Feminist/queer/diasporic temporality in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

Claiming that individuals and communities get their choices, rhythms and practices biopolitically choreographed by temporal mechanisms that dictate which human experiences are included or excluded, Elizabeth Freeman states that those ‘whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer’ (2005). The narrative subject of Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other ( 2019 ) is black, female and (mostly) queer in her design of a polyphonic text featuring twelve black women moving through the world in different decades and occupying a temporal dimension that deviates from the linear and teleological modes. I draw on Edelman (2004) ; Freeman (2010) and Ahmed (2010 , 2017 ) to analyse Evaristo's novel as a text informed by feminist queer temporality and thus explore these characters’ resistance to chrononormative assumptions like ‘the straight time of domesticated gender, capital accumulation, and national coherence’ ( Ramberg, 2016 ). In this light, I address her cast of ‘time abjects’ –lesbians, transgender women, feminist killjoys and menopausal females—as characterized ‘chronotopically’ as their racialized and gendered subjectivities coalesce temporally and spatially seeing their pasts and futures interact in a typically transpositional, queer and diasporic continuum. By invoking Freeman's notion of ‘erotohistoriography’ ( 2010 ) as a distinctive mode of queer time that not only recognizes non-linear chronopolitics, but decidedly prioritizes bodies and pleasures in self-representation, I contend that Evaristo depicts bodies as likewise performing this encounter between past and present in hybrid, carnal and trans-temporal terms. I conclude that in her joining temporality and corporeality, memory and desire, she suggests alternative ways of representing contemporary black British womanhood

Analysis of Barcelona’s tourist landscape as projected in tourism promotional videos

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the tourist landscape as represented in Turisme de Barcelona’s YouTube tourism promotional videos, looking at the landscape’s tangible locations, symbolic and tourist assets and the protagonists in an effort to interpret its storytelling in an overtourism context. Design/methodology/approach The mixed methodology is based on a visual content analysis of promotional videos posted on the official Barcelona tourism YouTube channel. Quantitative data analysis about the assets and their localization was completed with a qualitative assessment of the way these assets are displayed to unveil the narrative they convey. Findings The results highlight that Barcelona’s projected image is mainly based on tangible heritage (especially monuments), its recognizable cityscape and its eno-gastronomic assets. This rather conventional image is geographically concentrated on the neighborhoods perceived as tourist neighborhoods. Practical implications This analysis provides a critical reflection of the actual strategy of destination management organizations and the storytelling they transmit. The findings can help to orientate their future actions and provide a method of analysis that can be repeated for other destinations. Originality/value This paper sheds new light on the use of urban landscapes in nonstatic images both as a narrative subject and as a tangible tourist space in promotional discourse.

The Silenced Narrator and the Notion of “Proto-Narrative”

Narrative voices in Ismet Prcić’s memoir/novel “Shards” are many; this article primarily focuses on what we refer to as the voice of the “silenced narrator” that appears to speak from a deep (“s ubdiegetic”) narrative level shaped by the unconscious workings of traumatic experience. Starting from psychological insights into traumatic states (Elbert and Schauer, Hunt, Crossley, etc.) and tracing the encoded symptoms of this illness across the text, the discussion moves on to a theoretical level to investigate notions proposed by authors such as Genette (to discuss narrative levels), Ricœur (in examining the construction of self), Caruth (in evaluating narrative implications of the literary voicing of trauma), Antonio Damasio (in exploring the source and the nature of the trauma-related destruction of the narratively voiced “I”), and others. These are used to establish the concept of a narrative subject whose voice emerges from the deep zone of their “proto-self” (Damasio), to be weaved into a distinctive narrative form that we will refer to as “proto-narrative.”

A Theoretical Postscript: Time, Space, the Self and the You, and Digital Media as Narrative Constructions

This chapter explores how the concepts of time, space, the Self, the You, and the structural characteristics of the media concerned figure in the narratives. Time, for example, is fleshed out as biographical and sociocultural time whereas space takes on form in the narrative practices of managing boundaries and organizing virtual space. The analysis continues by confirming that the narrative subject is anything but isolated. The You sets foot on the narrative stage as a benchmark or a talking point. In the interplay between narrators and media, transmedia storytelling crystallizes as a new narrative form which interlinks media-based experiences from different phases of life and from different media, giving rise to a cosmos in which the narrators act as the designers of their own stories.