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Derek Walcott wrote that "History is sea": sailing, as a movement, goes beyond the borders and in the postcolonial narratives the transatlantic is a powerful symbol of the transnational space. The essay wants to analyse the images of the marine world, of the ocean and especially of the ship, the transatlantic as the fundamental and chronotopic figure of the postcolonial theories, particularly in relation to the delineation of a contemporary cultural and global reality as a transnational space in which take shape political and aesthetical expressions that challenge the modern conceptions on nationality, ethnicity and on cultural authenticity. The theories on postcolonialism by Paul Gilroy and Édouard Glissant are here examined. Gilroy considers the ship that moves through the archipelagos as the representation of the instability and the mutability of identities that are in perpetual development, since the ship's movement is transversal, not linear, and it crosses the "Black Atlantic", transmitting multicultural, hybrid ideas during its journey. Édouard Glissant is the theorist of the 'Antillanité' as the place of choice for the crossing of different cultures in the French-speaking Caribbean, and moves from his vision of the American and Caribbean landscape towards a broader, global identity.

The paper analyses the study of translation as a cultural phenomenon in the wider context of cultural studies. The first part investigates the position of translation as a cultural practice, with reference to the main critical voices that have put translation in relation with other cultural issues, such as gender, postcolonialism, diaspora. The second part analyses the specific case of Brian Friels play Translations, as an example of translation as a cultural practice, because of the political, linguistic and social implications that translation has in this writing.

Sky Lee is one of ethnic writers who dare to challenge the long-run silence of marginalized group, by the means of writing in English about historical experience of her community. Her book, Disappearing Moon Café which was published in Vancouver in 1990, immediately caught the public attention and won the City of Vancouver Book Award while being nominated the Governor General's Literary Award. Lee, as a female writer, cares very much about females' struggle for identity from one generation to the next. With the influence of postcolonialism and women's movements, identity became more and more concerned by the minority groups. Postcolonialists hold that women from the Third World countries are under the dual oppressions. On the one hand, they are subjected to racial and cultural discrimination under Euro-American dominated society; on the other hand, they suffer from gender prejudice in both white hegemony and patriarchal doctrines. For more than one century of racial discrimination and segregation, Chinese Canadians have been on the brink of mainstream society. Whereas the females have a crueler condition as they are the victims of being marginalized from racism and gender prejudice simultaneously. In Disappearing Moon Cafe, all female characters have suffered self-loss to some extent. Therefore, how to construct its own identity becomes an urgent problem that needs to be solved. This thesis will introduce the living conditions of Chinese Canadian women and the identity crisis they encounter by the means of rereading the novel Disappearing Moon Cafe. Based on the theories of postcolonialism, feminism and other identity theories, this thesis will conduct a multi-dimensional study on the self-identification of Chinese Canadian women through the in-depth analysis and study of the novel Disappearing Moon Cafe. Mainly divided into two parts, it focuses on how Chinese Canadian women form their own identities in terms of cultural and gender perspectives. First of all, being aware of the conditions they are in, Chinese Canadians have to trace back to their origin and gain power from their own profound traditional culture while challenging and resisting the cultural hegemony in Canadian society. They should rediscover the silent history of its own ethnic culture and aware the great contribution the ancestors made to the development of Canada. Canadian born ethnic Chinese are easy to get confused for self-identity as they are not accepted by white race on account of physical appearance while being considered as not pure Chinese at the same time. Thus, they have to find a comfort in the marginalized state and establish the unique hybrid culture. Secondly, the prejudice toward females demands for a solution. This thesis summarizes three necessary approaches for the establishment of female identity by analyzing the image of women in Disappearing Moon Café: gaining for political, vocational and educative rights while awakening of female consciousness as well as breaking silence through female discourse. Nowadays, equality between races and sexuality is becoming increasingly important. While marginalized groups are receiving more attention in literature field, it is of great historical and practical significance to study the Chinese Canadian women's experiences in the mainstream culture of Canada while to explore their identity formation in both cultural and sexual perspective.

On tracing the radical revisionism of American Studies' cultural and methodological paradigms, this intervention will specifically investigate the multicultural and transnational turn of the field, whose material and conceptual boundaries have been increasingly confronting other extra-national literary traditions, such as those from the Indian subcontinent. The relationship between the USA and the postcolonial diasporas from India and Pakistan resounds with the political and intellectual Asian American experience of the Sixties and the Seventies, and configures a literary space that simultaneously addresses the migratory flows from many South Asian countries in the last decades of the previous century, as well as globalization's challenges: citing works by first and second generation South Asian American writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, I will highlight the complex intercultural dialogue that these authors entertain with multiple linguistic and national collectivities. Keywords: literary multiculturalism in the USA; Indian diaspora; Asian American literature; postcolonialism ; Tracciando le linee storiche del ripensamento radicale dei paradigmi culturali e metodologici alla base degli studi americani, il seguente intervento prenderà in considerazione la dimensione multiculturale e transnazionale di un'americanistica i cui confini reali e concettuali si interfacciano con altre tradizioni letterarie extra-nazionali, come quelle provenienti dal subcontinente indiano. Il rapporto tra gli Stati Uniti e le diaspore postcoloniali dall'India e dal Pakistan, che si snoda attraverso l'esperienza politica e intellettuale asiaticoamericana degli anni '60 e '70, riconfigura un panorama letterario che risponde simultaneamente ai fenomeni migratori degli ultimi decenni del XX secolo e alle sfide della globalizzazione: citando opere di autori di prima e seconda generazione sud asiaticoamericana, come Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee e Jhumpa Lahiri, metterò in evidenza il complesso dialogo interculturale che questi autori e le loro opere intrattengono con multiple tradizioni linguistiche e realtà nazionali. Parole chiave:multiculturalismo letterario negli Stati Uniti; letteratura asiatica americana; diaspora indiana; postcolonialismo