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Review of 'Rosso come una sposa' by Anilda Ibrahimi Ibrahimi writes in swift sentences that mirror the simple, yet tortured, living of her characters, whilst giving voice to the complexities of human relationships – a fine balancing act between the innocence of young voices and the weight of words passed down through bodies that carry their pasts. by Alice Flinta 4 April 2025 Review: Ibrahimi, Anilda. Rosso come una sposa. (Torino: Einaudi, 2008) What do we make of the memories and stories we gather throughout generations, passed down so many times that not only truth becomes undiscernible from the inevitable pepping up, but that the distinction itself loses importance? Well, a good pen weaves stories and opens portals onto lives that aren’t our own; a compelling pen crafts narratives that trap their readers in the weaving, and the lives that aren’t theirs, magically, could be so. Rosso come una sposa , meaning “Red as a Bride” or, I may suggest, “Bride Red”, is Albanian-born writer Anilda Ibrahimi’s debut novel. Originally published in Italian in 2008, the book is available in French (La mariée était en rouge , translated by Maïra Muchnik, 2013) and German (Rot wie eine Braut , translated by Franziska Kristen, 2011). It tells the story of an Albanian family through the lives of four generations of women, as narrated by the youngest, Dora, who is the amplifier for the polyphony of voices that came before her. The novel, chronologically set, is divided into two sections, and further into brief chapters: in the first part, narrated in the third person, we meet the older representatives of the family, Dora’s great-grandmother Meliha and grandmother Seba; while the second part is narrated in the first person and revolves around Klementina, the narrator’s mother, and Dora herself. The title refers to the novel’s opening sequence where a fourteen-year-old Seba is being helped dismounting a horse, wearing a red wedding dress, “come il sangue. Come un sacrificio umano dato in dono agli dèi per propiziare la pioggia. Come una sposa” [like blood. Like a human sacrifice to the gods for some rain. Like a bride].[1]In striking opposition, the second part opens with a much different wedding image: “il giorno del suo matrimonio mia madre indossava un tailleur beige dal taglio semplice e nei capelli non portava nessun velo” [the day of her wedding, my mother was wearing a simple-cut, beige suit, and no veil was covering her head].[2]It is through these parallelisms and a certain circularity in the book’s structure that the story is kept together and turned into a seamless fireside tale. Ibrahimi’s narrative weaving is itself a reflection of the weaving of lives the women of Kaltra, a village among the Albanian mountains, enact. Older women are here the weavers of destinies, entrusted with the task of marriage arrangement, that is the orchestration of the continuation of the family lineage, as well as with establishing and repairing, where necessary, fruitful relationships among the village’s families. This is seen as a true “potere che si acquisiva diventando suocere” [power one would acquire through becoming a mother-in-law] and therefore “spesso le donne passavano la vita aspettando con gioia di invecchiare” [women would often spend their lives excitedly waiting to get older].[3]This role would also give them authority over their daughters in law, and their journeys through motherhood. In the novel, women are presented first and foremost as mothers, a role that gives meaning to both their lives and their marriage: “Che felicità trova una donna dal marito se non i figli?” [What happiness can women get from their husbands, if not their children?]. Motherhood becomes not just a social imperative, but a defining characteristic of womanhood, in that “una donna senza prole è come un tronco senza rami” [a woman without children is like a tree without branches].[4]As mothers, women weave their children’s destinies not only by arranging their marriages, but also because tradition and popular belief sees them as bearers of their daughters’ moral rightfulness, passed down through generations: in fact, women’s actions and any morally reproachable act is believed to curse the daughters to come. For instance, when one of Seba’s sisters gets wrongfully accused of kurveria [adultery], the family gets concerned not only about their reputation, but also about the marriage possibilities of the daughters to come as kurveria , like a genetic predisposition, will run through their veins too. Gender has then an important, even deterministic, role since birth. As it is to be expected, the birth of a boy is collectively celebrated, whilst that of a girl is close to be seen as a tragedy: just like in Vergine giurata [Sworn Virgin , trans. Clarissa Botsford], a 2007 novel written in Italian by Swiss-Albanian author Elvira Dones, Ibrahimi reminds us of the tradition, upheld by Albanian villagers, of shooting in the air when a boy is born and of the almost mournful silence that follows the birth of a girl. The birth of a girl, in fact, stands not only for the continuation of the mother’s lineage, but also for all the sins and dooms that her body carries. Up until Dora’s times (1980s-1990s) it is believed that girls take their traits from their mothers, therefore the mothers and their bodies are solely responsible for the passing on of morals and vices. Women’s social role, however, is not exclusively to safeguard future generations, but also to ensure a continuation between the dead and the living: Meliha first and Saba after spend long afternoons in either cemeteries or burial places mourning, chanting, telling their ancestors about how life is unravelling, thus weaving life with the afterlife. Dora herself is brought into this ritual, as she will take over from her grandmother and continue her work. Similarly, on the metanarrative level, Dora’s enterprise of recounting the family narratives is an act of weaving of the oral histories that have been passed down onto her. Women’s bodies thus become bridges, through their voices, their chants, their mourning, and their writing. The undisputable protagonism of women should not, however, trick us into thinking that a society run by matriarchs would necessarily foster safe and enriching relationships among the women involved – rather the contrary, as Dora remarks: “le donne possono essere di grande aiuto nella scoperta del mondo dei grandi, ma possono anche rovinarti. Chi ha vissuto in grandi tribù di donne sicuramente sa di cosa parlo” [women can be of great help when it comes to exploring the world of the grownups, but they can also ruin you. Those of you who have been brought up in large women’s tribes will understand what I am talking about].[5]We are drawn into a narrative where even if the order may seem of matriarchal nature at first, it is soaked in patriarchal values. Ibrahimi shows us that patriarchy survives because it is all encompassing and all-invasive, to the point of absorbing women into self-annihilating hierarchical orders. These women cast their own needs and wills aside, conforming instead to a set of expectations and roles to ensure the continuation of the family, the tribe, the village, or the state. Allowed to leave their parental house only to join their husbands’, women are expected to comply to established roles and are strictly monitored. Entering the husband’s house also means being entrusted to the care of the mother in law, who not only arranges and orchestrates marriages, but also takes it to heart to ensure that the dignity and honour of the family are preserved: they intervene in their sons’ marital life, give them advice on how to gain and maintain respect and submission from their wives, and also keep an eye on whether the marriage is fruitful, and therefore the lineage continues. Yet, even if the setting of the novel is deeply patriarchal, in this novel men take the backseat, often portrayed as inept, incompetent, drunkards and violent with little possibility for redeption, but also lonely and emotionally stunted creatures, who represent the flipside of patriarchy. These are unstable, emotionally immature men, unable to fully express themselves in a social setting that requires them to comply to harsh standards of virility. Overall, they appear as peripheral, suggesting they had equally peripheral roles in the running of their very family and the public life of the village. Within this context, they are (too) often forgiven for their behaviours, for which women are made responsible: “si sa che gli uomini ci provano tutti, è dovere delle donne dire di no” [it’s renown that all men hit on women, so it is a woman’s duty to say no].