1,721,011 research outputs found
Art of darkness: L'arte black in Gran Bretagna e la questione dell'appartenenza nazionale
No full textTraduzione dall'inglese all'italiano del saggio di Paul Gilroy Art of darkness: Black art and the problem of belonging to Englan
From Mugger to Rioter: The Myth of Black Criminality in Two Black British Texts
No full textThe essay stems from a series of black British research, related to the journal «Race Today» (1969-1988) and to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, which, from the 70s, started to draw attention on Law and Order’s and official media’s construction of blackness as danger or problem. In particular they focussed on how, through representations and statistics manipulations, the association between blackness and criminality crystallised in British mentality: that is on how black Britons were not only silenced, but also made visible. Stuart Hall opens his Black Men, White Media (1974) underlining how «there is something radically wrong with the way black immigrants – West Indians, Asians, Africans – are handled by and presented on the mass media». While in Police and Thieves (1982) Paul Gilroy denounces the fact that racism was progressively becoming an integrating part both in police education and in institutional statements, and that the struggles of black communities were deprived of their legitimacy: «blacks have been identified as the “dangerous classes” whose criminal culture erupts periodically [...]. The popular conceptions of their criminality embodied in the mugger, the Rasta and, latterly, the rioter have been defined and amplified by the police».
The essay wants to analyse especially the novel The Siege of Babylon (Farroukh Dhondy, 1978) and the travelogue Behind the Frontlines. Journey into Afro-Britain (Ferdinand Dennis, 1988). Both explore what Gilroy refers to as “The Myth of Black Criminality”, that is «the images and representations of black criminality which [seem] to have achieved a mythic status in the lexicon of contemporary race politics». By giving voice to the “angered” youth, these texts unveil a different reality behind the one officially reported: they investigate the reasons leading black Britons to “un-social” behaviour and answer back to those images fixed in the national unconscious; but they also show how the body and the style of the militarised black activist or the dishevelled Rasta had a role in the process of re-signification of blackness from a marker of shame to a marker of pride, while pointing out to the problematic association between blackness and masculinity
Collage and Decollage: A Multi-Media Approach to Black and Asian British Identity
No full textBlack Britain is a space of transcultural trans-formations: a process of encounters and collisions which entails the disruption of a previous order. Its literature and visual art are not only concerned in displaying experiences of insertion and adaptation within British society, but also in exploring and expanding the borders of a multi-layered identity that implies, even in its situatedness, transnational and transcultural routes. Within this frame, a multi-media approach may offer a way to tackle these continual processes of dis-articulation and re-articulation. Stemming from Salman Rushdie’s “stereoscopic vision” and Stuart Hall “cut-and-mix”, I will choose examples from black British and Asian British artists and writers (Hanif Kureishi, Yinka Shonibare, The Singh Twins and Ferdinand Dennis) and, drawing upon the techniques of bricolage, collage and decollage, I will analyse them as instruments both to construct and read a multiple narrative. Through the lenses of bricolage, collage and decollage black and Asian British identity may appear as a collective performance: the production of a community constantly transforming itself in a double act of mediation and re-mediation with past/present/future and of incorporation of the different traditions, heritages and geographies that shape it
L'Europa black British: esplorazioni della colourblindness del continente
No full textIl saggio ricorre alle teorie postcoloniali e alla “queer of colour critique” per analizzare alcuni testi letterari e artistici black British che mettono in discussione la “whiteness” associata automaticamente all’identità europea
Beyond Marsilio Ficino? Judah Abarbanel, Francesco Cattani da Diacceto, and the Renaissance Convivium
No full textThis article explores Judah Abarbanel’s interpretation of the Platonic myth of Eros’s birth at the
feast for Venus’s nativity in his Dialoghi d’amore, suggesting that Judah presents his exegesis as a critique
of the one given by Marsilio Ficino in his Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore. I will
show that Judah reads Ficino’s interpretation of the myth, as well as the allegorical images in Giovanni
Pico’s Commento sopra una canzona di Girolamo Benivieni, in light of Francesco Cattani da Diacceto’s
De pulchro
Songs and Verses of New Ethnicities: Resistance and Representation in Black British Culture
Full text linkIl saggio prende avvio da un analisi del ‘documentario’ Handsworth Songs, girato dai Black Audio Film Collective nel 1986 e ispirato agli scontri che hanno infiammato la città di Birmingham nel 1985. Mescolando Storia, storie e materiale d’archivio, esso cerca di dare una nuova prospettiva su quello che i media avevano fatto passare come ‘looting’, senza indagarne (spesso negandone) le ragioni sociali e politiche. Presentandosi come riflessione sul presente delle lotte delle comunità black in Gran Bretagna e contemporaneamente come ricerca stilistica ed estetica, Handsworth Songs diventa una tappa fondamentale nella nascita di una tradizione critica black British.
