- La rilettura e la riscrittura dei grandi classici della letteratura inglese nella scrittura creativa postcoloniale. - Analisi della funzione del canone nella politica coloniale e della valenza controdiscorsiva delle riscritture postcoloniali. - Il dibattito culturale sulla "apertura" del canone letterario.

This essay examines the novels of Andrea Levy, one of the more remarkable figures in the contemporary Black British literary landscape, in order to illustrate the restorative and healing power that can be exercised by the creative word in redefining identity and affirming a sense of belonging. The work of Levy epitomizes in artistic terms the effort on the part of black diasporic subjects to readjust their lives and identities in the very heart of the old Empire, in a society that has been radically transformed by mass migrations and the processes of hybridization they inevitably entail, but that is still resistant to a new world order reflecting these realities. The essay shows how Levy uses her creative activity as a writer to give voice to silenced histories, making possible that understanding of the past which is essential to the reknitting of fractured identities and to bringing about mutual acceptance and effective reconciliation in society. The five novels written by Levy since the 1990s—spanning the history of black Jamaicans in Britain from the period of the slave trade, through the deracinated Windrush generation, to those in today’s society suffering more subtle forms of uprootedness and exile—weave a vast canvas in which the different strands of a “common” past are interwoven. This is a project that disrupts schematic presuppositions inherited from the past and tends to foster partnership relationships based on mutual understanding and sharing. The hybridized, composite and shifting identities of the characters populating Levy’s novels, constantly repositioned by the interplay between historical, social, political and personal forces, foreground the urgency of moving beyond the boundaries of original monolithic subjectivities in order to articulate identity within a dialectics of cultural difference, and of rethinking abused and outworn categories of belonging. In Levy’s novels art establishes itself as a space of negotiation where different cultural discourses are able to interact, shaping a new sense of community in which everyone can find their place and feel fully “at home” not despite but thanks to their multiple, hybrid and liquid identities.

Oggetto di indagine in questo saggio è l’esempio più riuscito di riscrittura delle Grandi Speranze vittoriane ad opera dello scrittore australiano Peter Carey. Jack Maggs, pubblicato da Carey nel 1997, si pone in aperta contrapposizione e al tempo stesso in sostanziale continuità con il capolavoro dickensiano rappresentando un tributo ad esso, seppure polemico e provocatorio. Del romanzo ottocentesco verrà accennata una lettura che ne evidenzia i tratti e le forme con le quali il testo antipoideo entra in dialogo, tralasciando questioni di pur centrale rilevanza nell’opera che esulano dal rapporto con la sua riscrittura postcoloniale.

Small Island, published by the Black British writer Andrea Levy in 2004, is explored as a representative example of literary writing constructed as a space of negotiation and possible reconciliation aimed at fostering a wider and more integrated sense of community. This essay investigates how the novel contributes to re-forging the socio-cultural consciousness and imaginary by exposing and disrupting the dynamics at the roots of hegemonic constructions of space, time and subjectivity. Focussed on the central issue of the process of identity formation set in the context of the often obscured history of the Atlantic world with its traumatic past of slavery, migration and resulting legacies, Small Island gives voice to the predicament of the contemporary individual caught between different worlds and cultures constantly in search of a full sense of belonging.

In questo saggio viene esplorata la narrativa diasporica dello scrittore Caryl Phillips, “world writer” di origini caraibiche che rappresenta, a partire dalla sua personale biografia, una sfida alla fissità e alla chiusura di barriere ideologiche e identitarie. Nella scrittura di Phillips l’Atlantico riveste un ruolo centrale in qualità di ambito privilegiato di interrogazione e rilettura del presente da una prospettiva aperta e interlocutoria, incline all’ascolto delle storie, “storie che si intrecciano” e che esso custodisce e dissemina nei suoi “territori che si sovrappongono” (Said, 1993). Esso viene dunque sottratto alla dimensione di storia epica epurata dei suoi tratti più inquietanti, mito delle origini che ha trasformato il Middle Passage e la schiavitù in una metafora congelata nel tempo e astratta dal divenire storico. I testi dello scrittore approfondiscono la storicità dell’Atlantico e ne indagano, al fianco di quelle passate, le nuove forme di assoggettamento e schiavitù, meno palesi ma non meno inquietanti, esplorandone rotte e approdi inattesi rivelatori del nuovo ordine globalizzato.

