Marika Preziuso

B.A. (Salerno, Italy), M.A., PhD (Birkbeck, University of London)

Research Associate ARHC Project: ‘Space and Place in Translation: Postcolonial Geographies in the work of Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé’

email: M.Preziuso@lboro.ac.uk

Tel : +44 (0)1509 222789
Fax: +44 (0)1509 223930

Room NN.1.01, Martin Hall building, East Park

Career

• 2008 – Research Associate, Loughborough University September 2008-March 2009

• 2007-2009 Associate Fellow at the Caribbean Study Centre, London Metropolitan University

• 2006–2008 Graduate Teaching Assistant of the undergraduate course ‘Key Concepts in Cultural Analysis: The Production of the Human’, School of English, Birkbeck, University of London.

• 2005-2006 Lecturer of the undergraduate modules ‘The Literature of the French Caribbean since 1930’ and ‘From Caribbean Fiction to Films’, both taught at the Department of Caribbean Studies, London Metropolitan University, Holloway Campus, London.

Research Interests

My research interests are centred around the cross-cultural space(s) of intersection between contemporary post-colonial literature and disciplines tangential to it, such as translation studies, literary geography and gender studies. More specifically, I am interested in the dynamics that unfold at the level of textuality in such literature, in terms of how its language and imaginaries produce historical and spatial narratives of ‘post-coloniality’.

In my doctoral research I have privileged the contemporary literary production from and around the Caribbean diaspora. The Caribbean as both a geographical and socio-historical space has always been defined by a constant proliferation of spatial and bio-natural images and tropes that have constituted essential humus for the literature from the ‘extended’ archipelago (which I intend as encompassing its diaspora). Caribbean cultural imaginary, however, is rooted in the specific conditions of existence of Caribbean people and bears witness to their history of colonial dispossession and loss as its richly textured tropes often articulate the hope and freedom that have come out of these traumatic experience. In this respect, the focus of my doctoral research has been what I have defined as the ‘lived–imagined’ Caribbean, as the composite identity mosaic that is the ‘reality’ of the archipelago today, but it is also traversed by its imagining potential of ‘dislocation’.

Following from my doctoral thesis, in my current research I approach the textuality of cross-cultural Caribbean novels in comparative and multidisciplinary ways in order to suggest Caribbean and post-colonial epistemologies that interrogate the boundaries between ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’, through alternative definitions of ‘location’ and ‘dislocation’, ‘placement’ and ‘displacement’. In this respect, I privilege diasporic literature that crosses genres and charts transnational trajectories, as I am interested in the ways these texts claim both the ‘performative’ and ‘embodied’ aspect of post-colonial authorship.