British academic Dr. John Stotesbury will be delivering a lecture on the work of Gibraltarian author, Mark Sanchez at the University of Bergen in Norway, on September 1.
The University are holding a major international conference on the topic of transculturation (or cross-cultural interaction) in literature, the conference will be entitled “Transculturation and Aesthetics” and around 50 academics from all over the world will be taking part, including academics from major UK and USA universities.
Dr. Stotesbury is the author of various scholarly books, including Aging, Performance, and Stardom: Doing Age on the Stage of Consumerist Culture and London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis.
His talk will be entitled ‘Constructions of Transcolonial Identity in M. G. Sanchez’s Rock Black: Ten Gibraltarian Stories’. Further details about the talk can be found either on the University of Bergen’s website (http://www.uib.no/filearchive/conference-abstracts-by-workshops.pdf) or on the personal site of the author (www.mgsanchez.net).
To coincide with Dr. Stotesbury’s lecture, new and revised Kindle versions of M. G. Sanchez’s two fiction books, Rock Black: Ten Gibraltarian Stories and Diary of a Victorian Colonial and other Tales, have just been released.
The study of Gibraltarian cultural identity has focused primarily on one of two main fields: its pre-colonial and colonial history, continuing into the present, or the emergence of linguistic diversity within a remarkably confined geopolitical space, with particular emphasis on the creolized Andalucian Spanish spoken, alongside English, by a significant proportion of Gibraltar’s now-indigenous population.
In the present century Mark Sanchez, writing mainly from without the colony, has attempted in his Rock Black to explore the conflicted nature of his own Gibraltarian identity in a series of interlinked prose vignettes that draw on his experience of the colony in the period immediately succeeding the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Spain.
URL: http://www.chronicle.gi/headlines_details.php?id=25651 (link now defunct)