La sua proiezione genera, infatti, una serie di reazioni opposte e controverse, in particolare la pubblicazione sul Guardian dei commenti di Salman Rushdie e Stuart Hall. Nella polemica che ne scaturisce si esplica il tentativo di individuare un diverso modo per rappresentare tanto i riot, come forma di resistenza e affermazione, quanto il black British, come soggetto politico British e non più ‘altro’, estraneo ai confini geografici e culturali nazionali.
Le posizioni opposte di Rushdie e Hall costituiscono un tentativo di rimettere in discussione i discorsi e i regimi di rappresentazione ‘ufficiali’, al fine di individuare nuove pratiche di rappresentazione autonome e lontane da marginalizzazioni o ‘mitiche criminalizzazioni’ (Paul Gilroy).
Proprio dopo questa polemica, non a caso, saranno pubblicati due testi centrali alla storia culturale della black Britain: “New Ethnicities” (1988) di Stuart Hall e The Satanic Verses (1988) di Salman Rushdie, in cui sembrano confluire in parte le riflessioni generate dalla visione di Handsworth Songs, che porteranno a una fondamentale ri-definizione e re-visione della blackness
Exploring the European ‘Common’ Wealth. A Black British Literary and Artistic Tour
No full textAnalisi di alcuni testi contemporanei black British (romanzo in prosa, diario di viaggio e installazioni artistiche) che utilizzano il tema del viaggio per una esplorazione e re-visione dell’identità e della storia europee che siano inclusive delle rinnegate o cancellate comunità black. In particolare il romanzo in prosa e versi Soul Tourists di Bernardine Evaristo è allo stesso tempo lavoro di scavo e rilettura utopica della storia europea. In questa analisi si utilizza, inoltre, la teoria della “disidentificazione” sviluppata da Judith Butler e da José Esteban Muñoz
Approccio a una letteratura europea della differenza
No full textPanoramica sulle teorie della “differenza” nella seconda metà del Novecento con particolare attenzione alle prospettive di genere e delle donne, queer studies e studi postcoloniali. Riferimenti a Homi K. Bhabha, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Edward W. Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri C. Spivak
Passage to Afro-Britain: Ferdinand Dennis’s Behind the Frontlines and Colin Luke’s Black Safari
No full textThe essay analyses two texts, Black Safari, a 1972 ‘mockumentary’ directed by Colin Luke, and Behind the Frontlines (1988), a travelogue by Ferdinand Dennis. Both texts operate a re-definition of Britishness, defined by Stuart Hall in his essay “Whose Heritage” as a process which implies not a simple inclusion in but a complete re-vision of the national tradition.
Black Safari is a parody of the exploration documentary which presents the reversal of a colonial scientific survey: “Time has changed. It is time we have our Livingstones, our Mungo Parks, our Stanleys”. It tells the journey of a group of Africans approaching the “dark” coasts of Britain and sailing up the Liverpool to Leeds canal in order to locate the geographical centre of this “remote” island. The group is composed by a naturalist, an anthropologist, a reporter, and a navigator who find and discover a mysterious and hostile environment, collect specimens, rename places and plants, meet the local tribesmen and try to understand their customs and their “unintelligible dialect”.
Behind the Frontline collects Ferdinand Dennis’ impressions after a journey undertaken in the late Eighties across the ‘Midlands’, from Liverpool to London-Brixton, via Sheffield, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bristol and Bath. He narrates his encounters with different black communities, searching for their physical and cultural space within a Britain in decline, still “struggling to come to terms with its loss of Empire and diminished world stature”
A ‘New’ Gaze on Europe: Alternative Cultural Maps
No full textIl saggio analizza opere di artisti e scrittori "non-europei" in cui il confronto con l'identità europea e con la fortezza europa passa attraverso una rilettura dello spazio
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