Descrizione del progetto
Le narrazioni plurali offrono un quadro unificante dell’umanità
Il progetto Minor Universality, finanziato dall’UE, si basa sull’affermazione di Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie secondo cui una sola storia porta a interpretazioni errate. Nel suo TED Talk, la scrittrice nigeriana ha sostenuto l’idea che le narrazioni plurali offrono un’immagine più giusta e unificante dell’umanità. Parlando dell’impatto dell’universalismo occidentale sulle culture, il quale considera le idee occidentali come universali, la scrittrice ha sottolineato la sottorappresentazione di molte culture. Il progetto Minor Universality mira a contribuire al dialogo sull’universalità dopo l’universalismo occidentale. Il progetto studierà il ruolo della narrazione negli immaginari collettivi e si concentrerà su espressioni culturali quali la letteratura, il cinema e i social media.
Obiettivo
In her TED Talk 2009 the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made an argument on „the danger of a single story“. She maintained that only plural narrations do justice to the complexity of humankind: „Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.“ Thus narrations have the power to produce a unifying experience of equal humanity. Minor Universality aims to make a substantial contribution to the debate on the problem of universality after Western universalism. Indeed, the question of how universality can be produced is crucial in times characterised by a double relativistic signature: the necessary critique of Occidental universalism, and identitarian assertions. But how can a shared human horizon be addressed? Here general narratology provides a crucial twist: if it is an anthropological characteristic of the narration to make a claim about the world as a whole starting from a singular setting, narrations create ways of extending concrete contexts towards universality. This can be analyzed in literature, in an epistemic field beyond the book and in social practices being part of global migrations. In contrast to the conceptual debate on World Literature, which addresses the question through canons and legitimacies, this project shifts the debate to narratological problems of world production: with which aesthetic means do contemporary cultural productions such as literatures, films and social media, literary festivals, architectures and museums, open up local settings so as to produce a new sensuous, embodied or intellectual awareness of universality?
Re-expanding the material and medial turns to processes of consciousness and agency, the project is set to have a general impact in comparative literature and cultural studies. It will explore new literacies about the role of narration for civil imaginaries of our world and provide ways to address universality in debates about justice and legitimacy within world society.
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Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantIstituzione ospitante
66123 Saarbrucken
Germania