Ascolta le voci degli antenati: l'importanza della dimensione spirituale e della comunicazione con l'aldilà in Almanac of the Dead di Leslie Marmon Silko e Sing, Unburied, Sing di Jesmyn Ward

All human beings, regardless of their culture, ethnicity, nationality, and/or the time they lived in, have more or less consciously sought to define themselves through their relationship not only with their peers, but also with those who came before them: the dead. The universality of this phenomenon, which serves the specific human need to explore the basic condition of human existence and identity, finds a particular expression in contemporary United States, where the relationship with the other world and intergenerational exchange are essential to ethnic minorities as a means to achieve individual, collective, and historical consciousness. Taking inspiration from Hans Ruin's philosophical reflections in Being with the Dead (2019), my dissertation focuses on Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), two works of literature whose interpretation cannot overlook the fundamental importance bestowed by the authors on various forms of encounter and communication between the living and the dead. My purpose is to show how ethnic American literatures offer a privileged area in which the natural bond between this world and the other world(s) is still deemed important and kept alive, despite the allegedly disenchanted response of modern Western societies to mortality and its consequences. My analysis explores the impact of, and responses to centuries of oppression and marginalization on the lives of American Indians and African Americans, by moving from the private sphere of the family to the public sphere of the state and the law, and demonstrating that both are strongly influenced and shaped by an overarching spiritual dimension. I argue that, in literature, these three different but intertwined contexts provide a magnifying lens on the cross-cultural dynamics through which Americans of Native and African descent have managed to survive as a people and challenge hegemonic discourses on their historical and future presence on the North American continent.