Manuela Esposito

Abstract

The theory of Nature by Baruch Spinoza, in his Ethics, is at the centre of a new critical and philosophical interest today: the contemporary rereadings of his philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri have reopened the horizon of Spinoza’s ethics, with a great influence on the numerous feminist reinterpretazions as those of Genevieve Lloyd, Moira Gatens, Elizabeth Grosz. Affects, body and materiality, proposed by Spinoza, become the core of the feminist criticism and of the feminine writing of diaspora: writers like Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff find out in his conception of Deus sive Natura a material and symbolic source to re-narrate and remember the feminine experiences, concealed by the patriarcal and colonial powers, through the elementary images of aerial/watery ghost, of garden and of fire. The natural elements, in their immanence, represent an alternative language to explore the issues of hybridity, displacement, memory, history, colonial past and diasporic present.

Manuela Esposito completed her PhD in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World at the University of Naples «L’Orientale», with a dissertation devoted to «Elemental Landscapes. Writing Natures of the Contemporary Feminine Diaspora». Her research explores the connections between the philosophical concept of Nature as elaborated by Baruch Spinoza in his Ethic, and the Caribbean diasporic feminine writing, in particular in the works by Helen Oyeyemi, Elizabeth Nunez, M.E. John and Andrea Levy. She has published  Is It Possible to Archive Nature? Practices of Feminine Memory («estetica. studi e ricerche», 1/2012), e Tales of Transit: Andrea Levy, Roshini Kempadoo and Julie Otsuka («Anglistica» 2013).