de genere - Rivista di studi letterari, postcoloniali e di genere

Editorial

Marta Cariello — 2024-10-29

The Age of the Sad Passions. An Introduction

Rossella Ciocca — 2024-10-29

Offensive is not Enough: Hate Speech, Free Speech, and the Free Circulation of Ideas

Vincenzo Bavaro — 2024-10-29

This article interrogates the boundaries of the legal debate around hate speech in the U.S.. It departs from the argument that too often conversations about and against hate speech safely put the speakers on the right side of a divide: scholars and intellectuals critique and condemn discourses of hatred against minorities and disenfranchised communities, denouncing the violent speech and the anger of the powerful against the powerless. But both hatred and anger are central emotional qualities of the human mind, and in fact, we sometimes celebrate the rightful anger of the oppressed and of activists in the process of achieving justice and equality.

Free speech is a fundamental right sanctioned by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, stemming from the argument that the protected circulation of “more speech”, regardless of how disturbing or uncomfortable it may be, is in any case a healthy antidote to totalitarianism and censorship and that it is instrumental in the development of a civil society. Nonetheless, in some rare cases, the Courts have defended their authority to regulate it. Focusing on some landmark cases from the cultural history of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions, this article explores the intellectual premise that a democratic state should never limit speech on the basis of its content, but rather on the careful evaluation of its mode of production and its concrete consequences. This article offers an exploration into the significance of free speech regulation, and into the blurred space between speech and action, for our contemporary understanding of hate speech in an increasingly polarized and compartmentalized public sphere.

The Trouble with Trumpism: The Culture Wars for U.S. American Identity and the Normalization of Hate

Brad Bullock — 2024-10-29

Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger provides a historical context for understanding the recent, global rise of authoritarian populist movements – all of which ultimately turn on issues of national identity and are fueled by a language of hate that sanctions exclusion, violence, and social unrest. Mishra’s framework is useful for evaluating Trumpism: a U.S. sociocultural movement that is at once both a representative and a unique form of populism, and one already particularly disruptive to world order. And yet, Mishra’s paradigm only takes us so far. This paper contends that, in addition to tolerating or endorsing misogyny, racism, and xenophobia, the language of Trumpism emphasizes hatred of the factual truth, arguably the most dangerous form of hate speech. By employing a larger historical context, this analysis seeks to shed some light onto why – despite a bewildering series of political events – the U.S. faces a very real likelihood that Donald Trump, a convicted felon, could win the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

On Talking Back and Taking Back: Arab American Poetry and the Refusal to Comply

Marta Cariello — 2024-10-29

The Arab diaspora worldwide is extremely varied and articulated in myriad ramifications, intersections, and stratifications formed and informed by provenance, location, communal and personal experience, as well as overlapping identities and belongings. Racism and exclusionary logics, however, work in the erasure of complexity and through the extremely simple vocabulary – and discourse – of hate speech. The response to Arabophobic and Islamophobic attacks has been a dominating conversation in the Arab diaspora community, especially within the artworld, and perhaps even more strongly in the literary field. Deeply rooted in the constitutive racial politics of the US, the material and discursive assaults on Arabs and Muslims saw a turning point after the September 11^th 2001 attacks, growing into a deluge that has never stopped since, Poets and writers of the Arab diaspora have responded to such waves of hate speech and assaults producing some of the most interesting contemporary works of literature in English and in many other languages. However, the “obligation” to respond, or the “responsibility to educate” the Western audience has also become a terrain for critical reflection, with many authors affirming the wide spectrum of their experience and identity as – one could say – “decolonized” from the task of talking back, thus taking back instead word and speech, and possibly, then, disempowering the hate.

This paper will look specifically at the way the works of written- and spoken-word poets Mohja Kahf, Suheir Hammad, and Safia Elhillo, among others, trace stratified maps of re-significations, inventions, and palimpsests, claiming and re-claiming words and languages through and within community.

Stories of Anger and Hate: Constructing the Enemy in the Contemporary Indian Context

Esterino Adami — 2024-10-29

It is widely recognised that narratives do not merely reflect reality, but rather they construct it because they depict how the world is and “should” be, thus revealing authors’ intentions, hopes and beliefs. From such perspective, narratives are the building blocks of values and messages, and operate as a means for their circulation, endorsement and naturalisation, also spanning negative emotions like anger and hate, two paradigms that today in India emerge as dividing mechanisms across religious, social and cultural communities. Manifestations of hate, intolerance and communalism against minorities and diversity appear in the Indian scenario almost daily, and thanks to digital communication they are now pervasive and influential, in spite of legislative attempts to regulate the effects of their dynamics. Often, these stories provide an ideological and damaging prismatic hypervisibility of those subjects/communities that do not conform to mainstream standards since they discursively portray and expose them as figments of an “impossible” alterity.