[6]Within this women-run patriarchal order, the women must be tamed young so they do the taming of other women later on in their life. Along with the personal narratives, family- and village-centred, readers witness the development of yet another character that becomes more and more prominent – one might even say “invasive” – as we read on: Albania. The book opens in the immediate pre-World War II, with occasional flashbacks to the 1920s, and closes in post-communist and post-socialist times, when the country is just about to open up to the liberal freedom America was marketing as the staple of the “modern West” in 1992. The village of Kaltra is not spared the repercussions of national and international events – from soldiers’ recruitment and the arrival of the Germans during the war, to the process of urbanisation that sees villagers like Dora’s father moving to bigger cities like Valona or Tirana and setting up their families there, to the opening up of borders to both immigration and emigration. Following the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha (1946-1985), Albania sees, in fact, the coming of a global outlook, with the import of denim jeans, the arrival of migrant workers and an exodus towards other lands. Albania’s presence is ever so invasive during those sections of the novel that take place during communist times when, for the motherland’s sake, its citizens were allotted to different roles, often interfering with, and clashing against, their true ambitions and desires. Notable is the example of the narrator’s aunt Adelina, who is prevented from studying because the Party already agreed to her siblings going to university, and a family cannot serve the country when all its members “are sitting on their arses.”[7]Ibrahimi thus reproposes a larger-scale power dynamic evoking the first part of the novel where, within the small reality of the village, women were subjected to calculated marriage arrangements and roles to ensure the wellbeing of the families involved and the village at large. Ibrahimi writes in swift sentences that mirror the simple, yet tortured, living of her characters, whilst giving voice to the complexities of human relationships – a fine balancing act between the innocence of young voices and the weight of words passed down through bodies that carry their pasts. It is a story full of poetic glimpses and love, often contradictory and violent – such as when Seba gets punished by her mother Meliha, who after forgetting her outside hanging upside down from the branch of a tress in the cold, spends the night cuddling her daughter, cursing herself for being a terrible mother, and Seba wishes she could get punished more often, if it means it would be followed by such unequivocal outbursts of affection. These voices are also languages that we see failing from generation to generation, that produce mistranslations of love, and that make up for an extraordinary choral narrative, a work of true craft[wo]manship. [1] Anilda Ibrahimi, Rosso come una sposa (Torino: Einaudi, 2008), p.5, my translation. [2] Ibid., p.123. [3] Ibrahimi, Rosso come una sposa , p.42. [4] Ibid., p.58. [5] Ibrahimi, Rosso come una sposa , p.188. [6] Ibid., p.127. [7] Ibrahimi, Rosso come una sposa , p.169.

Prose and Counter-history: Review of Bernadine Evaristo's ‘The Emperor's Babe' Evaristo boldly challenges the prevailing notion of Britain as a white man’s nation by interweaving Roman history with elements of contemporary Black British culture and fiction, offering alternative visions of London. In doing so, she skilfully illuminates the often-overlooked histories of the African diaspora within both Roman and British contexts, while exercising creative license to craft a compelling counter-historical narrative. by Uthara Geetha 3 March 2025 Review: Evaristo, Bernardine. The Emperor's Babe: A Novel . (London: Penguin, 2001). Bernardine Evaristo's second book, The Emperor's Babe , intricately weaves a counter-historical narrative of the Black community’s presence in Britain, specifically London, against the backdrop of Londinium (Roman London) circa AD 211. Transporting readers to Evaristo’s Roman Britain, the novel explores the captivating and turbulent life of Zuleika, a young Black girl born to immigrant parents from ancient Nubia (present-day Sudan). At eleven, Zuleika is married off by her father to a wealthy, elderly Roman senator. What follows is a life of solitude—until she disrupts it by engaging in a romantic affair with Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor of African descent. Defiant and restless, Zuleika refuses to conform to the life imposed upon her, seeking excitement beyond the confines of her husband's chambers. Though Zuleika's brief nineteen-year life is rich with complexity, the novel’s historical backdrop and verse narrative style take centre stage, making The Emperor’s Babe an immersive and compelling read. Evaristo’s exploration of Londinium through Zuleika’s eyes is enriched by her stylistic experimentation with language and form. The novel employs a hybrid style, blending prose, verse, and slang, mirroring the multifaceted linguistic milieu of ancient Rome—a realm largely shrouded in mystery. Evaristo’s language is both lyrical and contemporary, infusing the narrative with vitality, immediacy, and humour. This stylistic approach vividly transports readers to Londinium, where aristocrats flaunt Armani, Gucci, and Versace. Another striking juxtaposition lies in the title itself, pairing the colloquial babe with the authoritative emperor. These choices not only challenge traditional literary forms but also disrupt conventional perceptions of Roman heritage. Evaristo acknowledges her own defiance of literary norms through Zuleika’s words: ‘Theodorous says I shouldn’t write poetry until I’ve studied the last thousand years of the canon, learnt it off by heart and can quote from it at random, and imitate it.’ [1] Furthermore, Zuleika’s identity as The Emperor’s Babe—both in her race and her status—serves as a focal point, often drawing more attention from readers than the plot itself. Evaristo boldly challenges the prevailing notion of Britain as a white man’s nation by interweaving Roman history with elements of contemporary Black British culture and fiction, offering alternative visions of London. In doing so, she skilfully illuminates the often-overlooked histories of the African diaspora within both Roman and British contexts, while exercising creative license to craft a compelling counter-historical narrative. As in her other works, Evaristo strategically engages with readers’ racial perceptions to her advantage. Unlike typical historical novels where Black characters are often depicted as slaves, Zuleika is a wealthy woman who owns two Scottish girls, exercising patronage and power over them. Evaristo clarifies this historical accuracy in an interview, stating, ‘the Romans took slaves from all over the Roman Empire which covered 9000 kilometres at its greatest extent, and it wasn’t conditional upon race. In fact, the Romans practiced no anti-black racism as far as we know.’ [2] This approach serves as a powerful critique of contemporary understandings of race and identity. By depicting Londinium as a cosmopolitan hub without imposing anachronistic racial constructs, Evaristo prompts readers to reconsider historical narratives beyond present-day racial frameworks. Through this method, The Emperor’s Babe not only reconstructs a marginalized past but also engages with broader discussions on migration, identity, and belonging in contemporary discourse. While depicting an ethnically heterogeneous Roman past, she also crafts compelling characters with feminist tendencies and contradictions. By examining Zuleika's relationships with individuals of different genders, the novel explores the dynamics of sexual autonomy and exploitation, highlighting how desire, in its many forms, can simultaneously empower and oppress. Zuleika's interactions with men from diverse social and ethnic backgrounds reveal the inherent power imbalances in her world, challenging the idealized depictions of love and desire often found in historical fiction. Evaristo's stylistic experimentation in this verse novel—structured as an epic—is undeniably bold and innovative. However, this unconventional form may pose challenges for some readers. The fragmented couplets and rapid shifts in tone and style can be disorienting, requiring active engagement to piece together the narrative threads. Additionally, the use of colloquial language and slang may present obstacles for readers unfamiliar with the various dialects and linguistic norms embedded in the novel. Despite these potential hurdles, Evaristo’s stylistic choices ultimately enhance the storytelling, creating a vivid and immersive experience of Zuleika’s world. In summary, The Emperor's Babe offers a rich, multifaceted narrative that defies simple classification. Through its exploration of identity, language, power, and desire, Evaristo prompts readers to reconsider their perceptions of history, literature, and human experience. While its stylistic innovations may challenge some readers, the novel’s thematic depth and socio-political commentary make it a compelling and thought-provoking work. By crossing boundaries of language, time, and genre, The Emperor’s Babe stands as a trans-literary work, resonating with contemporary discussions on migration, race, and identity. [1] Evaristo, Bernardine. The Emperor's Babe: A Novel . (London: Penguin, 2001), 83. [2] Collins, Michael. "My Preoccupations Are in My DNA’: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo." Callaloo, vol. 31, no. 4 (2008): 1199-1203.

Review of 'Sexe et mensonges' by Leïla Slimani Slimani’s interlocutors navigate their secret, but rich sexual lives, being constantly at risk of losing their social position and freedom. Their testimonies are often deeply saddening, but also witty and humorous. Most of them stress the society’s hypocrisy over sexuality, pointing out that the system promotes the exploitation and commercialization of the female body, while pretending to support “virtue”. Slimani leads the reader through these stories bringing different voices into a conversation by providing examples from Moroccan public life, scholarly articles, and her personal experiences. by Tamara Cvetković 17 March 2025 Review: Slimani, Leïla. Sexe et mensonges. Leïla Slimani’s first non-fiction book Sexe et mensonges: La Vie Sexuelle au Maroc (Sex and Lies: Sexual life in Morocco) is a collection of essays based on the interviews the author conducted with Moroccan women of different ages and classes, as well as on the analysis of social and political events, laws, art works, and media reports on (repressed) sexuality in contemporary Moroccan society. Sexe et mensonges was first published in 2017 in French,[1] translated into Arabic in 2019, and into English in 2020 as Sex and lies: True Stories of Women’s Intimate Lives in the Arab World . The book is divided into eighteen chapters/essays, the core of which are interviews with women who wanted to remain anonymous, but also with public figures such as feminist writer and journalist Fedwa Misk, Islamic feminist Asma Lambert, and with men such as Nabil Ayouch, a filmmaker who made a documentary on prostitution, and Mustapha, a policeman with 25 years of experience in law enforcement. Through personal stories, the book offers a detailed overview of the harsh consequences of the state ban on extramarital sexual relations, including homosexual practices. In addition, it showcases Moroccan society’s public morality that allows everything if it is kept secret, nurturing the “culture of silence” concerning sexuality, female pleasure, abortion, STDs, sexual violence, and harassment. According to the testimonies, among the harshest consequences of the morality legislation are prison sentences for the most vulnerable citizens (the poor, women, LGBT persons) who were caught having extramarital sexual relations; unsafe illegal abortions; unreported cases of rape, which occasionally force the victims to marry their rapists; public humiliation and exclusion; denial of the basic rights and citizenship to children born out of marriage, which ultimately leads to the most extreme consequences such as infanticide or suicide. Among these circumstances, Slimani’s interlocutors navigate their secret, but rich sexual lives, being constantly at risk of losing their social position and freedom. Their testimonies are often deeply saddening, but also witty and humorous. Most of them stress society’s hypocrisy, pointing out that the system promotes the exploitation and commercialization of the female body while pretending to support “virtue”.[2] Slimani leads the reader through these stories bringing different voices into conversation by providing examples from Moroccan public life, scholarly articles, and her personal experiences. From the beginning of the book, the author’s position is clear. Slimani self-identifies as a middle-class person from a liberal background. This self-identification is important, as the author sees it as the source of her values and privilege within Moroccan society. Namely, Slimani argues that her background allowed her not only to nurture self-respect, bodily autonomy, and a belief that hatred, violence, and misogyny cannot be justified by any religion, but also to remain safe.[3] From that position, she draws attention to the class dimension of sexual repression, arguing that the poorest are the mostly affected by the morality law,[4] as law enforcement is selective and arbitrary, and targets the most vulnerable citizens. Importantly, she further argues that people who are not as privileged as her in terms of education, class, and family background, nor raised according to “liberal values”, can be just as well aware of their rights: But I have to say that in Morocco I have met hundreds of people who have not had all this and who, nonetheless, believe that we should live and let live, that every human being has a right to dignity and to safety. [5] By pointing out the class dimension, Slimani argues that the right to dignity and safety is not an exclusive feature of middle-class morality or Western cultures, but also a right aligned with the core principles of Moroccan culture.[6]I find this claim important for understanding the different sides of public debate in Moroccan society. Namely, Slimani emphasizes the role that the binary opposition between West/modernity/“universal Enlightenment values” and “traditional” Islamic societies plays in debates about sex in Morocco. Talking from within this binary, Slimani seems to anticipate critique from both sides of the spectrum, claiming that privileged French liberal scholars will accuse her of Orientalism, reinforcement of stereotypes about Arab societies and Islamophobia, while Moroccan conservatives will accuse her of promoting “westernized decadence and liberalism of its elites.”