Immaginazione e memoria dopo l'11 settembre

"Remembering Bodies in the Borderlands" is a meditation by Clark on the life history narrative of Ferouz Abba-si, a Ugandan born British citizen who migrates to Afghanistan from London in 2000 after his conversion to Islam in a refugee camp on the borders of Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. Abassi, turned into U.S. militari in Kandahar by Afghans looking for bounty in December 2001, is imprisoned in Guantanamo from 2002 through 2005. Clark explores the differences between how Abbasi narrates his life story before, during and after his detention and torture as evidence of the losses he experienced as a result of his imprisonment, with particular reference to the memory of the body as expressed through visual memory. Through her analysis of the injuries to body and psyche Abbasi experienced, Clarks reveals the impact of the U.S. policies of detention, interrogation and the suppression of the rule of law on Muslim immigrants and migrants who were captured as suspected terrorists in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

Alsar Mahmood, an Indian-born legal U.S. resident, was taken into custody after taking a photograph of a sunset in the Catskills that included a water reservoir in the distance. Suspected of terrorism, he was held and interrogated; when his total innocence became evident, he was framed with the charge of abetting his co-worker who had overstayed his visa. While such offences usually only lead to mild sanctions, if any, Mahmood was held in jail for months and, in spite of a campaign for his release, expelled with no possibili-ty of return.

Drawing on his experiences as an interviewer for the Columbia University Oral History Center's September 11th Narrative and Memory project, the author investigates the long aftermath of the events of September 11th. He describes the incremental militarization of American society and the implications of that incremental change for how the past will be remembered and what the future might look like. The author discusses the fine line between the responsibility of the journalist and the responsibility of the oral historian at a time of terrorism-related disaster. He speaks with paramedics, a member of an Urban Search and Rescue team, police officers and others for whom the likelihood of a future catastrophic attack is taken for granted. The essay argues for the urgent need to preserve a broad range of experiences - not just those directly related to disaster of individuals and of cities. In order for a society not to become completely militarized, it must be in constant and unrestricted dialogue with its past.

This article examines the music of The Psycho Realm, a Los Angeles based hip-hop group in the context of crisis, moral panics over terror(isms), and the deadly use of force by the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division. The duo, Joaquin Gonzalez (aka Jacken) and Gustavo Gonzalez (aka Duke) were raised in the Pico-Union District of Los Angeles and witnessed the contradictions of a racialized class struggle, the repressive state apparatus, and the everyday forms of crisis it has produced. Their music provides a radical critique of the criminal (in)justice system and the LAPD. Alongside their critique, their music also delineates an alternative social vision against "the new world order." Like its predecessor, the Blues, hip-hop has served as a tradition of investigation, interpretation, and social critique that groups such as The Psycho Realm have embodied. Blues scholar and geographer Clyde Woods has argued that hip-hop is a "Blues Revival Movement." Taking his lead, this article contends The Psycho Realm has contributed to this Blues revival movement through their experiences in a predominately Central American and Mexican migrant community and the long history of racialized class violence in Los Angeles and the increased militarized policing emerging in the post-September 11 era.

Oral history raises questions about the relationship between subjectivity and history - particularly the role memory plays in understanding what historical events mean to human subjects who experience them. Can empathy enable folk performers and artists to represent what they have never experienced but only heard of? Focussing on a living performance and painting tradition in India which has since 9/11 painted and performed about the event, this article asks in what ways can oral traditions be used as resources to understand the relationship between experience and memory and thus point towards a diffe­rent understanding of events and their interpretations.

