Emilio Amideo, PhD in English (University of Naples "L'Orientale"), is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Naples "Parthenope", Department of Economics, Law, Cybersecurity, and Sports Sciences.
He was Visiting Fellow both at Northwestern University - Department of African American Studies (USA, 2015) and at Goldsmiths University of London - Department of Media and Communication Studies (UK, 2016).
He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Gender Studies and of the Advisory Board of JAm It! – Journal of American Studies in Italy.
His research interests include English Language and Translation Studies, Sociolinguistics, Anglophone Literatures, Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Black Queer Studies, Critical Race Theory, Black Diaspora Studies, Ecocriticism and Body Studies.
Address: Università degli studi di Napoli "Parthenope"
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Giuridiche, Informatiche e Motorie (DiSEGIM)
Naples
Italy
He was Visiting Fellow both at Northwestern University - Department of African American Studies (USA, 2015) and at Goldsmiths University of London - Department of Media and Communication Studies (UK, 2016).
He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Gender Studies and of the Advisory Board of JAm It! – Journal of American Studies in Italy.
His research interests include English Language and Translation Studies, Sociolinguistics, Anglophone Literatures, Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Black Queer Studies, Critical Race Theory, Black Diaspora Studies, Ecocriticism and Body Studies.
Address: Università degli studi di Napoli "Parthenope"
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Giuridiche, Informatiche e Motorie (DiSEGIM)
Naples
Italy
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Books by Emilio Amideo
Amideo engages and extends the work of Black queer studies, Oceanic studies, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and new materialism through the theorizations of Sara Ahmed, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, José Esteban Muñoz, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others. Ambitious in scope and captivating to read, Queer Tidalectics brings Caribbean writers like Glissant and Brathwaite into queer literary analysis—a major scholarly contribution.
Drawing on the peculiar character of the PhD programme, which fosters an open dialogue and a fruitful contamination among different disciplines, the volume explores the image as an element that fluctuates between representation and creation and is thus particularly prone to multiple readings and investigations. In the passage from textual to extra-textual reality, the image represents on the one hand a world “in being”, sometimes becoming symbol, while on the other it discloses the generative power inherent in the potential for a world “in becoming”. Considering that nowadays individuals are exposed to constant flows of visual solicitations, the dialectics between the fixity of mimesis and the dynamics of creation continues to offer a fertile ground of scientific inquiry. The aim of this volume is precisely to trace the different trajectories along which this duplicity develops and therefore addresses issues that touch upon the language-through-images nexus, semiotics, the strategies for the construction of textual meaning, and visual culture, among the others.
The opening essay by Hans Belting (keynote speaker of the conference and theorist working in the fields of art history, anthropology and media theory) employs anthropological insights for iconological readings, thus providing a precious frame of reference for the subsequent essays composing the volume. Written by former and ongoing PhD students, these essays explore the uses and functions of images as both textual and extra-textual representation in a number of different social and cultural contexts and through different methodological approaches drawing on fields such as archaeology, Italian linguistics and philology, literature (American and African American, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, German), cinema, theatre and comics. Bearing in mind not only the variety of perspectives involved in the investigation of the conference theme, but also the wide time span of the individual essays (from Ancient Greece to the contemporary period), the material is ordered chronologically and each essay is followed by an abstract providing a brief description of its specific content.
Agrillo, D., Amideo, E., Di Nobile, A., Tarallo, C., (eds.), 2016, L'immagine nel mondo, il mondo nell'immagine: nuove prospettive per un approccio pluridisciplinare alla rappresentazione testuale ed extra-testuale/The Image in the World, the World in the Image: New Perspectives for an Interdisciplinary Approach to Textual and Extra-textual Representation, Napoli: Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale', ISBN: 978-88-6719-131-4.
Chapters in Books by Emilio Amideo
Drawing on a methodological approach which combines translation studies, gender studies and black diaspora studies, the aim of this chapter is to explore how Kay’s “first-level translation” of her experience onto the page is rendered into another language and socio-cultural context through its reframing into Italian.
Considering that the creation of paratextual elements is linked to a culturally-specific time and place and as such proves particularly suitable as an instrument of cultural translation, the chapter will focus more specifically on the reframing in Italian of Kay’s collections of poetry The Adoption Papers (1991) and Fiere (2011) through a contrastive analysis of the paratextual elements of both source and target texts.
