Books by Serena Guarracino
La traduzione messa in scena nasce all’incrocio tra gli studi sul teatro e sulla traduzione, con ... 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.
Cosa fanno le donne all'opera? Partendo da questa domanda, e alla luce della triade genere-classe... 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... 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 ... 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.
Journal Articles by Serena Guarracino
This essay provides a tentative mapping of the musical Africa emerging from Toni Morrison's two r... 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.
This essay aims at tracing the intersection between literary production and multimedia textuality... 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.
This paper investigates the theatrical stage both as a walled-in space where ethnic difference ca... 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”.
This essay focuses on the elaboration of postcolonial literature as an event emerging from the in... 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.”
This essay considers Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida and the context of its production and reception ... 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.
This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the production of Gurinder Chadha,... 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.
This essay explores how the operatic voice has been used both in critical and fictional writing t... 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.
This essay offers a path across some of the essays in this volume exploring the relationship betw... 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.
This issue of Anglistica, is the first dedicated to music in the long commitment of this journal ... 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.
In this last contribution to the twin issues Anglistica dedicates to music and cultural studies, ... 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.
Altre Modernità, Jan 1, 2010
The article offers a reading of the staging of The Magic Flute by visual artist William Kentridge... 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).
Born in Western Maharashtra and now living between Devon (UK) and India, Suniti Namjoshi does not... 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 article addresses the representation of difference in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Mark Dornford-M... 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 G... 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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Books by Serena Guarracino
Journal Articles by Serena Guarracino
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.
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.
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.
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.
The study on migration from sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb has only recently profited from a new attention to the cultural expressions that embody the hopes and ordeals embedded in these global flows, shaping ever-changing aesthetic universes. The analysis of the African diaspora through related creative practices, from the present as well as from the past, demands to recognize how migration contributes to the elaboration of Italian identity as well as to its deconstruction as an authoritative discourse in the socio-political debate. The archive collecting these practices will necessarily be ‘future’ or ‘living’, as Arjun Appadurai writes, but also ex post, witnessing and interpreting the role that writers, musicians and artists already play in the media and within the academy.
This paper will use Gabriella Ghermandi’s work as a case study. The author of a well-known novel titled Regina di fiori e di perle (2007), Ghermandi has recently oriented her practices to musical performances. Since 2013, she has been singing, together with her Atse Tewodros Project, what she defines as “songs Ethiopian partisans sang while marching to fight against the Fascist army.” Through an analysis of the audio-visual documentation of one of her 2014 concerts, our contribution will focus on how her performance embodies a “cultural transit of the present,” working at the same time as re-memory of a removed past and practice of a democratic cohabitation ‘to come’. Ghermandi’s performing body is part of a future archive of migrant performances and performativities, but it also works as an archive of bodily, vocal and visual memories of colonial Italy, standing at the very crossroads between postcolonial criticism and artistic practices that ExPost aspires to map out.
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.
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.
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.
Nel 2013 la Società Italiana delle Letterate ha scelto di svolgere il proprio convegno nazionale all'Aquila, insieme alle donne di TerreMutate e alle docenti dell'università aquilana. Ragionare sulle ferite di un territorio così duramente provato, intrecciando le parole della letteratura con quelle delle architette come delle urbaniste per elaborare strategie che permettano di pensare diversamente i territori che abitiamo: questo il centro della riflessione che allora ebbe luogo e che costituisce atto di ricostruzione di vita e di immaginario. Scrittrici, studiose, artiste ed attiviste si interrogano su come rielaborare un trauma e un lutto irreparabile come il terremoto e le morti che vi sono state, insieme a tante altre testimonianze e riflessioni che permettono di guardare al binomio Terra e parole come a un insieme capace di sviluppi ancora impensati, grazie alla riflessione che in questi anni ha avuto luogo nelle parole e pratiche politiche delle donne che a ciò si sono dedicate in luoghi diversi del mondo, ma accomunate dalla medesima, benefica, tensione a riscrivere paesaggi e territori del vivere.
“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.
‘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.
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.