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.

The article presents a general overview of Italian travel in Lapland and, more marginally, in Finland in the 19th century; there were not many Italian travelers in the boreal land at that time, but some of their names are still important today in the panorama of travel literature in Scandinavia: Giuseppe Acerbi and Paolo Mantegazza are certainly the most famous, but we also mention Filippo Parlatore, Stéphen Sommier, Carlo Vidua, Giacomo Bove and three almost unknown tourists, Guardino Colleoni, Francesco Podreider and Father Luigi Randi. The article studies their routes, the practical organization and the difficulties of such a journey; we have identified some categories of travelers and, therefore, we analyze the resulting literary production, to seek the specificities that characterize the model of travel relationship in nordic countries.

The German poet and novelist Ida Countess von Hahn is one of the great travellers of the 19th century. She travelled through most of Western Europe, and even to the Near East. Her journey around Scandinavia took place in 1842 at a turning point in representations of the North, when scientific discourse, until then dominant in travel accounts of this region, was supplanted by a discourse related to tourism. The imaginary world of the North, which the author evoked in Reiseversuch im Norden published in 1843, thus rejects a scholarly presentation of the Nordic countries in favour of more personal and subjective evocations. As an expression of a quest rather than of certainties, the text is in line with the logic of borealism and sketches out an "identity-based otherness" (Briens) in a context where tourism ceased to be the privilege of a minority and invented its first standardised and popular formats.

The Anglo-Australian author George Egerton (1859-1945) dedicated a significant part of her output to representations of Northern spaces. Her translations in the 1890s gave the British public access to modern Scandinavian text, and several short stories in the collections Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894) are about Norway. In her descriptions of Nordic landscapes, Egerton combines the natural environment with the inner landscapes of female protagonists, echoing her project of rendering the “terra incognita” of female experience. Her focus on sensory perception earned her accusations of salaciousness, including from her publisher who saw in them the excess typical of “Scandinavian ideas”. Female perspectives and Nordic landscapes are also associated with a magical quality in her texts. In particular, the figure of the witch allows Egerton to combine a sublime image of Norway expected by the Victorian public with an aesthetic representation of female autonomy, especially the autonomy of the gaze highlighted in ekphrastic passages. This article aims to identify the forms of cultural and aesthetic mediation of the North proposed in her texts.

The article deals with the account of a trip to Denmark in 1893 by the Anglo-Irish writers Edith Somerville and Martin Ross. Disconcerted by certain local customs, and above all by the similarities they observed between Denmark and England, they used humour to create a sense of alienness and to captivate readers. But their story is also a reflection on Danish fin-de-siècle society, in particular the status of women from different social classes and the country's leading position in women's emancipation. The article develops the idea that oblique aesthetics are at work in the illustrated narrative, a metaphor for the travellers'position and their method of apprehending Danish society.

In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Italy was experiencing its post-war transformation from a largely agrarian, relatively poor nation into one of the most economically and socially advanced countries of the world, whose role in the international scenario grew in importance, especially in the founding of the future European Union. In a rapidly changing society – even as regarded social customs – there increased the curiosity about the way other people and countries approached modernity. Sweden (often standing for the whole Scandinavia) was still an ‘exotic’ area for Italian public, included most intellectuals. My contribution focuses on three movies of the early 1960s (Le svedesi; Il diavolo; Nude, calde e pure), with further hints at the ‘Swedish’ element in other films of the 1960s and 1970s, in order to highlight and discuss how the image of Sweden is stereotyped (as well as problematized) in these relevant Italian works.

Polar expeditions were very popular everywhere between 1875 and 1914. Nevertheless, a few people voiced critical views. Towards the end of this period, nationalistic feelings increased continuously in all European countries. The First World War – at least at the beginning – found broad support in all countries. But there were a few exceptions, like August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf in Sweden, or Karl Kraus in Austria. That those three writers did not share the general appreciation of “the conquest of the North” either is worth consideration. Both Strindberg and Kraus made fun of Cook and Peary, who in 1909 argued, each by himself, that he was first at the North Pole. In Lagerlöf’s The Outcast, we find an upsetting image of an expedition towards the pole, which sheds light on its inhuman aspects. The last part of the article deals with possible connections between pacifism and critical views on polar explorations in the three authors’ works.

This article discusses the importance of the media and artistic narration in the reception of polar expeditions by analyzing the case of the 1928 Italian-Norwegian expedition, called Italia. Undertaken by zeppelin and commanded by fascist general Umberto Nobile, this expedition aimed to establish the first permanent colony at the North Pole. The press and intellectual circles of the time welcomed the exploration as a celebration of Italian genius that had managed to establish itself where no other man had ever set foot. However, it was in actuality a tragedy, with an accident on the ice pack, the loss of half of the crew, a makeshift shelter on the ice floe for a month, and the poetic disappearance of Roald Amundsen in the northern mists. These events contributed to defining the legendary character of an expedition that shows to what extent the narrative of the imaginary voyage is important in the construction of the reception of polar expeditions.