Amideo, E., 2022, “‘What is an Afro-Scot anyway?’: Reframing Jackie Kay’s Fluid Identities in Translation”, in Dominique Faria, Marta Pacheco Pinto and Joana Moura (eds.), Reframing Translators, Translators as Reframers, Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 192-213, ISBN 9781032027739.
Amideo, E., (2020), “Celebrating One’s Natural Tendencies: Essex Hemphill’s ‘Borderland’ in Ceremonies”, in Suzanne Clisby (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands: Queering the Margins, Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality Series, London: Routledge, pp. 29-42, ISBN 9781138612358.
In the film, Julien undertakes a metaphorical journey with the aim of rediscovering black queer desire and rearticulating it by bypassing society’s stereotypes on black bodies and homosexuality. Along the way Julien considers issues linked to the hyper-sexualisation and objectification of black male bodies in Western tradition, and their exclusion from Western canon of beauty, while prompting a counter-aesthetic that may represent the first instance for “many people to look at black maleness with visual pleasure, not with a sense of threat or danger” (hooks 1990: 199).
The reading of the film intends to demonstrate how Julien’s images move in the context of Western culturally produced regularities (or ‘grammar’ in Kress and van Leeuwen’s terms) while at the same time disrupting them in order to propose alternative ways of seeing. Julien partly displaces the prominence of the visual, so important in Western epistemological tradition, by hybridising it with other senses such as hearing and the evocation of the sense of touch. Drawing on a fluid conception of identity and sexuality (enhanced in the film by multiple references to water and by the disruption of the linearity of time), Julien lingers over the details of black male bodies in order to define a new conception of black masculinity. Deprived of the mask of apparent strength and aggressiveness, black masculinity appears, therefore, more ambiguous, almost vulnerable, embracing the full complexity inherent in an otherwise silenced part of the Black experience.
Amideo, E., 2018, ‘Undoing Black Masculinity: Isaac Julien's Alternative Grammar of Visual Representation’. In P. Baker and G. Balirano (eds.), Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 195-224, ISBN 978-1-349-95326-4.
Articles in Journals and Volumes by Emilio Amideo
nationalism and far-right politics worldwide has recently brought to the
fore the dangerous conflation of immigration and ecological crisis at the
basis of eco-racist discourses fuelling several conspiracy theories. These, in
turn, have led to a series of terrorist attacks, including the mass shooting
among the Hispanic community which took place in El Paso, Texas, on 3
August 2019 by Patrick Crusius.
Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines eco-racism, appraisal
theory, and facticity in linguistic analysis, this article aims to analyse
Crusius’s manifesto – “The Inconvenient Truth” – to highlight the linguistic
strategies he deploys to construct his discourse as factual in order to
influence readers’ convictions. The analysis intends to increase awareness
about the implications of the co-articulation of anti-ecological and racist
discourses and eventually aid their dismantling.
Amideo, E., 2024, “Facticity Patterns in Eco-racist Discourse: Appraising the El Paso Shooting”, Textus, 37.1, pp. 13-33.
Amideo, Emilio. "Voicing the absented presence of blackness in Canada: a multimodal critical discourse analysis" Multimodal Communication, vol. 10, no. 3, 2021, pp. 211-227. https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2020-0022
In the context of Anglophone studies, this essay explores issues of 'home', belonging, community and self, with specific attention to the experience of contemporary black queer performance poets who live and work in the United Kingdom, and will do so from the vantage point of the diaspora, which is itself a kind of "way out" of the Nation-state. Through the performative poetry of Keith Jarrett (London based poet and short story writer of Dominican descent) and Dean Atta (poet of mixed Jamaican and Greek-Cypriot descent living in London), the essay concentrates on the importance of the performance – be it racial, sexual, involving videos, the written or spoken word – to undermine the stereotypes concerning the black and queer body, and the use of language as a creative tool to formulate other possible avenues for black queer existence and recognition. The two performance poets are linked by their attempt to create a 'home', a community, where 'black' and 'queer' do not need to be antithetical terms (as in the widespread discourse of 'blackness' and its essentialist take in most black communities), or where 'black' is not synonym with 'fetishised desire/fantasy' (as in most of the white gay subculture). A place where the queer black body can 'come home' and 'be home', as Keith Jarrett suggests in his "Meditations on Home" (2014), where he writes: "I have also grown to accept my body as a home, rather than a temple. Temples are sacred; you visit them once or twice a week [...]. Homes are where we store our memories and our secrets. We invite lovers [...]. Our homes gather wear and tear, and this gives us 'character'".
