gli ambiti affini delle lingue e delle letterature, della sociologia e dell'antropologia, della semiotica. È innegabile che la natura porosa e di frontiera di questa metodologia si trovi in difficile convivenza con il sistema universitario nazionale, soprattutto a seguito dell'introduzione dei settori scientifico-disciplinari. Da una parte, la mancanza di una precisa collocazione ha consentito agli Studi culturali italiani di rifuggire un’eccessiva istituzionalizzazione o ‘disciplinamento’ (critica peraltro attualmente mossa ai Cultural Studies, soprattutto di ambito statunitense) lasciandone libera la potenzialità creativa e, anzi, favorendo la circolazione tra differenti saperi; è pur vero però che tale ‘anarchia di base’ ne rende complessa la riconoscibilità e, insieme, il consolidamento in pratiche e modelli condivisi. Questo atteggiamento (che potremmo definire ‘analogico’) ha portato a forme creative e metamorfiche di declinazione della ricerca, che sono una delle caratteristiche più evidenti e interessanti degli Studi culturali italiani.
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This chapter offers some reflections on the social and cultural relevance of vocal identity in the embodiment of queer subjectivities through a reading of Kim Fu’s 2014 novel For Today I Am a Boy. The coming-of-age story of Peter Huang, a... more
This chapter offers some reflections on the social and cultural relevance of vocal identity in the embodiment of queer subjectivities through a reading of Kim Fu’s 2014 novel For Today I Am a Boy. The coming-of-age story of Peter Huang, a young Canadian of Chinese descent who undertakes the slow and painful journey from boy to woman, is mapped out through a web of intertextual references that this contribution aims at unravelling. The starting point is the title of the novel itself, a direct reference to the eponymous song by Antony Hegarty. Choosing the song as a privileged “point of hearing” for Peter’s story allows this contribution to trace the emergence of different vocal positionings to emerge, in the novel as well as in wider elaborations of queer positionalities.
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Interviste a:Adotto (e adatto) Esterino Adami p. 259Transiti queer Silvia Antosa p. 263Oltre le gerarchie e i modi di pensare Gennaro Avallone p. 266Navigare nel testo, al di la delle correnti Camilla Cattarulla p. 270Cultura e... more
Interviste a:Adotto (e adatto) Esterino Adami p. 259Transiti queer Silvia Antosa p. 263Oltre le gerarchie e i modi di pensare Gennaro Avallone p. 266Navigare nel testo, al di la delle correnti Camilla Cattarulla p. 270Cultura e colonialita Luigi Cazzato p. 273Uno studio(so) curioso Pietro Deandrea p. 280Coincidenze e incroci mai premeditati Rosa Maria Grillo p. 283Il gusto di sentirsi raccontare una storia Ilaria Magnani p. 287Eppure, lo confesso! Marilena Parlati p. 292Poliziesco, biopolitica e testimonianza Andrea Pezze p. 295Altrove e altrimenti: l'incrocio ibrido degli studi culturali in Italia Marco Pustianaz p. 303La materialita del testo e la pratica dell’indizio Amanda Salvioni p. 313
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Review of Fabio Vittorini's Melodramma. Un percorso intermediale tra teatro, romanzo, cinema e serie tv.
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This contribution represents a preliminary attempt to explore theatre and BDSM as intersecting performative loci of queer resistance through a reading of two works by British playwright Sarah Kane, the play Cleansed (1998) and the... more
This contribution represents a preliminary attempt to explore theatre and BDSM as intersecting performative loci of queer resistance through a reading of two works by British playwright Sarah Kane, the play Cleansed (1998) and the screenplay for television Skin (1997). Both works feature practices, such as degradation, spanking, and other forms of physical and emotional pain infliction traditionally found on the BDSM scene, especially in sadomasochistic interactions. While current criticism tends to pathologize the brutality displayed in Kane’s early works, my contention is that here pain infliction and reception are enacted as anti-normative relational modes both in the interactions among characters on stage and in the relationship with their audience. The BDSM “scene” and the theatre stage here overlap as safe spaces to experiment with sadomasochistic relationalities, offering experiences of catharsis that can work at a deep emotional and political level to elaborate a resistant q...
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Eleonora Federici, Quando la fantascienza e donna. Dalle utopie femminili del secolo XIX all’eta contemporanea . Roma: Carocci, 2015, 190 pp.