The territory of England, or even the whole of the United Kingdom, is often described as divided between the South and the North. Between these two halves of England, there would therefore be a North/South divide, a formula very frequently taken up in the press and in political discourses. Thus, the North of England appears as a specific territory, because of its historical, socio-economic, cultural and identity specificities. This paper then aims to question the perception and definition of Nordicity in England, through a geographical – and more specifically geopolitical – approach and methodology. Indeed, the North and the North-South divide can be defined as geopolitical representations, as they appear indisputable in political discourses, although they are debatable geographical realities. The definition of the North also tends to evolve given recent electoral developments in the country, in connection with Brexit.

The Smiths were an English band that gained commercial success and critical acclaim in the 1980s.They were closely associated with Manchester and the North of England. They had Northern accents when they spoke and sang; their lyrics contained references to areas of Manchester and to Northern cultural figures such as the playwright Shelagh Delaney, as did some of their videos; and they discussed their geographical origins in interviews with the music press. Yet their vision of Manchester and the North was far from celebratory and was in some ways quite detached. In fact, The Smiths used an adapted version of the genre of Northern Realism to contest the dominant version of Northernness, which was imposed on the North and held together its imagined community. For example, they promoted more inclusive forms of masculinity. However, their attempts to renew Northernness were stymied by the attitude of the music press. The latter gave The Smiths a platform for them to express their ideas but tended to reinforce traditional conceptions of the North in the way they presented the band.

The article explores the main structuring elements of the national mythology of Sweden as promoted in Selma Lagerlöf’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906/07), understood as mythemes of social knowledge. After a perhaps too short discussion of the main theoretical and methodological choices, including the concept of mytheme and homo narrans in the context of general narratology and media change, the article proceeds in the discussion of the results obtained by a computational method developed by Ludovic Stappazzon and the author. 196 common mythemes are mapped as a network of units representing the probability of co-occurrence in the narrative. Most Central Chronotope mythemes are Forest, Way, Water, Farm, Land and Lake, which are until today main elements of a national imaginative geography. Action mythemes relate to the idea of education, related in turn to the concept of family. Human and non-human actors and chronotopes are clearly divided as two spheres in the narrative grammar, underlining the nature-culture-divide central to the narration. 

This article analyses mistranslations in the Parisian lectures of the Polish author Adam Mickiewicz at the Collège de France. The texts were published between 1841 and 1849 in different versions in French, Polish, and German. Initially, mistranslations are defined as deliberate decisions of the translators, after which their aesthetic, linguistic, and linguistic-political functions are discussed. The analysis shows that those mistranslations were deliberately used by the author and the translators to achieve linguistic-political and aesthetic effects that were not intended in the original. This explains the mistranslations in the text, which are not to be understood as translation mistakes.

This article discusses the cooperation in translation between philologists and poets In a case study, three German versions of a poem by the Chinese Author Lu Xun were compared which were created out of a collaboration between the philologists Egbert Baqué and Michael Streffer together with the poets Sarah Kirsch, Jürgen Theobaldy and Gisela Kraft. Analyzing the different versions allows insights into the interplay between philology and poetry which brings forth a special potential for integrating foreign texts into new literary and cultural contexts despite or because of some instances of ‘mistranslation’. Moreover, it shows how inextricably translating and writing are intertwined.

The author argues that disciplines are human phenomena that produce knowledge without having to collapse into anthropomorphism. Dying disciplines turn away from reality; living disciplines reach to reality without attempting to capture, colonize, or constrain it. The author refers to the former as “disciplinary decadence,” which, he argues, is the dominant model in much of the academy. The situation need not, however, be moribund. The author outlines this concept, explores possibilities for its transcendence, particularly through resources of phenomenology from the global south, and devotes much attention to the question: Is even human transcendence, disciplinarily understood, a human relationship?

This contribution discusses questions of disciplinarity with reference to the example of the person and works of Marguerite Stix. The authors debate the implications of concepts such as trans-, inter-, multi- and x-disciplinarity in a critical fashion. They connect biographical sketches with conceptual reflections on their case study, making a plea for new disciplines with specific disciplinary delineations. The article contributes to North American Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Interdisciplinary Linguistics while, simultaneously, it argues for overcoming such disciplinary ascriptions.

