International Summer School

ENTANGLEMENTS
Postcolonial Futures
and New Futurisms

University of Padua
Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies

Monday 7 - Friday 11 July, 2025

Overview

The Summer School will be held at the University of Padua, at the Beato Pellegrino building, from Monday 7 to Friday 11 July, 2025. The 2025 edition looks to a postcolonialism of the future, synonymous with the awareness that a fair, sustainable, liveable future will necessarily have to be a postcolonial future. A future that will have gone ‘beyond’ colonial trajectories of world organization and divisions and will be based on alternative ways of planetary living, which we cannot yet foresee, but which must be ‘created’, including through literary imagination.

Keep reading

The present is the battlefield of versions of possible futures, which people imagine, anticipate, fear or aspire to. In this contest, postcolonial visions of the future have an important role: not only do they fight for a deeper decolonization of the planet, but they are indispensable contributions to “the work of creating the future” (Appadurai 2013).

Postcolonial perspectives are increasingly informing the new archives of literary futurisms, which knit together the work being done by people of colour and of the Global South, such as Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Indigenous Futurisms and Latinx Futurisms. Each of these represents a clearly identifiable movement, mode, aesthetic, and subgenre (science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction…). What they seem to share is a vision that bypasses the white supremacist future of the Global North, and offers the hope of surviving the dire future we face as a species and that we inflict on other species and the planet, should we not urgently institute change.

Plenary talks by leading international scholars hailing from different spheres of knowledge will be followed by workshops enabling participants to put the acquired insights into practice. The lingua franca of the School will be English, although workshops will be provided in Spanish and Italian, as well. On the last day, a feedback session will be held for participants to mingle and share their research projects with tutors.

The initiative is intended for Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD students, as well as researchers and activists. In addition to providing the acquisition of 4 European Credits, the four-day attendance will serve as an introduction and a facilitated access (Summer Term) to the Postcolonial, Afro-descendant and Global South Cultures programs offered by the Master’s Degree Course in European and American Languages and Literature (LM-37).

The School, in its second year, falls within the third line of action addressing the phenomena of literary transculturation in the global era as envisaged by the 2023-2027 ‘Digital and cross-cultural TRANSmission of TEXTs (TRANSTEXT)’ Project of Excellence, which the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies received funding for from the Ministry of Culture.

Guest Speakers

Igiaba Scego – writer

Keynote: July 7, 2025, 6 pm

Igiaba Scego was born in Italy to a Somali family: she is the daughter of Ali Omar Scego, the first governor of Mogadishu, ambassador and foreign minister who emigrated to Italy in the aftermath of Siad Barre’s coup in 1969. She is a writer, journalist and researcher focusing on dialogue between cultures, transculturalism and migration. She collaborates with many magazines, including Latinoamerica, Carta, El Ghibli, Migra and with a number of newspapers, including La Repubblica, il manifesto, L’Unità and Internazionale. She won the Mondello Prize with the work La mia casa è dove sono (2010); the Premio Napoli for fiction with La linea del colore (2020); she was among the twelve semifinalists for the Premio Strega with Cassandra a Mogadiscio (2023).

Luigi Marfè – Università degli Studi di Padova

In conversation with Igiaba Scego: July 7, 2025

Luigi Marfè is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Padua. His research interests include travel writing, visual culture, and translation studies. He is the author of Oltre la ‘fine dei viaggi’ (Olschki 2009), Introduzione alle teorie narrative (Archetipo 2011), ‘In English clothes’. La novella italiana in Inghilterra (Accademia 2015), and ‘Un altro modo di raccontare’. Poetiche e percorsi della fotoletteratura (Olschki 2021). He translated several volumes into Italian (W. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Bompiani 2015; R.L. Stevenson’s Songs of Travel (ETS 2019). He is on the editorial board of Cosmo: Comparative Studies in Modernism.

waaseya’sin Christine Sy – University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Conference “Introduction to Indigenous Literatures”: July 8, 2025, 6 pm

waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada). The university exists on the territories of the Lək̓ ʷəŋən peoples with which the WSÁNEĆ peoples also have a relationship. Specializing in Indigenous Studies, Christine researches in the areas of Anishinaabe womxn’s relationships with their territories as a source of their economic sovereignty and critical university studies; mobilizes knowledge across modalities and genres; and, teaches at the intersections of indigeneity and gender in the areas of literature, media, relationships with the settler state, feminist theory, and relationships with territory. She is co-author of Introduction to Indigenous Feminisms (Routledge, 2025) and editor of Indigenous Womxn Write and Orate More Land (Wolsak and Wynn, forthcoming).

