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Le differenti uguaglianze

Numero13

Primavera 1998 - Anno V


enlightened Atti del convegno "Le differenti uguaglianze"

enlightened La poesia di Denise Levertov

enlightened Ritratti d'autrici e d'autore: Ada Clare, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Roth

enlightened Grande impresa e discorso pubblico negli Stati Uniti

Le differenti uguaglianze

Introduzione al convegno "Le differenti uguaglianze: diritti, soggetti e complessità sociale. Una riflessione a partire dagli Stati Uniti" – pag. 5

Redazione

Ácoma’s first Conference was held at the University of Bergamo, from the 20th to the 22nd of March 1997, under the title “Different Equalities”. In their opening address, Acoma’s editorial board started by analyzing the peculiar economic situation of the present-day United States, where differences among classes and social layers are ever deepening, despite optimistic official discourses – differences that once more undermine the myth of a “classless society”. The opening address then moved on to show how the dialectics between difference and equality were in reality deeply engrained in the founding text itself of American experience – the “Declaration of Independence” –, with its unargued dismissal of class, color, and gender issues. Since then, class and economic differences have continued to interact with social, color and gender ones; and, while, in the past few decades, the discourse of difference and equality has been radically reconsidered in the light of different social and cultural movements, it clearly remains one of the most significant legacies that the American experience has passed on to European culture and society.

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Analisi costi/benefici e proporzionalità nel trattamento degli stranieri negli Stati Uniti e in Germania – pag. 13

David Abraham

In this article, Abraham argues that the gap between “citizen” and “alien” has been shrinking in both American and German law. Despite the recent hostility toward immigrants and aliens in both countries, the longer-term tendency has been to grant aliens greater rights. In part this is because the courts have moved to a more functional and prosaic perspective and away from grand theories of citizenship and rights. In part, however, this development also points to the reduction of solidarity within these societies and the decline in the power and viability of citizenship as a political and socio-economic category. The result has been a gain in “recognition” but at the expense of “redistributive” politics.

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Verso gli "Working-class Studies" – pag. 27

Janet Zandy

The paper discusses and exemplifies the question of class visibility, especially among young people and in educational environment; of class mobility, with specific attention to the access of working class people to academic institutions and cultures; and class-based knowledge and culture as a factor of identity. Working-class studies are not a mere addition to gender studies or ethnic studies, but rather an essential component, without which these approaches are bound to remain incomplete.

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Figurazioni del nomadismo: "homelessness" e "rootlessness" nella teoria sociale e politica contemporanea – pag. 43

Rosi Braidotti

The postmodern condition is characterized by two contradictory trends, globalization and fragmentation. Braidotti claims that it is necessary to think beyond the image of schizophrenia in order to explain the phenomenon of trans-culturality, or the coming of a pluri-ethnic or multicultural context. The shift in geopolitical power is confirmed and theorized by the poststructuralist anti-logocentric and anti-Eurocentric philosophy of Deleuze and Derrida and other “post-feminist” and “post-colonial” thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Judith Butler, Arjun Appadurai, Donna Haraway and others. It is always necessary to appeal to both political strategies and imaginary figurations (i.e. politically informed cognitive maps that read the present in terms of one’s embodied situation). Braidotti proposes figurations of nomadism, rootlessness and homelessness, that is, of mobile, complex and shifting subjectivity.

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Confini dell'etnicità e ruolo degli intellettuali afroamericani (sintesi) – pag. 60

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Gates describes identity as contingent and historical rather than fixed, and argues for an attitude of reciprocal, but not uncritical acceptance among different identities in constant evolution and change difference and assimilation, separation and community. Intellectuals have a role to play in creating this attitude. In the last part of the essay, Gates points out that class distinctions exist and have always existed in the black community, and that therefore the role of a new DuBoisian “Talented Tenth” would be that of creating a civic culture in which class differentiation can be distinguished from race discrimination and prejudice.

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Dibattito

L'università e la strada – pag. 64

Carla Cappetti
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Nulla esiste al di fuori del conflitto – pag. 66

Myra Jehlen
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Un margine necessario: uguaglianza e differenza – pag. 69

Michael Frisch

The challenges of contemporaneity require us to learn to inhabit the dynamic and unstable margin and edge between these and conflicting values, an edge that is always in the verge of breaking up into comforting but inadequate dichotomies. Multiculturalism cannot be assumed as an ideology, as in much of the current debate, but rather as a field of inquiry and research and a way of approaching the complexity of contemporary life. This state can best be described as “multivalence,” that suggests better than the dichotomous “ambivalence” the sense of living and practicing different or even conflicting values without feeling in contradiction: that problematic edge of equality and difference in contemporary experience.

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Testo a fronte

A proposito di Denise Levertov – pag. 74

Bianca Tarozzi
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Saggi

I significati della cittadinanza – pag. 80

Linda Kerber

The meaning of national citizenship in the United States is undergoing a change, from a land of immigrants to a node in a network of transnational diasporas, at a time when civic capital and civic trust have been severely damaged by the Vietnam war and later developments. The paper sketches some historical moments of redefinition of citizenship in the U.S., and discusses the multiple and reciprocal rights and memberships that are arising in the contemporary context.

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Anatomia di un fiasco letterario: Only a Woman's Heart (1866) di Ada Clare – pag. 88

Luisa Cetti

Ada Claire (1834-1874), American poet, journalist and actress gained a brief notoriety as “the Queen of Bohemia” and ruled over a group of witty and irreverent artists and writers who enlivened the cultural life of New York in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1866, she published Only a Woman’s Heart, a novel that did not meet a commercial success and was attacked by the critics, for its lack of respect for social conventions. Glorifying passion and offering a tragic ending, Only a Woman’s Heart shows a certain originality compared to contemporary women’s novels. The comments, notes and underlinings, drawn by a nineteenth century reader in the margins of the novel, permit to explore the personal meaning of reading and offer an insight into nineteenth century sensibility and literary tastes.

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Maschere e potere in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl di Harriet Jacobs – pag. 100

Sara Antonelli

In order to present the public with her life-experience, Harriet Jacobs was compelled to construct a fictionalized autobiographical self through the exploitation and hybridization of the nineteeth-century sentimental novel and black male autobiography, as narratorial devices to embellish her painful sexual past and to control the responses of her white female audience. Yet, Jacobs’ narratorial strategies are not only literary devices, but are essentially intervowen in the events that constitute her narrative. In fact, hybridization and masquerade are the real tricks by which Jacobs resisted slavery. In Jacobs text masquerade becomes a form of empowerment, both in terms of resistance and authorial authority.

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Morte e resurrezione dell'autore: Henry Roth e Ira Stigman – pag. 114

Cinzia Schiavini

Sixty years after Call It Sleep, Henry Roth started publishing his second work, Mercy of a Rude Stream, a “memory form novel”. The essay examines the role of the protagonist, Ira Stigman, as the chief alter ego of the author, stressing how the differences with Call It Sleep concern mainly the new perspective on the role of the artist. The act of writing becomes a more self-conscious process, through which Ira can re-examine all his controversial experience, draw bridges of continuity between past and present and rediscover a new social role by reinventing the relationship between the fictional and the real world.

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La democrazia degli affari. Grande impresa e disorso pubblico negli Stati Uniti d'inizio Novecento – pag. 121

Ferdinando Fasce

The article covers the early development of corporate public relations. Such a development is charted against the backdrop of three interrelated phenomena: the widespread quest for publicity and transparency permeating Progressive public discourse; the emergence of advertising as a major factor bound to shape the most varied aspects of American life; and the embryonic substitution of the modern notion of “personality” for the more traditional one of “character”.

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