UCLA

The present study explores negotiations of alterity in the Triestine literature of Claudio Magris, Boris Pahor, Giuliana Morandini and Giorgio Pressburger. Nestled between the Adriatic and Slovenia, the former major port and commercial hub of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has long been recognized as an intersection of Germanic, Italian and Slavic cultures. In the early twentieth century, however, this diversity became a chief source of ethnopolitical tensions, which persisted for several decades and transformed Trieste into a locus of contention between various ethnic, political, and national entities in the city and its surrounding borderlands. Trieste’s complex pursuit of a stable, cohesive identity is documented and thematized in the literature of the diverse voices of the city.The Other Others unearths contrasting and overlapping perspectives on belonging through an interdisciplinary dialogical engagement with ongoing global discussions of identity in hybrid [and] liminal geocultural contexts in order to rethink the notion of triestinit� on the local level. Advanced by a select group of Italian Triestine intellectuals, many of whom collaborated with the Florentine journal La Voce during the first decade of the twentieth century, triestinit� was fruit of a collective effort to affirm and promote the localized Italian identity of Triestine writers. The underlying scope of this movement, pioneered by the eminent Triestine intellectual and writer Scipio Slataper, coincided with nationalistic discourse in fascist Italy, which threatened to suppress the marginal(ized) and minor voices that comprised the diverse ethnocultural fabric of Trieste and that forms the analytical focus of this dissertation. The overarching objective of The Other Others is fourfold: (1) to consider how the ethnopolitical conflicts of the twentieth century challenged pre-war conceptions of triestinit� as an Italian localized identity and open this phenomenon up to more inclusive, supra-Italian considerations; (2) to engage with contemporary global debates on difference and identity politics and examine the mechanisms that drive negotiations of belonging and identity construction in and beyond liminal spaces such as Trieste; (3) to uncover points of convergence and points of intersection in the diverse body of these four writers’ works, which drive the ontological crux underlying individual and collective approaches to memory and identity construction; and (4) to unearth the destabilizing power of a periphery like Trieste, or the ‘centrality’ of minor(ity) and marginal perspectives in current humanistic discussions of difference and in an increasingly decentralized world.