Periodic Reporting for period 1 - POLITICALLIFEWRITING (MASS POLITICAL LIFE WRITING)
Reporting period: 2015-09-01 to 2017-08-31
My work takes into account these two political movements as case studies to examine how autobiography works as a political means of self-transformation and emancipation. How did communists use the autobiographical practice? How did feminists employ this practice? Was there a common autobiographical mechanism both communism and feminism were exploiting to their political aims? What is the difference between communist and feminist self-enunciation?
My research project has attempted to answer these questions in order to shed a new light on differences and similarities between old and new left cultures in the 20th century by using autobiography as an innovative way to interpret them. Moreover, the study of these two autobiographical culture focussed on self-enunciation as a way to emancipate individuals – working class members and women – will help us to have a better understanding of the culture we live in with its emphasis on the self and its right to tell and express itself.
My investigation is rooted in the European past to comprehend the present – or at least some facets of it – of European culture, by focusing on a transnational phenomenon such as autobiography as a means to build our present political and social identity.
My research activity has been strictly coupled with sustained activities disseminate my findings. My commitment has not only been towards academy and scholars, but towards the general public as well. To this aim, I have organized two autobiographical readings of political autobiographical materials in London (UK) and in Genoa (Italy) with the assistance of actors and theatre practitioners. I have also met more than a hundred final year students of the Liceo Giandomenico Cassini (Genoa), one of the best Italian grammar schools, to present my research and its results.
First, it establishes a unitary interpretive frame both for communist and feminist self-enunciation. The latter is represented by the concept of paradoxical autobiographical injunction which combines the idea of paradoxical injunction as developed in the field of the pragmatics of communication with the definition of autobiography, according to which the autobiographical form is characterised by the identity between author, narrator and character. Communist and feminist autobiography are considered not only as documents or literary texts. Rather, they are regarded as discursive mechanisms through which militants attempt to change themselves in order to create their new political self. However, this work on the self is endless: the autobiographical injunction is paradoxical, for it is a command that is impossible to fulfil. Becoming a real communist or feminist is thus impossible, but this impossibility has a performative value, making those identities possible. This conclusion also serves to broaden the idea of political performativity as developed in the works of Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau.
Second, the concept of autobiographical paradoxical injunction is also vital o a better understanding of the well-known feminist claim that “the personal is political”. This claim is not only a political stance; it also produces specific textual strategies that identify different ways of constructing the feminist political self to challenge male discursive power. To this aim, Italian second-wave feminists have adopted three separate strategies in their autobiographical accounts: they used a schizophrenic discourse together with paranoid and catatonic self-writing, and in so doing, they trespassed the traditional boundaries of autobiography in search of a new female and human identity.
In conclusion, my research impinges on important facets of European civilisation. It not only reconsiders a recent part of its history from a different perspective, but also focus on one specific element, the forging of individual identity, which is quintessential to the constitution of the collective cultural identity. The latter is a crucial issue in order for European people to have a long and peaceful cohabitation on the continent.