Ologrammi e stereotipi coloniali nell'opera di Harriet Martineau

Abstract

The volume aims at deepening the discoursive modalities through which Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) relates to the complex nature of the economic, political, social and cultural period in which she lives and identifying the interrelations and discontinuities her work shows with regard to the relationship the writer has with Alterity. Textual peripheries rather than what may be considered the centre of the literary domain, demonstrate how colonial representations follow the evolution of the economic and political pattern which marks the passage between commercial and industrial colonialism. Specifically, textual spaces belonging to the first half of the century establish what I identified as colonial holograms, altered representations of the colonized as they already were during the XIX century and which in optical physics are bi-dimensional images and hence irreal, given back to the human eye in through three-dimensional images but uniquely virtual, and that the writer offers to her readers as icons only seemingly dissonant with reference to those ones suggested by the hegemonic discoursivity. The texts produced during the second half of the century, on the contrary, show colonial figurations which overlap to the conventional colonial stereotype. The alleged re-articulation of the ontological and epistemological space occupied by the colonized, together with the stereotyped representations of the second half of the century, are actually aimed at fully supporting, from the discoursive point of view, the project of expansion and systematization of British colonialism.