Abstract
Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam, was born in Benghazi in 1927 into a family of Maronites from Aleppo and spent most of his life between Libya and Italy, speaking several languages and writing in Italian. He may be described as the “unsung” writer of Italian colonial and post-colonial past in North Africa. Spina’s oeuvre—collected in an omnibus edition, I confini dell’ombra. In terra d’oltremare (Morcelliana)—charts the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the Ottoman province, to 1966, when the country witnessed the economic boom sparked by the petrodollars. The cycle was awarded the Premio Bagutta, Italy’s highest literary accolade. In 2015, Darf Press published in English the first instalment of Spina’s opus with the title The Confines of the Shadows. In Lands Overseas. Spina always refused to be pigeonholed in some literary category and to be labeled as a colonial or postcolonial author. As a matter of fact, his works go beyond the spatial and imaginary boundaries of a given state or genre, emphasizing instead the mixing and collision of languages, cultures, identities, and forms of writing. Reading and re-discovering Spina in a transcultural mode brings to light the striking newness of his literary efforts, in which transnational lived life, creative imagination, and transcultural sensibility are inextricably interlaced.
Highlights
Writers with a neo-nomadic penchant, with complex cultural orientations, or engaged in transnational exchanges have become increasingly visible in the past decades
Most often than not, under the same roofs. It almost starts like a sort of dark Oriental tale, with a disfigured ogre and his 12-year-old new wife; it develops into the tragic story of two young lovers; and it reaches its climax by plunging itself into the midst of modern Libyan history, exposing the “forgotten” pages of Italian colonization in Northern Africa
The year is 1912 and Italy has just begun its colonial enterprise in North Africa, wrestling Libya’s eastern province of Cyrenaica from the Ottoman Empire
Summary
Writers with a neo-nomadic penchant, with complex cultural orientations, or engaged in transnational exchanges have become increasingly visible in the past decades Such authors eschew former narrow identitarian labeling, such as (im)migrant, colonial, postcolonial, ethnic, Commonwealth, or minority writers and can no longer be considered to belong primarily to a single (or original) national framework. Working at the level of the individual, transculture/ality takes on a plurality of forms (as many forms as there are individuals); as such, it is a dimension which can be accessed by multiple entry points and engaged in different ways and circumstances. As Epstein claims, in relation to our present, transculture “differs from both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism” ([7], p. 327)
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