Stories

Contesting the Black Flâneur: The rhetoric of disruption and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's urban literature

“…The fact that a Will Smith doll becomes an essential component of Yabar's everyday life, always clenched in his hands, secreted in his pocket, and never lets himself be separated from it, metaphorizes the characteristics of Somalia's diasporic community that interweaves a transnational past, present, and future. Bond (2022: 282–283) also perfectly points out that ‘the feelings of attachment to the miniature model engendered by this transnationalizing bricolage allow Yabar to achieve a sense of mastery through active play, as well as to experience positive aesthetic emotion.’ However, all of these assertions may sound disturbing, since Ali Farah offers a corrective, that holds symbolic value, highlighting the fact that speaking of an Afro-Italian community cannot be considered a misnomer. Yabar's recall inscribes the experiencing of spaces and territories within acts of memory, relocating his national origin within larger familial networks in Britain, Kenya, and possibly also other places around the world.…”

‘Transnational Italian Cultures’: Editing as method

“…Indeed, in my own work trying to decipher and articulate ways of using the transnational as a tool of methodological analysis, I too have often zoned in on acts of play, collage, and assemblage as ways to evidence practices of “construction by addition and association that lie at the heart of the transnational” (Bond, 2022: 280). It is this bricolage, as expressed through acts of selection, juxtaposition, and re-assemblage, which I think also speaks to the idea of editing work as a transnational methodology, and that allows me to conceive of our editing of the ‘Transnational Italian Cultures’ series as the “linking up of a series of particularities” that will allow “for the creation of new meaning from existing parts” (Bond, 2022: 281; emphasis in original). Each book in the series functions as a standalone volume, of course, but our ambition is that as a composite whole, they each “gain meaning from their interplay” with the others (Bond, 2022: 288), forming supplementary patterns that illuminate and reinforce their individual points of transnational analysis.…”

“…It is this bricolage, as expressed through acts of selection, juxtaposition, and re-assemblage, which I think also speaks to the idea of editing work as a transnational methodology, and that allows me to conceive of our editing of the ‘Transnational Italian Cultures’ series as the “linking up of a series of particularities” that will allow “for the creation of new meaning from existing parts” (Bond, 2022: 281; emphasis in original). Each book in the series functions as a standalone volume, of course, but our ambition is that as a composite whole, they each “gain meaning from their interplay” with the others (Bond, 2022: 288), forming supplementary patterns that illuminate and reinforce their individual points of transnational analysis. This is, perhaps, where the transnational also manages to enact a productive shift of perspective away from the vexed question of the parameters and limits of “migration literature” identified by Contarini.…”