[7] She argues that people suffering in prisons are not her Orientalist fantasies but reality, and calls for the ending of this opposition:[8] We need to stop pitting Islam and universal Enlightenment values against each other, stop opposing Islam and equality of the sexes, Islam and sensual pleasure.[9] While her call for dismantling this binary opposition is an important step in further building her arguments, Slimani does not problematize the values of the “liberal West”, nor middle-class morality, which sometimes leads to contradictory statements. For example, recalling the public outrage that accompanied the concert by Jennifer Lopez in 2015, who was criticized for sexually “provocative” dancing and outfit, Slimani remembers being “shocked” by the fact that Moroccan middle-class liberals called Jennifer Lopez a “whore.”[10] She further expresses similar, but affirmative shock when her housekeeper, whom she considered a conservative woman, expressed “progressive” attitudes by stating that the silence about sexuality is oppressive towards women, but also bad for Islam.[11] Unfortunately, Slimani remains “shocked”, instead of questioning the foundations of liberal middle-class morality, which has a lot in common with the “culture of silence” she argues against. In addition to that, while her conversations with the interlocutors stress the need for emancipation, and the importance of the education of youth, especially boys, about sexual rights, and women’s rights for overcoming the challenges within Moroccan society, Slimani does not extend her critical approach to the contradictions of European societies. For example, she often makes comparisons with Europe, particularly France as a place where the challenges that Moroccan women and girls are facing are non-existent and/or hardly imaginable, without mentioning the challenges that Muslim girls and women face in France, and without addressing the oppression of women in Europe.[12] I argue that an explicit critique of middle-class morality and complexities within Europe would allow the author to build a stronger argument against the binary opposition of Western modernity/Islamic traditionalism. Together with that, the book offers a valuable analysis of the debate on sexuality and women’s rights within Moroccan society. Slimani argues that Moroccan authorities are also ambiguous regarding the opposition of (Western) modernity vs. (Islamic) traditionalism, as testified by the psychiatrist Jalil Bennani, who participated in a series of public debates organized by Moroccan state authorities on abortion in 2015. Bennani claimed that politically liberal “modernists” were more hesitant to advocate for legal access to abortion, while “hard-line Islamists” were more open for discussion and negotiation,[13] revealing that these debates are more nuanced and complex than expected. In addition, even though in most of the chapters Slimani takes the Enlightenment and Western liberal values as universal and non-problematic, she also provides valuable insights for critiquing these values and dismantling the binary division Western modernity/Islamic traditionalism. In the chapter “All the religions are the same when it comes to sex” Slimani analyzes the works of scholars of Islamic culture to reveal that there is a centuries-long tradition of thematizing eroticism and sensuality in Islamic literature. According to this analysis, in Islamic literature faith was not confronted with desire, but rather intertwined with it, and sexual pleasure was seen as divine, while orgasm was compared with the “delights in paradise.”[14] She argues that the arrival of “puritanical” views on sexuality coincides with the decline of political and economic power in Arab countries at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and with the region’s subsequent colonization by Europeans. According to her the imposition of puritan views primarily served as a means of prevention of sexual relations between settlers and native women.[15] Slimani points out that the Moroccan morality law that bans homosexuality originates from the French penal code that was repealed in 1982. Further, Slimani provides important information about rich Islamic traditions that are neither conservative nor sexually repressive. She introduces the views of Avbdelwahab Bouhdiba, a scholar of sexuality, who argues that sexual freedom cannot be a copied Western model, but rather achieved through faith, relying on Islamic traditions.[16] Slimani also interviews pathologist and theology scholar Asma Lamrabet from the Centre for Women’s Studies in Islam, who goes back to close reading of Quran to support her feminist arguments. Lamrabet points out that the Quran does not deal with matters of sexuality and that virginity is not even mentioned once in the whole text. In her interpretation, women are conceptualized as free human beings in the Quran. Moreover, Lamrabet argues that over time rigidity took over the place of compassion, affection, and intimacy that were historically present in Islamic societies.[17] Lamrabet advocates for a decolonial model, rather than the Western, and points out that the liberation of women to make their own choices requires a non-hegemonic strategy, a development of a new approach.[18] I find this chapter central to the whole book, as it offers a critical approach to the traditions, as well as possible paths for analyzing social and historical complexities instead of reinforcing hierarchical binary oppositions. In conclusion, Sex and Lies offers brave, lucid, witty, and valuable testimonies about the sexual lives of Moroccan women of different ages, educational backgrounds, and classes, inclusive of lesbian experiences; then testimonies of young women who had no other option but to engage in prostitution to support their families; testimonies of married, divorced, and unmarried women who speak freely about desire and practice sexual pleasures despite of repressive circumstances. The book offers a convincing critique of Moroccan laws and public morality related to sexuality and provides an important argument that sexually repressive measures are not derived from Islamic tradition. By providing more details on the French colonial origins of the Moroccan repressive legislation, Slimani could build a stronger argument both against Moroccan conservatives who, according to her, would argue that sexual repression is an Islamic tradition, and against French liberal intellectuals whom she suspects would accuse her of Islamophobia and Orientalism. In fact, this book challenges the Orientalist stereotypes about Islamic societies, and especially about Muslim women in many ways. What I find missing from Slimani’s analysis is the critique of European colonialism and misogyny; a problematization of the strands of the Enlightenment that offered no rights or freedom to women; and ultimately, the critique of so-called middle-class morality. I argue that these elements, sorely missing from her analysis, are core to the contemporary rise of far-right movements in Europe, which are also oppressive towards sexual freedoms and women’s rights. In that sense, I consider that a critique of “universal Enlightenment values,” would allow Slimani to build a more convincing argument for overcoming binary oppositions and hierarchies. [1] The title of the French original is Sexe et Mensonges: La Vie Sexuelle au Maroc [2] Slimani, Leïla. 2020. Sex and Lies . Translated by Sophie Lewis. Faber & Faber. Society on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, p. 58 [3] Sex and Lies , pp. 68-69 [4] Sex and Lies , p. 2 [5] Ibid., p. 70 [6] p. 70 [7] p. 5 [8] p. 70 [9] P. 7 [10] p. 63 [11] p. 72 [12] p. 15, p. 19, etc. [13] p. 31 [14] p. 94 [15] p. 94 [16] p. 95 [17] p. 102 [18] p. 102 References: Slimani, Leïla. Sex and Lies. Translated by Sophie Lewis. Faber & Faber, 2020. Kindle.

