A journey through The Nature of Blood's places

Places seem to shape our existence. Human life is based on moments connected to a specific temporal and spatial fragment. As S. R, Sanders, in his book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World(1994), has pointed out: 

“In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world. This condition of clarity and focus, this being fully present, is akin to what the Buddhists call mindfulness, what Christian contemplatives refer to as recollection, what Quakers call centering down. I am suspicious of any philosophy that would separate this-worldly from other-worldly commitment. There is only one world, and we participate in it here and now, in our flesh and our place”. 

Hospitality and Mobilities

"Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!". He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. 

Bram Stoker, Dracula.

Trip to the Venetian Ghetto

Blood: A critique of Christianity

Blood: A Critique of Christianity - Gil Anidjar Blood, in Gil Anidjar's argument, maps the singular history of Christianity. A category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining, Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. In Part One. The Vampire State, Anidjar analyzes the role of blood in medieval Christianity and its subsequent influence on the Western civilization- in particular how it founded and shaped the three fundamental concepts of modernity: nation, state and capital. In Part Two. Hematologies, Anidjar explores the space occupied by blood in the literary canon of the Western world, engaging with Greek culture, philosophy and psychoanalysis

What's so special about blood?

Migration and Identity: Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Migration and identity are relevant topics in Moshin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The plot evolves around Changez, a Pakistani migrant in America, who struggles between two identities and is torn between the clash of two different worlds. As a matter of fact, after 9/11 and the following invasion of Afghanistan, he starts to resent America and he feels a crippling sense of displacement. His disillusionment will lead him back to his native country.

Personal experience as a migrant in Italy

      As a migrant in Italy, I have had a chance to view many different things. The first and the foremost among them was my sense of alienation. Being an alien, I had to acquaint myself with the new culture which is a European culture; the culture that is much different in almost every respect from the oriental culture. It led me to be a man of inquisitive nature. I kept on enquiring about things whether it was purchasing a train ticket or food articles. I had to see novel things in almost every aspect of the life. If there was a construction in progress in a building, I would keep looking at it and observed things objectively to know how far was it different than the place of my origin. They are just a few of the instances which has had an effect upon my sensibilities in my day to day life in Italy.

Videos demonstrating the impacts of 9/11 on Muslim immigrants

An interview with four immigrants

Italy is one of the most important destination countries for migrants in Europe. Around 500.000 regular migrants live there and the annual growth rate of migrant presence is, together with Spain, the highest in Europe. Italy is currently struggling to deal not only with the legal immigrants but also with the illegal ones. As a matter of fact, many of these undocumented immigrants use the sea route as a way to enter in the country. This problematic situation has increased tension within Italian cities, as well as feelings of animosity towards immigrants.
A week ago we decided to interview some immigrants living in Northern Italy in order to understand how they are treated by Italians, whether or not they feel welcomed, and if they are still victims of racial bias. The interview took place in four different cities - Brescia, Treviso, Mantua and Venice - and has been translated in English

Venice, post-cosmopolitan city?

In the volume Post-Cosmopolitan cities: Explorations of Urban Coexistence, Venice is listed among post-cosmopolitan cities, that is places once famous for being cosmopolitan but which are no longer so in the twenty-first century.

Group Discussion on the Novel

Germany as Migration Destination

For many international migrants Germany seems a desirable destination because of its stable economy. In 1994 its GDP per head was more than $25,000 per year; compared to some of Germany's neighbor countries, like Poland, which GDP was $5,336 and the Czech Republic which had a GDP of $7,824 in the same year (U.S. Department of Commerce 835), Germany is a wealthy country and is, therefore, an attractive state to migrate to. In fact, as a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation reveals, in 2012 Germany has become the second most desirable destination to move to permanently after the USA. Financial crises in the Southern European states led people to leave their home countries and migrate to Germany. Permanent migration rose 38% from 2009 to 2012, and in 2012 400,000 permanent migrants came to Germany. One in three migrants in Europe is moving to Germany now; in 2007 one out of ten moved to the nation. Consequently, Germany is undergoing a migration boom (Webb).

