Against the Grain : Dissent, Opposition and La parola contraria in Literature, Politics and the Arts

The special issue engages with different forms of verbal and non-verbal contrarian speech from interdisciplinary analytical perspectives, with the aim of clarifying distinct types and tactics of contrarian speech. ‘Contrarianism’ is explored as a multifaceted practice from across the political spectrum, and under the premise that the analysis of such practice cannot be divided from its ethics. Thus, contributions address a range of different political and social scenarios. Contributors take their cue from the analogy that De Luca establishes between contrarian speech and a nuanced understanding of sabotage, which demands close attention to the subtle and sophisticated workings of the systems and machineries that are to be opposed. In De Luca’s practice, this attention to the subtle and the sophisticated is enacted in the affinity with poetry and poetic language, and many contributors to this volume work with this approach. The ‘poetic’ is thereby used as a socially grounded hermeneutics that recognizes that language can be world-making in many ways, some of them terrible. The approaches range from contributions that present direct analyses of poems and poetic works as concrete examples of contrarian speech; to contributions where writers approach non-poetic manifestations of contrarian speech through a poetic sensibility and attention to detail.