Annalisa Oboe – Università degli Studi di Padova

Lecture and workshop: July 9, 2025

Annalisa Oboe is Professor of Anglophone literatures and postcolonial studies at DiSLL, University of Padova. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal From the European South: a transdisciplinary journal of postcolonial humanities and the founder and Director of the ‘Elena Cornaro’ Centre for gender studies and policies of the University of Padova. Her research focuses on postcolonial literatures and cultures; Black Atlantic studies; Anglophone women’s writing; South African and West African fiction; historical novels and historiographic metafiction; literature, ethics and collective futures. Latest publication: Chris Abani, Contemporary World Writers (Manchester University Press, 2022).

Ana Llurba – Writer

Lecture: July 10, 2025

Ana Llurba is a writer, researcher and educator. She published the novels La puerta del cielo and Hemoderivadas, a book of short stories titled Constelaciones familiares and the essays Erase otra vez. Cuentos de hadas contemporáneos, Mapas y cicatrices and Encarnar al monstruo: Hacia una nueva imaginación especulativa (2024, Spain). She is currently a doctoral student at Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA). Her academic background includes a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Literature from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina (UNC). Her research interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and visual arts, environmental humanities, cosmopolitics, new materialisms and feminist aesthetics.

Gabriele Bizzarri – Università degli Studi di Padova

In conversation with Ana Llurba: July 10, 2025

Gabriele Bizzarri is professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Padua and editor of Orillas. Journal of Hispanistics. His research focuses on the construction of Latin American cultural identity, in a chronological perspective which sets the era of the great identity theories and narrative macro-foundations of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the deconstructionist drifts of the late twentieth century and with the embattled re-actualizations of the contemporary (with a series of works devoted, for example, to Bolaño’s “Latin American vision”). His interest in queer studies is also declined in this vein throughout his latest book Performar Latinoamérica. Estrategias queer de representación y agenciamiento del Nuevo Mundo en la literatura hispanoamericana contemporánea, 2020, where the performative resurrection of localist resistance in authors such as Pedro Lemebel, Diamela Eltit, and Roberto Bolaño is highlighted. He is currently working on a book on new Latin American weird fiction.

Program

The program is currently being defined, further details will be added in the coming weeks.

MONDAY 7 JULY, 2025

Opening session in the early afternoon.
Workshop: Postcolonial Keywords.
Keynote: Igiaba Scego.

TUESDAY 8 JULY, 2025

Workshop: analysis of a novel by Igiaba Scego.
Plenary Lecture: “Indigenous Literatures Across a Temporal Arc: A Brief Introduction,” by Prof. waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy.

WEDNESDAY 9 JULY, 2025

Lecture and workshop – Prof. Annalisa Oboe: “African Futurism”

THURSDAY 10 JULY, 2025

Plenary lecture by Ana Llurba.
Workshop: analysis of a novel by Ana Llurba.

FRIDAY 10 JULY, 2025

Students’ assignments

Registration

Early bird registration will be available from Monday, March 10 to Monday, April 7, 2025, at a cost of €300. Early bird registrants will have access to subsidized housing reserved by the organizers of the initiative at a guesthouse at the University of Padua.

From Tuesday, April 8, until Thursday, May 13, 2025, registration will instead be counted as late registration, at a cost of 400€.

Applications received will be evaluated by the scientific committee at the end of each registration period, which will confirm admission as soon as possible.

In order to participate, all those who have received confirmation must complete payment of the registration fee, in a manner to be indicated later, no later than 30th April 2025 for the early bird period.

The initiative will be launched with a minimum of 15 registrants: should the minimum enrollment threshold not be reached, the registration fee will be returned in its entirety.

The penalty for non-participation in the School, without valid and substantiated justification, will be 30 percent of the registration fee, to cover operational costs.

In order to register, please complete the form below: