Trespassing the Borders: Redefining Postcolonialism from Peripheral Experiences

‘So, we ask, is the Postcolonial really dead?’ By starting from this challenging question, Trespassing the Borders would engage with new strands in Postcolonial studies. The main aim of the event is to connect different disciplines to study some dynamics that are shaping contemporary societies. In so doing, the vicissitudes of some Countries that have been considered for decades ‘peripheral’ cases in terms of the colonial/postcolonial experience (e.g. Italy, Germany) will be compared with examples which have received much greater scholarly attention (France, United Kingdom), in order to highlight mutual interconnections, differentiations and peculiarities.

The awareness of the distinction between the anticolonial thought and a more theoretical attitude formed in the metropolitan centres will be at the core of the event. At the same time, Trespassing the Borders wants to be a forum where the term 'Postcolonial' will not be investigated in a theoretically-oriented way only: accordingly, the conference will engage more politically-charged and possibly compromising terms, such as imperialism, neo-colonialism, racism in order to analyse the complexity of current issues and both their historical and ontological roots. This awareness allows to focus the multifaceted study of crucial concepts such as colonialism and decolonization, global history, mobility, from a transnational point of view.

In this framework, Italy and other ‘peripheral cases’ offer a peculiar case-study due to the singularity of their colonial past, the complexity of their process of decolonization, the history of migration, and contemporary issues (refugees, neo-facism, border crossing, social conflicts). All these intertwined phenomena push to consider porous the boundaries of disciplines, in order to a better understanding of the past and current dynamics that are shaping the present. Trespassing the Borders would foster new perspectives that encourage the investigation of different meanings of contemporary citizenship/belongings, and related representational practices.