Bio

Katiuscia Darici is a lecturer at the University of Turin, where she teaches Contemporary Spanish and Catalan Literature.

Her lines of research include Iberian Studies, migrant literature, writings of the self, both from a female perspective (writing of the body, feminist writing and on maternity) and in pandemic literature.

Noteworthy among her published works are Traslaciones. Identidades híbridas en las literaturas ibéricas (Edizioni dell’Orso, 2021) and La piel fría de Albert Sánchez Piñol: una novela in limine (QuiEdit, 2020).

She is secretary of AISC (Associazione Italiana Studi Catalani) for 2022 to 2025. Since 2022, she has been on the Editorial Board for Rivista Italiana di Studi Catalani. She has given conferences on Catalan literature at the universities of Valencia, Alicante, Copenhagen, Cambridge, Venice and Verona.

Project

At Faberllull she wants to focus on analysing the protagonists of some of Najat El Hachmi’s novels as “wilful subjects”, according to the approach Sara Ahmed explored in her eponymous essay published by Duke University Press (2014). According to Ahmed, the wilful subject [one charged with wilfulness] can be considered disobedient and, therefore, problematic. Their wilfulness, their desire to pursue a goal, can be interpreted as stubbornness.

This has consequences, even putting the subject’s own survival at risk.

The main characters in El Hachmi’s works are young women trying to exercise their right to personal freedom beyond the restrictions imposed by their families and religion. The push for emancipation leads to changes that affect the family order and somehow endanger these women’s lives. Her working hypothesis is that studying these female characters from the theoretical framework provided by Affect Studies will allow her to test possible interpretations on top of the traditional ones, such as migrant literature. In fact, the proposal consists of seeing whether these wilful characters suffer as a result of being considered wilful. And to do so, she will analyse the text through the lens of Ahmed’s proposal.