Drawing on and combining notions and intuitions from critical stylistics, postcolonial criticism and media, this article aims to identify and discuss some of the strategies that underpin the affective language of anger and hate discourses, utilised to textually “demonise” the Other, and “invent the enemy”. This preliminary investigation draws materials from news coverage, in particular three stories involving a political leader, a Dalit worker and an urban activist, to show the pragmatic structures at work in the language of persuasion and exclusion. Specifically, I discuss how a strategic use of rhetorical aspects and figurative expressions can convey emotional force and vividness to spread and reinforce fanaticism, and ultimately create an enemy.

Resenting Other People’s Being: Narrating Pakistani Social Rivalry and Discontent in Faiqa Mansab’s This House of Clay and Water

Daniela Vitolo — 2024-10-29

Novels written in English by Pakistani authors frequently present a society based on a class system that makes social mobility challenging and that dictates economic and moral standards, status symbols and acceptable behaviour. Fiction is a medium for the portrayal of the effects of this socio-cultural environment on the individual, and for highlighting the tensions within a highly structured society. Narrated from the perspective of two women and a hijra, Faiqa Mansab’s novel This House of Clay and Water, shows how emotions such as resentment and anger arise and intensify in different environments that constitute Pakistani society while people face the challenges connected with the choice of obeying or resisting social rules.

Telling Stories Sideways. Resentment and Nostalgic (Be)longings in Mohsin Hamid’s Novels

Giuseppe De Riso — 2024-10-29

This article uses three novels by Mohsin Hamid – The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008), Exit West (2017) and The Last White Man (2022) – to describe how nostalgia is experienced in the contemporary world. In these novels, Hamid uses magical realism to portray nostalgia as a tension between dissatisfaction or resentment with a troubled present, often linked to the economic inequalities of capitalist society, and a longing for the restoration of an often idealised past in the future. The misleading appeal of nostalgia, which lures people into a comforting but false attachment to the past, can thus lead to resentment that justifies social discrimination, ethnic or religious violence, or economic exploitation. However, while providing a critical perspective on the restorative aspect of nostalgia, Hamid’s work also explores what Svetlana Boym (2001, 2007) defines as its “reflective” character. This dichotomy allows the reader to see that nostalgia is not only an escape into the past or an attempt to revive it, but can also be an inquiry into how to transform its lament into an elegy of growth and connection.

Negative Solidarities, the Perils of “Reading” and the Acts of Resistance of Books and Artworks

Anna Maria Cimitile — 2024-10-29

Over the centuries and across different cultures, books and artworks have been objects of acts of vandalism, violence or hate, ban and censorship. In those different forms, biblioclasm and iconoclasm are often caused by the fear of the oppositional force that specific books and artworks may pose to consolidated power structures, cultural tenets (which are often complicit with those structures), and moral frameworks of individuals and social groups. In this article I discuss contemporary examples of different forms of book- and art-hate to focus on how the “objects of hate” have in turn offered resistance to the acts of violence against them.

“Years and Years”: The Age of Anger and Sad Passions as Speculative Fiction

Rossella Ciocca — 2024-10-29

Years and Years is a speculative fiction in the form of a family drama. Following the lives of the Lyons, the six-part series takes place in the post Brexit England between 2019 and 2034. Fifteen years during which, while the family, tossed among economic instability and technological upheavals, faces a series of disparaging crises, on the whole Britain witnesses the quick deterioration of social hold, within an increasingly riotous global scene. This article introduces the relationship between speculative fiction and the Deleuzian notion of the sad passions to successively analyse the miniseries addressing three separate scenarios: technological, political and ethical. Through each of them the author of this experiment in social science fiction, the well-known Russell T. Davies, draws a chilling, collective descent into a universe of rage and chaos, a sort of generalized and accelerated Age of Anger (Mishra 2017). Positing the thorny question of individual accountability, Years and Years interrogates the cumulative effect of repeated single acts of indifference and intolerance and everyone’s shared complicity in the collapse of our worn out democracies.