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AUTHOR
Alessandra Di Maio
“Translating the Caribbean: Cristina Garcia’s Cuban Dream”
Pearls in Motion
Mediterraneo Nero. Le rotte dei migranti nel millennio globale
Weak Postcolonialism? Somali Italian Writers
“Black Italia. Contemporary Migrant Writers from Africa”
Through the centuries, historical and fictional characters of African descent have been an integral part of Italian culture at large – from Hannibal to Othello. Yet their presence, in history as much as in the arts, has often been marginalized, or considered episodic, if not entirely overlooked by Italy’s dominant discourse. The recent arrival of a plethora of migrants from the four corners of the world, many of whom from African countries, has urged Italians to recuperate their African past as an essential, and often problematic, component of their national identity. Yet historical sources appear fragmentary and often interpolated. How to re-compose the neglected African Italian heritage? …
Migrazioni letterarie
Il re della strada
Di Maio, A
Traduzione di poesie e brani tratti da varie opere di Wole Soyinka, Premio Nobel per la letteratura (1986)
"Perle per il mondo: origine ed evoluzione della diaspora postcoloniale"
Canti della diaspora
Articolo sull'edizione del 2012 del Lagos Black Heritage Festival, diretto da Wole Soyinka, dedicato al rapporto tra l'Italia e l'Africa. Include in anteprima alcune poesie degli autori italiani e nigeriani partecipanti.
Wor(l)ds in Progress: A Study of Contemporary Migrant Writings
In the contemporary world, the figure of the migrant, moving across spaces, cultures and languages, has acquired unprecedented centrality. Migrants have transformed the ways of representing, and narrating, the transnational world in which they live, responding in new fashions to one of the oldest impulses of men and women of every place and time: the impulse to tell stories. By engaging with notions of diaspora, postcoloniality, nomadism, translation, exile and migration, the study moves across the Anglophone and Italophone spectra offering a compelling definition of migrant literature at the turn of the millennium. Chapters on Cristina Garcia, Nuruddin Farah, Caryl Phillips and Ubax Cristi…
The Mediterranean, or Where Africa Does (Not) Meet Italy: Andrea Segre's A Sud di Lampedusa (2006)
The essay studies the crossing (or "burning") of the hundred thousand Africans who have traversed the Mediterranean in the past decades to look for better life conditions in Europe, through an analysis of Andrea Segre's documentaries, in particular South of Lampedusa (2006).
Gli Studi Culturali in India. Il collettivo Subaltern Studies e il discorso postcoloniale da Said a Spivak
Sull'origine e lo sviluppo del collettivo "Subaltern Studies" in India, sul ruolo fondamentale che ha giocato nella formazione degli Studi Culturali e Postcoloniali, e sulla sua diffusione transnazionale.
“Le voci dell’Africa nelle lettere italiane”
By referring to the postcolonial and diaspora studies, the essay analyzes the rise of a multicultural literature in Italy where Africa's literary voices contribute to a transformation of the national canon, opening it up to the contemporary notion of a transnational literature that crosses languages, territories and cultures.
Nigeria poligama. Prudenti come serpenti di Lola Shoneyin
Recensione di Prudenti come serpenti, romanzo della scrittrice nigeriana Lola Shoneyin.
“Subaltern Studies”
Sul far del giorno
Traduzione ed edizione critica aggiornata dell'autobiografia del Premio Nobel per la Letteratura nigeriano Wole Soyinka, corredata di Prefazione e note della curatrice e di un apparato fotografico pubblicato in anteprima mondiale. Soyinka, classe 1934, drammaturgo, poeta, saggista, romanziere e attivista politico è stato il primo autore africano a essere insignito del Premio Nobel per la Letteratura. In questo avvincente memoir, racconta le proprie vicende di artista, intellettuale e attivista militante nella sua Nigeria e nel palcoscenico del mondo, in cui da sempre porta le voci dell'Africa. Nel linguaggio lirico e politico profondamente umano che gli è proprio, mescolando immagini della …
Framing Migrant Memories: Lampedusa's Fragmented Archives
The small island of Lampedusa, a key destination of the Central Mediterranean Route connecting Africa to Italy, offers a special observatory on the contemporary trans-Mediterranean odyssey of migrants, although often transformed into a “border spectacle.” Upon landing, migrants are stripped of their belongings, as these are impounded by the authorities. Such an act of dispossession is intended to deprive them of their histories, family ties and cultural identity. Photographer Mario Badagliacca has portrayed a selection of these lost and retrieved items in his work Fragments (2013). Each object reveals expectations, fears, desires, endurance, but cannot tell a full story. They are fragments …
“L’arte dell’olio di palma. La trilogia africana di Chinua Achebe”
Sul far del giorno
Autobiografia di Wole Soyinka, primo autore africano insignito del Premio Nobel per la Letteratura, drammaturgo, poeta, romanziere, saggista e noto attivista politico internazionale.
