This volume is the result of the close collaboration between the University of Naples ”L’Orientale” and the scholars organizing and Università degli studi di Napoli participating in the postgraduate course Feminisms in a Transnational Perspective in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The contributions presented here “L’Orientale” use different conceptual approaches to theory, history and cultural texts, and to women’s lives, experiences and legacies, in order to offer their re-visions of the past and their prospects of the future as an act of feminist responsibility. Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future is a complex, methodologically innovative, and valuable collection of scholarly works. Pointing to mimetic and absent places (themes, artefacts, female figures, suppressed Others, acts of resistance) within great historical narratives and the importance of a different kind of reading and researching of heritage, archived sociality, and the future, the essays collected here signal the potency of feminist epistemology to assume responsibility in the ‘re-semantization of the contemporaneity’. The texts show how, with which tools, and through which critical lenses, feminist epistemology gives answers to the overwhelming problems of modernity, having in mind the centrality of emancipatory values of women’s heritage and insight. (Prof. Biljana Kašić, University of Zadar, Croatia) The collected book of proceedings Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future represents a valuable publication that includes multiple perspectives, problems and concepts of feminist research (...) from a wide range of approaches: from analyzing historical materials, archives, new discoveries to an overview of the lives and works of female Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future philosophers, the predecessors of gender studies, literary and film criticism, etc. Of particular, perhaps even decisive importance is that some of the authors speak and reflect on their own place in writing “from the European semi-periphery” and “from the ruins of disrupted, denied or instrumentalized socialist worlds”. With this they confront the growing dangers of the Americanization and Britishization of gender studies and bring to light phenomena that were forgotten “overnight”. (Prof. Eva D. Bahovec, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) edited by Silvana Carotenuto, Francesca Maria Gabrielli, Renata Jambrešić Kirin NAPOLI Università degli studi di Napoli ISBN 978-953-8089-29-9 "L'Orientale" ISBN 978-88-6719-173-4 2019 Materia Postcoloniale/Postcolonial Matters Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future edited by Silvana Carotenuto, Francesca Maria Gabrielli, Renata Jambrešić Kirin NAPOLI 2019 Cover image: Anita Artura Agresta, Self-portrait, 2014 (courtesy of the artist) Materia Postcoloniale/Postcolonial Matters Book Series General Editor Silvana Carotenuto Editorial Board Iain Chambers, Marta Cariello, Marina De Chiara, Antonia Anna Ferrante, Annalisa Piccirillo, Stamatia Portanova International Advisory Board Aghogho Akpome, Eva Dolar Bahovec, Wanda Balzano, Maurizio Calbi, Andrea Cassatella, Alessandra Cianelli, Lidia Curti, Beatrice Ferrara, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Barzoo Eliassi, Julian Enriques, Lada Čale Feldman, Susanne Franco, Paul Gilroy, Serena Guarracino, Catherine Hall, Stefano Harvey, Celeste Ianniciello, Isaac Julien, Biljana Kasic, Rose Martin, Sandro Mezzadra, Michaela Quadraro, Viola Sarnelli, Ash Sharma, Marina Vitale, Gabriel Zuchtriegel. Proprietà letteraria riservata © Napoli 2019 Tutti i diritti di riproduzione sono riservati. Sono pertanto vietate la conservazione in sistemi reperimento dati e la riproduzione o la trasmissione anche parziale, in qualsiasi forma e mezzo (elettronico, meccanico, incluse fotocopie e registrazioni) senza il previo consenso scritto dell’editore. ISBN 978-953-8089-29-9 ISBN 978-88-6719-173-4 The volume has been published with contributions from the Dep. of Human and Social Sciences of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research of Zagabria (Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Zagreb). This volume has been partially funded by the Croatian Science Foundation within the project “Narrating Fear” [IP-2016-06-2463]. Università degli studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" IMPAGINAZIONE E FOTORITOCCO / LAYOUT AND PHOTO EDITING Antonio Quagliozzi - Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” DISRUPTING HISTORICITY, RECLAIMING THE FUTURE — 3 Table of content Silvana Carotenuto, Francesca Maria Gabrielli, Renata Jambrešić Kirin Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future ................................... 5 Herstories Sanja Milutinović Bojanić On the Eternal Present ...................................................................... 