Tracing Transmedial Sameness

How can we identify meaningful transmedial points of contact between cultural practices in a way that doesn’t overlook the specific modes of expression inherent to different medial forms?

My doctoral research has sought to explore how contemporary artists and writers offer ways of thinking about Rome that may differ from conventional ideas about the city. I’m interested in how their practices emerge from the diverse transnational positionalities that bring them to Rome, and how they explore the city as an entangled site of postcolonial or transhuman memories. I began the first year of my PhD by focusing on textual descriptions of the city (for example by Igiaba Scego, Cristina Ubah Ali Farah and Amara Lakhous). But while visiting Rome in person or staying in touch via social media with cultural events there, I started to notice that the transnational approach to the city and its memories that I had identified in texts was not unique to writers: street artists as well as established practitioners (for example, Carrie Mae Weems, FischerelSani and William Kentridge) who have ‘set’ practices in Rome seem to share a similar approach to the city.

This experience of noticing transmedial commonalities across cultural practices recalls the everyday aesthetic experience of “tracing patterns of commonality” across different contexts that Andrew Ginger locates as fundamental to comparative inquiry (Andrew Ginger, “Comparative Study and the Nature of Connections”, Modern Languages Open, 18, 2018). The direction of my thesis emerged from chance meetings that might well not have happened, from the absence of other meetings that could have led it elsewhere. Even though Ginger is concerned with tracing “poetic resemblances” across different linguistic or geographical contexts, this subjective, sense-led approach speaks to the transmedial route that my own research has taken.

Being led by transmedial poetic resemblances doesn’t mean losing appreciation of medial or disciplinary difference but it does mean sometimes consciously overlooking such differences. Sensitivity to sameness means my “psychological journeying” is not so framed by disciplinary difference but is, in Ginger0s terms, “open and indeterminate”. For me this approach has shifted how I see my practice: giving preference to appreciating sameness has encouraged me to be more responsive to my objects of study; it involves being in “continual dialogue with materials […] not knowing quite where the journeying is going to take me” (Ginger). I also find that this approach encourages me to continuously reflect on my singular, embodied and emplaced positionality as a UK-based researcher in Italian Studies, “placing my bod[y] and biograph[y] into critical dialogue” with the objects of my study (Naomi Wells et al, “Ethnography and Modern Languages”, Modern Languages Open, 1, 2019).

In search of transmedial connections outside the frame of disciplinary difference, I’ve developed a deeper awareness of qualities –other than those reflective of their different medial languages – that hold together textual and visual artistic forms, or that hold them apart. In particular, I’ve started thinking about cultural agency; considering cultural practices, in Rita Felski’s terms, as “nonhuman actors” that by giving us ideas “help to modify states of affairs” (Felski, The Limits of Critique, U of Chicago P, 164). While using different medial languages, the performative qualities and thought-provoking intentions shared by the texts and artworks I examine mean that they share an agency to, perhaps, invite us to think differently about Rome and its memories.