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A way to Armando Gniscis poetics of decolonization

Prof Dr Shirley de Souza Gomes Carreira UNIGRANRIO-Brazil For the last two years I have been studying the critical work of a prominent Italian scholar and critic who teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Roma, La Sapienza. I confess that the first time I had the opportunity to read one of his texts I became completely impressed and affected by his extremely humane approach to the problems of our contemporary world. By that time I had already been interested in the literature of migration, and especially acquainted with Salman Rushdies works. By reading Armando Gniscis critical essays I was able to see, completely materialized before my eyes, a great deal of the questioning I myself had made a thousand times about contemporary academic issues and I discovered that I was not alone. Above all I was able to see that he had found a way out. We started a productive interlocution, a literary dialogue, which enabled me to improve my knowledge of literature of migration in Italy as well as to become intimate to Gniscis concept of decolonizzazione. In May, Gniscis new book, Via della Decolonizzazione Europea , was published in Italy and, as its author points out, it was meant to be a pedagogical pamphlet whose aim is to enhance reflexive thought through which man would be able to find a way to get free from the colonial domain of the global capitalism in whatever part of the world. For him that freedom would be the result of a fierce fight that is at the base of his definition for decolonization: La decolonizzazione non un sinonimo pi o meno equipollente di postcolonialismo.Per decolonizzazione intendo, invece, la lotta per liberarsi

dal dominio coloniale del capitalismo globalizzato, in qualquiasi parte del mondo.(VDE, 11) Gnisci seeks to make a difference between postcolonialism and

decolonization by showing that the first is connected with the idea of a time that started immediately after the beginning of colonization (not at its end, as usually people think of it, even because, according to his view, colonization has not been completely finished), whereas the second has to do with a mental decolonization and a consequent creolization of the world: Intendo per postcoloniale lepoca della modernit europea che stata via via stesa a tutti i populi del pianeta a partire dallinizio della colonizzazione; intendo il post-, infati, esattamente come a partire dal momento di. (VDE, 7) And he adds: La colonizzazione non passata. Perdura; cresciuta e cresce. Attualmente la si pu riconoscere, se si voule, nella cos detta globalizzazione neoliberalista della societ mondiale.(p. 8) Gniscis theory has its source in his acquaintance with the literature of migrant writers that took place in 1991, when he went to Tunisia as a lecturer. His poetics of decolonization proposes a kind of cultural mestizage to the highly xenophobic Europe. His proposal looks down on the old pattern of acculturation, assimilation, and highlights the cultural dialogue by assuring that writing is as political as creative an act. According to him, the fact that in Italy the phenomenon of the literature of migration had a late expression, if compared to England, France or Germany, for example, is a positive aspect since it has permitted to follow the course of that kind of literature from its very beginning. Although it may sound ambiguous to some extent, the term European decolonization used by Gnisci does not refer to any of reaction of ex-colonized people against the ex-colonizer, but to a political, social and mental act of getting

rid of the habit of being colonists, of dictating norms and rules. That kind of opening is only possible if European people face the reality of their prejudice. As Salman Rushdie points out in Imaginary Homelands, reality is built on our prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge(p.25). Gnisci exhorts the European people to respond with responsibility to the demands of a world they had devastated with their colonization. The replacement of prejudice with knowledge would make possible what he calls a colloquy, a word he prefers to the commonly used dialogue, since it implies a conversation that goes beyond the simple exchange of words between two people. I will borrow from one of Gniscis most beautiful texts, Rome as a system of ruins1, the idea of the past that survives time passage. In that essay, Gnisci refers to Circo Massimo as a ruin without ruins, that is, a forma loci, a place where there is nothing to remember past (as a monument, for instance), since it was not able to resist time action. Even so it exists in its monumental invisibility. The text is about Romes eternity, her wish of not being forgotten or deposed. There is a subtle connection between this text and the demands of our global world. The old imperial system, of which Rome is the maximum symbol, wants to survive, even in an apparent invisibility, just like Circo Massimo, disguised in a multicultural dress and a global economy. At the end of the essay, Gnisci mentions the fact that there is a legend according to which Rome has a secret name, her inverted name: amor, that is, love. Gnisci suggests that only the power of Eros projected over Rome would be able to transform the double image of fundamental felony into a reconciled civilization.

Original in Italian: GNISCI (2002). Translated version in Portuguese: http://www.unigranrio.br/letras/revista/textognisci2.html

As he says in Migration and Literature 2, our intercultural philosophy is still that one of a superior civilization, even if marginalized by the USA superpowers and the colonial mission/burden, a civilization of imperialism and racism, only superficially softened by co-operative and charitable logic that disguises any possible form of new-imperialism, even the military one. By now, Europeans should carry the burden of decolonization, skinning the colonizer inside. Gnisci sees the colloquy promoted by literature and art with the public as a medium for co-education. He does not want his poetics of decolonization to be a mere theoretical variable of the academic criticism to Eurocentrism, but the enthronization of the habit of listening the multiple voices of our diversity. To those who argue that Gniscis point of view has been overtaken or become old-fashioned in the panorama of contemporary criticism, on the ground of new social relationships which push terms as immigrant away, it is useful to remember that the project of a cosmopolitan citizenship will only be possible for those who belong to an unprivileged group, no matter how it is labeled, if their basic rights are guaranteed, cutting off the bonds to the old state-nation formula and to the colonial experience. In A different history3, Gnisci suggests that a Worlds Literature intends to oppose globalization set up by mass culture within the mystical body of the universal market as well as the concept of European Literature, which has been clearly connected with colonialism and identified as the Global Literature. It is still willing to stand as a form of education of the oppressed and a utopian drive, becoming a zone of the permanent colloquy among the worlds. The extra-European colonial literatures interaction with metropolitan literatures, by invading and transforming them from within their own languages,
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Original in Italian: GNISCI (2004) Translated version in Portuguese: http://www.unigranrio.br/letras/revista/textognisci.html 3 GNISCI (2001)

was responsible for the growth of a phenomenon that was named creolization, that is, a cultural mestizage which is a signal of reciprocal influences among cultures, reassuring an alternative and new model of identity configuration to the monolithic certainties of European identity. According to the author, the concept was borrowed from douard Glissants Poetics of the different4: Ho ripreso il conceto ddi creolizzazione dalla particolare elaborazione che ne fa lo scrittore caraibico francofono douard Glissant. Con questo concetto egli indica il fenomeno mondiale dellincrociarsi e del meticiarsi delle lingue, delle culturem dei popoli e degli individui.(p.59) By proposing a different literary history, Gnisci means a rewriting of critical sense, an incessant translation of the past, a sensible reading of the Worlds Literature and the correct interpretation of its ability to express the plurality of discourses. Bibliography GLISSANT, douard. Poetica del diverso. Trans. Francesca Neri. RomaL Meltemi, 1998. GNISCI, Armando. Una storia diversa. Roma: Meltemi, 2001. -----. Roma come sisteme delle rovine. In: GNISCI, A. Da noialtri europei a noitutti insieme. Saggi di letteratura comparata. Roma: Bulzoni, 2002. -----. La stagione presente e viva: migrazione & letteratura. Neohelicon, 2004, vol. 31, iss. 1, pp. 7-17(11) -----. Via della decolonizzazione europea. Roma: Cosmo Iannone, 2004. RUSHDIE, Salman. Imaginary Homelands.Essays and criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1991.
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GLISSANT (1998)

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