As students of Italian 98T: Bordered Identities: Between Italy, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia at UCLA, we were enraptured by the prose of Boris Pahor’s short stories and novel Necropolis and wanted to bring his cross-cultural perspective into the mainstream American literary canon as well as to younger generations.

Through the analysis of four different but interrelated binaries (History and histories; Individual and Collective; Center and Periphery; Universalism and Particularism), we aim to expose the complexities of literature and art and deconstruct positionality within Pahor’s work. Our individual perspectives and backgrounds bring into the forefront the ways in which his work, and work that engages with bordered identities, are relevant to current sociopolitical contexts. As a collective, we can learn from diverse voices of the past and apply their lived knowledge to improve upon our own communities.

As receivers of History, we understand that there exists a plethora of histories that have been purposely excluded from the mainstream narrative to censor voices critical of the center. Pahor has always been taken by the particular, focusing on details and creating imagery highlighting injustice and the experiences of minority peoples. His perspective is deeply influenced by his upbringing as a part of the Slovenian minority in Trieste and his later experiences as a political prisoner in multiple Nazi concentration camps during WWII. His autobiographical works deal with his trials as a boy and young man during the rise to power of fascists and his internal struggles with identity. Pahor’s works, largely written in the 1950s and 1960s, were not published in Italy, despite their author being from Trieste, until 2008 (Necropolis, The Pyre in the Port). His novel Necropolis was not translated into English until 2013, despite his status as the oldest living survivor of the Holocaust. The plethora of injustices that Pahor has faced highlights the dynamic of our four main binaries, revealing why we simply must discuss this intriguing author. It is especially of importance to read his work as a minor author whose voice has been stifled in his own country and has not been given well-deserved recognition. His words, painting vivid pictures of pain, cut through and raise.