IT303: Week 3
Quando Dio ballava il tango
Borderlands
Structure of lecture:
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Images of home and space
Memory
Intergenerational relationships
Marginality
The sea
Borderlands
• ‘Soltanto due mesi fa Corazón e la sua bambina erano
ancora nelle praterie slargate all’altro capo del mondo;
adesso invece il loro orizzonte è qui, in questa angusta
cucina di cardenzóni tartati, vigilata da scure fotografie di
gente che fu’ (pp. 13-14).
• Come deve essersi sentito prigioniero in questa cascina buia,
al suo ritorno dall’America, dopo aver assaggiato l’ampiezza
luminosa degli spazi argentini’ (p. 14)
• ‘l’atmosfera di chiuso’ (p. 14)
• Space: ‘ un deserto verde, l’orizzonte irraggiungibile’ (p. 76)
‘il paesaggio la opprimeva’ (p. 98)
Regalada Majna’s the life in the village, ‘una vita immobile e
senza vie d’uscita; una gabbia, (p. 58-60).
Martinita Colombo leaves home to escape a violent father. ‘una
terribile trappola da cui fuggire’ (p. 276).
Raquel Potok, who flees from her home in Poland during the
1930s to escape racial persecution (p. 116).
Pietro Colombo ‘voleva la libertà’Ambrogio also leaves home
‘in casa Colombo si soffocava’ (p. 111).
Pietro Colombo wants to build a house in Argentina so his
children can be born in their own home.
Mafalda Cerutti, ‘il suo paese ce l’aveva nel cuore’, p. 169
Catterina Ceruti: ‘La nostra colpa e’ stata quella di aver tradito
la casa dove eravamo nati’(p 77).
Pages for analysis
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89
142
169
174
• 291
Anzaldúa: mestiza consciousness
• What are the main ideas of her essay and what does
she mean by mestiza consciousness?
• What is her view of identity?
• Why does she link homosexuals to the idea of mestiza
consciousness?
• Can you make any connections between her theories
and Pariani’s novel?
• How does she use language and different styles in her
writing? What effects does this create?
Borderlands
• A place where cultures overlap and collide
‘The coming together of two self-consistent but
habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un
choque, a cultural collision’.
‘Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two
cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value
systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, an
inner war’
Identities
Are multiple, hybrid, plural, flexible,
dynamic, always shifting.
‘in a state of perpetual transition’
‘Rigidity means death’.
Mestiza consciousness
• Avoids concepts of purity
• Embraces ambiguity and sustains contradiction
• Transcends dualities (on which Western thought is
founded)
• Breaks down rigid categories
• Intertwines cultures; ‘juggles cultures’
‘It is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank’.
‘We will have to leave the opposite bank, the split
between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so
that we are on both shores at one’.
Homi Bhabha: Third Space and
hybridity
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Focuses on thresholds, borders
Celebrates in-between spaces, margins
Where cultures meet and clash
(Colonial) authority challenged
Challenges binary divisions and oppositions
Unsettles stable identities
new hybrid identities created – not just a merging of two
cultures
• a site of tension