This paper will analyze the ‘historical’ novel Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan with the aim of reflecting upon the power of the creative word as a means to forge reality, shape identities, mask or unmask truths, and also to prefigure a different, alternative world order based on commonly negotiated and thus shared values. The postmodernist revisiting of the traditional genre of the historical novel does not compromise the postcolonial commitment of the writer: Flanagan’s incursions into the Australian colonial past are informed by his concern for urgent social and political causes which has characterized his unswerving fight against all systems of inequality and exploitation. In his novel, the subversion of the linear causal relation of events which calls into question the truthfulness and objectivity of history, together with the foregrounded metanarrative reflection on the art of writing, contribute to the revisiting and re-discussing of the myth of progress and the cult of rationality at the very roots of Western civilization and of its imperialistic enterprise. Flanagan’s ‘anti-historical’ historical novel tackles urgent questions about modernity interrogating the founding narratives of the Australian national identity, in order to explore the uncontrollable and shifting areas of the contemporary ‘transnation’ in which the traditional categories shaping subjectivities are disrupted. As the paper will demonstrate, the writer digs into the past of his nation not simply in order to unravel its hidden histories but to detect the profound, inextricable interconnections with the present across different times and spaces. Feelings and experiences that exist above and beyond historical contingencies and cultural differences represent the writer’s privileged area of investigation as they trespass upon conventional and artificial boundaries revealing what it is that makes us all human.

This chapter focuses on relevant novels by contemporary black British writers, novels which represent the condition of exile, uprootedness and ‘in-betweenness’ experienced by the first and the second generation of migrants who arrived in Great Britain from colonized or once colonized-countries in the second half of the 20th century. Creative writing presents itself as a privileged area of investigation of the problematic question of belonging and of identity negotiations. The new fluid and hybrid identities which emerge out of the inevitable processes of contamination between different worlds and cultures – identities ‘positioned’ by the interaction of different historical, political and cultural factors – challenge the binary dichotomies at the very roots of Western civilization dismantling the myth of a homogeneous and static Englishness based on the traditional opposition between Self and Other. Through the novels taken into examination mostly by writers born and/or bred in England whose identities are enriched by different ethnic roots, the chapter will reflect upon the concept of cultural diversity and on the problematic issue of multiculturalism: a model which has undoubtedly revealed its flaws. The question of cultural identity stands out as a relevant common thread and is explored in its most different declinations, from the suffered sense of uprootedness and alienation to the celebration of hybridism, from generational conflicts to adherence to forms of fundamentalism, from the attempt to assimilate to the enthusiastic celebration of diversity. All the novels selected for analysis reveal both in narrative form and content a diasporic connotation and a dialogic afflatus which is aimed at prefiguring a ‘new world order’ whose objective is a more equitable and caring society ready not simply to accept and tolerate but to appreciate and cultivate its fruitful, precious diversity.

The essay is meant to stimulate a general reflection on the burning issues and problems which affect contemporary South African society but whose shadows, in different forms and degrees, loom over the world at large. The focus of the attention is the South African writer Sindiwe Magona’s literary production with a particular emphasis on her latest novel, Beauty’s Gift, published in 2008. The novel, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2009, represents the starting ground to interpellate South African society in its present innermost contradictions and hidden tensions in order to re-think the widespread culture of violence which wounds the community.

Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000) is investigated by adopting Riane Eisler’s ‘Cultural Transformation Theory’ in order to highlight the culture-nature dialectic at the core of a novel that explores the long-lasting conflict between tradition and modernity through a distinctive South African perspective. The article shows how in Mda’s novel the notions of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ are called into question by denouncing the catastrophic consequences that ensue when they are blindly pursued at the expense of a respectful and harmonious cohabitation on Earth. Particular attention is given to the forms and ways in which the borders between nature and culture, tradition and progress, past and present are deconstructed and traversed within the complex narrative framework of the novel which testifies to the central and permanent concern of the writer for ethical, social and environmental issues. Mda, as I intend to demonstrate, encourages a critical re-thinking and re-orientation of ossified dichotomical oppositions and prejudiced assumptions as a necessary first step in fostering a more equitable and sustainable world so that a future of equal opportunities available to all can be re-imaged. From this perspective, fundamental is the role played by literature, language and education (Eisler 2013), a responsibility the writer fully endorses through his committed and challenging fiction.