Entanglements. Postcolonial Transtextual Dialogues

About

The Summer School is intended to foster a dialogue “between and beyond” literary texts,
“between and beyond” the diverse souls of the Postcolonial (and Decolonial) involving
Environmental Studies, Ecofeminism, Queer and Posthuman Studies, in an attempt to unlock new
opportunities to understand the “contemporary extreme”.
Building on a reflection on the literary text, as well as on the postcolonial cultural object more
broadly —which by its very nature calls for transdisciplinarity and cooperation among different
spheres of knowledge— we aim to equip participants with the necessary tools so as to adequately
frame their presence in the ‘narrative’ of globalization within a critical perspective.
Plenary talks by leading international scholars hailing from different spheres of knowledge will be
followed by workshops enabling participants to put the acquired insights into practice. The lingua
franca of the School will be English, although workshops will be provided in Spanish and Italian, as
well. On the last day, a feedback session will be held for participants to mingle and share their
research projects with tutors.
The initiative is intended for Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD students, as well as researchers and
activists. In addition to providing the acquisition of 4 European Credits, the four-day attendance
will serve as an introduction and a facilitated access (Summer Term) to the Postcolonial,
Afro-descendant and Global South Cultures programs offered by the Master’s Degree Course in
European and American Languages and Literature (LM-37).
The School falls within the third line of action addressing the phenomena of literary
transculturation in the global era as envisaged by the 2023-2027 ‘Digital and cross-cultural
TRANSmission of TEXTs (TRANSTEXT)’ Project of Excellence, which the Department of Linguistic
and Literary Studies received funding for from the Ministry of Culture.

The 2026 edition of the Summer School is centered on Postcolonial Horrors and aims to explore
horror as an aesthetic, political, and epistemological symbol through which postcolonial literatures
stage the traumatic memories of colonization, identity tensions, diasporic movements, and the
re-emergence of the spectral within global modernities. The goal is to interpret horror not only as
a genre, but as a critical and deconstructive tool capable of destabilizing ethnocentric categories of
subjectivity, body, sovereignty, and knowledge.
Learning objectives:
● Examine horror as a poetics of resistance to colonial violence and its contemporary
legacies;
● Investigate the relations among the monstrous, historical trauma, and cultural memory;
● Provide theoretical and critical tools for the comparative analysis of postcolonial literatures;
● Promote transcultural dialogue.
Thematic areas:
● Spectrality and necropolitics;
● The monstrous in the diaspora of racialized identities;
● Wounded bodies, gender violence, and biopolitics;
● The Monsterocene, New Weird, and New Gothic.

Target group

Target: Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD students
Minimum number of participants: 20
Maximum number of participants: 40

Fee info