Andrea Abreu's 'Dogs of Summer': An in-depth exploration of working-class adolescenthood Abreu's novel places provincial life at the center stage and transforms the ordinary experiences of two young adolescents into extraordinary. Also, the novel celebrates the Canarian Spanish dialect and language difference and invites the reader to experience the narrative through a descriptive narration and imagery. by María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto 10 March 2025 Review: Abreu, Andrea. Dogs of Summer: A Novel . Translated by Carolina Hoyos. (United States: Blackstone Publishing, 2023). Andrea Abreu has earned admiration and recognition as a novelist after her novel Perros de verano was translated from Spanish to German, French, Italian, and then into English as Dogs of Summer . Because of her success, Granta, an English publishing house and literary magazine, selected Abreu among their Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2021 . Abreu’s pride for her family’s working-class background, the place where she comes from, Tenerife, and her Canarian Spanish dialect are perceptible throughout her novel. Although the island where the story takes place does not have a name, there are references to places in Tenerife, and there is a volcano overlooking the inhabitants’ neighborhood which could be an allusion to the Teide. The detailed description of places in the novel takes readers around varied sceneries and spaces that influence both the characters and the narrative itself. Dogs of Summer provides a sneak peek into common daily life affairs from a young adolescent’s perspective. It is also an ode to the Canarian Spanish dialect, and an invitation to explore realist narration through the senses. Dogs of Summer is a novel that invites readers to discover life in a touristic island far away from the all-inclusive hotels and one day tours. Abreu introduces two main characters: Shit, the first-person narrator, and her best friend Isora, the one who refers to her friend as Shit. There is no reference to the narrator’s real name. Both Shit’s and the island’s names are a mystery. The story takes place during a short, but exciting and adventurous summer that the two characters spend together. They are around 10 years old and on the verge of welcoming their teen years, and with them lively experiences with friendship, sexuality, boundaries (and lack of them), family, school, boys, authorities, and many other axes of teen life. Most of the story develops at a neighborhood where everyone knows each other well and experiences similar harsh economic situations. However, the two characters also move around in other neighborhoods, the beach, the fields, computer classes, fancy hotel areas, and other places around the island. Shit’s parents are working most of the time while Isora’s parents are out of the picture, her mother passed away and her dad is not mentioned, leaving both in the care of their grandmothers. This lack of constant supervision grants the girls the freedom they need to experience life on their own and forge their own luck. Isora is a wild and open-minded person. She speaks up her mind and earns older people’s trust easily. She is curious and adventurous, and she influences Shit to go along with her ideas. Shit, on the other hand, is more prone to thinking about the consequences of their actions even though, at the end of the day, she ends up doing what Isora says. Shit loves her friend, and the way she expresses herself about Isora signals that she is the most important person to her. There is no clear boundary between romantic love and friendship; and through Shit’s descriptions and narration, the reader empathizes with this confusion. Shit’s love for Isora is explicit, but also the anger and frustration toward Isora and her careless behavior. They spend most of their time together; and when they are not together, Shit is dreading each minute until they can reunite again. The reader is in for a treat while having access to Shit’s thoughts and experiences with her neighbors, family, and friends around the island. Through her perspective we are introduced to the inhabitants’ daily routines, such as going to the mini market, going to church, cooking, working, among other provincial activities. The readers are invited to all these places while the two main characters discover themselves through the island, which mostly offers a safe haven for them. To highlight the two characters’ daily lives, Abreu evokes pop culture through lyrics and references to specific brands and television shows that set a familiar tone in the novel. On the one hand, the author showcases the two characters’ routines. They visit their neighbors and eat their food, shave their genitals, masturbate, and play with other children. On the other hand, Abreu exposes societal topics and their influence on the two main characters. For instance, although the girls give little to no importance to societal constructions such as gender, those affect them, nonetheless. What for adults might be stereotypically masculine or feminine, for the girls does not carry such difference. For example, they talk about getting thinner and prettier through dieting, gastric balloons, and purging, but these ideas come from Isora’s grandmother who criticizes her granddaughter’s size and eating habits. Dogs of Summer is an in-depth exploration of working-class adolescenthood, but also is an ode to language variations, more specifically, the Canarian Spanish dialect. The novel’s English translation uses a mix of English and Spanish words, especially when it comes to pop culture references, while the Spanish version stays loyal to Abreu’s dialect “el Canario.” Abreu also plays with the rules of spelling and grammar and writes English words as they would sound phonetically for a Spanish speaker (forener, foc yu). She translates the orality of the language into her writing, making it possible for readers to grasp where she comes from, how her dialect is differentiated from Castilian Spanish, and how it is influential to the characters’ identity. Besides, Abreu challenges grammar rules by using constant word repetition and offering long paragraphs with no punctuation. The author revolutionizes the use of language to validate different ways of speaking and writing but she also plays with literary strategies to differentiate her novel from what is commonly accepted. For instance, there are not explicit dialogues in the novel, but she uses language in such a creative way that the different conversations camouflaged in the text are easy to follow and the character who is speaking easy to identify. Finally, Abreu’s explicit and detailed narration is an invitation to activate the senses, a creative writing device that authors use to connect the readers to the story. The emotional responses that these techniques awaken invite readers to take part in the plot through the description of vivid imagery. This connection is accomplished mostly by the description of sensations, tastes, smells, noises, and landscapes. As an outcome, the novel exhibits a strengthened presence of realism because of the way that it exalts the two characters’ adventures and dilemmas, transforming the ordinary to extraordinary. Beyond doubt, Dogs of Summer is an extravagant read, which I cordially invite readers to experience. If this review piqued your interest, you may read an excerpt from the novel here.

