European Women Writing the (Post-)Empire: 'Homing Desires', Identity and the Body

This seminar sets out to showcase the epistemologies and ontologies ingrained in language in post-colonial European literature(s)—an understanding currently hampered by the focus of postcolonial criticism on Anglophone sources.

By applying interdisciplinary and gender perspectives, it will focus on a number of case studies within European literature(s), with a specific emphasis on Italian Studies, Portuguese Studies, and French Studies. The textual analysis will be carried out around three intersecting thematic streams that, in turn, encompass key realms in women’s postcolonial writings, dealing with issues of:

•home/homelessness and relationality (‘homing desires’); 
•gender and racial identity (gender performativity and/or phenomenology of whiteness);
•self-narratives of bodily and/or spatial exile (postcolonial narratology, examples of mimicry, writing back, generic fusion).

Taking into account the inextricability of the gender/race nexus, the purpose of the seminar is to provide a forum to discuss the role of the female postcolonial writing subject in actively (re)shaping literary and cultural norms in a way that challenges monolithic notions of gendered identity, Europe and Europeanness.  

Organiser: 
Maria Morelli (ILCS, University of London)

Speakers:
Maria Morelli (ILCS, University of London): "Negotiating Black Italianness: Igiaba Scego’s La mia casa è dove sono"
Francesca Cricelli (Universidade de São Paulo): "On memory and belonging. Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and Conceição Evaristo’s recent works"
Antonia Wimbush (University of Melbourne): "Michele Rakotoson’s Return ‘Home’"

(University of Virginia, CCWW Steering Committee)

Maria Morelli (ILCS, University of London): "Negotiating Black Italianness: Igiaba Scego’s La mia casa è dove sono"

Igiaba Scego (1974-) is one of the most prominent figures in the Italian postcolonial literary landscape. In her fictional writings, corporeality and violence are inextricably linked, particularly using the representation of the female body to critically examine the colonial past and the postcolonial present. Scego, an Italian citizen born in Italy with family ties in Somalia, portrays colonial violence in the former Italian colony as primarily directed against women’s bodies, establishing a connection between sexism and racism.

In this paper, I focus on Scego’s autobiographical text La mia casa è dove sono (2010), where the violence inflicted on the body of the female protagonist and narrator may not be as overt as in the other novels, but it is no less insidious. I analyse how the author explores the concept of Italian identity and the experience of being considered “other” due to one’s skin colour. I delve into the complexity of identity and categorisation as examined by the author, who herself embodies a multifaceted persona beyond the simple distinctions of native versus migrant or Italian versus Somali.

In La mia casa è dove sono Scego illustrates how being a black Italian is experienced as a condition of alienation and difficult assimilation in a nation where social and political norms still contribute to the reinforcement of whiteness as a ‘moral imperative’ (Lombardi-Diop 2012: 182), inviting us to rethink the concept of italianità in a way that can no longer be understood on the basis of specific ethnic and biological traits.

Dr Maria Morelli is Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies at the University of London.  Her research project applies multidisciplinary and gender perspectives to compare Italian and Portuguese postcolonial texts authored by women writers. She has taught Italian literature and language at the University of Kent and the University of Leicester, and at Wheaton College (USA) as a Fulbright grantee. She has co-edited the volume Women and the Public Sphere in Modern and Contemporary Italy (Troubador, 2017) and published the edited collection Il teatro cambia genere (Mimesis, 2019). Her monograph, Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women’s Writing (2021) won the Peter Lang Competition in Italian Studies.

Contemporary literature produced both in Portugal and Brazil has more recently made use of collective memory as a tool to understand the present, particularly in works addressing the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and racial oppression. This presentation will briefly delve into recent works of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (Luanda, Angola, in 1982) and Conceição Evaristo (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1946).

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso and Conceição Evaristo’s Canção de Ninar Menino Grande share a profound exploration of race, migration, and the legacies of colonialism through the lens of Afro-descendant experiences. Both novels address the intersections of race, gender, and class, portraying the struggles of marginalized individuals to navigate hostile environments shaped by historical trauma and contemporary inequalities.

Both novels foreground collective memory as a tool for understanding the present. While Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso looks at the colonial past’s lingering effects on migrant identity, Canção de Ninar Menino Grande delves into ancestral memory, portraying how historical trauma continues to shape Black Brazilian life. These narratives intersect around themes of displacement, family struggles, and the pursuit of dignity in the face of systemic violence, offering nuanced perspectives on Afro-descendant resilience and survival in post-colonial societies.

Dr Francesca Cricelli is a poet, translator, and researcher. She holds a PhD in Foreign Literatures and Translation from the University of São Paulo, where she studied Giuseppe Ungaretti's letters to Bruna Bianco. Cricelli has translated major Italian authors into Portuguese, including Elena Ferrante, Igiaba Scego, and Claudia Durastanti. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of London and currently teaches Portuguese in Reykjavík, Iceland. Her research focuses on contemporary women writers, translingualism, and intercultural literary exchanges.

What does it mean to return ‘home’ after an enforced absence of twenty-five years? Can the country of origin ever truly become ‘home’ again following a long period of imposed political exile? How might we define ‘home’? These are questions at the heart of Madagascan journalist, writer, and teacher Michèle Rakotoson’s corpus of life writing. Rakotoson was born in 1948 in Antananarivo, a year after the anticolonial uprisings of 1947. In 1983 she was forced to flee to France because she actively opposed the authoritarian regime of President Didier Ratsiraka, in power between 1975 and 1993, and again from 1997 to 2002. She made Paris her home, and returned definitively to Madagascar in 2008.

In 2007, Rakotoson published her autofictional novel Juillet au pays: chroniques d’un retour à Madagascar. This text narrates the multiple return journeys made by her narrator-protagonist, also called ‘Michèle’, as she rediscovers important places from her childhood. In 2011, Rakotoson published a follow-up account, Passeport pour Antanarivo: Tana la belle, in which she recounts her wanderings across the city after deciding to settle there for good. In this presentation, I analyse the representations of homecomings in these two autofictional texts through Edouard Glissant’s conceptualisation of errance. I explore how the protagonist’s identity quest is affected by her spatial and temporal wanderings. As she wanders across the island in search of home, she realises that she has lived in, and continues to inhabit, an in-between space. Her nomadic existence prevents her from embracing Madagascar as ‘home’.

Dr Antonia Wimbush is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her current research project investigates cultural responses to post-war migration from the French Caribbean to mainland France. Her second monograph, BUMIDOM (1963-1982) and its Afterlives: Literature, Memory and Migration, will be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2025, and she has recent work published in journals such as Memory Studies, Contemporary French Civilization, and Nottingham French Studies.

All are welcome to attend this free seminar, starting at 4pm GMT (UK time). The seminar will be held online, via zoom. Click Book Now at the top of the page to register and receive the zoom link.