This article focuses on the iconic function of the Kalashnikov rifle and the romantic mythology that surrounds it, as it appears in the pictorial war rugs produced in Afghanistan since the 1970s and as described by the rugs displayed in an exhibition Tappeti di Guerra recently held in Bologna. Its silhouette embodies an avant-garde, modernist design, which, starting from the 1950s onward, has become a symbol of all sorts of rebellions, despite the fact that, technically speaking, the rifle was by then already obsolete. The Kalashikov enjoyed a special success in Afghanistan, where is has been the most popular weapon since the anti-soviet guerrilla war to the post 9/11 war. It is no surprise, then, that it figures prominently in the pictorial war rugs, where it is a powerful artistic symbol, which resonates with a centuries-old cultural tradition, and extends well beyond the borders of its realistic, mimetic function. Igiaba Scego 9/11 and the Obelisk of Axum: Remember in order to Forget In this article, the author, born in Rome from Somali parents, offers a personal and reflective account of a special place of this city. While walking in its streets, Igiaba Scego is irresistibly driven to piazza Capena. There, she finds a memorial of the 9/11 terrorist attack, placed as a tribute to its victims and a symbol for peace. But she feels that something is out of place, that something else is missing in this square. She then comes to realize that what is missing in Piazza Capena is the memory of the violence perpetrated by Italian colo-nialism in Africa. A violence symbolized by the obelisk of Axum which, stolen from the Ethiopians by Mussolini as a sign of his power, characterized the landscape of piazza Capena from 1937 to 2005 when it was returned to Ethiopia. The replacement of that monument with the Twin Towers memorial is a highly problematical and controversial act of memory, for in denouncing the brutality of the Twin Tower's attack, it also simultaneously effaces the memory of the brutality suffered by the victims of Italian colonialism in Africa.

In this article, the author, born in Rome from Somali parents, offers a personal and reflective account of a special place of this city. While walking in its streets, Igiaba Scego is irresistibly driven to piazza Capena. There, she finds a memorial of the 9/11 terrorist attack, placed as a tribute to its victims and a symbol for peace. But she feels that something is out of place, that something else is missing in this square. She then comes to realize that what is missing in Piazza Capena is the memory of the violence perpetrated by Italian colonialism in Africa. A violence symbolized by the obelisk of Axum which, stolen from the Ethiopians by Mussolini as a sign of his power, characterized the landscape of piazza Capena from 1937 to 2005 when it was returned to Ethiopia. The replacement of that monument with the Twin Towers memorial is a highly problematical and controversial act of memory, for in denouncing the brutality of the Twin Tower's attack, it also simultaneously effaces the memory of the brutality suffered by the victims of Italian colonialism in Africa.

This paper offers a reflection on the impact of major social currents on students' choices as regards international education, arguing that the commodification of higher education in the U.S.A. has significantly affected students' educational goals, their choice of international programs, and the outcomes of their experience abroad. The paper first examines relevant aspects of commodification in contemporary American institutions, discussing their impact on the expectations of students. Then it considers the characteristics of these students as defined in the empirical research on generational cohorts, and the ways they affect their understanding of themselves and their opportunities. Finally, it points to specific choices that demonstrate the ways in which students seek to conform to what they see as desirable goals in the market-oriented climate of higher education in the 21st century.

Deeply religious, preoccupied with moral and spiritual problems but, at the same time, interested in the grotesque and the bizarre, Flannery O'Connor published Wise Blood in 1952. It describes the reverse pilgrim's progress of a young ex-soldier, Haze Motes, towards his goal of a Church Without Christ, a mission that compels him to accept the martyrdom he is actively repudiating. From the very beginning, O'Connor has borrowed characters, plots, and themes from the Bible which, in an almost unique way, she places in her contemporary Christ-haunted South. Specifically, this article examines the influence of the Old Testament upon O'Connor's first book. The close reading takes note of the largely explicit ways in which Wise Blood is grounded in Old Testament theology, and looks more particularly to the ways in which the story is figuratively, as well as metaphorically, driven by specific Old Testament texts which the writer similarly distorts, exaggerates, and subverts. Discarding the formal experimentalism of the Joyce-Woolf-Faulkner school, O'Connor considered herself a direct literary descendant of the American romance tradition, attuned to the dark side of human nature; but the darkness of her conclusions is illuminated by her belief in mystery and in mysterious salvation, personally expressed in passionate, traditional Catholicism.

Ulla Haselstein's survey essay juxtaposes three distinct historical scenarios. In her analysis of Poe's story The Man of the Crowd, she focuses on coolness as a performance of aesthetic detachment and on its negative evaluation as a menacing lack of emotion, which together form the matrix of twentieth-century ambivalent notions of coolness. The second part of her essay discusses the well-known mid-twentieth century "birth of the cool", a fusion of African-American cool, jazz culture, and European bohemian traditions as represented in Kerouac's cult novel On the Road. In conclusion, she discusses coolness as propagated by the global fashion and entertainment industry against the backdrop of her earlier findings.