1 Il femminismo all'opera. La new musicology 21 1.1 La musica allo specchio: voce, psicoanalisi, filosofia 23 1.2 Voci femministe: Catherine Clément e Susan McClary 33 1.3 La scrittura come performance queer: Wayne... more
1 Il femminismo all'opera. La new musicology 21 1.1 La musica allo specchio: voce, psicoanalisi, filosofia 23 1.2 Voci femministe: Catherine Clément e Susan McClary 33 1.3 La scrittura come performance queer: Wayne Koestenbaum 41
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Silvia Antosa, Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing Travel, Writing the Self(Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2018, 153 pp. ISBN 9788857548135)by Serena Guarracino
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For this issue, the Societa Italiana delle Letterate presents two contributions: an article by Francesca Maffioli intersecting Amalia Rosselli’s writing with the idea of ecriture feminine theorized by Helene Cixous; and a new review from... more
For this issue, the Societa Italiana delle Letterate presents two contributions: an article by Francesca Maffioli intersecting Amalia Rosselli’s writing with the idea of ecriture feminine theorized by Helene Cixous; and a new review from the future by Sara Positano, who offers an overview of the proceedings from the conference "The space of writing. Compared to female literature" SIL organized in 2002. Both texts represent instances of the critical thought, past and present, that the association keeps producing on women's literature, in a global perspective. which emerges as topical as ever.
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This essay considers Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida and the context of its production and reception on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. It starts from Edward Said’s insightful discussion in Culture and Imperialism describing Verdi’s work... more
This essay considers Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida and the context of its production and reception on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea. It starts from Edward Said’s insightful discussion in Culture and Imperialism describing Verdi’s work as pivotal to an understanding of both cultural and economic relationships between Europe and Egypt. Yet, this essay also counterpoints Said’s reading, taking into consideration Aida’s role in the construction of both an Italian and “European” cultural identity inside and outside Europe, as opera was “exported” to the colonies, allowing colonial elites to recreate a “European” atmosphere at the heart of such burgeoning metropolises as Cairo or New York. In this context, the multifarious incarnations of Aida featured in the essay open operatic representation to the contested space of the Mediterranean and, more widely, to voices from the margins of European modernity. First, accounts of the reception of Aida show an osmosis between European and Egyp...
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Gli Studi culturali e l'universita italiana Culturalista in Italia oggi? Si> <Forse (a cura di) S. Guarracino, E. Monegato, L. Scarabelli
Giorgina Pi is a theatre director, activist, video maker, and outspoken feminist. She is among the founders of the Angelo Mai collective, who transformed an abandoned warehouse in Rome into one of the city’s most active cultural hubs.... more
Giorgina Pi is a theatre director, activist, video maker, and outspoken feminist. She is among the founders of the Angelo Mai collective, who transformed an abandoned warehouse in Rome into one of the city’s most active cultural hubs. Home of the artistic formation “Bluemotion”, Angelo Mai represents an uncommon form of grassroots initiative joining cultural experimentation and political commitment in a network expanding both nationally and internationally. Here, Giorgina Pi talks about practicing theatre and art as a form of dissent, and how this shapes creative relationhips and experiences.
A mouth opens, sound flows out to embrace the viewers - watching any film where a character sings, and especially any film about opera, the audience is invested by this primary scene. Both inside and outside the screen, the voice effaces... more
A mouth opens, sound flows out to embrace the viewers - watching any film where a character sings, and especially any film about opera, the audience is invested by this primary scene. Both inside and outside the screen, the voice effaces the image seducing the spectator to the realm of the aural. But where does this voice come from? Does it come from the open mouth whose close-up often reveals not vibrations but immobility, not sound but silence? Indeed, the loudspeakers give away the illusion that that voice may be bound to the body on the screen without any residue, any trace left by the machine creating the cinematic illusion of unity between image and sound. And still these representations perform a 'technology of gender' where desire (the desire of one character for another, of the audience for the voice and the spectacle, for the voice as spectacle) may be articulated in a dialectic relationship with the heterosexual matrix whereby sexual desire is still generally articulated.1 The relationship between voice and sexuality, singing and gender performance will be here explored through two films, M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg, 1993), and Farinelli (Gerard Corbiau, 1994). Their representation of the erotic body as singing body (and vice versa) is close to other films of the same period, first and foremost Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). This last film also features a trans-sexually situated gendered body as the locus of both music and desire. On this body, as on those of castrated singer Farinelli (Stefano Dionisi) and Chinese opera diva Song Liling (John Lone), a conflation of musical and erotic practices is articulated that
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The paper offers a reading of opera stagings by visual artist William Kentridge; it aims at showing how the South African video-maker has trans-coded the Western musical language into contemporary visual arts, underscoring the political... more
The paper offers a reading of opera stagings by visual artist William Kentridge; it aims at showing how the South African video-maker has trans-coded the Western musical language into contemporary visual arts, underscoring the political relevance opera acquires in his work as both voice of colonial Europe and place of resistance for the postcolonial artist (see Said 2000).
