2012 / 17 Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture straniere

The article analyzes the construction of space and the relations between identity and space in some novels by two Finnish writers representing religious and ethnic minorities. Daniel Katz (born in 1938) is considered as the first Jewish author writing in Finnish. He was rapidly spotted out as a writer with an original voice and an atypical perception of the world. Veijo Baltzar (born in 1942) is the first Finnish gypsy writer who managed to get published by a leading publishing house and to gain a large public outside of his own ethnic group. Drawing on Marc Augé’s theory of nonplaces, the article examines how Jewish and Gypsy identities in Katz’s and Baltzar’s works are questioned in relation to the major geopolitical transformations of the 20th century and the modernization of Finnish society in the 1950s and 60s, showing how sub-and transnational networks connect individuals with traditional communities engaged in a difficult process of redefinition and adaptation. The analysis contextualizes the novels within the tradition of Finnish literature and includes an overview of the construction of Finnish culture in the 19th century and the codifications of space and nation it produced.

Western Europe has often considered its eastern counterpart as a suspicious place populated by vampires, child-eaters and other monsters; in other words, part and parcel of Europe but at the same time a totally alien neighbour which still remains a fecund field of imaginary places. Plenty of examples support this cliché: one may think of Ruritania, where Anthony Hope’s novel is set, or of Allan Mellet’s Poldévie in "The Prisoner of Zenda", which appeared in the late 1920s on the right-wing newspaper "L’Action Française" and was later drawn on by less disputable writers. Also, other examples are provided by Hergé’s Tintin’s travels to Bordurie and Syldavie, and by the more recent travel guide Molvania: a land untouched by modern dentistry by the Australian trio, Santo Cialuro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch, which was published few years ago. All of these imaginary places raise some questions about the reasons underlying the success of these imaginary geographies, about why this part of Europe produces such a considerable amount of imaginary lands and the mutual influence existing between these places and “reality”.

As Phaswane Mpe’s novel "Welcome to our Hillbrow" (2001) convincingly shows, the crisis suffered by post-apartheid ideological discourses is intimately related to a crisis in the representation of spaces. As a matter of fact, the demise of the apartheid regime of racial segregation has not led to a completely new spatial organization, producing, rather, a multiplicity of boundaries which range from the apartheid model of the township to newly constituted “migrant ghettos” such as Hillbrow, in the heart of Johannesburg. While South African spatiality is interrogated by Mpe’s novel though issues such as inter-African migration, AIDS and persisting forms of prejudice and racism, a comparison between Mpe’s novel and Neill Bloemkamp’s blockbuster movie "District 9" (2009) hints at the permanence of corporate violence as a major cause for this political and economic failure, by connecting it to a global scenario.

This paper examines how the key 20th Century, Irish public intellectual, Sean O’Faolain, elaborates what we can term an “imaginative geography” in relation to the problematic issue of religious identity and its relationship to the universities in Ireland in the decades following independence. Using particularly the critical vocabulary of Edward Said around the tropes of exile and counterpoint, I will examine how O’Faolain deals with sectarian clashes in order to map a public space of democratic engagement in which strategies akin to Said’s idea of secularity, and appropriate to his “unhoused” model of intellectual participation in society, are employed to negotiate shifting, interconnected paths between the universities and religions. From such strategies we can adduce suggestive “secular,” spatial paradigms of consciousness which are neither moulded to fit in with the stasis of rural “authenticity” nor perpetually in desperate and always urgent pursuit of “mature,” non-contradictory and ultimately metropolitan identity.