With the end of modern metanarratives, and the dismantling of political utopias as mass emancipatory drivers, societal life has found its center of rotation in the innovative cycles of ICTs. A digital revolution that has liquefied everything solid in the old world into sequences of 0s and 1s, into molecules of digital water, gave life to the new world of the Infocene constituted by the technological era that has submerged the geo-cultural space in an ocean of bits, where ideas, knowledge, forms of socialization, symbolic processes, forms of beliefs, and historical events circulate in real time. Since the 1990s, the digital world has been thought of in anthropocentric terms, like the communicative environment produced by the Web’s electro-nervous system that has extended human intelligence. This chapter, instead, proposes a critical exploration of informational reality. Adopting a technocentric viewpoint, the hypothesis developed here is that the informational sea of the Infocene nourishes the life of a self-creating connective mind, capable of informing human neural and relational networks through a continuous flow of high-spectacle content images. It is precisely the rapid succession of created images, as exchanged, and interconnected by the connective mind, that leads humans to lose the time for reasoning, regressing toward the space and time of animal reactivity. By compressing reflectivity, deconstructing the metacognitive functions of deep thought, Homo digitalis enters a level of fast reasoning, stripped of doubts, more linear, dictated by the need to respond to the stimulations of the medial landscape that surfaces on his screens. Focusing on the COVID-19 infodemic, the last part of the chapter aims at highlighting the power of the connective mind to synchronize social life into archaic emotional states, such as fear, so intense as to legitimize a new zootechnical type of political order.

The concept of ontology has a long and complex history, with roots that can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, who is widely regarded as its founder. Parmenides developed the idea of ontology as a means of exploring the fundamental nature of existence and being. He sought to understand the logical and immanent meaning of the term “being” and how it relates to the world around us. In contrast, metaphysics is concerned with exploring the fundamental nature of reality itself. It distances itself from the physical world and its distinct temporal elements. Plato, in his work Sophist, argued that only the “eteros” remained identical to itself within the system of genera, highlighting the importance of understanding the nature of existence itself. Similarly, Aristotle’s Metaphysics reflected a tension between the creation of a closed system and the impossibility of reaching it. In book Δ/V, chapters 9 and 10, he discussed the meanings of the terms “other” and “opposite”, revealing the challenges of understanding the nature of reality itself. The debate between ontology and metaphysics has been ongoing in the Anglo-Saxon world since the early twentieth century, particularly in the context of empiricism. This debate has resurfaced in France, where philosophers like Levinas and Ricoeur have attempted to reconcile the tension between ontology and metaphysics by proposing categories such as “dialectic” and “metaphor” to bridge the divide. In this chapter, we will continue this process of reconciliation between ontology and metaphysics, recognizing the necessary identity of each pole involved in the dispute. By exploring the complexities and nuances of these concepts, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of existence and reality.

Between 1979 and 1989, about 20,000 Mozambicans were sent to study and work in East German factories under the aegis of cooperation agreements between FRELIMO and the GDR. Magermanes, madgermans is how these “Made in Germany” men and women are called, whose migration—behind the purpose of boosting professional training and contributing to the construction of the New Man—revealed inevitable similarities with the former exodus of the enslaved workers in colonial times in the mines of South Africa: paternalistic legal and institutional framework, rotating hiring of young single men, deferred payment of part of the wages, segregation and social-habitational control in the host country. Hastily repatriated after the fall of the Berlin wall and the failure of FRELIMO’s socialist project, many of the Madgermans were unable to reintegrate into the changed economic and social landscape: the one that was supposed to represent the future elite became a lost generation, suspended in an in-between condition. Thirty years ago, the Madgermans began marching in Wednesday protests, an almost unique case of political contestation in the post-independence period, turning the streets of Maputo into a stage for demanding recognition for the pensions and benefits accrued during their stay in the GDR. These demonstrations contributed to strengthening the perception of a common identity, in a movement somewhat comparable to that of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, particularly in the challenge to oblivion.