Kentridge has acquired world-wide renown as director of short films made out of the drawing and redrawing of the same few charcoal sketches, a technique the artist has defined “stone-age filmmaking” (see Lissoni 2006): the trace of the pencil, drawn and then cancelled but never completely erased, materializes the workings of memory and forgetting, directly connected in his early films to the heritage of apartheid. The soundtrack of these films mixes original compositions (by composer Philip Miller) with jazz and classical music, which acquire new resonances as they work in counterpoint with each other and with the visual text.
More recently, the artist has staged and directed both theatrical pieces and opera, from Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse to Mozart’s Zauberflöte. Monteverdi’s baroque opera exposes the fragility the West’s faith in the power of reason, turning Ulysses into a mere body speculated upon by doctors in a 17th century anatomical theatre; while Mozart’s fairytale on the triumph of enlightenment values over chaos becomes a bitter commentary on the consequences of Western colonial hubris. Opera, a genre that has supported colonial enterprises in the late nineteenth century (see Levin 1994), is here confronted with its problematic heritage, troubling the reception of Western music as an aesthetic medium without any political implications. On the contrary, Kentridge’s take on opera elaborates the genre in the light of his experience as a white South African, thus trans-coding the ambivalent place of music at the core of Western orientalist imagery (see Said 1993) in a postcolonial narrative of hegemony and subalternity.
Kentridge has acquired world-wide renown as director of short films made out of the drawing and redrawing of the same few charcoal sketches, a technique the artist has defined “stone-age filmmaking” (see Lissoni 2006): the trace of the pencil, drawn and then cancelled but never completely erased, materializes the workings of memory and forgetting, directly connected in his early films to the heritage of apartheid. The soundtrack of these films mixes original compositions (by composer Philip Miller) with jazz and classical music, which acquire new resonances as they work in counterpoint with each other and with the visual text.
More recently, the artist has staged and directed both theatrical pieces and opera, from Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse to Mozart’s Zauberflöte. Monteverdi’s baroque opera exposes the fragility the West’s faith in the power of reason, turning Ulysses into a mere body speculated upon by doctors in a 17th century anatomical theatre; while Mozart’s fairytale on the triumph of enlightenment values over chaos becomes a bitter commentary on the consequences of Western colonial hubris. Opera, a genre that has supported colonial enterprises in the late nineteenth century (see Levin 1994), is here confronted with its problematic heritage, troubling the reception of Western music as an aesthetic medium without any political implications. On the contrary, Kentridge’s take on opera elaborates the genre in the light of his experience as a white South African, thus trans-coding the ambivalent place of music at the core of Western orientalist imagery (see Said 1993) in a postcolonial narrative of hegemony and subalternity.
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This article aims at exploring recent theories on the postcolonial literary text as ‘event’ and their echoes of Edward Said’s formulation of the ‘contrapuntal reading’. Taking life writing and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (2012) in... more
This article aims at exploring recent theories on the postcolonial literary text as ‘event’ and their echoes of Edward Said’s formulation of the ‘contrapuntal reading’. Taking life writing and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (2012) in particular as case study, the article will show how discourses surrounding the publishing and reception of postcolonial writers must be considered as part of the reading experience, as clearly emerges when the works deal with public discourses such as the ‘Rushdie affair’. Following this lead, the paper
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As leading figure of a burgeoning ‘third generation’ of Nigerian writers (Adesanmi & Dunton 2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie raised to international fame in 2007 after winning the Orange Prize for Fiction with her novel on the Biafra war,... more
As leading figure of a burgeoning ‘third generation’ of Nigerian writers (Adesanmi & Dunton 2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie raised to international fame in 2007 after winning the Orange Prize for Fiction with her novel on the Biafra war, Half of a Yellow Sun. This paper aims at investigating how the way Adichie’s fiction deals with the subject of war offers new insights in the role of the engagé writer in a postcolonial and global context. Adichie chooses to narrate the conflict through multiplying layers of re-telling, and hence refuses to cast herself as the spokesperson of either a national identity (Nigeria and/or Biafra), an ethnic group (Igbo), or a social class among those featured in the novel. Hence, Half of a Yellow Sun is meant to foster a culture of peace for a generation of cosmopolitan Igbo Nigerians born at least a decade after the war’s bitter end, advocating the new generations’ right to memory without retaliation.