Strong of the "private is political" feminist lesson, particularly of the so called Third World Feminism, these artists find their sites of resistance and self-making by rendering public what is private, by disorienting the audience and creating provocative performances with erotic, spectral and highly inter-textual references. Their performances, like their circulations inside and outside academic contexts, contribute to expand recognition of their (private) experiences and to legitimate their political expression.
Amideo, Emilio, 2017, “Unhomely Lives: Black and Queer Belongings in Contemporary Black British Culture”, in Rossella Ciocca, Annamaria Lamarra e Maria Laudando (eds.), Transnational Subjects: Literary and Cultural Encounters. Selected papers from XVII AIA Conference, Vol. 1, Napoli: Liguori, pp. 36-45. (ISSN: 1972-0645)
Amideo, E., (2015), 'Thomas Glave's Queer Eco-phenomenology', Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19:2, 53-69.
In his second novel 'Giovanni’s Room' (1956), often quoted among the texts reconstructing a queer genealogy, the African American writer James Baldwin presented the damaging effects of what Jafari S. Allan has termed Western classed and ‘racialized heteropatriarchy’ (Allen 2012).
Drawing on the fruitful conflation of two theoretical paradigms – namely Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of ‘tidalectics’ and the work on queer temporalities (Halberstan 2005; Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2010) – this paper aims at exploring how, through the use of aquatic imagery as a dissolvent of borders and categories, Baldwin tries to find a language to express an alternative to this normative and oppressive system. Brathwaite’s ‘tidalectics’ (a ‘tidal dialectic’), that draws on the back and forth movement of the tides to express a cyclical temporality which resists closure, parallels the resistance of queer temporalities to ‘chrononormativity’, that is the structuring of individuals’ lifetime according to the rhythms of birth, accumulation of wealth, reproduction, and death.
In Baldwin’s novel, shaped around the ménage à trois which sees the male protagonist (David) involved with his American fiancée (Hella) and his Italian secret lover (Giovanni), it is especially the room that David shares with Giovanni which assumes aquatic connotations. The room then, through the paradigm offered by the ‘queer tidalectics’, will be read as an ever-changing place of transformation that enables Baldwin to find a site for the expression and recognition of queer desire, while disrupting the linearity of Western historiography and gender essentialism.
ITALIANO
Nel suo secondo romanzo 'Giovanni’s Room' (1956), spesso menzionato tra i testi che ricostruiscono una genealogia queer, lo scrittore afroamericano James Baldwin presenta gli effetti disastrosi di ciò che Jafari S. Allan ha definito come l’‘eteropatriarcato razzializzato e classista occidentale’ (Allan 2012).
Sulla base della feconda combinazione di due paradigmi teorici – il concetto di ‘tidalectics’ di Edward Kamau Brathwaite e la produzione teorica intorno alle temporalità queer (in particolare Halberstan 2005; Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2010) – questo articolo intende esplorare il modo in cui, attraverso l’utilizzo dell’immaginario acquatico come solvente di confini e categorie, Baldwin cerca un linguaggio adatto ad esprimere un’alternativa a questo sistema normativo ed oppressivo. La ‘tidalectics’ (una dialettica delle maree) di Brathwaite, infatti, nel suo ispirarsi al moto delle maree per esprimere una temporalità ciclica che resiste qualsiasi chiusura, si pone in parallelo alla resistenza che le temporalità queer oppongono alla ‘crononormatività’, ossia allo strutturarsi della vita degli individui secondo i ritmi della nascita, dell’accumulazione di capitale, della riproduzione e della morte.
Nel romanzo di Baldwin, che si struttura intorno al triangolo amoroso che vede il protagonista (David) coinvolto in una relazione con la sua fidanzata (Hella) e con l’italiano Giovanni, è soprattutto la camera che David condivide con Giovanni che finisce per assumere connotazioni acquatiche. La stanza, dunque, attraverso il paradigma teorico offerto dalla ‘queer tidalectics’ (dialettica delle maree queer), sarà letta come luogo di trasformazione continua che permette a Baldwin di trovare una modalità di espressione e riconoscimento del desiderio queer, scardinando al contempo la linearità della storiografia occidentale e dell’essenzialismo di genere.