This contribution discusses questions of disciplinarity with reference to the example of the person and works of Marguerite Stix. The authors debate the implications of concepts such as trans-, inter-, multi- and x-disciplinarity in a critical fashion. They connect biographical sketches with conceptual reflections on their case study, making a plea for new disciplines with specific disciplinary delineations. The article contributes to North American Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Interdisciplinary Linguistics while, simultaneously, it argues for overcoming such disciplinary ascriptions.

This article examines how the concept of creolization, that emerged to grasp the distinctly African New World of the Caribbean, offers especially useful resources for thinking through what can and should constitute alternative forms of intellectual legitimacy and scholarly progress in transdisciplinary pursuits. It does so by revisiting Thomas Kuhn’s suggestion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that cause and effect are often mistaken when determining which scholarly projects merit the designation as “science.” Suggesting that transdisciplinary scholarship fundamentally rejects most of the conditions that constitute normal scientific communities, it turns to the ways in which creole languages revealed the insufficiency of prior academic linguistic models by demonstrating that the multilinguistic, multiracial, and multinational region out of which they came was prototypical rather than exceptional. As with the languages themselves, the concept of creolization, when used by creative writers and social theorists alike, offered a more rigorous descriptive account of the outcomes of the larger transnational and transoceanic processes that ushered in European modernity. In ways that offer a guide to disciplines beyond the model of identitarian, sovereign territories, they drew on varieties of scholarly resources to understand how people without prior shared histories did not exist in impermeable bubbles but were remade in relation to one another. Finally, the piece asks whether the prefix “trans-,” shared in terms like transnationalism, transdisciplinarity, or transsexuality, should encourage us to consider whether the aim of calls for transdisciplinarity are for “trans” to be a temporary designation and episodic challenge or a permanent orientation.

This contribution explores the politics of transdisciplinarity on three interconnected levels: Firstly, transdisciplinarity as an aspect within the political economics of university management. Secondly, in relation to universities socio-political significance in transitional societies in the global South, grappling with historic legacies of violence and exclusion shaping todays socio-political complexities. Thirdly, as a crucial element of critical pedagogy in relation non-hierarchical and non-violent forms of communication and interaction assisting assist students and teachers in unlocking their individual potential, to develop critical thinking skills, a consciousness of freedom versus authoritarianism and of self-situatedness in relation to power and privilege—ultimately empowering them to be socially and politically responsive and responsible.

This paper argues that the contemporary complexity of global challenges requires “connective cognition”, joined-up approaches to knowledge and innovation. These trans-disciplinary knowledge systems afford insights into complex challenges and offer prospects for remedying measures which are distilled from multiple knowledge fields and multiple locales, yielding hybrid and transcendent ways of apprehending the world. This cross-boundary collaboration enables forms of societal learning which are essentially connective and which will constitute the cognitive patterns and platforms of the future. This knowledge generation needs to be the subject of study in its own right because it is far from straightforward.

The decolonization of knowledge involves various forms of transdisciplinarity but not all forms of transdisciplinarity are decolonial. This article offers an analysis of decolonial transdisciplinarity in relation to the European sciences, its disciplines, and methods. It identifies a “secular-line” which combines with a “color-line” to define the context and horizon of European sciences. Ethnic Studies appear as the site of a different attitude to the one found in the European sciences and as an example of decolonial transdisciplinary thinking.

This article compares the fixed identities resulting from the essentialist drift in research, to the multiple free identifications generated by the practice of transgressive, sadomasochist lesbianism: It cross-reads Dorothy Allison’s queer grotesque literary works, feminist, gay and lesbian studies, and subject theory, to show that the transdisciplinary approach promotes a reevaluation and reconsideration of the complexity which pertains to queer identities. Whereas traditional disciplines deny the subject’s complexity, this study argues that queer grotesque literature works contra disciplinary and identity paradigms to propose a counter-model of the human subject.

In language contact situations, circulating discourses about languages and their speakers and about language learning voice cultural and historical conceptions about language and throw light on the complex symbolic dimensions underlying all language learning activities. This article aims to explore such discursive manifestations by university students learning Spanish as L3. Firstly, we propose a theoretical overview in order to discern between what can be said to “belong to the self” and what is “foreign” when it comes to language learning in multilingual settings. We also deal with the notions of source and target: what is the initial learning stage when the learner already knows several languages? How do we define ultimate achievement in language learning? We then look into the ways in which the learners’ multilingualism is construed and how these discoursive constructions relate to their learning practices in the classroom. More specifically, personal narratives are analyzed in the search for words through which the learners come to terms with linguistic alterity and make a new language their own. Finally, we focus on translingual practices, which transcend language-specific boundaries and result in learning and communication strategies involving more than just the L1 and the L2.