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Special Issue, XII, 12, 2014
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a cura di Giorgio de Marchis e Maria Paola Guarducci “La fotografia non è ciò che è stato fotografato, è qualcos’altro. È piuttosto una trasformazione”, affermava il fotografo statunitense Garry Winogrand, citato in un articolo a... more
a cura di Giorgio de Marchis e Maria Paola Guarducci
“La fotografia non è ciò che è stato fotografato, è qualcos’altro. È piuttosto una trasformazione”, affermava il fotografo statunitense Garry Winogrand, citato in un articolo a proposito di un altro fotografo – René Burri – da Teju Cole, il quale aggiunge: “L’immagine fotografica è un racconto creato dalla combinazione di obiettivo, macchina, pellicola, grana, colore (o assenza di colore), momento del giorno, stagione” (Cole 2015). Consapevole che una fotografia è sempre una miscela di prontezza, opportunità e mistero, Teju Cole, a sua volta fotografo e scrittore, attraversa San Paolo (Brasile) alla ricerca del punto di vista di un suggestivo scatto di Burri datato 1960, Men on a Rooftop, per concludere, dopo molta fatica, che “una volta scoperto tutto quello che possiamo sapere su un’opera d’arte, quello che non possiamo conoscere assume ancora più valore. Arriviamo sulla cima e non riusciamo ad andare oltre” (ibid.). Il punto di vista, il ‘taglio’ di una rappresentazione, sembra dire Cole giunto nel luogo esatto da cui Burri scattò Men on a Rooftop, non è dunque solo una questione di angolazione: nemmeno nella fotografia, che “sembra avere con la realtà visibile un rapporto più puro, e quindi più preciso di altri oggetti mimetici” (Sontag 1978).
L’immagine della città nelle arti - scrittura, arti visive, musica, multimedialità – è, quindi, una narrazione che acquista senso e fisionomia a partire dal punto di vista di chi narra. Lo sguardo che osserva la città informa la peculiarità del ritratto della metropoli che propone, della quale delinea, al contempo, tratti nascosti e caratteristiche palesi; note private, intime ed esclusive ma anche aspetti di rilevanza collettiva perché così sono stati architettati o così li ha resi, appropriandosene più o meno consapevolmente, chi ne fruisce. La città, che è per sua stessa natura spazio definito da una pianificazione precisa e ‘realistica’, è comunque anche luogo utopico e distopico, mutante e aperto, minaccioso e accogliente, familiare e indecifrabile. Lo spazio urbano – a differenza delle città spettrali, delle rovine urbane dell’antichità o delle fake cities dell’estremo contemporaneo – è di per sé molteplice e inafferrabile perché attraversato e modificato dal tempo, metamorfico, patchwork scomposto di gentrificazioni e abbandoni, riqualificazioni e nuove incurie, omologazioni e caratterizzazioni estreme. Tuttavia, o proprio in virtù della sua contraddittorietà e versatilità, la città è un topos privilegiato dell’arte che però, riteniamo, si carica di rinnovata pregnanza se posto sotto lo scrutinio critico di quest’epoca. Inoltre, spesso pensata al femminile come territorio di conquista, esplorazione, appropriazione, la città è uno spazio originariamente pianificato soprattutto da uomini, ‘naturalmente’ a beneficio del soggetto maschile o, comunque, di un’identità collettiva astratta codificata secondo categorie normative che tendono ad escludere le minoranze (siano queste numeriche, culturali o politiche).
