Travelling Subjects: Women’s Writing, Mobility and Photography (original) (raw)

We live in a time obsessed by visual images: we remember, imagine and (re)construct places, objects, people, experiences and ourselves through images. Photographs, in particular, respond to our desire to stop the world, to frame and freeze it, to possess it and secure it in space and time. In particular, we are continually invited to take photographs through new optical and visual technologies, and to share them through social networks. Yet we live in an era of significant geographical mobility and displacement where notions of space, time and identity are also constantly called into question in relation to the way we perceive ourselves and others visually. By the recording, display and narration of personal and collective experiences of mobility (from a short walk to long-distance travels, even to migration), every day we are provoked and encouraged to experiment with new ways of seeing and being. What happens then when photographic products (traditional and digital) come to influence or complement tales of displacement? In what ways does the writing of present and past experiences of mobility reflect and respond to photographic images? How are issues such as identity, memory (and nation) expressed through the interlacing of written and photographic texts? And how does what we see photographically and then narrate, reflect gender-in particular female identity-and displacement? When we look at women's writing, attention to the gendered politics of exile, decolonization, migration and immigration has recently led scholars to explore issues on the transmission of experiences and memory across spatial and generational boundaries, as in the scholarly work by Keya Ganguly and Sonia Saldívar-Hull. Feminist work on nostalgia, memory, trauma and practices of oral history, often linked to issues of exile (and the 1 , among others. However, investigations focusing on women as both active and passive users of visual means-in particular photography-with regard to the questions of mobility in general, are still scarce, especially in Italian Studies. 2 Some examples of non-Italian authors who have been the object of recent investigation for the use of and reflections on visual images in their writing about experiences of migration and exile are W. G. Sebald author of Immigrants (1993), Oscar Hijuelos and his The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1994), as well as Yvonne Vera for her descriptions of (street and studio) photographs of Bulawayo (in South Africa) in Butterfly Burning (1998) and The Stone Virgins (2002). Within the Italian context, it is worth mentioning Younis Tawfik and his Il profugo (2006) as well as Ribka Sibhatu with his Aulò: Canto poesia dell'Eritrea (1998) illustrated by drawings attributed to the author and Marco Petrella, or the more sophisticated interlacing of visual aesthetics and writing in the books by Ornela Vorpsi.