Book Review 'Down with the Poor!' By Shumona Sinha, 2022 by Les Fugitives An evocative portrayal of those who arrive but never truly ‘arrive.’ Down with the Poor! is a novel about borderlands—geographic, linguistic, and personal. by Laura Bak Cely 4 August 2025 Book Review Down with the Poor! By Shumona Sinha, 2022 by Les Fugitives Assommons les pauvres! , originally published in French in 2011, has been published in English in Teresa Lavender Fagan’s exceptional translation that preserves the poetry of Shumona Sinha’s language. The author borrowed the title from one of Charles Baudelaire’s short prose poems from Le spleen de Paris , to which the novel has direct links to. This intertextual reference not only pays homage to Baudelaire but also situates Sinha’s contemporary narrative within the context of the French literary tradition. Like Baudelaire’s poem, Sinha’s novel invites readers to reflect on the complexities of power dynamics and the human implications of individual actions in the grey zones that many people inhabit. Shumona Sinha is a Bengali author who has lived in France since her early twenties. Since then, she has accumulated awards and accolades for her novels in which she explores the themes of identity, racism, and migration in both her adopted and native country. The story takes place in Paris, albeit a distant Paris, demarcated by the borders not only of a foreign territory but of another reality. The novel quickly introduces us to the world of the narrator, an Indian woman who, years earlier, migrated with her parents to France. Residing in Paris, she, whose name we never get to know, works at Ofpra, the French Office of the Protection of Refugees and Stateless People. She is an interpreter whose job is to be the communication link between people seeking political asylum, their lawyers and the officials who have the power to decide who stays and who does not. The novel, however, revolves around one fact: the narrator is detained because she struck another immigrant on the head. Monsieur K, an official, interrogates her. The echo of Kafka’s The Trial is unmistakable. Spaces that never end, doors that open and close set the tone of the story. Throughout the narrative, the protagonist grapples with her actions, attempting to rationalize and understand the motives behind her outburst to both herself and Monsieur K. Besides that, she also recapitulates scenes from her labour life: numerous men and women whose stories she had to translate. Her work, as she makes it clear, is translating, and only translating literally, without interpreting, without getting in the way, without clarifying, without explaining, and especially without taking sides. “[I]n the People’s Theatre I didn’t exist. My role was to erase myself. My entire effort consisted in not existing” (115). This marginalisation delineates the space that she is allowed to occupy as a woman, and as an immigrant. The world which the narrator inhabits exists outside the city of lights, beyond the RER (Regional Express Network) train line, behind other borders. The migrants she encounters through her work left their homelands and underwent crusades to reach France, only to realise that arriving is only the beginning of another journey: a crossing that involves other forms of violence, of erasing oneself, inventing, lying, becoming someone else. That other is the subject who will receive political asylum. Down with the Poor! highlights how the process of applying for asylum brings the veracity of the truth to a critical point. When crossing borders and arriving in another place, the truth of what earlier happened ceases to exist. “Crossing the border has something irreversible about it that resembles mourning, a secret crime, a loss of self, a loss of reference, a loss of life” (124). Through the immigration cases she recalls the narrator points out that what happened on the before or during the journey has little or nothing to do with what the immigrants need to say to gain asylum. The reasons why they fled must, in cases, be set aside and a story that meets the legal criteria for state protection must be told. “Here, everything was in the language, in the words, between the lines. The name of a river erroneously placed next to the name of a village, a vague adjective describing an incident, planted like a knife in flesh, bits of sentences uttered under one’s breath, a voice extinguished, out of fear, expectations, despair” (80). The narrator outlines the different manifestations of this necessity to reinvent the truth. She explains the challenge of translating the information given by the interlocutors. In some cases, the narrator says, it is enough to paraphrase what they said happened. In others, the inability to understand what facts are necessary within their stories, makes them fall into an abyss of lies and meaningless phrases from which no one can rescue them. As a translator, she is a witness to the full scope of human imagination. The novel does not portray human beings in terms of a simple good-versus-evil binary. Its coherence and critique lie precisely in showing that such a division does not reflect how the system works. It captures people’s desperation and reveals the thin line between those who receive asylum and those who do not. Down with the Poor! shows that it is not always the good, the innocent, or the most at risk who are granted asylum. Often, it comes down to who can tell their story most effectively. Sinha writes from an thought-provoking position in contemporary French literature. She is an outsider who has been in France for a long time and knows European literature very well, both as a great reader and as a scholar. Through the novel’s references to Kafka and Baudelaire she initiates a dialogue with canonical European literature. The exploration of alienation, bureaucracy, and existential angst as well as the dark and complex aspects of human experience, explored by Kafka and Baudelaire, serve Sinha to speak from the core of European culture and thus construct a scenario that, although still conceived as on the outskirts of Europe, is very much a part of its reality. Sinha is magnificent in the way she weaves the story. Her way of constructing the places where migrants and refugees live is reminiscent of the non-places described by Marc Augé, with the gravity that, in these cases, these places of transit are places from which it is difficult for the refugees to escape. The peripheral and temporary places are, in the end, the definitive places for them. In this profoundly human novel, the narrator leaves us with the unpleasantness that obtaining asylum, obtaining a ‘safe’ place, repeatedly implies suppressing oneself, living in non-places, trying to stay as far away as possible, arriving without ever arriving, without ever being able to be anywhere definitively, that is, today, the utopia of migration.