Scopo di questo numero di de genere è raccogliere una serie di interventi il più possibile eterogenei e interdisciplinari sul rapporto tra punto di vista e città, in cui la cifra di tale relazione sia data dalla commistione di una o più connotazioni dello ‘sguardo’ quali gender, classe sociale, status economico e/o giuridico, età, ecc. Si chiede perciò di esplorare quanto la polisemia delle metropoli - a qualunque latitudine e longitudine e in qualsiasi epoca storica - le renda, nella loro rappresentazione, luogo di integrazione o disintegrazione (o entrambi), di significati stabili o instabili (o entrambi); le definisca come territori di potere, desiderio, paura, scoperta, affettività, crescita, perdizione, anonimato, appartenenza, esclusione, successo o tragedia.
Si invitano gli/le interessati/e a sottoporre abstract a partire da diversi ambiti disciplinari e anche in chiave comparata che analizzino lo spazio urbano in qualunque sua declinazione ma partendo sempre da specifici punti di vista, impliciti o dichiarati, privilegiando i temi che seguono (o temi affini), nella letteratura così come in altre forme artistiche:
- spazi pubblici e spazi privati: sottrazioni, appropriazioni, occupazioni
- la città attraversata
- la poetica della città
- la politica della città
- città coloniali/postcoloniali/neocoloniali/decoloniali
- immobilismi e mobilità
- coesione e coabitazione: urbanità inclusiva e off limits
- la città delle donne / degli uomini
- la polisemia dello spazio urbano
- multiculturalismi e monoculturalismi urbani
- sconfinamenti urbani
- radicamenti e sradicamenti
- città vive e città morte
Per inviare proposte o richiedere informazioni scrivere a: degenere.journal@gmail.com
Scadenza per le proposte: 5 aprile 2017.
Scadenza per gli articoli: 30 giugno 2017.
Consulta le linee guida alla nostra pagina per l'invio delle proposte.
“La fotografia non è ciò che è stato fotografato, è qualcos’altro. È piuttosto una trasformazione”, affermava il fotografo statunitense Garry Winogrand, citato in un articolo a proposito di un altro fotografo – René Burri – da Teju Cole, il quale aggiunge: “L’immagine fotografica è un racconto creato dalla combinazione di obiettivo, macchina, pellicola, grana, colore (o assenza di colore), momento del giorno, stagione” (Cole 2015). Consapevole che una fotografia è sempre una miscela di prontezza, opportunità e mistero, Teju Cole, a sua volta fotografo e scrittore, attraversa San Paolo (Brasile) alla ricerca del punto di vista di un suggestivo scatto di Burri datato 1960, Men on a Rooftop, per concludere, dopo molta fatica, che “una volta scoperto tutto quello che possiamo sapere su un’opera d’arte, quello che non possiamo conoscere assume ancora più valore. Arriviamo sulla cima e non riusciamo ad andare oltre” (ibid.). Il punto di vista, il ‘taglio’ di una rappresentazione, sembra dire Cole giunto nel luogo esatto da cui Burri scattò Men on a Rooftop, non è dunque solo una questione di angolazione: nemmeno nella fotografia, che “sembra avere con la realtà visibile un rapporto più puro, e quindi più preciso di altri oggetti mimetici” (Sontag 1978).
L’immagine della città nelle arti - scrittura, arti visive, musica, multimedialità – è, quindi, una narrazione che acquista senso e fisionomia a partire dal punto di vista di chi narra. Lo sguardo che osserva la città informa la peculiarità del ritratto della metropoli che propone, della quale delinea, al contempo, tratti nascosti e caratteristiche palesi; note private, intime ed esclusive ma anche aspetti di rilevanza collettiva perché così sono stati architettati o così li ha resi, appropriandosene più o meno consapevolmente, chi ne fruisce. La città, che è per sua stessa natura spazio definito da una pianificazione precisa e ‘realistica’, è comunque anche luogo utopico e distopico, mutante e aperto, minaccioso e accogliente, familiare e indecifrabile. Lo spazio urbano – a differenza delle città spettrali, delle rovine urbane dell’antichità o delle fake cities dell’estremo contemporaneo – è di per sé molteplice e inafferrabile perché attraversato e modificato dal tempo, metamorfico, patchwork scomposto di gentrificazioni e abbandoni, riqualificazioni e nuove incurie, omologazioni e caratterizzazioni estreme. Tuttavia, o proprio in virtù della sua contraddittorietà e versatilità, la città è un topos privilegiato dell’arte che però, riteniamo, si carica di rinnovata pregnanza se posto sotto lo scrutinio critico di quest’epoca. Inoltre, spesso pensata al femminile come territorio di conquista, esplorazione, appropriazione, la città è uno spazio originariamente pianificato soprattutto da uomini, ‘naturalmente’ a beneficio del soggetto maschile o, comunque, di un’identità collettiva astratta codificata secondo categorie normative che tendono ad escludere le minoranze (siano queste numeriche, culturali o politiche).
