Claudia Gualtieri Books

This collection of essays presents a study of migration cultures in the contemporary Mediterranean with a particular focus on Italy as a point of migratory convergence and pressure. It investigates different experiences of, and responses to, sea crossings, borders and checkpoints, cultural proximity and distance, race, ethnicity and memory, along with creative responses to the same. In dialogic and complementary interaction, the essays explore violence centring on race as the major determining factor. The book further submits that the interrogation of racialized categories represents different kinds of critical response and resistance, which involve both political struggle and day-to-day survival and coexistence. Following the praxis of cultural and postcolonial studies, the essays focus on the present but draw indispensable insight from past connections and heritage as well as offering prognoses for the future. The ambitious aim of this collection is to identify some useful lines of thought and action that could help us to think outside intricacy, isolation and defensiveness, which characterize most of the public official reactions to migration today.

The essays address the cultural politics of our global present. They offer a contribution towards keeping the spirit of utopia alive by practicing it, promoting that the struggle for liberation may continue in an era whose landscape is not inhabited by the presence of great utopian constructs. The collection adapts the idea of utopia to the intercultural present using it as a metanarrative projected towards the future and rooted in local experiences and actions. The book presents an interdisciplinary and anti-canonical perspective, and methodological frames from Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Imagining social and cultural change outside hegemonic articulations of power is a practice of freedom opposed to the protective drive that raises borders and walls around potential islands to claim the right of keeping them isolated and self-sufficient.