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From a cultural point of view, at the end of the XIX century, race was represented in-between an attempt of a verisimilar narration of what the white British explorers had seen in the colonies and the proliferation of the racial theories promulgated by the academic sciences. However, that form of representation is rarely connected with the socio-political aspects of the British empire, as well as with matters of power in general. This can be a problem because the direct experience and its cultural implications cannot be considered distinctly; therefore, the article seeks to examine the relationships among power, science, and narration in the late colonial literature, in order to deeply analyse the complexity of the colonial experience in its relation with the literary scenario. The scientific and anthropological advancements, the several journeys of exploration and the expansion of the boundaries of the world, the racial classifications, and the religious and political aspects of the colonies are part of the novels and romances of the time, but mainly treated from a Eurocentric point of view. The article considers all those elements, as well as the link among travel literature, colonial romances, and the construction of the Other. Furthermore, the African characters of H. R. Haggard’s romances are examined through the lens of the pseudo-scientific theories of the second part of the XIX century in order to demonstrate how much they have influenced each other. The British colonial apparatus has improperly exploited both travel literature and the scientific theories to justify and support the colonization of Africa, thus creating a juxtaposition between black and white people highlighted by the colonial romance and the new-born anthropology. The article also examines how much the colonial propaganda took into consideration and was influenced by travel writing and romances, thus shifting the already unbalanced relationships of power in the colonies. Le forme attraverso le quali la cultura razziale di fine Ottocento in Inghilterra viene rappresentata sono il punto d’incontro tra la verosimiglianza del contesto imperialista inglese, sostenuta dai racconti di viaggio degli esploratori, e i suoi aspetti più teorici promulgati dalle accademie scientifiche. Eppure raramente esse vengono poste in relazione con le questioni socio-politiche dell’epoca e così la rappresentazione letteraria appare come scollegata da qualsiasi intreccio di potere. Questo non può essere considerato vero, come non si possono dividere esperienza e cultura. Sono esattamente queste al contrario le relazioni che il saggio si propone di approfondire per riuscire a considerare, attraverso le sue molteplici sfaccettature, la complessa esperienza coloniale e soprattutto il suo rapporto con il mondo letterario. Le nuove scoperte in campo antropologico e scientifico, i numerosi viaggi di esplorazione con il conseguente allargamento dei confini del mondo, le classificazioni evolutive e razziali, così come le questioni relative agli aspetti politici e religiosi delle terre coloniali sono tutti presenti all’interno della narrativa dell’epoca, nella maggior parte dei casi trattati da un punto di vista eurocentrico. L’articolo intende indagare il profondo legame esistente tra questi elementi, e in particolare tra letteratura di viaggio, romanzo coloniale e costruzione dell’Altro. Si prenderà in considerazione il rapporto tra la descrizione dei personaggi africani in alcuni romanzi di H. R. Haggard e le teorie evolutive e pseudo-scientifiche della seconda metà del XIX secolo allo scopo di dimostrare quanto le une siano state influenzate dalle altre. Nel corso dell’argomentazione si evidenzierà l’uso improprio della letteratura di viaggio e di quella scientifica fatto dall’apparato coloniale britannico per sostenere e giustificare l’opera di colonizzazione dei territori africani, in una continua contrapposizione tra neri e bianchi sottolineata dal romance coloniale e sostenuta anche dalle teorie antropologiche dell’epoca. Si cercherà di approfondire, inoltre, fino a che punto la propaganda colonialista sia stata fedelmente perseguita e agevolata dai testi di fiction e non-fiction, e utilizzata per spostare gli sbilanciati equilibri di potere nel contesto coloniale., ECHO, N. 4 (2022): Metafore del viaggio: testi, identità, generi in movimento