Scopo di questo numero di de genere è raccogliere una serie di interventi il più possibile eterogenei e interdisciplinari sul rapporto tra punto di vista e città, in cui la cifra di tale relazione sia data dalla commistione di una o più connotazioni dello ‘sguardo’ quali gender, classe sociale, status economico e/o giuridico, età, ecc. Si chiede perciò di esplorare quanto la polisemia delle metropoli - a qualunque latitudine e longitudine e in qualsiasi epoca storica - le renda, nella loro rappresentazione, luogo di integrazione o disintegrazione (o entrambi), di significati stabili o instabili (o entrambi); le definisca come territori di potere, desiderio, paura, scoperta, affettività, crescita, perdizione, anonimato, appartenenza, esclusione, successo o tragedia.
Si invitano gli/le interessati/e a sottoporre abstract a partire da diversi ambiti disciplinari e anche in chiave comparata che analizzino lo spazio urbano in qualunque sua declinazione ma partendo sempre da specifici punti di vista, impliciti o dichiarati, privilegiando i temi che seguono (o temi affini), nella letteratura così come in altre forme artistiche:
- spazi pubblici e spazi privati: sottrazioni, appropriazioni, occupazioni
- la città attraversata
- la poetica della città
- la politica della città
- città coloniali/postcoloniali/neocoloniali/decoloniali
- immobilismi e mobilità
- coesione e coabitazione: urbanità inclusiva e off limits
- la città delle donne / degli uomini
- la polisemia dello spazio urbano
- multiculturalismi e monoculturalismi urbani
- sconfinamenti urbani
- radicamenti e sradicamenti
- città vive e città morte
Per inviare proposte o richiedere informazioni scrivere a: degenere.journal@gmail.com
Scadenza per le proposte: 5 aprile 2017.
Scadenza per gli articoli: 30 giugno 2017.
Consulta le linee guida alla nostra pagina per l'invio delle proposte.
Research Interests:
Guest editors: Giorgio de Marchis and Maria Paola Guarducci ‘The photograph isn’t what was photog¬raphed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation’’, said the American photographer Garry Winogrand, quoted in an article about... more
Guest editors: Giorgio de Marchis and Maria Paola Guarducci
‘The photograph isn’t what was photog¬raphed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation’’, said the American photographer Garry Winogrand, quoted in an article about another photographer – René Burri – by Teju Cole, who adds: “The photographic image is a fiction created by a combination of lenses, cameras, film, pixels, colour (or its absence), time of day, season” (Cole 2015). Knowing that a photograph is always a mixture of readiness, chance and mystery, Teju Cole, a photographer and writer himself, wanders through the city of São Paulo, Brasil, looking for the point of view of an evocative snapshot by Burri dated 1960 and titled Men on a Rooftop, and comes to the laborious conclusion that “in discovering all that can be known about a work of art, what cannot be known is honored even more. We come right up to the edge, and can go no farther” (ibid.). The point of view, the ‘angle’ of a representation, Cole seems to say once he has found the exact place from which Burri took Men on a Rooftop, is not just a matter of perspective: not even in photography, which seems to have a cleaner, and therefore a more precise, relationship with visible reality than other imitative objects, as Susan Sontag put it in her famous essay on photography (Sontag 1977).
