Antifascist geopoetics, anticolonial dissidence and feminism: engaging with Joyce Lussu’s transnational stories

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper addresses matters of anticolonialist, anti-fascist and feminist geopoetics, analysing a case that is virtually unknown to Anglophone geographical readerships, namely the transnational trajectories and literary works of Italian activist, writer and translator Joyce Lussu (1912–1998). Drawing upon recent literature on geopoetics and literary geographies that commit to produce and analyse ‘hybrid texts’, I extend and put in communication for the first time scholarship on antifascist transnational geographies and literature on decolonial and feminist geopoetics, by discussing Lussu’s exceptional biographical and literary experience, one that first shows the importance of coherence between life and texts. Lussu practiced plural, multilingual and transnational ways to construct (feminist and radical) non-elitist knowledge by taking part in anti-fascist exile and resistance in the 1930s and 1940s. Later, she supported ‘Third World’ anticolonial and revolutionary movements by translating and internationally circulating poems from politically committed authors, especially from Western Asia and Lusophone Africa. Finally, I contend that Lussu’s nonconformist feminism, that she understood as an inclusive antiauthoritarian notion for the construction of a renewed society by deconstructing masculine institutions such as the State, the Church and the Army, can speak powerfully to current debates on scholarly and political dissidences.