Abstrakt
After having defined the role of the maps within European expansionist plans and the different uses of this topos in (post)colonial literature, my paper will focus on two emblematic novels, which share the same basic assumption, namely the idea that history, both individual and collective, is closely related to the mapping of urban and national territory: La mia casa è dove sono written by Igiaba Scego, and Maps by Nuruddin Farah. I will demonstrate that 1) Scego's novel leads to a conciliatory construction of identity based on a naive confidence in narratives as a mean to "give an account of oneself" and on un unwarranted equivalence between "I" and "We" 2) Nuruddin Farah's Maps, on the contrary, conceives the relation between individual and collective or between being member of a family and being member of a nation in allegorical way and adopts the point of view of an unreliable narrator.
This way, he provides a convincing criticism of narrative as a privilege reserved to the members of the wealthy metropolitan elite, and sketches out a new geography of interpersonal and international relations where the frontiers are wholly de-naturalized.