0000000000238646
AUTHOR
Di Maio Alessandra
Una nazione di narrazioni
The Preface offers a historical overview of Somalia, a former English and Italian colony, of the years of Mogadishu's Amministrazione Fiduciaria, independence, Syad Barre's regime and the ensuing civil war producing an exodus of people living abroad, in diaspora. It also covers the biography of the dean of Somali letters Nuruddin Farah, eminent Anglophone writer and intellectual, obliged to live in exile since the times of Syad Barre's dictatorship.
La baia dei sogni: poesia e memoria pubblica in Migrante di Wole Soyinka
On March 10, 2015, the mayor of Catania, Enzo Bianco, inaugurated a monumental mausoleum in the city's cemetery to commemorate 17 people who had lost their lives to the Mediterranean the year before. Their corpses were found in the waters around Lampedusa, whose small cemetery, in former mayor Giusi Nicolini's words, could not spatially 'welcome' any more bodies to bury. Not only did Bianco offer them a burial place in his city but he also had engraved on each of the 17 graves a verse of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's recent poem Migrants, a powerful reflection on exile and migration as an act of resistance, written for the poetry anthology Migrazioni/Migrations. Bianco also commissioned a s…
Cronache dalla terra dei più felici al mondo
Translation into Italian of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka's 2021 novel Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. Soyinka's Chronicles - published 48 years after his latest novel, The Interpreters - offers a fictional fresco of contemporary Nigeria, a country ridden by political and moral corruption. During the latest political campaigns, Dr. Menka finds out that some colleagues at the hospital where he works sell body parts for ritualistic reasons. Afflicted by such an unexpected discovery, he shares the news with his oldest college friend, bon viveur, star engineer, and Yoruba royal Duyole Pitan-Payne, who is about to leave the country to assume a prestigious post at the Unit…
Postfazione a E. C. Osondu, Quando il cielo vuole spuntano le stelle
The Postface to E. C. Osondu's most recent novel offers a commentary on this Bildungsroman, whose protagonist is a young man from an unknown African country who leaves home behind to reach Europe hoping in a better world. Although narrated in a lyrical tone, the protagonist's epic journey resonates with the actual stories of the uncountable young African men who in the past years have crossed the Black Mediterranean.
Rifugiati: Voci della diaspora somala
Acclaimed Somali writer Nuruddin Farah's non-fiction text is based upon a number of interviews to Somali refugees in four European nations historically close to his homeland - Italy, England, Sweden, Switzerland. Their voices intertwine, framed by that of the exile writer, providing a reconstruction of Somalia as a postcolonial nation first and a civil-war ridden failed state later.
La letteratura nigeriana in lingua inglese
La tradizione letteraria nigeriana, appropriatasi della lingua del colonizzatore, travalica i confini nazionali, nonché quelli dei cosiddetti studi postcoloniali, percorrendo temi che vanno dalla cosmogonia mitologica all’impatto coloniale, dall’indipendenza alle migrazioni contemporanee. Nonostante sia ampiamente tradotta, in Italia questa produzione letteraria, che pure si è affermata come una delle più ricche del mondo delle lettere in lingua inglese, non è mai stata sistematizzata all’interno di uno studio specifico che ne sottolinei l’aspetto nazionale insieme a quello transnazionale. Questo volume si propone di colmare questo vuoto, contestualizzandola storicamente e culturalmente, sp…
Foglie rosso sandalo
"Foglie rosso sandalo" è il titolo della prima e unica traduzione italiana del radiodramma "Camwood on the Leaves" del Premio Nobel nigeriano Wole Soyinka. Commissionato dal Teatro Baretti di Torino e da RAI Radio 3, è stato messo in scena al Teatro Baretti (regia di Mauro Avogadro) e mandato in onda in diretta da RAI Radio 3 il 16 ottobre 2009.
'Sinking Hopeful Roots into Difficult Soil': Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River.
This article proposes a reading of Caryl Phillips Booker-shortlisted novel Crossing the River as an exemplary text of the African Diaspora.
Ode laica per Chibok e Leah
The volume contains two short poems by Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka -- "No, He Said!", dedicated to Nelson Mandela, from the Author's 1988 well-known collection "Mandela's Earth and Other Poems" and the recent "Mandela Comes to Leah", written purposely for this volume -- and the Author's 2019 long epic poem "A Humanist Ode to Chibok, Leah" denouncing all forms of fundamentalism and fanaticism as opposed to secular humanism. Soyinka pays tribute to the girls abducted in Chibok and to 15 year-old Leah Sharibu, one of the 108 girls abducted in 2018 from Dapchi, comparing her firm refusal to renounce her faith to Nelson Mandela's refusal to compromise his moral stance on Apartheid while…
Prefazione a Emmanuel Iduma, Lo sguardo di uno sconosciuto
By introducing Emmanuel Iduma's travelogue across Africa, which he traveled from East to West as a member of the Trans-African project "Invisible Borders", the Preface also explains the significance and urgency of launching a new African Literature Series for the respected Milan-based independent press Francesco Brioschi Editore. The Series publishes the works of African writers from the younger generations.
"Man Jack the man is": An Analysis of Gerald Manley Hopkins' sonnet The Sheperd's Brow
Although the sonnet The Shepherd’s Brow, written by G. M. Hopkins only a few months before his death, has been considered by Robert Bridges an unfinished work, critics have gradually tended to agree that it is one of the poet’s most refined and powerful poems, structurally and thematically. W. H. Gardner has read in it a “Swiftean cynicism”, while other more recent scholars have defined it “conflicted” (Mariani), “ironic and damned” (Feeney), and above all “cryptic” (Sobolev). Often studied as an ideal appendix to the so called “terrible sonnets”, by offering a close-reading of the sonnet this article argues that The Shepherd’s Brow is one of Hopkins’ most powerful poems, marking an importa…
Those Are Lasers That Were Their Eyes
In a Cultural Studies perspective, this essay proposes an intertextual reading of sea-change and representations of the Moor in literature, folklore, visual and decorative arts, and fashion theory studies, as interpreted by William Shakespeare, the artist duo Invernomuto, and fashion designers Dolce & Gabbana.