At the End of the World and Beyond

📅 When: March 21st and 22nd, 2024

📍 Where: Sala Napoleonica, via Sant’Antonio, University of Milan

For the academic year 2023-2024, C.H.A.I.N., in collaboration with the Research Center Geolitterae, is organizing the interdisciplinary conference At the End of the World and Beyond: Geographical and Textual Migrations.

The event: an interdisciplinary and multicultural focus on migrations

B. Barberis, Made in Romania, 2011

Intentionally interdisciplinary, this event offers a multifaceted perspective across various disciplines, from Literary Studies to Linguistics, from Cultural Studies to Geography, seeking to involve a broad spectrum of languages and viewpoints to enrich the reflection on what is indeed the most urgent topic of the present.

The exhibition Made in Romania by Barbara Barberis will explore the phenomenon of migration through the medium of photography.

Below is the program.


March 21st – Day 1

14:30-15:00 – Institutional Greetings

With the Rector Elio Franzini, the Director of the Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Mediations Marco Castellari, and the President of the School of Linguistic and Cultural Mediation Sciences Paola Catenaccio

15:00-16:00 – Keynote 1

Lidia De Michelis: “Making room for the human”: chronotopes of the hostile environment and poetics of crossing in some recent literature on migrations

Chair: Nicoletta Brazzelli

Coffee Break

16:30-18:30 – Panel 1

Chair: Moira Paleari

  • Marco Modenesi: An America between imagination and reality: the migrant gaze of Alain Mabanckou
  • Annarita Taronna: Acting with language: practices of inclusion and translation in migratory contexts marked by GBV (gender-based violence)
  • Federico Pozzoli: “Because the world is all interconnected”: immobility and global narrative networks in contemporary Arab fantasy
  • Nicoletta Brazzelli: Beyond borders: the desert in The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

March 22nd – Day 2

9:30-11:00 – Panel 2

Chair: Dino Gavinelli

  • Elena Ogliari: Beyond the fear of living? A journey through the short rewritings of “Eveline” by James Joyce
  • Andrea Meregalli: Memory and identity between the Faroe Islands and Denmark in the novel Ø by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen
  • Michael Lioi: Migrant knowledge: when the book dared to challenge the sugar cane. Reading La Panse du chacal by Raphaël Confiant

11:30-12:30 – Keynote 2

Giulia de Spuches: Summits, Vortices, Abysses. Mediterranean geographies of migration

Chair: Nicoletta Vallorani

Buffet Lunch

14:15-14:30: Presentation of photographic exhibition

Made in Romania by Barbara Barberis

14:30-16:30 – Panel 3

Chair: Laura Scarabelli

  • Paolo Caponi: Sì, viaggiare… A poem for other worlds
  • Elisabetta Di Minico: The migrant experience in superhero worlds: telling margins and otherness through the ninth art
  • Anna Pasolini: “A wonderful spiral”. Storytelling beyond the end of the world in The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
  • Nicoletta Vallorani: Of mothers and water. The poetics of return in African science fiction

16:30-17:00: Presentation of project

The journey of Roland Deschain in the Dark Tower saga: a transmedia analysis by Cecilia De Martino

Conclusions

With the participation of the students of the 2024 Geolitterae Workshop

Documents