La doppia subalternità della donna postcoloniale. L'immaginazione come risorsa per una nuova politica culturale

Abstract

Colonization, or rather, colonizations left their indelible marks on the “dominated” people, not only in political, economic and cultural terms but also on their identities. The Western Powers, getting in touch with colonized people, generated mirror images of themselves, stereotypes persisting over the years, objects created by the ruling culture that took the real subjects’ place, who became silent and invisible. Influence on women has been so deep that it assumed the features of irreversibility, by virtue of that double subalternity – both racial and sexual – that makes the female subject, particularly the native woman, the object of a double exclusion from the language, and so, from all the (auto)representations. From this point of view, western feminism also showed its limits as regards its relationships with other women who have often been thought as unlucky sisters to save and to give voice, thus perpetuating a relation of subordination where the privileged look is the western one to“his” others, the women above all.
In this research, starting from postcolonial studies and critique – that have always considered the imagination as a significant element for the relation between representation and violence – and particularly from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Assia Djebar’s works – concerning subaltern women’s silence and unperformability – imagination represents an essential resource that, if is opportunely trained, can offer new possibilities both to recover, although partially, women’s stories and identities– and also to generate a shared space, created both by the representation work and by the representation itself. In that space it is possible to meet the Others.
Our hypothesis is that if we consider the use of imagination not only aesthetic but also ethicalpolitical we can approach a new cultural horizon placed between the past and the future – and that for this we define “postcolonial” – where change both the concept of representation and the image of the dominant thought. Imagination makes a new cultural politics possible that emphasizes the native woman and not the dominated woman: subject who speaks and produces signs, simple echos sometimes, the only possibilities to a new selfrepresentation.

Keywords: imagination, postcolonial, subalternity, representation, politics
Parole chiave: immaginazione, postcoloniale, subalternità, rappresentazione, politica