Mobilities and Mediterranean peripheries: Narrating Maltese identities in Vincent Vella’s Slippery Steps

ABSTRACT

This article examines the representation of European peripheries in contemporary postcolonial writing through a study of the centre–periphery relationship in the English-language novel Slippery Steps: A Maltese Odyssey (2011) by the Maltese writer Vincent Vella. The article argues that Vella’s novel is embedded in transnational mobility and shows that Maltese identity is constituted by constant movement between Malta and Britain, periphery and centre, as well as in interaction with other Mediterranean and European spaces. This reading of the novel suggests that its representation of Maltese identities is ambiguous. While the experience of mobility in the novel emphasizes the importance of contact zones as sites of hybridity in both the centre and the periphery, by locating its central characters in the contexts of diaspora and migration, the novel also shows how its diasporic identities signify trauma and loss, thus problematizing the centre–periphery relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Centre and periphery
• Malta
• transnational mobility
• diaspora
• trauma
• Vincent Vella

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jopi Nyman

Jopi Nyman is Professor of English and Vice Dean at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Eastern Finland. His recent books include Displacement, Memory, and Travel Contemporary Migrant Writing (2017), Equine Fictions (2019), and the co-edited collections Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings (2021) and Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture: Surfacing Histories (2021). His current research interests focus on human-animal studies, tanscultural literatures, and border narratives.