15 Brigita Malenica Lost and Found: Female Subjectivity and Political Agency as a Feminist Utopian Horizon ........................................................... 31 Brigita Miloš Thoughts on Being Late: (Re)presentational Case Study of Rijeka’s Center for Women’s Studies ......................................................... 55 Dubravka Dulibić-Paljar Virginity Stories: From Virgin Martyrs to Virginal Heroines in Nineteenth-Century Croatian Literature ..................................... 73 Nataša Polgar Between Romanticization and De-historization of History: The ‘Unveiling‘ of Gender in Witchcraft Trials .................................. 97 Foremothers Francesca Maria Gabrielli Feminism in Disguise: Isotta Nogarola’s Defense of Eve (1451) ........... 115 Katherine Borland Feminist Epistemology Outside the Academy: Jane Addams’ The Long Road of Women’s Memory ........................................... 149 Marija Ott Franolić ”I wanted to be somebody”: Learning from the Past and Making Women’s Life Stories Matter ........................................... 163 Renata Jambrešić Kirin Yugoslav Women Intellectuals: From a Party Cell to a Prison Cell ......... 179 4 — DISRUPTING HISTORICITY, RECLAIMING THE FUTURE Revisions Lada Čale Feldman Acting History Across Media: Margarete von Trotta‘s Hannah Arendt ......201 Daša Duhaček Arendtian Concept of Judgment: Between Thinking and Acting? ... 221 Iva Rogulja Praštalo The Abject Body: Feminist Approaches to Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy in Julia Kristeva, Linda M. G. Zerilli, and Judith Butler ............233 Petra Belc Krnjaić Some Remarks on the Position of Women in the History of Yugoslav Experimental Cinema: The Case of Tatjana Ivančić........ 249 Ana Fazekaš Bitch Better Have My Money: Female Eros and Aggression in Contemporary Pop Music ............................................................271 The Future Durre S. Ahmed The Crazy (Br)Other: Islam and the West .........................................291 Simona Miceli Migration and Female Writings: Experiencing Contamination, Decentralizing Narration ..............................................................307 Tijana Matijević Neo-Avantgarde and Feminist Underpinnings Of Post-Yugoslav Literature and its Utopias: A Comparative Reading of Judita Šalgo and Slobodan Tišma ........................................................ 325 Silvana Carotenuto The Génie of Nnedi Okorafor’s Oeuvre: Genre, Gender and the Generosity of Writing .......................................................... 339 Svetlana Slapšak Women Novelists and Love as a Tool of Changing Historical Perspective ............................................................................... 353 Notes On Contributors ......................................................... 363 DISRUPTING HISTORICITY, RECLAIMING THE FUTURE — 5 Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future Silvana Carotenuto, Francesca Maria Gabrielli, Renata Jambrešić Kirin Every writing or revision makes the ‘discovery’ all over again. (Hortense Spillers) The aim of this volume is to intervene both in the ways women inherit the past and open up towards the future, mobilizing feminist epistemology and feminist legacy in order to establish the agenda of a hospitable Europe and a collaborative world, a humanistic university and a peer reading sisterhood instead of the fallacy of excellence and academic proficiency. It is the critical incentive for the authors of the contributions presented here – who use different conceptual approaches to theory, history and cultural texts, but also to women’s lives, experiences and legacies – to reveal the strategies that we have used and still use in historical and sociocultural locations in order to confront the ‘foreclusionary structures’ of the grand narratives and to establish a more intimate relationship with the ghosts of a traumatic past and the promises of a future that cannot be fully anticipated. Although most authors focus on the theoretical reverberation of silenced, neglected and insufficiently explored women’s discourses, social criticism is the corollary of a shared endeavor – encouraged by the Dubrovnik feminist course1 – because, as Linda Nicholson notices: ¹ The edited volume Disrupting Historicity, Reclaiming the Future consists of selected proceedings from three sessions of the postgraduate course Feminisms in a Transnational Perspective (held in May 2014, 2015, and 2016 respectively). This postgraduate course started in 2007 at the Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik, an independent international centre for advanced studies, in order to connect feminist scholars and activists from the North and South of Europe with the idea 6 — DISRUPTING HISTORICITY, RECLAIMING