Una geografia alla deriva. Spazio, identità e utopia ne La zattera di pietra di José Saramago

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).