Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

IN SEARCH OF THE “THIRD SPACE”
Melita Richter Malabotta (University of Trieste)
I have different cultures, and I have different countries.
I belong to all of them.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Multicultural experience and personal layers of memory
I would like to start my approach to the issue of travelling selves by exploring
my personal experiences of migration and mobility through space and time,
comparing them with the life stories and narratives of other women’s experiences
of migration and of the dislocation process. I believe that migration
– whether resulting from ‘free’ personal choice, or from social and political
circumstances – inevitably results in the migrant subject finding a period of
time when she/he will position herself/himself between two or more cultures,
in a so-called ‘third space’ which emerges from, but also embraces, multiple
positions.
This third space, fertile soil for memories and for the creation of cultural
hybridism, is dominated by a series of opposing movements – attraction and/
or resistance – both to the birth place and to the place of adoption, between
the need to belong and the need to discard every biological root. But the key
concepts that inform research into the third space are migration, voyage and
boundaries or, rather, lack of boundaries.
Considering the concept of travelling, the Italian writer Mario Soldati
writes: “Usually we revolt against living in two spaces simultaneously, when one
or the other occupies our mind… We can start travelling then, but while the
target of our travel becomes closer and real, the place of departure is becoming
more distant, and we substitute for it a destination of unrealistic remembering:
gaining one, we lose the other. The distance between the two becomes a feature
of the human condition.” 1
In this wave of contracting and extending distances – in what we call
the ‘transformative space’ – which characterises the migrant subject in his/
her geographical and cultural dislocation, I will try to examine more closely
the meaning of my own experience of existing in and appropriating this ‘third
1
Mario Soldati, America primo amore (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1976), 22.
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