Amideo, E., 2016, ‘Queer Tidalectics: Sea-change in Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin', in D. Agrillo et al., L'immagine nel mondo, il mondo nell'immagine: nuove prospettive per un approccio pluridisciplinae alla rappresentazione testuale ed extra-testuale/The Image in the World, the World in the Image: New Perspectives for an Interdisciplinary Approach to Textual and Extra-textual Representation. Napoli: Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale', pp. 101-115, ISBN: 978-88-6719-131-4, (peer-reviewed).
Invited Talks by Emilio Amideo
Conference Presentations by Emilio Amideo
Book Reviews by Emilio Amideo
Amideo engages and extends the work of Black queer studies, Oceanic studies, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and new materialism through the theorizations of Sara Ahmed, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, José Esteban Muñoz, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others. Ambitious in scope and captivating to read, Queer Tidalectics brings Caribbean writers like Glissant and Brathwaite into queer literary analysis—a major scholarly contribution.
Drawing on the peculiar character of the PhD programme, which fosters an open dialogue and a fruitful contamination among different disciplines, the volume explores the image as an element that fluctuates between representation and creation and is thus particularly prone to multiple readings and investigations. In the passage from textual to extra-textual reality, the image represents on the one hand a world “in being”, sometimes becoming symbol, while on the other it discloses the generative power inherent in the potential for a world “in becoming”. Considering that nowadays individuals are exposed to constant flows of visual solicitations, the dialectics between the fixity of mimesis and the dynamics of creation continues to offer a fertile ground of scientific inquiry. The aim of this volume is precisely to trace the different trajectories along which this duplicity develops and therefore addresses issues that touch upon the language-through-images nexus, semiotics, the strategies for the construction of textual meaning, and visual culture, among the others.
The opening essay by Hans Belting (keynote speaker of the conference and theorist working in the fields of art history, anthropology and media theory) employs anthropological insights for iconological readings, thus providing a precious frame of reference for the subsequent essays composing the volume. Written by former and ongoing PhD students, these essays explore the uses and functions of images as both textual and extra-textual representation in a number of different social and cultural contexts and through different methodological approaches drawing on fields such as archaeology, Italian linguistics and philology, literature (American and African American, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, German), cinema, theatre and comics. Bearing in mind not only the variety of perspectives involved in the investigation of the conference theme, but also the wide time span of the individual essays (from Ancient Greece to the contemporary period), the material is ordered chronologically and each essay is followed by an abstract providing a brief description of its specific content.
Agrillo, D., Amideo, E., Di Nobile, A., Tarallo, C., (eds.), 2016, L'immagine nel mondo, il mondo nell'immagine: nuove prospettive per un approccio pluridisciplinare alla rappresentazione testuale ed extra-testuale/The Image in the World, the World in the Image: New Perspectives for an Interdisciplinary Approach to Textual and Extra-textual Representation, Napoli: Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale', ISBN: 978-88-6719-131-4.
Drawing on a methodological approach which combines translation studies, gender studies and black diaspora studies, the aim of this chapter is to explore how Kay’s “first-level translation” of her experience onto the page is rendered into another language and socio-cultural context through its reframing into Italian.
Considering that the creation of paratextual elements is linked to a culturally-specific time and place and as such proves particularly suitable as an instrument of cultural translation, the chapter will focus more specifically on the reframing in Italian of Kay’s collections of poetry The Adoption Papers (1991) and Fiere (2011) through a contrastive analysis of the paratextual elements of both source and target texts.
Amideo, E., 2022, “‘What is an Afro-Scot anyway?’: Reframing Jackie Kay’s Fluid Identities in Translation”, in Dominique Faria, Marta Pacheco Pinto and Joana Moura (eds.), Reframing Translators, Translators as Reframers, Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 192-213, ISBN 9781032027739.
Amideo, E., (2020), “Celebrating One’s Natural Tendencies: Essex Hemphill’s ‘Borderland’ in Ceremonies”, in Suzanne Clisby (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands: Queering the Margins, Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality Series, London: Routledge, pp. 29-42, ISBN 9781138612358.