The article considers the complexity of the concept of ���home��� in Amitav Ghosh���s novel The Shadow Lines (1988). I will examine how matters of migration and homesickness intersect a contemporary idea of a global borderless space, as well as the interrelationships and the exchangeability among topics like border, space, and home in Ghosh���s work. I will demonstrate that different characters of the novel correspondingly embody different ways of perceiving home and themes of crossing-borders: the narrator���s grandmother Tha���mma is the fictional representation of an ancient conceptualisation of borders and geo-localisation, while the narrator himself and his uncle Tridib are emblems of an innovative perception of space. Also, the relationships between characters consequently produce an idea of home in movement. This may lead to a significant change in the ancestral perception of home seen as a supportive milestone for human life: borders, space, and home are exploited by Ghosh in a sort of unceasing circle in which each element influences and completes the others. After all, the task that primarily concerns Ghosh is, as well, ��not how to arrive, but how to move, how to identify convergent and divergent movements; and the challenge would be how to locate such events, how to give them a social and historical value�� (Carter 1992, 101)., NuBE. Nuova Biblioteca Europea, N. 2 (2021)

Postcolonial literature has always been interested in exploring what is double, ambiguous, multiform, and migrant. Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie have notoriously dealt with those topics in their novels, such as in their most celebrated The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Satanic Verses (1988). The postcolonial theory of 1980s pervades their masterpieces, especially considering scholars’ focus on the costs of the blurring global phenomena on migrant processes. Tejander Kaur has properly underlined how diaspora experience of the 1980s “has assumed newer and vibrant dimensions. The experience of migrancy and Diaspora also engenders various problems and facts of journeys and relocation in new lands e.g. displacement, up-rootedness, discrimination, alienation, marginalization crisis in identity, cultural conflicts, yearning for home and homeland etc.” (Kaur 2008, p. 8). Moreover, Victoria Arana has accurately added that migrants “sought to affirm their personal process of renegotiation, their cultural diversity, and the denial of rigid borders between black and white” (Arana 2005, p. 237). Those prerogatives have been the seeds of a harsh debate begun in 1987 among postcolonial scholars and novelists to point out the inadequateness of the term “Black” and of similar notions, “terms that mask the ‘constructedness’ of much more complex racial and ethnic identities” (236). Nowadays those same identities have undergone another significant change due to the collapse of historicism and of the centre-periphery dichotomy, as well as to the spread of globalization. In their more recent production – especially in Sea of Poppies (2008) and The Golden House (2017) – both Ghosh and Rushdie investigate the influence of such phenomena on migrant identity by observing and narrating multiple processes of erection of blurred identities in a changing world. The Golden family in Rushdie’s text and Ghosh’s coolies on the vessel Ibis are groups of migrant people who do not hesitate to abandon their beliefs for a “rebirth” in a new host land. By looking for new belongings in foreign lands – else/nowhere places which do not assure to welcome them – migrants from the Asian continent wish to remove every link to their past lives and worlds thanks to the acquisition of a new identity, a goal achieved at the expense of deep inner conflicts. The characters of Dionysus Golden and Baboo Nob Kissin are epitomes of that condition. They both embody the difficulties and aspirations of their communities; moreover, in the middle of their migrant journey, they also experience a personal “migration” towards a new gender identity which should lead them to a sort of “reincarnation” into a spiritual – but also a physical and actual – femininity. Gender and migrant identities thus escape from the traditional and usually accepted definitions which see XXI-century young migrants like Dionysus and the respectable gomusta of colonial India like Nob Kissin as prototypical emblems of virility. Therefore, in their novels, Ghosh and Rushdie deal with transgender, transnational, and transcultural movements: the vicissitudes of the characters twist and turn through two multicultural microcosms – contemporary New York and the vessel of the East Indian Company Ibis – which are temporally distant, but strongly convergent., ECHO, N. 2 (2020): Semiosi della colonialità e dinamiche culturali al tempo della mobilità globale

My aim is to analyse scientific literature and its representation of the animal body in relation to the disciplinary institutions of its time, namely zootechnics. I will focus on the nineteenth century as the moment of birth of a specific biological discourse and as the moment of deployment of the Industrial Revolution, which had a significant impact on animal breeding. This conjuncture produces a radical new image of the animal body and of animality in general, which plays an important role not only in science and zootechnics, but also in philosophy and the human sciences. I will frame the evolution of scientific discourses on the animal body from the Greeks to the Modern Age, in order to present their material history in relation to the concrete practices that involved animals in their time. I will finally focus on two of the most important scientific models of the nineteenth century – Pasteurism and Darwinism – as cutting-edge moments in the history of biology, precisely due to their innovative relation to the zootechnical institution and its related conceptualization of the body.

Review of Caryl Phillips, The Lost Child, Iperstoria, No 7 (2016): Old and New West