This book argues for the importance of adopting a postcolonial perspective in analysing contemporary Italian culture and literature. Originally published in Italian in 2018 as Riscrivere la nazione: La letteratura italiana postcoloniale, this new English translation brings to light the connections between the present, the colonial past and the great historical waves of international and intranational migration. By doing so, the book shows how a sense of Italian national identity emerged, at least in part, as the result of different migrations and why there is such a strong resistance in Italy to extending the privilege of italianità, or Italianness, to those who have arrived on Italian soil in recent years. Exploring over 100 texts written by migrant and second-generation writers, the book takes an intersectional approach to understanding gender and race in Italian identity. It connects these literary and cultural contexts to the Italian colonial past, while also looking outwards to a more diffuse postcolonial condition in Europe.
This book questions Italian “white innocence” and examines the specificity of Italian racial discourse through the analysis of different kinds of texts and representations. Intersectionality – a theoretical and methodological approach focusing on the multidimensional discrimination that individuals and groups experience based on their race, color, gender, and other axes of oppression – has only recently been embraced as an effective methodology in Italy, whose national identity is structured around the “chromatic norm” of whiteness. The categories of race and color have been almost absent in post-war public debate as well as in scholarly discourse. Feminist movements and theoreticians have mostly placed gender at the core of their analyses, leaving white privilege unchallenged and undertheorized. Colonial and postcolonial studies have linked present-day racism to Italian colonialism, thus shedding light on contemporary incarnations of Empire. In this volume, the authors adopt an intersectional methodology to question Italian “white innocence” and to examine the specificity of Italian racial discourse through the analysis of different kinds of texts and representations. The volume also includes two interviews with writers and intellectuals Djarah Kan and Leaticia Ouedraogo, who discuss how they articulate concepts of intersectionality, Blackness, white privilege, and structural racism in Italian contemporary culture and society. The book will be of great significance to students, researchers and scholars of Migration and Postcolonial Studies interested in gender, class, and racial identity. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
This book examines the meaning of home through the investigation of a series of public and private spaces recurrent in Italian postcolonial literature. The chapters, by respectively considering Termini train station in Rome, phone centres, the condominium, and the private spaces of the bathroom and the bedroom, investigate how migrant characters inhabit those places and turn them into familiar spaces of belonging. Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature suggests “home spaces” as a possible lens to examine these specific places and a series of practices enacted by their inhabitants in order to feel at home. Drawing on a wide array of sources, this book focuses on the role played by memory in creating transnational connections between present and past locations and on how these connections shape migrants’ sense of self and migrants’ identity.
This volume studies the literary voices of the Italian diaspora in Britain, including 21 authors and 34 pieces of prose, verse, and drama. This book shows how authors both recount the history of the migrant community in the period 1880-1980 while creatively experimenting with hybrid forms of expression and blending words with visuals. Literary Voices of the Italian Diaspora in Britain discusses topical issues like migration and social integration, cultures and foods in transition, as well as plurilingualism. The book pays special attention to discussions of the horrors of the Second World War – especially on the tragedy of the Arandora Star (2nd July 1940) – to show this literary community’s political commitments. More importantly, it will begin to fill the void left by a critical tradition which has only appreciated the northern American and Australian branches of Italian writing.
This study adopts a postcolonial approach to literary criticism by tracing the ghosts of Italy's colonial past to contemporary constructions of race, gender, and nationality and by considering how these persistent hierarchies are inscribed on the bodies of the protagonists in Italian postcolonial literature by Carla Macoggi, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, and Igiaba Scego. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the psychoaffective consequences of hereditary colonial power dynamics on the Black female diaspora protagonists, a theoretical framework which is referred to as "postcolonial pathology." Adapted for the Italian context from Ann Cvetkovich's concept of "political depression" in Depression: A Public Feeling (2012) which attributes depression to failed politics, and Good et al.'s conceptualization of "social suffering" in Postcolonial Disorders (2008) as an expected response to "disordered states," the notion of postcolonial pathology argues that positionality has affective sequelae: the multitude of mental illnesses which manifest in the novels' protagonists are owed to the failed decolonization process in Italy which began with a suppression of its colonial history and its later mythologization which was necessary to reify the implausible construct of the Italian nation itself with its millennia-long fragmentary past. The heredity of its colonial past manifests yet today in essentialist representations of Italianness which have injurious effects on the lived social, political, and psychological experience of the Other. This study focuses on the detrimental impact of lingering colonial power relations during a critical period of development when the child and adolescent protagonists are constructing their very notion of self. Frantz Fanon's theory of the "epidermalizing" mirror of racism, Kelly Oliver's paradigm of the "reversed mirror stage," and Michelle Wright's notion of the erasure of the Black female even in counter-discourses are enlisted. The selected texts of Italian postcolonial literature demonstrate that the distorted mirrors of race, gender, and the myth of the ethnic homogeneity of the Western European nation disrupt identity formation in the black female diaspora protagonists. As such, the narratives are framed as inverted Bildungsroman which recount the deformation of the youths' sense of self, thus resulting in grave psychopathy.
This book explores Italian science fiction from 1861, the year of Italy’s unification, to the present day, focusing on how this genre helped shape notions of Otherness and Normalness. In particular, Italian Science Fiction draws upon critical race studies, postcolonial theory, and feminist studies to explore how migration, colonialism, multiculturalism, and racism have been represented in genre film and literature. Topics include the role of science fiction in constructing a national identity; the representation and self-representation of “alien” immigrants in Italy; the creation of internal “Others,” such as southerners and Roma; the intersections of gender and race discrimination; and Italian science fiction’s transnational dialogue with foreign science fiction. This book reveals that though it is arguably a minor genre in Italy, science fiction offers an innovative interpretive angle for rethinking Italian history and imagining future change in Italian society.
