Contesting the Black Flâneur: The rhetoric of disruption and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's urban literature

Abstract

This article investigates the spatial poetics of disruption in Ubah Cristina Ali Farah's second novel Il comandante del fiume. The book sets a unique stage around fragmented flashbacks to resignify the configuration of Afro-Italian urban identity and community. These flashbacks are rendered through a complicated recoding of Rome's urbanscape by its protagonist, Yabar, a young Somali immigrant who experiences a mysterious disfigurement of his body and narrates his past as he recuperates in the hospital. The Black body thus becomes the primary shifting site through which new paradigms of spatial arrangements against power and authority are articulated. This article argues that, by having Yabar fantasize, observe, and live through Rome's urban physicality, Ali Farah delineates a poetics of disruption that functions to redraw the conceptual boundaries of Blackness and postcoloniality in contemporary Italy. Ali Farah's experiment with the city as an actual character de-romanticizes it as a historical fixed site, and instead displays the possibility of plurality in the shape of Black corporeal relationality in determined stances. In this novel, not as observed objects, the protagonists remap Rome as a Black city and carry forward a Benjaminian mode of flâneur to observe the city's fragmented and chaotic arrangements, demystifying its undercurrent construction of racial exclusion.