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

Abstract

An autonomous Italophone literature has never emerged in any of the territories of the former Italian colonial empire. On the other hand, the literature of Italian emigrants throughout the world, although quantitatively important, has remained mostly separate from national literary production without exerting any real influence on its evolution. The case of so-called migrant literature within Italy, however, is different. It is usual to place within this category not only 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 literary field can enter into the center/periphery conversation, for example featuring postcolonial dynamics that also invest other Romance language literatures. Although today there are many reasons to blur and even definitively eliminate the dividing line between migrant literature and contemporary Italian literature tout court, arguments in this chapter attempt to reify 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. The subchapter concludes by explaining a number of reasons the distinction between migrant and Italian literature has gradually lost its meaning, as well as by suggesting some avenues for future research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.