The Road to Berlin': Displacement and Cultural Exile in the New Italian Fiction of the Nineties (original) (raw)

Italian Postcolonial Literature

California Italian Studies, 2017

Italian postcolonial literature has been one of the most historically relevant, culturally incisive, and artistically revitalizing phenomena to emerge in the past twenty-five years. It has provided a symbolic representation of the many social changes that took place in Italy during this period, encouraging society to rethink itself and to conceive of migrants to Italy and subsequent generations of new Italians in ways that go far beyond rejection and victimization. This essay is a tribute to the cultural and literary relevance of Italian postcolonial literature and to its crucial role as part of contemporary Italian culture.

Remapping Cityscapes: Postcolonial Diasporas and Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary Italian Literature

Nel presente saggio esamino le modalità attraverso cui scrittrici di seconda generazione come Igiaba Scego e Ubax Cristina Ali Farah rappresentano i cambiamenti sociali che avvengono quotidianamente nell’Italia postcoloniale attraverso nuove articolazioni spaziali. Queste autrici propongono nuove rappresentazioni di soggetti migranti e postcoloniali, e lo fanno popolando le proprie narrazioni e i paesaggi urbani in cui tali narrazioni si articolano con personaggi migranti e di seconda generazione che non sono in alcun modo conformi al modello di indesiderabilità attraverso cui questi soggetti sono tradizionalmente rappresentanti. Attraverso una rimappatura degli spazi urbani come luoghi di significazione culturale e una messa in discussione delle tradizionali articolazioni del potere in ambienti urbani e metropolitani, scrittrici e scrittori di seconda generazione decostruiscono le rappresentazioni della popolazione italiana come omogenea e dei migranti come soggetti pericolosi e/o vittimizzati, assolutamente privi di agency. In questo processo di rimappatura dello spazio locale, che conduce ad una rimappatura anche dello spazio nazionale, si intersecano questioni di genere, razza, postcolonialità, cittadinanza e appartenenza.

Italian ghetto stories: Toward a transnational literary history

Forum Italicum, 2023

This article examines Italian ghetto stories, which are distinguished by confusions of time, continuities, tourism, reflections on collective identities, and movements in and out, in order to outline one potential literary history. In contrast to German-language and Anglophone literary ghettos, Italian ones are generally absent as a critical category from literary debates, though they appear in works by

'Rented Spaces': Italian Postcolonial Literature

"Moving from the marginal social space assigned to migrant women and from their condition of objects of enunciation, this essay analyses the literature produced by Italophone women writers, Italians of African, Eastern European or Indian ancestry as a controversial site of self-representation. Although they gain increasing visibility through access to publication, these writers still occupy ambiguous spaces of exotic objectification and limiting definitions. By choosing a postcolonial perspective as a theoretical approach which might help re-establish connections between a repressed colonial history and contemporary global migration, the essay suggests that, in their precarious occupation of Italian literary and linguistic spaces, postcolonial women writers inhabit different discursive places like a ‘rented apartment’ whose transitory power provides new strategies of literary and linguistic cohabitation, effectively disturbing the construction of supposedly homogeneous national and cultural spaces. Keywords: gender and migration; postcolonial; Italian literature; space"

From Migrant Literature to Contemporary Literature of Transcultural Italy: Forms and Effects of a Strategic Marginality

Ed. Petr Kyloušek, "Centers and Peripheries in Romance Language Literatures in the Americas and Africa", Brill, pp. 383-414, 2023

In the territories of the former Italian colonial empire, an autonomous Italophone literature has never emerged. On the other hand, the literature of Italian emigrants in the world, although quantitatively important, remained mostly separate from national literary production without exerting any real influence on its evolution. Different is the case, however, of the so-called migrant literature, within which it is usual to place not only the production written in Italian by immigrants, but also that of authors from former colonies or second generations. It is through this corpus, I argue, that the Italian case can enter into dialogue with postcolonial dynamics between centers and peripheries that invest other Romance language literatures. Although today there are many reasons to abolish and definitively overcome the dividing line between migrant literature and contemporary Italian literature tout court, the chapter insists on the role that migrant production has been able to play in the Italian context, precisely as a “marginal” textual area distinct from both foreign literature in translation and contemporary Italian literature. After presenting the effects of this strategic peripherality on the Italian literary field (especially in terms of deprovincialization and revitalization of literary criticism), the contribution focuses on literary forms and genres through some emblematic examples and concludes by explaining why the distinction between migrant and Italian literature has gradually lost its meaning, suggesting some avenues for future research.

Relocation Narratives 'Made in Italy': Self and Place in Late-Twentieth Century Travel Writing

At the intersection of life writing and travel writing, relocation narratives form a distinct subgenre of contemporary travel memoirs concerned with the inter-subjective and intra-subjective experiences of travellers who become settlers in foreign locales. Lured by the dream of the ‘good life’ abroad, transnational writers detail their post-relocation experiences in autobiographical accounts that seek to educate and entertain global readers about what it means to accommodate to a new life in a new land. This study examines the entwined processes of identity (re)formation and place attachment represented in recent relocation trilogies set in Italy, highlighting the tension between reality and illusion in the pursuit of la dolce vita in the adopted homeland. Focusing on Frances Mayes’s popular Tuscan texts, Annie Hawes’s Ligurian trilogy, and Tim Parks’s memoirs set in Verona, the study addresses how their accommodation over a period of long-term foreign residency is represented in multipart nonfiction accounts. Are their memoirs of ‘becoming Italian’ merely an exercise in social distinction that appropriates Italian ‘authenticity’ and packages it for global tastes? Or does dwelling in cultural difference over time lead to the development of an intercultural competence that is one aspect of an engaged form of cosmopolitanism? A close reading of the language, stylistics, and form of relocation narratives reveals a tension between colonial and cosmopolitan orientations as strategies for cultural representation. By re-positioning themselves across geographic, conceptual, and generic boundaries, relocation writers are mapping out new possibilities for identity-making through new patterns of home-making within contemporary transnational lifestyles. Their deep immersion in place enables the production of situated readings of Italy, Italians and Italianness that avoid essentialising otherness through the recognition of dialogical subjectivities.