The work of the Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda has been characterized from the outset by intertextuality, which he uses as a means of conveying the complex entanglement of symbolic and historical tensions that relations between Africa and Europe have always carried with them, not only during the long centuries of colonization but also in the post-colonial present. These reflections are crucially informed by the artist’s own experience: in the early years of his career he was selected to participate in several artistic residencies on the European continent and it was during the first one, which took place in the city of Venice in 2010, that he began to create pieces that directly call into question the relationship of Europe with the continent that for centuries it has considered its own Other—a critique carried out from the soil of Europe itself. The chapter presents an analysis of Kiluanji Kia Henda’s works The Merchant of Venice (2010) and Othello’s Fate (2013), a photographic portrait and a series of tableau-vivant photographs, respectively, that can be considered cross-cultural and transmedial adaptations of William Shakespeare’s dramas, and The Isle of Venus (2018), an installation whose title refers to Os Lusíadas by Luís Vaz de Camões. This analysis will clarify how these three classical, Renaissance literary texts echo in the three contemporary artworks, focusing particularly on the reinterpretation of the theme of the ethnic and cultural Other that they engage with. My aim is to understand how, in our post-imperial contemporaneity, the universalization of European cultural referents, and within these of the literary canon, provides an “inversion of the gaze” that enables the historical Other to contribute to the interpretation and definition of what Europe’s present is.

Chen Xi (1981–), aka Long Santiao, is a UK-based transnational cartoonist, writer, and illustrator. With the exception of Under the Sky of Rome (Luoma de tiankong xia), an illustrated novel published in 2009 by Shaanxi Normal University Press, her work consists mainly of comics and graphic novels, some of them collected in a book titled Dreams and Shadows: Tales from Planet Xi’s Teahouse, published in 2015 by the British independent publisher Line of Intent, and others self-published or simply uploaded on her blogs. Since her style—playfully called “Sinophone pop” (Pedone Il favoloso mondo di Chen Xi. Narrazioni pop nell’epoca della fluidità culturale. Presentazione. LEA—Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente 7: 3–17, 2018b)—draws upon different cultural traditions to shape original, fluid meanings, her work can be described as transcultural (Dagnino Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity. Transcultural Studies 2: 130–160, 2013). This occurs through the massive use of scripts and images ascribable to a Chinese cultural context (traditional folklore, wuxia martial heroes, mythology, and fantasy), combined with European ones (Italian writers Buzzati, Calvino, Eco, or atmospheres from Britain’s Victorian era or London’s Swinging Sixties). In a skilfully crafted paradox, Chen Xi employs commodification, fetishization, and self-orientalization to create a personal neo-nomadic, transcultural landscape. Interrogating the hybridity of the graphic novel/illustrated fiction as a genre to challenge the univocity of identity, the chapter also demonstrates that Chen Xi’s work is an act of creative agency to articulate a specific Sinophone chronotope (Shih, The Concept of the Sinophone. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 163 (3), 709–718, 2011), in a continued questioning of the center/periphery matrix that reflects the author’s transformation through active (trans)culturation empowerment.

What is, or what has to be, the meaning of ‘otherness’ in the present century? This question is one often posed in volumes concerned with the theme of ‘otherness’, revealing the atemporality of this topic; it is always current, and a source of cross-reflexions, involving different cultures. In the Collins and Cambridge dictionaries we read as follows:

This chapter aims to summarize the contact between the Portuguese world and China by examining the various embassies that took place between 1508 and 1725, focusing mainly on the embassy sent in 1725 by King João V, represented by Alexandre Metelo de Souza e Meneses. With the aim of resolving the difficult situation of the Lusitanians in the Orient, Metelo brought in his luggage more than two centuries of Luso-Sino relations. The encounter with the alterity created some cultural mismatches which caused misunderstandings and disagreements especially with regard to language, translation, and interpretation of cultural systems.