Marinella Rodi-Risberg – författare

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders. The essays argue that such border crossings reflect on recent sociocultural transformations and geopolitical anxieties to create an image of networked and interconnected societies where crime is not easily contained. The book further analyses crime texts’ wider sociocultural and affective significance by examining the global mobility of the genre itself across cultures, languages and media. Underlining the global reach and mobility of the crime genre, the collection analyses types and representations of mobility in literary and visual crime narratives, inviting comparisons between texts, crimes and mobilities in a geographically diverse context. The collection ultimately understands mobility as an object of study and a critical lens through which transformations in our globalised world can be examined.

Trauma and Spirituality in Ethnic American Women’s Novels examines a genre of ethnic American women’s literature, which the author calls spiritual trauma narratives, that testify to traumas caused by epistemological violence, wreaked by ongoing colonialism, systematic racism, and marginalization grounded in a binary, hierarchical, and supremacist post-Enlightenment epistemology that negates the spiritual knowledge of interconnectivity found in people of color’s belief systems. Placing trauma theory in productive conversation with women of color feminist studies, Marinella Rodi-Risberg explores literary texts by Chicana, African American, and Native American authors that engage readers in the protagonists’ transformative encounters with ancestral knowledge through symbols, ritual, dreaming, storytelling, and interactions with the natural world. In this way, the author argues, they model a shift in awareness regarding historical and present traumas including slavery, genocide, racial and sexual violence, highlighting the importance of literature as a site of knowledge production and resistance.