Italian Diaspora in America: Italians as emigrants

Nowadays it is very common to define Italy as a country of immigration whilst in the past it was considered merely such as a country of emigration. During the unification of Italy in 1861, the rise of Fascism and the end of the World War II, there was a phenomenon known as the Italian Diaspora. At the beginning the so called “exodus” regarded only the Northern regions such as Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lombardy and Piedmont. Afterwards, the phenomenon interested also the Southern Italian regions such as Calabria, Sicily and Campania. In particular Italians chose to move to America.

Cosmopolitanism: the migrant and the city

"City life is carried on by strangers among strangers" 

Zygmunt Bauman

Graphics on International Migration in Germany

Source:

Spiegel

Rural and Urban Migration in Germany

Migration is usually linked to modernization which is closely connected to industrialization. Therefore, it is often assumed that migration is mostly a process of people moving away from the countryside to an urban environment, as has been described by Ravenstein and Weber among others. The main reason to take part in the process of migration was the poverty that many people in rural and urban areas suffered from. For this reason, people tried to escape poverty and move to areas that were more advanced economically, in hope for a better and wealthier life. In the case of Germany, where industrialization started to grow rapidly around 1850, the assumption that migration in the industrial age is moving away from the rural to the urban space, is not necessarily correct. Migration in Germany has mostly been rural. In fact, while industry was still growing immensely in the the beginning of the twentieth Century, migration declined. The first World War was a major reason for mobility to go down and migration rates proceeded to drop afterwards. For this matter, city registration data from 1924 show that in- and outmigration in urban areas sank from 18% in 1912 to around 9% in 1924-1926 (Hochstadt 453).

Post 9/11 Muslim Immigrants

      History reveals that racism and migration are inextricably intertwined. An outflow of migration is by nature racial as it is a movement in which people move to a country where they are not nationals. In other words, opposition to migrants is opposition to the arrival of foreigners in one’s land. This opposition is usually based on reservations of the locals that the migrants are not credible and that they are not acquainted with the culture and language of the land of arrival.

Analysis of the characters in the novel

     "Speak of me as I am" (Oth, V, II, 342). Othello's final words point to the interconnections that can be established between one's story and one's identity; specifically, to the process of identity construction determined by the act of story-telling. As pointed out by Calbi, Othello's invitation to relate his story is not without complications: as a migrant, the general has in fact inhabited a "multiplicity of personalities" (Calbi, 39) which makes it difficult to pinpoint his identity and, therefore, to "speak of" him Caryl Phillips's The Nature of Blood, answers Othello's plea by linking his story to those of other displaced figures from early modernity to our postcolonial globality. The discourse around the migrant is thus re-articulated through a plurality of voices which by addressing each other across time and space function as tiles in a composite mosaic of European racism and anti-semitism. Not only does Phillips propose a new way of looking at history, "through the prism of people who have normally been written out of it" (Jaggi, 26), but he also creates a narrative space where the "displaced and the dispossessed" (Phillips, 5) can reappropriate their voices and tell their own stories. By interlocking narratives of Jewish and Black oppression, Phillips let these marginalized figure address each other and their respective sufferings: the figure of the migrant is re-shaped through the dialogue established among outsiders. This essay will attempt to analyze the juxtapositions between the characters of the novel and to explore the role of narration in relation to identity construction.

Analysis of themes

                          

     A number of themes have been dealt with by Caryl Phillips in his novel The Nature of Blood. This essay aims at examining the themes of racial discrimination, identity crisis, alienation and isolation in The Nature of Blood.  A considerable part of the essay, however, deals with racial discrimination. The comparative analysis to the source text and the effects of migration remains focal during the course of discussion.

Language and Intertextuality in "The Nature of Blood" and "Othello"

Caryl Phillips's novel The Nature of Blood consists of five main story lines. There are several narrators who are shifting throughout the novel. The first one is being told by the first person-narrator Stephen Stern who is jewish and leaves pre-Nazi Germany in order to help found the state of Israel. The second story line is told by his niece, Eva Stern who is also a first-person narrator and who tells her story of surviving the Holocaust.

Analysis of the main structural aspects of Caryl Phillip’s The Nature of Blood

“ There is nobody with whom I might share memories of a common past, and nobody with whom I might converse in the language that sits most easily on my tongue[...]There is no turning back[...]Let the storm do its work!” 

 (Phillips,2008:160)