StudiUm, Department of Humanities

The papers collected in this volume deal with the explorations of Science Fiction, Fantasy and, more generally, the representation of otherness through the narrative construction of fantastic, imaginary, appalling or attractive places, stories and figures. Contributions are arranged in four main sections. The first section (Other spaces, new worlds) deals with Hindi and Arabic Science Fiction. The second section (Constructing forms of otherness) analyses the narrative and psychological mechanisms that give forms to a stereotype or archetypical image of the threatening Other. The third section ((Re)shaping style(s), language(s) and discourse(s) of otherness) is centred on the idea of language as a tool to build up styles, genres and texts, and literature as an escape from disappointing history and a cross-cultural wandering space of narrative ghosts. The fourth section (Circulating fearful otherness) tests the limits and heuristic potential of a philological approach in reconstructing the wide circulation of motifs and characters from antiquity to (post-)modernity.

La rivalutazione di beni culturali di svariata natura, materiali e immateriali, raramente percepiti come ‘oggetti turistici’, quali punti di interesse dislocati su itinerari insoliti, può divenire una risorsa destinata ad avere ricadute pratiche per lo sviluppo sociale, economico e culturale dei territori coinvolti. Questa sfida implica però una gestione sinergica fra discipline umanistiche e discipline economico-aziendali. D’altronde, ormai le humanities hanno preso coscienza delle proprie capacità di transitare dalla ricerca di base alla ricerca applicata e, nel contempo, il valore della cultura umanistica è sempre più riconosciuto in ambito economico.
Con l’iniziativa di indire un “Anno dei cammini d’Italia” per il 2016, il Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo ha inteso avviare una serie di azioni che promuovessero la riflessione scientifica su queste tematiche favorendo il coinvolgimento di Università e Istituti di ricerca.
Attraverso tre ‘itinerari’ (Camminatori e viaggiatori di ieri e di oggi: vie della Storia e della Cultura vissute e narrate; Cammini linguistici e culturali nel tempo: percorsi di parole e scritture; Cammini in costruzione oggi per il domani: le vie della cultura come risorsa per il territorio) che stimolano il confronto fra competenze, esperienze e professionalità diverse, il volume, a vocazione dichiaratamente interdisciplinare, mira a coniugare saperi umanistici e culture management ai fini di riscoprire, analizzare, e comprendere un patrimonio dinamico e plurale, le cui anime si intrecciano nel tempo e nello spazio.
Il volume riunisce saggi di Esterino Adami, Carlos Alvar, Antonella Amatuzzi, Laurence Audéoud, Alex Borio, Daniela Broglio, Valter Cantino, Mirko Casagranda, Damiano Cortese, Eleonora Federici, Elisabetta Nicola, Marco Piccat, Laura Ramello, Adeline Rucquoi, Renata Santoro, Cristina Trinchero.

Amitav Ghosh’s second novel, The Shadow Lines (1988), was notoriously conceived in 1984, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, when Delhi was upturned by bloodthirsty mobs that attacked the Sikh community killing, raping, and looting. This was the “madeleine” that brought the would-be novelist (he was halfway through writing The Circle of Reason) back to 1964, when a similar mob attacked Hindus in Dhaka, where Ghosh, then a child, was living with his family. Thus The Shadow Lines became a historical novel about Bengal in the Sixties, a portrait of post-Independence India, a Bildungsroman, or indeed a Künstlerroman, about a young Bengali, an Indian reply to both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915) and Remembrance of Time Past (1922) that enthused a generation of Indian intellectuals. Indeed, The Shadow Lines is the first and so far only novel by a living author to be included in University syllabi all over India. Unsurprisingly this is, among Ghosh’s books, the most written about, especially in South Asia. The Shadow Lines has gained enormous resonance in postcolonial studies as it touches upon some of the major issues in the fields of colonial history, national identities, memory, and borders. Likewise, the novel has been seminal in the definition and discussion of a postcolonial geography that challenges the current cartographical order. It has drawn from the literary tradition of the past and has influenced new literary productions, as the variety of international scholarly essays in this collection demonstrate.