Da Birmingham a Napoli: Otherness, ritmi urbani, e voci dalle periferie di Hanif Kureishi

In this essay, the important concept of Otherness in Cultural Studies is discussed through the author's academic training experience at the University of Naples ‘L'Orientale’. Here, since the mid-1980s, the perspectives of Cultural Studies have come from courses in English and Anglo-American Literature taught by professors directly involved with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham (Iain Chambers, Lidia Curti, Marina Vitale) and with the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The essay explores the concept of Otherness through texts that have been fundamental in teaching proposals from the 1980s to the present day, and events that testify to the centrality of the Neapolitan university in building a transnational and transcontinental dialogue. In the concluding section, Hanif Kureishi's novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), creatively illustrates the question of the Other.