The Asymmetries of Border Spaces

Simona Škrabec*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Boris Pahor was born in 1913 in Trieste, where he died at the age of 108. In all his works, he tries to reconstruct the conditions of exclusion experienced by himself, his family, his people, and finally all those who resisted the ideological pressures at the height of the Nazi terror, as described in the novel Necropolis (1967). The extreme violence with which assimilation was imposed on the Slovenian minority did not allow him to preserve his original identity. Pahor’s Trieste confirms that spaces exposed to a constant pressure of assimilation are spaces of undeniable vitality. This perspective should allow us to create a corpus of knowledge that reflects the resilience of cultures exposed to domination. Instead of seeing the margins as a place of exclusion and endemic difficulties, we need to change the narrative that defines them. Margins are the spaces where translation constantly materializes, the spaces of exchanges and transfers, thus the periphery has the capacity for mediation between complex cultural systems.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages11
JournalCritique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

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