Mobilities and Mediterranean peripheries: Narrating Maltese identities in Vincent Vella’s Slippery Steps

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of European peripheries in contemporary postcolonial writing through a study of the centre–periphery relationship in the English-language novel Slippery Steps: A Maltese Odyssey (2011) by the Maltese writer Vincent Vella. The article argues that Vella’s novel is embedded in transnational mobility and shows that Maltese identity is constituted by constant movement between Malta and Britain, periphery and centre, as well as in interaction with other Mediterranean and European spaces. This reading of the novel suggests that its representation of Maltese identities is ambiguous. While the experience of mobility in the novel emphasizes the importance of contact zones as sites of hybridity in both the centre and the periphery, by locating its central characters in the contexts of diaspora and migration, the novel also shows how its diasporic identities signify trauma and loss, thus problematizing the centre–periphery relationship.