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The volume offers the Italian public a new translation of George Bernard Shaw's novella, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), with its facing-page original. In the novella contemporary readers will find the innovative figuration of a young black woman who, along her personal search for God, deconstructs the false myths of the great religions and of European civilization with iconoclastic force, uncovering their contradictions with geopolitical far-sightedness.

The essay illustrates the ways in which the incorporation of authentic excerpts from Mary Seacole’s autobiography in Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Soul Tourists acquires a significant cultural value within the novel’s representational strategies. The essay also explores the extent to which Seacole — together with her work — can be thought of as a litmus paper in the context of Britain’s self–representation and strategies of identity delineation.

Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991) offers an imaginative deconstruction of the myth of the Great War as produced within British official patriotic rhetoric and in some of the best-known lyrics by Wilfred Owen (1893- 1918), who, together with Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), has always been celebrated as one of the leading War poets. If Owen’s poetry partly entails the apolitical sublimation of the devastating facts of war through the ambiguous sentiment of pity, in Barker’s novel any suppression of emotions is posited as artificial and counterbalanced by a thorough exploration of those contradictory aspects of the Great War which official discourses have tended to obscure: the homoerotic experiences of the army life, its oedipal scenarios and soldiers’ subservient positions within a paternalistic environment. Through specific formal strategies entailing a recourse to intertextuality and rewriting, Barker deconstructs the myth of masculinity and re-inscribes the terms of the Male/Female binary couple in an attempt to de-totalise History.

This essay shows how the London-born Anglo-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo contributes, with her Soul Tourists (2005), to deconstructing modern European nationalist and racially exclusivist models by means of anti-essentialist representational strategies. Centred around the voyage by car and across Europe which, in the late eighties, leads two black Britons, Stanley Williams and Jessie O’Donnell, from England to the Middle East, the novel becomes an imaginative vehicle through which Evaristo represents the black presence as intrinsic to Europe since the th century and foregrounds the substantial contribution of black and mixed-race men and women to the cultural development of Western civilisation.

In exploring the complex female identity models that are articulated in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, this essay foregrounds Atwood’s sensitiveness to one of the major feminist issues of the early nineties: the debate over whether it is/was possible to postulate a distinctive “female specialness”. The essay's specific contention is that, in outlining the complex experiences of three Canadian friends – Tony, Roz and Charis – and of their demonic antagonist, Zenia, across three decades (from the sixties to the early nineties), Atwood questions notions of biological reductionism and, more importantly, the feminist creed of universal sisterhood4.

Underpinned by an interpretative grid where the analytic categories of gender and race are interwoven, the paper contends that Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), unveils and dismantles culturally-constructed inscriptions of the white female body as elaborated within the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial discourses and largely reproduced at folk level. Exploring Lessing’s robust delineation of the entanglements of gendered sexuality and race-biased social constraints as active in the colonial context, the paper also suggests that the novel problematizes and recasts traditional British identity configurations from an authorial perspective which posits itself as internal to the nation. Moreover, in focusing on the contradictory nature of white colonial women’s social positioning, the novel questions the Identity/Otherness binary which buttressed the colonial paradigm and anticipates a number of theoretical issues that would come to prominence within Cultural, Gender and (Post-)colonial studies nearly three decades later.

This paper is informed by an interpretative framework in which the theoretical paradigms of Cultural, Gender, (Post-)colonial and Tourism studies are interwoven. It is claimed that fostering a specific kind of literary and cultural tourism, centred on (post-)colonial authors’ works, might emerge as a political practice able to reshape the self-fashioning of Western European cultural heritage in non-essentialized terms. Consequently, this would also help promote cross-cultural exchanges. In this respect, Lara (1997), The Emperor’s Babe (2001) and Soul Tourists (2005), the first three novels by the London-born Anglo-Nigerian writer Bernardine Evaristo, appear to be extremely relevant literary instances.

Informed by an interpretative framework where the theoretical paradigms of British Cultural studies and Black feminism inextricably interweave, the paper aims at illustrating a complex identity model of the Black British woman as delineated in Anglo-Nigerian writer Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001). Published at the turn of the 21st century, Evaristo’s second novel-in-verse revolves around the life-experience of a young black woman born of Sudanese parents in Roman London, Zuleika, who ends up having an intense relationship with the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. In its highly orchestrated narrative fabric where prose and poetry conflate, this unconventional historical novel, in focusing on Black gendered identities, simultaneously engages with contemporary issues of racialization and national belonging, while, at the same time, transplanting them in Roman Britannia. By virtue of such temporal transposition, The Emperor’s Babe also inevitably allows for an imaginative reshaping of British national history in the context of a wider revision of the European classical past.

Informed by a theoretical-critical grid in which the main hermeneutical paradigms of Gender theories, British cultural studies and Post-colonial studies converge to intersect in an inextricable way with the theories of Black British feminism, Black British cultural studies and of “Critical Mixed Race Studies”, the monograph focuses on the interpretative analysis of the narrative production of Bernardine Evaristo, a London-born Anglo-Nigerian Booker-winner writer, who is now considered one of the most original voices in the contemporary British literary scene. On the basis of a complex theoretical-interpretative paradigm, within which the analytical categories of gender and "race" are conceived and assumed in their constant intersecting, the volume aims to highlight the formal and content peculiarities which, in characterizing Evaristo's novels, allow on the one hand, to distinguish them both from Anglophone post-colonial literature, due to the changed perspectives that characterize them, and from that heterogeneous set of works known as "migration literature", and, on the other hand, to identify the moments of convergence and, conversely, of divergence with respect to the composite phenomenon of British Black literature to which it also belongs.

The article illustrates the ways in which the productive theoretical conflation of feminist critique and (post)colonial studies makes it possible to demonstrate that the implications of the category of gender and 'race' allow Erna Brodber's Myal (1988), Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997) and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) to contribute to imaginatively reshaping the postcolonial nation.

Published in the early 1950s, The Grass is Singing (1950), the first work by Doris Lessing (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007), through the deconstruction of certain normative characters traditionally attributed to Englishness, anticipates in its narrative plot some of those founding issues that, in the decades to come, would be explored both by the theoretical-critical writings of Second Wave Feminism and within that complex study field which became known over the Seventies, such as (post-) colonial studies. In the novel, the body of the white colonial woman living in the colonies is depicted as the site of opposite tensions and the traditional homogeneity of the group of colonizers is decontructed.

This essay illustrates the strategies through which literary tourism can activate transformative cultural strategies within the wider context non-Eurocentric definitions of locality.

Abstract in lingua inglese: The publication of The Grass Is Singing in 1950 inaugurated the beginning of the long and distinguished literary career of Doris Lessing (1919-2013), the 2007 Nobel laureate for literature. The novel proves to be highly anticipatory in many respects. Firstly, the “eclectic realism” characterizing its formal aspect paves the way to Lessing’s future aesthetic experimentalism and stylistic innovations. Moreover, it also displays several interconnected thematic correspondences with the main motifs informing its author’s entire production and testifies to the oppositional, if not subversive, nature of her works with respect to the normative symbolic foundations of society buttressed within official discourse in England and its colonies from the 1950s onward. Indeed, in giving a voice to those who would tend to be silenced, Lessing turned writing into a privileged site of corrosive social criticism in which she stigmatised numerous forms of oppression, including those that the establishment obscures or secretly condones. Endowed with an “extraordinary barometric sensitivity to the social cli mate”, which allowed her to register minutely – if not foresee – social change, Lessing made her literary intervention the political vehicle for a re-modelling and a re-definition of national (as well as Western) identity paradigms., Altre Modernità, No 12 (2014): MANDELA