ABOUT THE ARTICLE
This collaborative study investigates Gabriella Ghermandi’s novel Regina di fiori e di perle (2007) through two perspectives: the first considers music as a historical and social practice by observing Ghermandi’s characters who reference Ethiopian oral traditions; the second explores the contemporary dynamics of migration and transnational identity that critically analyses how storytelling practices are carried into an Italian context. We argue that the fate of singing and storytelling in Ghermandi’s fictional world mirrors the author’s real life experience of moving between orality and recorded and written forms as a reciprocal process as a means of preserving history. Her fictional tradition bearers (Aron, Yacob, and Mahlet) embody these malleable modes of communication, reconfiguring stories for a new generation of Ethiopians and Italians.
For more information about my collaborator Eveljn Ferraro (whose interests reside in Italian culture, literature, film, postcolonial, migration, and transnational studies), click here.
CITATION
Dolp, Laura and Eveljn Ferraro. “Casting Sound: Modality and Poetics in Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle” altrelettere (2016)
