Transnational Time: Reading Post War Representations of the Italian Presence in East Africa

Italian School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures Talk

by

Charles Burdett, University of Durham 

Working from recent theoretical writing on time and the concept of the spectral, the paper begins by questioning how we can talk about transnational temporalities. The paper then looks at some of the ways in which the Italian colonial and post-colonial presence in Eritrea and Ethiopia, with all its complexities and haunting legacies, has been represented in fiction by Gabriella Ghermandi, Erminia Dell’Oro and Nicky Di Paolo.

Charles Burdett

is a Professor of Italian at the University of Durham. The principal areas of his research are: Italian culture under Fascism; the representation of colonialism; travel writing; theories of inter-cultural contact. An important part of his work concerns the theoretical frame through which we consider transnational contact and the implications for the disciplinary field of Modern Languages of the study of cultural translation in all its forms. He is one of the investigators in the large grant, ‘Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures’ that is a beacon project for the AHRC’s ‘Translating Cultures’ theme. He is the author of Journeys through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing between the Wars (paperback 2010). His most recent book is Italy, Islam and Islamic World: Representations and Reflections from 9/11 to the Arab Uprisings (2016). He is currently working on a monographic study, The Representation of the Italian Empire and its Afterlife: Utopia, Time, and Memory.