Marta Cariello

Abstract

Stuart Hall’s relationship with literature has deep roots, from his (unfinished) PhD studies in English Literature, to the ambition of becoming himself a creative writer, as admitted by Hall in various interviews. However, as his theorizations went on to focus on other aspects of the relations between culture and politics, literature seemed to disappear, or at least to be marginalized in Hall’s critical thought. Yet, the «unpredictability of ideas», which Hall considered in a relation of mutual determination with the economic domain, rendered literature a fundamental element of his critical theory, along with other forms of textuality. Indeed, Hall’s theorizations are strongly focused around the symbolic and could not therefore discount literature among the different forms of textuality it analyzed. Hall’s analyses in this sense, however, do not regard literature as object, but rather imply the use and study of the semantic and symbolic depth of words, with their political weight, which is always, also, an aesthetic weight.

Marta Cariello, Ph.D., is a research fellow in English Literature at Università di Napoli II, Italy. She has published on postcolonial literature and cultural translation, with a specific focus on Anglophone Arab women writers. Her latest volume is Scrivere la distanza. Uno studio sulle geografie della separazione nella scrittura femminile araba anglofona (Liguori, 2012); in 2007 she also translated James Procter’s Stuart Hall (Routledge Critical Thinkers, 2004) into Italian for Raffaello Cortina Editore. Her current research focuses on poetry by women of the Palestinian diaspora, multilingualism as a feminist strategy of identity discursive formation, and the cultural construction of revolution.