Narrative Form and Palimpsestic Memory in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

Abstract

L’articolo esplora il romanzo di esordio di Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift (2019), attraverso la lente della ‘memoria del palinsesto’, individuando l’interconnessione tra memoria e migrazione. In primo luogo, si analizza il rapporto dialettico tra tempo eonico e alcuni elementi paratestuali che, nel tentativo di stabilire ordine e guidare il lettore, sembrano imitare ed evocare la stessa trama intricata del palinsesto. Quindi, si discute l’oscillazione tra narrazione extradiegetica e intradiegetica e l’uso del modello del romanzo multi-generazionale, mettendone in luce il carattere palinsestico in cui varie generazioni e storie diverse si intersecano, generando una spirale che rifrange le traiettorie multiple e invisibili del tempo. DOI : 10.17456/SIMPLE-159 Parole chiave Palimpsestic memory, migration, narrative form, postcolonial fiction, allegory. Bibliografia Basile, Giambattista. 2007 [1634]. Pentamerone . Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project . Cambridge (MA): Belknap Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1992. The World and the Home. Social Text , 31-32: 141-153. Booker, Keith M. 2009. The African Historical Novel. Abiola Irele ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 141-157. Creet, Julia. 2011. Introduction: The Migration of Memory and Memories of Migration. Creet, Julia & Andreas Kitzmann eds. Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies . Toronto: Toronto University Press, 3-25. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense . New York: Columbia University Press. Dery, Mark. 1994. Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delaney, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose. Mark Dery ed. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture . Durham: Duke University Press, 179-222. Doolittle, Hilda. 1968 [1926]. Palimpsest . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Erll, Astrid. 2017. Fictions of Generational Memory: Caryl Philips’s In the Falling Snow and Black British Writing in Times of Mnemonic Transition. Lucy Bond, Stef Craps & Peter Vermeulen eds. Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies . New York: Berghahn Books, 109-130. Heaney, Seamus. 2016. Aeneid Book VI . London: Faber & Faber. Owens, Craig. 1980. The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism. October , 13: 58-80. Quayson, Ato. 2009. Magic Realism and the African Novel. Abiola Irele ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 159-176. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 2019. Salman Rushdie Reviews a Sweeping Debut Novel about the Roots of Modern Zambia. The New York Times (March, 28), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/books/review/old-drift-salman-rushdie.html (consulted on 20/05/2020). Serpell, Namwali. 2014. The Sack. Ellah Wakatama Allfrey ed. Africa 39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara . London: Bloomsbury, 288-297. Serpell, Namwali. 2019a. Interview with Namwali Serpell. Big Echo , www.bigecho.org/interview-with-namwali-serpell (consulted on 25/05/2020). Serpell, Namwali. 2019b. The Old Drift . London: Penguin. Silverman, Max. 2013. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film . New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books. Slemon, Stephen. 1988. Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse. Canadian Literature , 116: 9-24. The 2015 Short List: Namwali Serpell. The Caine Prize for African Writing , http://caineprize.com/2015-caine-prize (consulted on 15/05/2020). Upstone, Sara. 2009. Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel . Farnham: Ashgate.