The Other is frequently decorrelated from the many forms that make up his or her Being. Often considered through clichés, the Other is imagined rather than understood. By separating what really makes up its ontological dimension (Being) from the physical performances of the latter (beings), and without really deciphering their identities, Western societies do not consider the differences that exist among the individuals of a group of people who are othered. This becomes even more apparent when these othered identities are linked to the spaces in which they are constructed. This issue of Quaderna looks at how othered subjects appropriate these spaces—whether physical or moral—to transform them into heterotopias. The aim is to analyze how they autonomously construct their identities.

The consequences of climate change are particularly acute in Kenya, where 80% of the land is arid or semi-arid. What critical and constructive perspective can the concept of habitability offer in this context? Based on fieldwork carried out in Kenya in 2022 and 2023, this article aims to refine an in-situ definition of habitability, using exclusively qualitative data from two research phases, supplemented by video-mapping exercises. Far from proposing a positivist reading of habitability, driven by an exclusively mechanical and linear conception of mobility dynamics, this study proposes to better link habitability to the daily practices, habits, solidarities and even resistances that make up the ordinary lives of community dwellers and displaced persons. Habitability would then lie at the heart of the intricacy between sociality and spatiality, between the social and the biological, which defines – according to Stanley Cavell – “the human form of life.”

This article focuses on the discursive construction of the Eastern European space in Western imagination, exploring the various theoretical and critical approaches that challenge the metageography associated with the Eastern European space and its representations. The term “Eastern Europe” designates a socio‑historical reality linked to the socialist and post‑socialist experience, a symbolic construction resulting from a discursive hardening that needs to be deconstructed, as well as a potential “site of enunciation,” a source of resistance and counter‑representation. In this context, the article aims to highlight the significance of the Eastern European space in a critical mapping of otherness and its potential to illuminate, through its inbetweenness, complex mechanisms of othering.

The study is rooted in collaborative research based on artistic practices bringing together several categories of individuals (artists, institutional operators, researchers) and young people, mainly from the priority neighborhoods of Toulouse’s urban policy. It looks at how young people, artists and researchers are “put to the test” by the realities that unfold during the encounters, sometimes leading them to (re)study the processes of vulnerability. Spatial contexts, where vulnerable situations are recalled, are levers for activating or inhibiting identity games in a bid to rebuild. The article develops the effects of social and spatial reciprocity on identity games, and proposes a mapping of the senses in order to define identity readjustments as closely as possible to a vision of the body that is more sensitive than visible.

Este artículo propone una exploración cartográfica de un archivo como heterotopía feminista y disidente. La violencia reiterada y los feminicidios dieron lugar a las movilizaciones políticas y artísticas #Niunamenos de junio de 2015, en Argentina. Así, para reflejar la pluralidad de feminismos, pero también con el objetivo de ar(t)chivar lo efímero, Proyecto Ni Una Menos ha reunido un conjunto de trabajos que han puesto de manifiesto cuestiones relacionadas con la sexualidad, el género y la violencia machista. Estos trabajos se han reunido en un libro titulado Recuperemos la imaginación para cambiar la historia. Nuestro corpus planteará una propuesta cartográfica de experiencias, espacios de resistencia y su circulación a través del análisis de fotografías y grabaciones de vídeo del archivo.

This article analyzes the remapping of queer citizenship in time and space in Erín Moure’s 2002 collection, O Cidadán, particularly through her translingual practice. Her translingualism contravenes the exclusive structures of the patriarchal, heteronormative, monolingual nation-state by deconstructing its spatiotemporal tenets. Setting up a conversation between her epistemological poetics and José Muñoz’s theory of queer futurity, I examine her creation of alternative queer spacetimes and her subsequent queering of citizenship.

In Australia, Songlines criss-cross the continent, telling of its story and the deep connection between Indigenous peoples and “Country”—the holistic Aboriginal worldview. This cultural mapping becomes a counter-mapping of the Indigenous self, which is unfathomable to outsiders, unless they are initiated to the stories that form the Songline. Songlines are at the heart of both works that form the corpus of this paper: Carpentaria, Alexis Wright’s novel published in 2006, and the international itinerant exhibition entitled Songlines, showcased at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, produced by the National Museum of Australia with the constant collaboration of Indigenous Australian communities. This paper demonstrates how Songlines function as a structural and narrative principle in the corpus, allowing outsiders—whether they be non-Indigenous readers or visitors—to navigate the spaces of the novel and the exhibition while remapping Indigenous epistemological sovereignty.

Against any essentialist spectrum of identity (idem), this paper aims to show hybridization as a (trans)formation strategy for Puerto Rican national singularity (ipse). By reading across Giannina Braschi’s major literary production, this paper illustrates autofiction, translingualism and nomadism as socio-literary strategies of identification (Brubaker), or even of disidentification (Muñoz, Sedgwick). By questioning the idea of post-identity, I will focus on post-otherness, an otherness not declining the identical, nor erasing its solidity, but simply permeabilizing and elasticizing it. Against the hegemony of the identity’s concept, I will go beyond the constructivist approach of postmodernism, in order to illustrate that identity’s prism can contrast the intransigence of appellation.

Neste artigo 45 manuais de português língua não materna servem como corpus para estudar a alteridade linguística na lusofonia. Os livros foram editados no Brasil, em Portugal e nos PALOP (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Moçambique e São Tomé e Príncipe) entre 1975, ano das independências africanas em relação a Portugal, e 1996, ano de criação da Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa. As análises revelam posturas diferentes dependendo do polo lusófono considerado. Os manuais brasileiros demonstram particularismo linguístico, autocentração e falta de familiaridade com a lusofonia. Nos manuais portugueses predominam representações universalistas, relativizando a variação linguística e essencializando a relação entre a língua e os territórios. Nos manuais africanos, uma presença (demasiado) frequente da lusofonia pode ser a origem dos numerosos mecanismos discursivos utilizados no corpo do texto para dissimulá-la. Esses discursos revelam a desvalorização e o relacionamento conflituoso das formas culturais africanas em relação à língua do antigo colonizador.