Margins Marges Margini is a multilingual WordPress electronic journal, focusing on Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Studies. It is directed by C. Bruna Mancini (University of Calabria, Italy), Elisabetta Marino (University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy), and Robert T. Tally (Texas State University, USA). The journal’s mission is to share contributions of a literary, historical, artistic, cultural, humanistic, and social nature through a transdisciplinary and multilingual perspective.

Margins are the kingdom of change, transformation, fluidity, and (re)location. To stand on the margins is to be transgressive, interdicted, eccentric. To prefer the margins over the central/centralised dominant culture is to take up a space of resistance. Therefore, it is crucial to embody marginality and counterpower in order to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the complexity of reality.

Thinking and rethinking the borders means re-evaluating space from a geocritical perspective, combining language, identity, and setting representation – be it home, a rural or urban landscape, or even a digital or scientific/science-fiction space. Strictly connected with female writing, the household space, for instance, is remarkably ambivalent: a familiar place that provides protection but also requires it, the household often becomes a “prison”, and the inside-outside dialectic eventually leads to subversion dynamics. Because of the possibilities provided by semanticization, walls – namely, dividing lines between indoors and outdoors – become somewhat destabilising despite their function to support other elements and define space. Therefore, a house can also become a place of the eccentric and the unsettling, the so-called Freudian Unheimliche.

The notion of margin opens up a wide range of possibilities. Margins are frontiers that become a space of transition where different forces and individuals come in contact and alter their identities. As geographical borders, margins generate dividing lines that protect well-established political, social, and symbolic spaces. The crossing of borders, limits, and marginalities leads to issues of citizenship and belonging; and suffice it to think that some identities in movement, in the making, in transition, find it more complex to develop a sense of belonging towards a certain space, as well as to recognise themselves within it. Yet, crossing borders means opening a breech in the self, to enhance the possibilities for that self, to come to life once again.

A propelling force of change, movement and rebirth comes from inhabiting the margins. In relation to possible forms of categorisation, all of the texts inhabiting the margins, giving them a voice, and restoring complexity to the practices that stem from borders, thresholds, hybridization and impurity, are a symbol of fragmentary and destabilising artistic experiences. Indeed, they oppose the notions of safety, frontier, purity, and mobile forms linked with extraterritoriality and trans-territoriality, and can equally develop and promote a continuous process of transformation, while highlighting a movement towards somewhere else, a tension towards trespassing.