“Shakespeare’s Pioneer Migrant Othello”: Desire, Migration, Pathology and the Politics of Citizenship in The Nature of Blood

In a historical period characterised by political and social occurrences of immigration crises, Shakespeare’s and early modern dramatic attention to aliens and foreigners invite us to re-read the anguish of Shakespeare’s alien and to investigate the ways in which, in the specific case of Othello, the Moor’s experience prefigures subsequent migrations and the contemporary immigrants’ struggle for integration. Caryl Phillips’ creative re-appropriation of Shakespeare’s Othello in The Nature of Blood (1998) gives voice to the psychological anguish of a migrant in the guise of an unnamed Othello-like black general newly arrived in Venice. In a never-ending dialogue between present and past, Phillips articulates a complex reflection on the immigrants’ desire to be granted recognition as a legitimised individual with a social identity, while problematising the idea of home and the sense of belonging, here understood as the subjective feeling of identification with a city/nation. With such a complex redefinition in mind, my reading conceptualises Othello (alias the migrant) as an ethnopsychiatric “symptom”, in a psychopathology of migration and exile which exposes the meanings and practices of belonging produced and supported by host societies.

Faithful to the Wor(l)d. Visual Texts, Responsibility and the Issue of Translation

My work here focuses on translation and migration, with specific reference to the field of visual arts, exploiting the kind of approach suggested by Loredana Polezzi – and mostly applied to linguistic translation – in her “Translation and Migration”. My contention is that, though apparently mimetic and universally understandable, images are culture-bound and they need being translated when crossing a border. The process of translation becomes more and more complex when the represented object/events/person is framed within a much-debated and politically overloaded issue. Focusing on a definite time (today) and a specific space (the Mediterranean Sea), I select some artistic projects by both Western and non-Western artists, pursuing a twofold objective. I want to show how the selected works raise the issue of responsibility and I want to reflect on the “language” they use to “translate” an untranslatable experience into an understandable message.

Performing Identities in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Encounter with the Other Between Politics, Tourism, Migration and Culture in the Late Victorian Context

Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents an investigation of identity from multiple perspectives: the political stance of the Victorian fin de siècle intersects with questions of identity and their liminal articulation through narrative control. The count becomes a “thick” synecdoche for the East and his arrival to England symbolises a reverse political and cultural colonisation that leads to a new image of the individual, revealing the innermost recesses of Western culture.

From Constitutional Transitions to the Great National Transition: A Constant and Obstinate Italian Narrative

The essay aims to illustrate the ways in which Italian literature deals with transitions (constitutional or political). After having clarified the methodological approach, the author identifies and describes in the national literature some historical phases, analysing the trends emerging from the reading of famous novels. In conclusion, some observations are drawn, in which it is highlighted that in the national literature there is a profound awareness of the importance of informal institutional transformations and of the central role of social, moral and economic factors.

The Casebook of Sir Edward Coke

Sir Edward Coke, Jacobean Lord Chief Justice, is commonly regarded as being one of the great jurists in English legal history. In considerable part, for reason of his vigorous defence of the courts of common law against the seeming intrusions of royal prerogative, his running dispute with King James I is renowned, not least as a precursor to the civil wars which would later engulf James’s son, King Charles I. The purpose of this essay is revisit Coke and, more closely still, some of his most famous judgments, in order to trace the origins of the principle of ‘legality’. It will close in whimsical tones, by wondering what Coke might have thought of ‘legal’ regime put in place in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic.

Taking Responsibility for the Pasts

One of the most significant connections between power and responsibility occurs in relation to the past. The post-revolutionary political powers of the new nations in the nineteenth century reinterpreted or, less politely formulated, invented their past to fit the process of nation building and only then take responsibility for future development of the nations. And they were not alone: pre-nineteenth century periods and the 20th and 21st centuries abound with examples. In our personal lives, self-empowerment often depends on the capacity to take responsibility for one’s past, including all its happy and traumatic moments. In a court room the forensic evidence of past events alone gives the judges the power to decide the fate of the defendant. In neither of the cases power and responsibility can work together without activating individual and collective memory and without finding a language to express responsibility as a manifestation of political, formal and personal power in a process of political legitimization, legal affirmation of justice and personal identity formation. With literary examples from South Africa this article discusses power and responsibility in their relation to a troubled political, legal and personal past.

The Power without Responsibility of the Gaze. The Letter and Spirit’s Eye in the Humanities, from the Italian Perspective to the Robot

The paper identifies a continuity between the legal issue of the letter and spirit (or ratio) of the law and the invention of perspective as a symbolic form. The idea of perspective in Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation and the concept of “Italian perspective” in Arasse’s work are based on the aesthetic normativity of the painting in relation to the normative form of the norm, moving from the analysis of the invisible/visible nexus in legal theory. The notion of thirdness thus mediates between law as text and normativity as image, leading to the aesthetic enactment that conceives Italian playhouse as a form of theater, cinema, trial and university, as a symbolic form of knowledge and culture in the West. The simultaneously normative and aesthetic power of the gaze thus emerges as the removed from legal theory, until the problem of self-driving vehicles brings the issue back to the center of contemporary debate. The transition from frontal gaze to 360° vision suggests the theme of immersion as a new symbolic for the man–robot society.