Suchergebnisse

In one of his Treatises on Government, John Locke stated that «every Man has a Property in his own Person». The complex articulation of this apparently matter-of-fact argument has haunted the Western cultural imaginary, and has been transformed into numerous literary texts and figures. Ever since Mary Shelley started investigating an ante-litteram Foucauldian «unfolding»of life, the issues related to the «immortalization of the flesh and the amortization of the body»have become growingly relevant. In this paper, I shall aim at investigating the literary versions of the biopolitics of owning and disowning bodies, of ageing and dying offered by Kazuo Ishiguro, namely in his celebrated Never Let Me Go, and by Hanif Kureishi, who dedicated his novella "The Body" to an interrogation of the marketable value of human bodies and body parts.

The wreck and subsequent mutiny of the VOC Batavia happened in 1629 off Western Australia mainland, became one of the Australian founding myths, and triggered many heated discussions about the concepts of nation, identity and cultural heritage. In European eyes, Australia was a land of exotic adventures and possible utopia, but also the land of very real and quite invasive encounters whose traces are dispersed in the collective memory of the native tribes. British Australia came into existence in 1770, when Captain Cook disembarked in Botany Bay and choose it as the ideal place for a settlement. The Batavia case and the textual and documental apparatuses linked to it trigger a series of discourses and reflections on concepts and ideological practices, such as nation, historical and cultural heritage, authenticity and identity politics. From institutional webpages, to history books and documentary films, from adult and juvenile fiction to opera and radio drama, the story of the Batavia has gone through a process of continuous rewriting. The essay focuses on texts, icons, and objects which capture and manipulate a supposedly documental history and refashion it into a source of continuous reverberations.