In the film, Julien undertakes a metaphorical journey with the aim of rediscovering black queer desire and rearticulating it by bypassing society’s stereotypes on black bodies and homosexuality. Along the way Julien considers issues linked to the hyper-sexualisation and objectification of black male bodies in Western tradition, and their exclusion from Western canon of beauty, while prompting a counter-aesthetic that may represent the first instance for “many people to look at black maleness with visual pleasure, not with a sense of threat or danger” (hooks 1990: 199).
The reading of the film intends to demonstrate how Julien’s images move in the context of Western culturally produced regularities (or ‘grammar’ in Kress and van Leeuwen’s terms) while at the same time disrupting them in order to propose alternative ways of seeing. Julien partly displaces the prominence of the visual, so important in Western epistemological tradition, by hybridising it with other senses such as hearing and the evocation of the sense of touch. Drawing on a fluid conception of identity and sexuality (enhanced in the film by multiple references to water and by the disruption of the linearity of time), Julien lingers over the details of black male bodies in order to define a new conception of black masculinity. Deprived of the mask of apparent strength and aggressiveness, black masculinity appears, therefore, more ambiguous, almost vulnerable, embracing the full complexity inherent in an otherwise silenced part of the Black experience.
Amideo, E., 2018, ‘Undoing Black Masculinity: Isaac Julien's Alternative Grammar of Visual Representation’. In P. Baker and G. Balirano (eds.), Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 195-224, ISBN 978-1-349-95326-4.
nationalism and far-right politics worldwide has recently brought to the
fore the dangerous conflation of immigration and ecological crisis at the
basis of eco-racist discourses fuelling several conspiracy theories. These, in
turn, have led to a series of terrorist attacks, including the mass shooting
among the Hispanic community which took place in El Paso, Texas, on 3
August 2019 by Patrick Crusius.
Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines eco-racism, appraisal
theory, and facticity in linguistic analysis, this article aims to analyse
Crusius’s manifesto – “The Inconvenient Truth” – to highlight the linguistic
strategies he deploys to construct his discourse as factual in order to
influence readers’ convictions. The analysis intends to increase awareness
about the implications of the co-articulation of anti-ecological and racist
discourses and eventually aid their dismantling.
Amideo, E., 2024, “Facticity Patterns in Eco-racist Discourse: Appraising the El Paso Shooting”, Textus, 37.1, pp. 13-33.
Amideo, Emilio. "Voicing the absented presence of blackness in Canada: a multimodal critical discourse analysis" Multimodal Communication, vol. 10, no. 3, 2021, pp. 211-227. https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2020-0022
In the context of Anglophone studies, this essay explores issues of 'home', belonging, community and self, with specific attention to the experience of contemporary black queer performance poets who live and work in the United Kingdom, and will do so from the vantage point of the diaspora, which is itself a kind of "way out" of the Nation-state. Through the performative poetry of Keith Jarrett (London based poet and short story writer of Dominican descent) and Dean Atta (poet of mixed Jamaican and Greek-Cypriot descent living in London), the essay concentrates on the importance of the performance – be it racial, sexual, involving videos, the written or spoken word – to undermine the stereotypes concerning the black and queer body, and the use of language as a creative tool to formulate other possible avenues for black queer existence and recognition. The two performance poets are linked by their attempt to create a 'home', a community, where 'black' and 'queer' do not need to be antithetical terms (as in the widespread discourse of 'blackness' and its essentialist take in most black communities), or where 'black' is not synonym with 'fetishised desire/fantasy' (as in most of the white gay subculture). A place where the queer black body can 'come home' and 'be home', as Keith Jarrett suggests in his "Meditations on Home" (2014), where he writes: "I have also grown to accept my body as a home, rather than a temple. Temples are sacred; you visit them once or twice a week [...]. Homes are where we store our memories and our secrets. We invite lovers [...]. Our homes gather wear and tear, and this gives us 'character'".
Strong of the "private is political" feminist lesson, particularly of the so called Third World Feminism, these artists find their sites of resistance and self-making by rendering public what is private, by disorienting the audience and creating provocative performances with erotic, spectral and highly inter-textual references. Their performances, like their circulations inside and outside academic contexts, contribute to expand recognition of their (private) experiences and to legitimate their political expression.