The portrait of the city in the arts – literature as well as visual arts, music, multimedia – is therefore a fiction that acquires meaning and shape according to the point of view of its narrator. The gaze observing the city informs the special features of the portrait it presents, outlining hidden traits and spectacular aspects at the same time; private, intimate and unique marks, but also collectively relevant characteristics, which are such because they were originally thought like that, or because of the use people made of them, in time and possibly unpredictably. The city, which is born out of an act of ‘realistic’ planning is, however, also the site of utopia and dystopia, it is an open and changing place, threatening and welcoming, familiar and undecipherable. The urban space - unlike ghost cities, urban ruins from ancient times or the extreme contemporary ‘fake cities’ – is, per se, a manifold and elusive arena because it is crossed and changed by time, because it is metamorphic and irregularly fragmented with its gentrifications and abandonments, re-qualifications and new forms of neglect, homologations and intense characterizations. However, because of its many contradictions and its versatility, the city is a privileged topos in all forms of art whose meanings, we believe, are enhanced if scrutinized thought a contemporary critical lens. Furthermore, often conceived in female terms as a territory to conquer, to explore, to seize, the city is a space originally planned mostly by men, ‘naturally’, for the benefits of male subjects or, at best, for an abstract collective identity codified according to normative standards ruling out all minorities (whether numerical, cultural or political).
The aim of this issue of de genere is to put together a series of articles as heterogeneous and interdisciplinary as possible focussing on the relationship between the point of view and the city, where the relationship is determined by a mixture of one or more connotations defining the gaze such as gender, social class, economic and/or legal status, age, etc. We ask contributors to explore how the metropolis’s polysemy – in any time and place – shapes the representation of the city as a place of integration/disintegration (or both), of stable/unstable meanings (or both), as a site of power, desire, fear, discovery, affection, growth, damnation, anonymity, belonging, exclusion, success or tragedy. We invite contributors from different disciplinary fields to submit their abstracts, also in a comparative key, analysing the urban space in all its possible declinations but always considering a specific point of view, be it implicit or openly declared, and privileging the following issues (or similar ones), in literature as well as in the other arts:
- public and private spaces: subtractions, appropriations, occupations
- crossing the city
- the city’s poetics
- the city’s politics
- colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial/decolonial cities
- mobility and immobility
- cohesion and cohabitation: inclusive and ‘off limits’ urban spaces
- the city of women/ of men
- urban space’s polisemy
- urban multiculturalism and/or monoculturalism
- urban crossing overs
- rootings and uprootings
- dead cities / living cities
For submissions and queries please write to us at degenere.journal@gmail.com.
Deadline for abstract proposals (300 words and short bio): 5 April 2018.
Articles will be due on 30 June 2018.
For submission guidelines and further info please check our submissions page.
‘The photograph isn’t what was photog¬raphed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation’’, said the American photographer Garry Winogrand, quoted in an article about another photographer – René Burri – by Teju Cole, who adds: “The photographic image is a fiction created by a combination of lenses, cameras, film, pixels, colour (or its absence), time of day, season” (Cole 2015). Knowing that a photograph is always a mixture of readiness, chance and mystery, Teju Cole, a photographer and writer himself, wanders through the city of São Paulo, Brasil, looking for the point of view of an evocative snapshot by Burri dated 1960 and titled Men on a Rooftop, and comes to the laborious conclusion that “in discovering all that can be known about a work of art, what cannot be known is honored even more. We come right up to the edge, and can go no farther” (ibid.). The point of view, the ‘angle’ of a representation, Cole seems to say once he has found the exact place from which Burri took Men on a Rooftop, is not just a matter of perspective: not even in photography, which seems to have a cleaner, and therefore a more precise, relationship with visible reality than other imitative objects, as Susan Sontag put it in her famous essay on photography (Sontag 1977).
The portrait of the city in the arts – literature as well as visual arts, music, multimedia – is therefore a fiction that acquires meaning and shape according to the point of view of its narrator. The gaze observing the city informs the special features of the portrait it presents, outlining hidden traits and spectacular aspects at the same time; private, intimate and unique marks, but also collectively relevant characteristics, which are such because they were originally thought like that, or because of the use people made of them, in time and possibly unpredictably. The city, which is born out of an act of ‘realistic’ planning is, however, also the site of utopia and dystopia, it is an open and changing place, threatening and welcoming, familiar and undecipherable. The urban space - unlike ghost cities, urban ruins from ancient times or the extreme contemporary ‘fake cities’ – is, per se, a manifold and elusive arena because it is crossed and changed by time, because it is metamorphic and irregularly fragmented with its gentrifications and abandonments, re-qualifications and new forms of neglect, homologations and intense characterizations. However, because of its many contradictions and its versatility, the city is a privileged topos in all forms of art whose meanings, we believe, are enhanced if scrutinized thought a contemporary critical lens. Furthermore, often conceived in female terms as a territory to conquer, to explore, to seize, the city is a space originally planned mostly by men, ‘naturally’, for the benefits of male subjects or, at best, for an abstract collective identity codified according to normative standards ruling out all minorities (whether numerical, cultural or political).
