Mario Domenichelli’s Lugemalé: Heart ofDarknesss revisited in Post-colonial Italy
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Franco Manai
Abstract
Mario Domenichelli’s novel Lugemalé is set in the late 1980s and early2000s, between Rome and Somalia. The book follows the narrator,Valerio, as hereads, in the early 2000s in Rome, the typescript of a novel written by a friend,Tomas, before his mysterious death in Mogadishu. Tomas’ novel describes theevents which took place in 1989 at the end of the Siad Barre regime, when Italywas still committed to fulfilling its responsibilities as an ex-colonial power,through major projects of cooperative development. Both Valerio and Tomas wereemployed by the Italian government’s Development Cooperation Agency as lecturersat the University of Mogadishu. In his narration, Tomas merges his ownexperiences with Valerio’s, through the main characters of Gigi and Marco. In acomplex play of mirrors (a novel within a novel, a reading of a tale within the taleof a reading) that reveals the ambiguities and contradictions of both characters,Lugemalé is merciless in its judgment of the generation of Europeans whobecame the ruling class of the 1980s. Such a post-colonial adventure offers apowerfully alienating perspective for the representation, post res perditas, of the vanishing of that class’s commitment to changing the status quo and breakingwith a capitalist society based on the most depraved and egoistic consumerism.
© 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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- Euripides’ Medea und die stoischeAffektenlehre
- Die globale Dichtung des Orlando Furioso
- Negotiating Ethnic Difference in RestorationTravel Fiction
- Patriotism and Bellicism in German and Dutch Epics of the Enlightenment
- Singbarer Rest: Celans phänomenologische Poetologie
- Valérys Namen: Der Status des Lesers in derpoésie pure
- The Grand Narrative Revisited;Contemporary Flemish Novelists Take Up theChallenge to Create Plots of the Flat World
- Der neue Diamant: Verfremdungseffekte bei E. S. Özdamar
- Mario Domenichelli’s Lugemalé: Heart ofDarknesss revisited in Post-colonial Italy
- The Narrative Rhetoric in Léa Silhol’s La Tisseuse: Contes de Fées, contes de Failles
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- Achim Hölter (Hrsg.): Comparative Arts. Universelle Ästhetik im Fokus derVergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft. (Beiträge zur XIV. Tagung der DeutschenGesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. Münster:26.–28. November 2008), Heidelberg: Synchron 2011, 433 Seiten
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- Liedeke Plate: Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting.Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 239 pages
- Ginette Verstraete: Tracking Europe. Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics ofLocation. Durham/London: Duke UP 2010, 224 pages
- L. Papadima, D. Damrosch, T. D’Haen (eds.): The Canonical Debate Today:Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi,2011, 355 pages
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Euripides’ Medea und die stoischeAffektenlehre
- Die globale Dichtung des Orlando Furioso
- Negotiating Ethnic Difference in RestorationTravel Fiction
- Patriotism and Bellicism in German and Dutch Epics of the Enlightenment
- Singbarer Rest: Celans phänomenologische Poetologie
- Valérys Namen: Der Status des Lesers in derpoésie pure
- The Grand Narrative Revisited;Contemporary Flemish Novelists Take Up theChallenge to Create Plots of the Flat World
- Der neue Diamant: Verfremdungseffekte bei E. S. Özdamar
- Mario Domenichelli’s Lugemalé: Heart ofDarknesss revisited in Post-colonial Italy
- The Narrative Rhetoric in Léa Silhol’s La Tisseuse: Contes de Fées, contes de Failles
- Brian Boyd: On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction.Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010,540 Seiten
- Simona Bartoli Kucher/Dorothea Böhme/Tatiana Floreancig (Hrsg.): Das Subjektin Literatur und Kunst. Festschrift für Peter V. Zidma. (Unter Mitwirkung v. BrigittePappler). Tübingen: Francke, 2011, 429 Seiten
- Sebastian Donat: Deskriptive Metrik. (Reihe Comparanda.Literaturwissenschaftliche Studien zu Antike und Moderne). Innsbruck/Wien/Bozen: StudienVerlag, 2010, Band 15, 180 Seiten
- Sabine Becker, Robert Krause (Hg.): Exil ohne Rückkehr, Literatur als Mediumder Akkulturation nach 1933. München: edition text+kritik 2010, 338 Seiten
- Achim Hölter (Hrsg.): Comparative Arts. Universelle Ästhetik im Fokus derVergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft. (Beiträge zur XIV. Tagung der DeutschenGesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. Münster:26.–28. November 2008), Heidelberg: Synchron 2011, 433 Seiten
- Alvin H. Rosenfeld: The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress 2011, 328 pages
- Liedeke Plate: Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting.Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 239 pages
- Ginette Verstraete: Tracking Europe. Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics ofLocation. Durham/London: Duke UP 2010, 224 pages
- L. Papadima, D. Damrosch, T. D’Haen (eds.): The Canonical Debate Today:Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi,2011, 355 pages