Amideo, Emilio, 2017, “Unhomely Lives: Black and Queer Belongings in Contemporary Black British Culture”, in Rossella Ciocca, Annamaria Lamarra e Maria Laudando (eds.), Transnational Subjects: Literary and Cultural Encounters. Selected papers from XVII AIA Conference, Vol. 1, Napoli: Liguori, pp. 36-45. (ISSN: 1972-0645)
Amideo, E., (2015), 'Thomas Glave's Queer Eco-phenomenology', Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19:2, 53-69.
In his second novel 'Giovanni’s Room' (1956), often quoted among the texts reconstructing a queer genealogy, the African American writer James Baldwin presented the damaging effects of what Jafari S. Allan has termed Western classed and ‘racialized heteropatriarchy’ (Allen 2012).
Drawing on the fruitful conflation of two theoretical paradigms – namely Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of ‘tidalectics’ and the work on queer temporalities (Halberstan 2005; Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2010) – this paper aims at exploring how, through the use of aquatic imagery as a dissolvent of borders and categories, Baldwin tries to find a language to express an alternative to this normative and oppressive system. Brathwaite’s ‘tidalectics’ (a ‘tidal dialectic’), that draws on the back and forth movement of the tides to express a cyclical temporality which resists closure, parallels the resistance of queer temporalities to ‘chrononormativity’, that is the structuring of individuals’ lifetime according to the rhythms of birth, accumulation of wealth, reproduction, and death.
In Baldwin’s novel, shaped around the ménage à trois which sees the male protagonist (David) involved with his American fiancée (Hella) and his Italian secret lover (Giovanni), it is especially the room that David shares with Giovanni which assumes aquatic connotations. The room then, through the paradigm offered by the ‘queer tidalectics’, will be read as an ever-changing place of transformation that enables Baldwin to find a site for the expression and recognition of queer desire, while disrupting the linearity of Western historiography and gender essentialism.
ITALIANO
Nel suo secondo romanzo 'Giovanni’s Room' (1956), spesso menzionato tra i testi che ricostruiscono una genealogia queer, lo scrittore afroamericano James Baldwin presenta gli effetti disastrosi di ciò che Jafari S. Allan ha definito come l’‘eteropatriarcato razzializzato e classista occidentale’ (Allan 2012).
Sulla base della feconda combinazione di due paradigmi teorici – il concetto di ‘tidalectics’ di Edward Kamau Brathwaite e la produzione teorica intorno alle temporalità queer (in particolare Halberstan 2005; Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2010) – questo articolo intende esplorare il modo in cui, attraverso l’utilizzo dell’immaginario acquatico come solvente di confini e categorie, Baldwin cerca un linguaggio adatto ad esprimere un’alternativa a questo sistema normativo ed oppressivo. La ‘tidalectics’ (una dialettica delle maree) di Brathwaite, infatti, nel suo ispirarsi al moto delle maree per esprimere una temporalità ciclica che resiste qualsiasi chiusura, si pone in parallelo alla resistenza che le temporalità queer oppongono alla ‘crononormatività’, ossia allo strutturarsi della vita degli individui secondo i ritmi della nascita, dell’accumulazione di capitale, della riproduzione e della morte.
Nel romanzo di Baldwin, che si struttura intorno al triangolo amoroso che vede il protagonista (David) coinvolto in una relazione con la sua fidanzata (Hella) e con l’italiano Giovanni, è soprattutto la camera che David condivide con Giovanni che finisce per assumere connotazioni acquatiche. La stanza, dunque, attraverso il paradigma teorico offerto dalla ‘queer tidalectics’ (dialettica delle maree queer), sarà letta come luogo di trasformazione continua che permette a Baldwin di trovare una modalità di espressione e riconoscimento del desiderio queer, scardinando al contempo la linearità della storiografia occidentale e dell’essenzialismo di genere.
Amideo, E., 2016, ‘Queer Tidalectics: Sea-change in Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin', in D. Agrillo et al., L'immagine nel mondo, il mondo nell'immagine: nuove prospettive per un approccio pluridisciplinae alla rappresentazione testuale ed extra-testuale/The Image in the World, the World in the Image: New Perspectives for an Interdisciplinary Approach to Textual and Extra-textual Representation. Napoli: Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale', pp. 101-115, ISBN: 978-88-6719-131-4, (peer-reviewed).
Available at: https://blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-emilio-amideos-book-queer-tidalectics