Review of 'Exquisite Cadavers' by Meena Kandasamy From the outset, Kandasamy expresses her intention to separate the biographical from fiction. Yet, the autobiographical elements that she registers on the text’s margins spill over into the “main” text, blurring the boundaries between personal and fictional. One may ask if Exquisite Cadavers can exist without its margins; however, such a question is predicated on the assumption that the margin is a separable entity that can somehow be extracted from the novel proper. The margins are not merely experimental additions; they drive the text, adding theoretical and political arguments informed by the author’s material and lived experiences. by Samriddhi Pandey 25 March 2025 Review of the Book Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the founders of the 1960s French literary movement “Oulipo”, believed in the generative potential of constraints, systematic rules, and self-restricting techniques to develop innovative literary texts. Inscribing herself into this trajectory, Meena Kandasamy, in the preface to Exquisite Cadavers , states her intention to write a novel based on the principles of Oulipo. The challenge she sets up for herself is to write a story as far removed from her life as possible. A masterful political novel is the result, with authorial decisions, inspirations, and plot points documented in the margins of the main body of the text. As part of documenting her reflections, Kandasamy, in the preface, exposes the racial bias behind even sympathetic reception of art from the so-called Global South and the exclusionary nature of the literary avant-garde. Exquisite Cadavers , she writes, was conceived as a response to the reception of her last novel, When I Hit You , based on her own experience of a violent, abusive marriage. By relegating the novel to the status of a memoir, the reviewers brushed past the formal and artistic aspects of the novel’s construction, reducing the artist to her experience as a rape victim. In Kandasamy’s words, “No one discusses process with us. No one discusses our work in the framework of the novel as an evolving form. No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived.” She argues that artists from marginalized groups are often seen as the imitators of the postmodern novel, while the genre itself is commonly viewed as developing through Western innovation. This idea is reinforced by the choice of epigraph from M. NourbeSe Philip: “The purpose of avant-garde writing for a writer of colour is to prove you are human.” In this context, experimental writing for marginalized groups becomes a means to claim kinship in the postmodern novel as a genre rich with artistic and political possibilities. The novel’s title derives its name from the French term cadavre exquis , a Surrealist technique of stringing together a set of words or images. The technique, in turn, is based on a French parlor game called Consequences, where each participant takes turns to draw on a piece of paper, fold it, and pass it along to the next, to eventually reveal a fragmented creature. Following this principle, the novel unfolds in two sections. On the right side is the love story of Karim and Maya. On the left, occupying a marginal space, and a smaller font are stories from Kandasamy’s life, her political influences, and explanations behind her creative choices. As these sections gradually unfold and intersect, the constructedness of the novel becomes apparent. It becomes politically necessary for Kandasamy to foreground her work’s artifice and align it explicitly with Oulipo and Surrealism in order to stake her claim over an intellectual tradition typically denied to writers like her. From the outset, as one of the self-imposed constraints of an Oulipo, Kandasamy expresses her intention to separate the biographical from fiction. Yet, the autobiographical elements that she registers on the text’s margins spill over into the “main” text, blurring the boundaries between personal and fictional. One may ask if Exquisite Cadavers can exist without its margins; however, such a question is predicated on the assumption that the margin is a separable entity that can somehow be extracted from the novel proper. The margins are not merely experimental additions; they drive the text, adding theoretical and political arguments informed by the author’s material and lived experiences. Posing an enigmatic question, “Have the margins always remained disciplined?” Kandasamy invites the reader to see for themselves if it is at all possible to separate fact and fiction, novel and autobiography, form and content. The reader is actively encouraged to engage with the novel, just like in the French parlor game that inspired the title, where players can shape a fragmented trajectory to create a narrative of their choice. The “main” text sets the scene of regular middle-class domesticity and tells the story of Karim, a Tunisian filmmaker, and Maya, his white-passing English wife of mixed-race origins. Their domestic idyll is tenuously constructed and the description carries the ominous hint of an impending collapse. The reader is led through the couple’s everyday struggles in a post-Brexit UK. Even as the novel speaks about the somewhat assimilatory process of homesteading and the coming together of a burgeoning interracial family, there are disruptive forces at work (casual racism, skyrocketing rents, intellectual dissatisfaction arising from creating art palatable to a White, middle-class audience), threatening to disrupt the façade of domesticity. There are layered dynamics at work in Maya and Karim’s relationship: Maya’s cosmopolitan upbringing is contrasted by Karim’s acute awareness of his race and the attendant pressures of keeping his artistic and political vision alive in an environment driving him to self-commodify his art as an Arab man. While Karim tends to view everything, including his wife, through a filmmaker’s lens, Maya sees herself in various characters in films they watch together. They balance each other out, with Maya keeping him in thrall with her unpredictability and Karim balancing out her volatility with his pacifying behavior. While their relationship is far from perfect and characterized by frequent arguments, they stand firmly by each other, especially in the face of the incessant scrutiny coming from the outside world. Maya sees Karim, his artistic vision, his struggles, and people’s racist attitude toward him and drops everything to follow him to Tunisia. In turn, Karim senses the discomfort of Maya’s British and White friends in various social situations, bears all the racist jokes, and, in fact, makes jokes at his own expense to dispel discomfort and cement their social standing. Exquisite Cadavers features relentless social commentary, uncovering exclusionary practices in life and art through juxtaposing fictional domestic struggles of the “main text” with the grim political realities of India, Kandasamy’s birthplace. The intertwining of the center and the margin creates a bricolage effect, reflected at multiple points throughout the novel. Karim’s film ideas, the novel’s cover art, fragments from dictionaries, statistics, news reports, movies, music, anthropology, and philosophy all contribute to creating a bricolage of a transnational milieu where multiple ethnicities, languages, and cultures come into contact. By detailing the violence of everyday racism both in the UK (her adopted country) and in India (her birthplace), Kandasamy crucially deconstructs the concept of home, emptying it of any easy romantic significances. If home is a place of refuge, is it still home when a right-wing state continues to kill, persecute, and arrest people who try to challenge its exclusionary narrative of Hindu homogeneity and Brahmin supremacy? Is home still a home if its very foundations lie in the coercive system of caste-based labor and discrimination? Is it still a home where every critical dissenting voice is silenced, censored, and discredited under manufactured charges of terrorism? It is up to the readers to decide. In one instant, Kandasamy derives her idea of home from Tamil poetics. The poetic formulation: Yaadum oore, yaavarum kelir (anywhere is home, everyone is kin) keeps her going as she packs up her life in India, meets new people, creates a budding family with her Belgian partner, and goes through the messy, transformative experience of giving birth, as described in the margins. The delicate cocoon of Maya and Karim’s domesticity breaks towards the end of the novel with the sudden arrest of Karim’s brother, Youssef, on the fabricated charges of terrorism, evoking the real-life arrest of Kandasamy’s human rights activist friend, Rona Wilson. The narrative’s ending remains uncertain, presenting not one but four different possibilities. It remains up to the reader to decide and take charge of the narrative, steering it like players in the game of consequences from which the novel derives its lifeblood and name.

Birgit M. Kaiser Utrecht University Researcher Birgit M. Kaiser is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She holds a BA and MA in Sociology from Bielefeld University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. In fall 2009/2010, Birgit was Chair of Western European Literatures (Vertretungsprofessur) at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). Birgit has also been visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy at Paris Nanterre University (spring 2017) and at the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University (fall 2017/2018), as well as DFG-Mercatorfellow at Leuphana University Lüneburg (fall 2023/24). Publications: Kaiser, B., Thiele, K., Jansen, E., Paterino, A., Avelino, F., & Wijsman, K. (2025). Power and Polycrisis: On the Durability of Capitalism-Patriarchy-Colonialism. Journal of Political Power , 18 (1), 147-164. Kaiser, B. (2024). Hélène Cixous's Poetic's of Voice: Echo - Subjectivity - Diffraction . Bloomsbury Academic.

