ENTANGLEMENTS:
Postcolonial Transtextual Dialogues

International Summer School

University of Padua, Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies

Monday 9th to Friday 13th, September 2024

Overview

The Summer School will be held at the University of Padua, at the Beato Pellegrino building, from Monday 9 to Friday 13 September, 2024. It is intended to foster a dialogue “between and beyond” literary texts, “between and beyond” the diverse souls of the Postcolonial (and Decolonial) involving Environmental Studies, Ecofeminism, Queer and Posthuman Studies…, in an attempt to unlock new opportunities to understand the “contemporary extreme”.

Building on a reflection on the literary text, as well as on the postcolonial cultural object more broadly —which by its very nature calls for transdisciplinarity and cooperation among different spheres of knowledge— we aim to equip participants with the necessary tools so as to adequately frame their presence in the ‘narrative’ of globalization within a critical perspective.

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, currently in its first 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.

Registration

Click here to register

Early Bird Registration will be available until June 30, 2024, while Late Bird Registration will be open from July 1 to July 15, 2024.

All applications will be assessed by our Scientific Board. By July 22 applicants will receive a confirmation. In order to be able to attend, all successful applicants shall make payment of the registration fee by means that will be notified no later than July 31, 2024.

Failure to participate without sound and substantiated evidence will result in a penalty amounting to 60% of the registration fee.

Early bird
100€

until June 30, 2024

Late registration
200€

from July 1 to July 15, 2024

Guest Speakers

Françoise Vergès – Author and independent curator

Opening Plenary Talk: September 9, 2024 – Workshop: September 10, 2024

Françoise Vergès (La Réunion-France) is a decolonial antiracist feminist, author and independent curator. Her writings focus on the racial fabrication of premature death, the afterlives of slavery and colonization, decolonial feminism, the impossible decolonization of the Western museum and the racial capitalocene. Latest publication: Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée (La Fabrique, 2023, forthcoming Italian translation by Meltemi).

Photo: Daniel Mordzinski

Gabriela Wiener – Independent writer and scholar

Plenary Talk and Workshop: September 11, 2024

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist, one of the new voices of so-called narrative journalism, as well as a 2SLGBTQI+ rights activist and performer. Her publications include the news books Sexografías and Nueve Lunas and the novel Huaco retrato (translated into Italian as Sanguemisto ), a sharp narrative memoir that investigates the writer’s proudly mongrel origins with a rabidly decolonial approach.

Rachele Borghi – Sorbonne Université

Performance lecture “Exercises in decoloniality” & Conferenzaret, performance on decoloniality and feminism: September 11, 2024

Rachele Borghi, professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, is a queer transfeminist performance geographer. Her work focuses on the deconstruction of dominant norms and the contamination of spaces through dissident and militant bodies. Drawing on feminist and decolonial thinking, she seeks to blast university walls, circulate people, knowledge, reflections and practices to develop radical pedagogical methods. Latest publication: Decolonialità e privilegio (Meltemi, 2020).

Chiara Mengozzi – Charles University, Prague

Lecture and workshop: September 12, 2024

Chiara Mengozzi is a professor of Literary Theory and Italian Literature at Charles University in Prague. She also serves as a research associate at CEFRES in Prague (Centre Français de Recherche en Sciences Sociales), president of OFFRES (Organisation Francophone pour la Formation et la Recherche Européennes en Sciences Humaines) and director of the journal “Scritture migranti” at the University of Bologna, together with Daniele Comberiati and Yahis Martari. Latest publication: Outside the Anthropological Machine. Crossing the Human-Animal Divide and Other Exit Strategies (Routledge, 2020).

Iain Michael Chambers – independent researcher

Lecture and workshop: September 12 & 13, 2024

Iain Chambers studied at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University before moving to Naples, where he taught Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Naples, L’Orientale. He is presently an independent researcher and writes regularly for the Italian daily il Manifesto. Among his publications are Migrancy, Culture, Identity (1994) and Mediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008), Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017), and with Marta Cariello, The Mediterranean Question(2025). With Lidia Curti, he edited the volume The Postcolonial Question. Common Skies, Divided Horizons (1995).

Workshops will focus on:

Postcolonial and Posthuman Studies, Postcolonial and Environmental Studies, Postcolonial and Queer Studies.

Show and Tell Sessions will focus on participants’ research projects.