Search

Albeit late with respect to the Iberians, the English contributed in a hegemonic way to the rise of Euro-Modernity, or that geocultural identity which emerged as the central site for the control of the world. Further to the idea of East, the idea of South has been central to British cultural imagination and has helped the rise of Englishness and of the European imperial master narrative. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine - through the tool of decolonial thinking – in which way the South/North division contributed to the emergence of European and British modern identity and, at the same time, to the inoculation of its disintegration virus. I will start with some reflections on world mapping and world imaging in European cultural history, emphasizing how histor(icit)y has made geography unreal and local Western iconography has created a global fictional world, in which we all dwell even today. I will then proceed with a brief survey on the concept of “coloniality of power”. Finally, I will try to tackle the idea of South as a literary topos in Charles Dickens’ Pictures from Italy (the beginning of Victorian age apogee) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the end of it), examining to what extent they reflected the North/South dichotomy and partook of the (dis)integrating discursive formations of Meridionism and Australism.

My work here develops along a twofold path. On the one hand, and as a researcher committed to postcolonial issues, I share what many theorists say about the need for a more or less stable framework allowing to approach the issue of empire and post-empire in the light of some relatively stable critical categories. On the other, I also feel the gap between theories and some increasingly complex realities that do need a more direct appraisal of the facts implied in a globalized world in the way this need is voiced by Simon Gikandi in his “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality” (2001). To the purpose of imagining a more effective critical frame, I’m borrowing Kara Walker’s notion of sidelong glance to develop a reflection on theories and their usefulness in terms of the actual approach to issues whose profile and complexity are to be intended as not only in progress, but also undergoing a very quick definition and redefinition through time. Starting from Hall’s statement that the postcolonial may be intended as “sign of desire or signifier of danger” (1996) and also exploiting the notions of rhizoma (Deleuze & Guattari 1980), subalternity (Spivak 1988) and “Thinking plural” (Said 1993), I’m approaching a number of written, visual and performative texts, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to tightly contemporary artistic experiences, to show how both the postcolonial and the decolonial paradigms eventually prove inadequate to the reading of our present condition in terms of the ability to go beyond the traditional Western attitude to the post-colonies.

This study constitutes a further development of my doctoral thesis For a Methodology of Translation Criticism: the Italian Translations of The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad, where the importance of the translational metalanguage was discussed. In the first section of this paper several definitions of translation and rewriting (mainly by Eco, Bassnet and Lefevere, and Torop) are reviewed, thus highlighting contrasting positions concerning the very definition thereof. The main characteristics of an Italian version of The Secret Sharer for young readers – L’ospite segreto translated by Pieroni and Liberio – are listed, showing the editing and translating strategies underlying this specific text in which the target reader is very different from the source reader. The role of the target reader in translation practice is eventually examined, by stressing the vital status of metalanguage in translation criticism.