Francesca Maria Villani

In Poetics of Relation, Glissant reflects on poetics, which, by acting on the imaginary, allows us to renegotiate power dynamics. At the same time, in the context of decolonial theory, philosophy often takes on a hybrid form with strong literary and poetic influences. This work aims to investigate the link between musical practice and feminist and decolonial studies, arguing that music constitutes a form of thinking from/about the margins, characterised by continuous dislocation, which allows us to think differently. This discussion is accompanied by an analysis of Tania León’s Indígena, in which the composer explores the border between the USA and Cuba and the relationship between the various identities that make up the island. Close to Anzaldúa’s frontier thinking, the composer’s rejection of labels – gender, musical, cultural – means that her work becomes, when read in an intersectional key, a true political manifesto.

María Zambrano’s philosophy is studded with musical metaphors. Indeed, one could say that it is the very proceeding of thought that seems to accord with a logic more akin to music than to pure rationality. This work focusses, in particular, on the figure of Antigone, as described by Zambrano within The Tomb of Antigone, with the intention of demonstrating how the figure of the heroine is essentially musical. Starting from the realm of the sonic, it is possible to trace a line of research within feminist studies that focusses on the being-in-hearing as an existential posture. Within this space, Antigone represents the dissonance that allows for the unhinging of the binary order, to open up to a perspective that includes otherness in all its forms.