Tempi anomali per la Somalia di Farah
Compagno di strada
Introduzione alla figura e all'opera del primo Premio Nobel per la Letteratura africano, Wole Soyinka, autore prolifico e attivista nigeriano, e alla sua ricezione in Italia
Out of Africa. A Conversation with Wole Soyinka - La sua Africa: Conversazione con Wole Soyinka
"Lampedusa und das 'Schwarze Mittelmeer'. Die Migrationsrouten im Jahrtausend der Globalisierung"
On frontiers in the global millennium. The role played by the minor island of Lampedusa as a bridge and border between Africa and Europe.
Lo scrittore e la capra
Traduzione di un racconto dello scrittore nigeriano Chris Abani (titolo originale: The Writer and the Goat)
A Venezia, nel ghetto
Translation of the chapter "In the Ghetto" from Caryl Phillips' travelogue "The European Tribe"
"Una scrittura che vive. Un’intervista con Buthaina Al Nasiri”
A New World Tribe in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore
A Poetics of Passage: The Prose of Ubax Cristina Ali Farah
Un'inquieta adolescenza afroitaliana. Il comandante del fiume di Ubah Cristina Ali Farah.
Recensione del romanzo di Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Il comandante del fiume (2014)
Beyond Lampedusa: Africa Meets Europe / Para Lá de Lampedusa: A África Encontra a Europa
The volume, resulting from a photograph exhibit that travelled the globe (Portugal, China, USA, Nigeria, Italy, etc.), offers a miscellaneous portrayal of the history of African photography and its influence on non-African imaginings of Africa and the African diaspora in all its diversity. My essay comments on the photographic representation of the black body in Italy in both colonial and postcolonial times.
Of Moor's Heads and Other Sicilian Decorations
Salah Methnani’s Immigrato: Portrait of a Migrant as a Young Man
Although after Unification Italy was predominantly a country of emigration, in recent years it has become a hub for migrants from different parts of the world. Among these migrants a group of writers has contributed to re-configuring Italy's national literary identity. Read by critics primarily as an autobiographical text with remarkable sociological value, Tunisian-born Salah Methnani’s Immigrato is, I argue, first and foremost a classic Bildungsroman. Salah, the 'immigrant' in the title, is the story's protagonist, point of view and leading metaphor. His Bildung follows a double path. On the one hand Italy is a country imagined through TV and books read in school, on the other it is the c…
"Pearls in Motion" -- Prefazione al romanzo di Cristina Ali Farah, Little Mother (titolo originale: Madre piccola), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2011
La vita continua. Sotto la nevicata di Caryl Phillips
Recensione del romanzo di Caryl Phillips, Sotto la nevicata (Mondadori 2011)
'Another Art Altogether': Heart of Darkness come romanzo breve
By referring to a number of studies on Joseph Conrad as well as to critical works on the novella as a modern narrative form (from Henry James to Leibowitz, Nemerov and Kundera), this article explores how a reading of Heart of Darkness as a short novel can add new nuances to a better appreciation of Conrad's masterpiece.
The Mystery of Origins: Migratory Patterns in Caryl Phillips' A Distant Shore
La terapia delle parole. Conversazione con Wole Soyinka
Intervista con Wole Soyinka, Premio Nobel per la Letteratura (1986), riguardo la sua produzione teatrale e letteraria e l'attività politica
“Il suono del sangue: Foglie rosso sandalo di Wole Soyinka”
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka's first radio-play in its first and only Italian translation, performed in Turin at Teatro Baretti, director Mauro Avogadro, broadcast live by RAI Radio 3
“Changing Landscapes, Transforming Histories: A Reading of Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore”, in Englishes, vol. 12, n. 34, 2008
“Refugees as Postcolonial Subjects: Nuruddin Farah’s Yesterday, Tomorrow”
I veri colpevoli della tragedia
Traduzione di un editoriale del decano della letteratura somala Nuruddin Farah sulla situazione politica in Somalia.
Where the Present is Absent: Farah's Portrait of Contemporary Somalia
Prefazione a Migrations / Migrazioni
Preface to the poetry collection Migrations/Migrazioni explaining the project, and poetry and photograph selection