Isabel Carrera Suárez University of Oviedo Principal Investigator Isabel Carrera Suárez is Professor in English at the University of Oviedo, her research centres on the intersections between postcoloniality and gender. She first taught at the University of Glasgow and has been a visiting scholar at the universities of Calgary, Flinders, Adelaide, Tsinghua and King’s College London, among others. She has been a keynote speaker at international conferences, such as the biennial meeting of the European Society for the Study of English, ESSE , and the Spanish Association for English Studies, AEDEAN. Her articles have appeared in international specialist journals such as Interventions, EJES, Journal of Canadian Poetry, International Journal of Canadian Studies, and Australian Literary Studies, and she has collaborated in and coedited many collaborative transnational volumes. Since 2017, she has been co-general editor of the European Journal of English Studies (EJES), a journal of The European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), and was Chair of EACLALS, the European Association for Postcolonial Studies (2017-2021), among other academic responsibilities. She leads the transnational research group Intersections/Intersecciones, recognised as an excellence group by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Spanish QA), and the recipient of many R&D competitive projects. Publications: "Growing Up Multiply: British Women Write the Ampersand Experience". In Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction , (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021) "Negotiating singularity and alikeness". In Debating the Afropolitan (1st ed.). Routledge, 2019.

Suzanne Clisby Coventry University Special Project Advisor and Supervisory Expert Advisor Suzanne Clisby (FRSA) is Professor of Education and Social Justice at the University of Lincoln with longstanding experience and expertise in academic research and leadership, teaching and authorship. She has conducted over 15 research projects, totalling circa. £8m and has trained numerous scholars in feminist methodological approaches and qualitative methods. She provides expertise in gender analyses, participatory development, life history narrative methods and creative praxis across a range of academic and NGO contexts, including a University of Iceland/UNESCO international fellowship programme. Professor Suzanne Clisby was the UK PI of the Horizon Europe European MSCA EUTERPE project (2022-24) and continues to work closely with the EUTERPE Consortium as a Special Project Advisor, Supervisory Expert Advisor (Coventry) and Employability Mentor (Granada). Professor Clisby was the Co-Director of the UKRI GCRF Global Gender and Cultures of Equality  (GlobalGRACE) Project (2017-2022), PI and Director of the Horizon 2020 MSCA Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe (GRACE) Project (2015-2019), and, for over a decade, Co-Editor of the Journal of Gender Studies. Her research focuses on gender, education and development. Publications: Gendering Women: identity and mental wellbeing through the life course  (with Holdsworth, 2016, Policy Press) The State of Girls Rights in the UK   (with Alsop, 2016, New Internationalists Publications) Theorising Cultures of Equality  (with Johnson & Turner, 2020, Routledge) Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands: Queering the Margins  (2020, Routledge) Investigating Cultures of Equality (with Golańska and Różalska, 2022, Routledge) Performing Cultures of Equality (with Durán-Almarza and Rodríguez-González, 2022, Routledge).

Rita Monticelli University of Bologna Principal Investigator Rita Monticelli is a full professor of English at the University of Bologna; she teaches gender studies, feminists and cultural studies, and theories and history of culture in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Her research includes memory and trauma studies, the global novel, utopia and dystopia, travel literature, and memory and trauma studies in contemporary dystopian fiction and visual culture. She also works on issues connected to human rights and intercultural and interreligious dialogues. In these areas, she has published and co-edited volumes and essays. She is a member of international European research networks and PhD programs centred on gender studies and cultures of equality. She is part of the international councils on diversity and social Inclusion and projects on the New Humanities. She directs the Centre for Utopian Studies and coordinates the International Erasmus Mundus GEMMA (women's and gender studies) at the University of Bologna. She is the representative of the University of Bologna for the SSH Deans and the board of the Gender&Diversity group of the GUILD (European Research-Intensive Universities), a member of the governing Board of EASSH (European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities). She is currently a member of the City Council of Bologna and a delegate for human rights and interreligious and intercultural dialogue. Publications: Rita Monticelli, In sisterhood: leggere insieme Adrienne Rich , in: Adrienne Rich: passione e politica, Trieste, Vita Activa Nuova, 2024 Rita Monticelli, Raffaella Baccolini, Giuliana Benvenuti, Chiara Elefante, Transmedia Science Fiction and New Social Humanities , in: The Edinburgh Companion to the New European Humanities, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2024

Jasmina Lukić Central European University Principal Leader Jasmina Lukić is Professor with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna, the Principal Leader for EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, a Marie Curie Doctoral Network project (101073012  EUTERPE HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 Project, 2022-26), and the CEU Coordinator for EM GEMMA MA Program in Women's Studies and Gender Studies. She has published two monographs, numerous articles, and book chapters in literary studies, women’s studies, and Slavic studies. Publications: Times of Mobility: Transnational Literature and Gender in Translation  (with Sibelan Forrester and Borbála Faragó, CEU Press 2019) “To Dubravka Ugrešić, with Love”, CEU Review of Books  (No 1/2023) “Reading Transnationally: Literary Transduction as a Feminist Tool”, in Swati Arora, Petra Bakos-Jarrett, Redi Koobak, Nina Lykke, and Kharnita Mohamed (eds.), Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place  (Routledge 2024).

Carla Rodríguez González University of Oviedo Researcher Carla Rodríguez González is Senior lecturer in English at the University of Oviedo, Spain, where she teaches in the Erasmus Mundus GEMMA and in the Gender and Diversity Master’s Degrees. Her research focuses on contemporary Scottish literature, as well as on postcolonial, gender, space and cultural studies. She is co-PI (with Isabel Carrera Suárez) of the research project “World-travelling: Narratives of Solidarity and Coalition in Contemporary Writing and Performance” (2022-2025), funded by the Spanish National R&D Programme. She was the coordinator of the Gender and Diversity Master’s Degree at the University of Oviedo, Spain (2019-2023). Publications: "Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay" In A Companion to Scottish Literature . First edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2024. Durán-Almarza, Emilia María, Carla Rodríguez González, and Suzanne Clisby. Performing Cultures of Equality. Routledge, 2022.