Una geografia alla deriva
Spazio, identità e utopia ne La zattera di pietra di José Saramago
Abstract
This article analyses José Saramago’s The Stone Raft (A Jangada de Pedra, 1986) through the lens of geography as both a mobile metaphor and a critical device. Starting from the absurd event that opens the novel — the physical detachment of the Iberian Peninsula from Europe and its drift across the Atlantic toward the global South — the essay reads Saramago’s narrative as a form of metaphysical parody that destabilizes reality from within in order to expose its hidden contradictions. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s theory of relational space (2005), Henri Lefebvre’s reflection on the social production of space (1974), and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization (1990), the article argues that the wandering peninsula functions as an ironic deconstruction of Eurocentric cartography and of the foundational narratives underpinning European modernity: geography as immutable order, Europe as the center of the world, and history as linear progress. At the same time, the peninsula’s movement toward the South Atlantic becomes a geographical utopia and an ethical project, imagining new forms of coexistence grounded in solidarity, dialogue, and openness to otherness, in ways that resonate with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s epistemologies of the South (2016).
Presentato: 18 Maggio 2026 | Accettato: 26 Giugno 2026 | Pubblicato 12 Ottobre 2026 | Lingua: it
Keywords Cartography • Critical geography • Utopian geography • Deterritorialization • Relational space • José Saramago
Copyright © 2026 Barbara Gori. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.