The aim of this issue of de genere is to put together a series of articles as heterogeneous and interdisciplinary as possible focussing on the relationship between the point of view and the city, where the relationship is determined by a mixture of one or more connotations defining the gaze such as gender, social class, economic and/or legal status, age, etc. We ask contributors to explore how the metropolis’s polysemy – in any time and place – shapes the representation of the city as a place of integration/disintegration (or both), of stable/unstable meanings (or both), as a site of power, desire, fear, discovery, affection, growth, damnation, anonymity, belonging, exclusion, success or tragedy. We invite contributors from different disciplinary fields to submit their abstracts, also in a comparative key, analysing the urban space in all its possible declinations but always considering a specific point of view, be it implicit or openly declared, and privileging the following issues (or similar ones), in literature as well as in the other arts:
- public and private spaces: subtractions, appropriations, occupations
- crossing the city
- the city’s poetics
- the city’s politics
- colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial/decolonial cities
- mobility and immobility
- cohesion and cohabitation: inclusive and ‘off limits’ urban spaces
- the city of women/ of men
- urban space’s polisemy
- urban multiculturalism and/or monoculturalism
- urban crossing overs
- rootings and uprootings
- dead cities / living cities
For submissions and queries please write to us at degenere.journal@gmail.com.
Deadline for abstract proposals (300 words and short bio): 5 April 2018.
Articles will be due on 30 June 2018.
For submission guidelines and further info please check our submissions page.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and 8 moreJudith Butler, Postcolonial Feminism, Feminist activism, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Solidarity, Gender Relations in Partition, Women in Partition, notion of feminist solidarity and bonds of community among women refugees, Solidarity movements, and Etnicity Community Nationalism Transationalism Diaspora
Seminario metodologico per gli studenti del dottorato in "Letteratura, arti, media: la transcodificazione"
Research Interests:
Per i viaggiatori stranieri in Italia tra il diciannovesimo e l’inizio del ventesimo secolo, esplorare le zone meno battute della penisola non era cosa semplice. Definiti “petits tours”, questi itinerari eccentrici offrivano spunti per... more
Per i viaggiatori stranieri in Italia tra il diciannovesimo e l’inizio del ventesimo secolo, esplorare le zone meno battute della penisola non era cosa semplice. Definiti “petits tours”, questi itinerari eccentrici offrivano spunti per formulare trattazioni sull’archeologia classica e sull’arte italiana del Medioevo e del Rinascimento, per gli studi sul folklore e l’antropologia, oppure ancora per ritrovare (e immortalare) scorci e paesaggi interpretati attraverso l’usata formula del Pittoresco. La specificità di regioni come l’Abruzzo e il Molise, le Marche e le zone meno conosciute del Lazio e dell’Umbria agli occhi dei forestieri non riguardava solo il punto di vista geografico o il patrimonio archeologico e storico-artistico, ma anche quello identitario e culturale. Incuneati tra i paesi del Nord Europa e le aree mediterranee, questi luoghi restituivano a chi li attraversava un’identità rifratta, opaca.
Il convegno intende concentrare l’attenzione sulle donne che scrissero, dipinsero e raccontarono le aree meno frequentate dell’Italia centrale tra Otto e Novecento. L’intenzione è di analizzare e comparare le modalità idiosincratiche di narrazione del territorio (testuale e figurativa) tipiche di autrici e artiste, un osservatorio interessantissimo, costituito da sguardi d’eccezione su luoghi marginali.
Il convegno intende concentrare l’attenzione sulle donne che scrissero, dipinsero e raccontarono le aree meno frequentate dell’Italia centrale tra Otto e Novecento. L’intenzione è di analizzare e comparare le modalità idiosincratiche di narrazione del territorio (testuale e figurativa) tipiche di autrici e artiste, un osservatorio interessantissimo, costituito da sguardi d’eccezione su luoghi marginali.