851-0226-00L  Postcolonial Readings

SemesterAutumn Semester 2024
Lecturers
Periodicitynon-recurring course
CourseDoes not take place this semester.
Language of instructionItalian


AbstractThe history of colonialism in the modern age begins with Christopher Columbus who, as Todorov has well told us, did not "discover" anything, but crossed the Ocean in search of riches, bringing with him a baggage of violence, stereotypes and violent conquest of resources and bodies. And from here, from that 1492, the story became one of blood and struggle.
Learning objectiveThe course will be based on case studies, linked to national realities (Brazil, Senegal, Eritrea, Great Britain, Italy, Peru, Somalia, etc.) and to physical places (the front, the museum, the field, the street, the body), to see how in different contexts, despite the peculiarity of the context, the dilemmas that are attempted to be answered are in fact very similar.
ContentWE are here, because YOU have been there, have you ever heard that phrase? In a university lecture hall? In an anti-racist demonstration? In a play? In a discussion on the bus? The YOU represents Europe and in a broader sense the West, the WE the peoples who suffered colonization by the very West that portrayed itself as a beacon of civilization. The history of colonialism in the modern age begins with Christopher Columbus who, as Todorov has well told us, did not "discover" anything, but crossed the Ocean in search of riches, bringing with him a baggage of violence, stereotypes and violent conquest of resources and bodies. And from here, from that 1492, the story became one of blood and struggle. It is a story that has covered a time span from precisely 1492 to the present, ranging from human trafficking to the extractive, and accumulation, policies of our contemporary times. The consequences of all this violence are sadly still visible on the body of the world, open wounds that bleed. Wounds in which lurk prejudice, systemic racism and murder.
To examine these consequences, to understand how contemporary societies in the global north and south, are still torn apart by this history that never seems to pass; we will rely on literature, on "postcolonial" texts that will show us the complexity of what exists. The course will be based on case studies, linked to national realities (Brazil, Senegal, Eritrea, Great Britain, Italy, Peru, Somalia, etc.) and to physical places (the front, the museum, the field, the street, the body), to see how in different contexts, despite the peculiarity of the context, the dilemmas that are attempted to be answered are in fact very similar.

The lecture will examine the body of the colonized/migrant as a field of battle and resistance in real and metaphorical wars. Place where the stereotype is overthrown through a will for personal agency. Colonial space and the consequent postcolonial space is a hierarchical space where instruments of violence and oppression do not provide for the agency of the colonized subject or in the contemporary case of the migrant subject placed by power structures in a space of subalternity. But subjects are born free and though in a confined space seek their own path to freedom and awareness. In ways that are perhaps paradoxical in our eyes, but certainly effective in a very limited space granted. In the three lectures, through literary texts, three case studies related to as many books will be examined to understand precisely this tension between enclosed space and the search for freedom. A tension between (unjust) rules imposed, malevolent looks imposed and one's own body, one's own moral integrity.