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The Inner Border as the Construction Site to Build a Hybrid Europe. The Case of South Tyrol

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Images of Europe

Part of the book series: Law and Visual Jurisprudence ((LVJ,volume 4))

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Abstract

The frontier space builds hybrid and plural identities, which can be projected onto a larger scale to suggest new forms of coexistence and mixing. In the transition from speculative abstraction and graphic representation to application on the territory, borders mobilize, multiply and disintegrate to become frontiers: places of transformation, where the game of intercultural translation may be played. For cultural semiotics, borders and peripheries are zones of increased semiotic activities where the generation of new meanings is accelerated. This chapter focuses on the historically contended and bilingual geographic area of South Tyrol as the object of ideological, political and legal discourse. A certain way of narrating it through a double understanding of frontier, as a space of conquest and place of cultural hybridization, makes it particularly suited as a source for stories about the construction and denial of a united Europe.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author.

  2. 2.

    Dictating this elementary form of distinction between an interior and an exterior, lending it to our language and hence to our world, is, at the elementary level, our physical conformation, which as Lakoff and Johnson say, defines us as a “container with a bounding surface and an in-out orientation. (…) Even where there is no natural physical boundary that can be viewed as defining a container, we impose boundaries – marking off territory so that it has an inside and a bounding surface – whether a wall, a fence, or an abstract line or plane. There are few human instincts more basic than territoriality” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, p. 29).

  3. 3.

    Alexander Langer was a politician from Alto Adige who belonged to the Green party movement, active in the 1980s and early 1990s. A member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1995 (the year he died), Langer, who wrote the famous Tentativo di decalogo per la convivenza interetnica, wanted to turn a territory that was initially peripheral, conflictual and divided territory, into a cross-border laboratory, hybrid and multilingual.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Free University of Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Valeria Burgio

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  1. Valeria Burgio
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Correspondence to Valeria Burgio .

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  1. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Francesco Mangiapane

  2. University of Urbino, Urbino, Italy

    Tiziana Migliore

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Burgio, V. (2021). The Inner Border as the Construction Site to Build a Hybrid Europe. The Case of South Tyrol. In: Mangiapane, F., Migliore, T. (eds) Images of Europe. Law and Visual Jurisprudence, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69240-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69240-7_11

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