Soggetti transnazionali e identità interculturali: il viaggio e il Sud Globale

The Global South is a dynamic cultural and political spatiality characterised by complex intercultural relations and signifying practices. According to Xnour Dados and Raewyn Connell, “[t]he use of the phrase Global South marks a shift from a central focus on development or cultural difference toward an emphasis on geopolitical relations of power”(Dados and Connel 2012, 12). Therefore, the Global South is not just a material entity or a geographical location which can be portrayed and visualised in maps and states, but is also a complex and multilayered sociocultural category. Its borders, which are porous and shifting, have been discursively inscribed within a sociocultural and geopolitical framework which demands a recognition of its complexities and variations. Moreover, the concept of Global South has also been thoroughly and consistentlyinterrogated beyond its physical, geographical and political lines,in order toexplore numerous contact zones, which can be considered as sites of colonial encounterand postcolonial dislocation. In the articles that make up the second part of this issue of degenere, the Global South is posited as a highly contested terrain. Scholarly interrogations of this terrain have fostered a number of different positions and interpretations; theyhave also focussed on a variety of itineraries that are at the same time geographical and metaphorical, political and personal, subjective and collective, local and global. The authors and texts here discussed engage with different geographical contexts and decades of the second half of the 20thcentury by critically exploring the “contact zones”between cultures, literatures and languages from theoretical, methodological and thematic perspectives in the Global South. Discussions explore contexts ranging from Nigeria to the UK and the US, from Russia to the States, from Morocco to Paris. All of them question and tackle crucial issues such as displacement,diaspora, identity construction between and beyond national boundaries, gender, class, race, exile, from a wide range of theoretical positions and through recourse to a critical examination of a variety of literary and non-literary genres.