IT331 TRANSNATIONAL STORIES IN ITALY
Term 1, week 2: Introduction
1. Histories of Italian mobility and migration
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Italy’s history shaped by emigration, 27 million left in 19th & 20th centuries.
In 1970s changed from a country of net emigration to net immigration
Geographical location in centre of Mediterranean
Italy has a shorter and more limited colonial history compared to France &
UK.
Migrants came from colonies of other European countries and were likely to
be proficient in other languages such as French or English.
Reasons for change from 1970s
 Local economic boom in Northern Italy in early 80s: demand for cheap
migrant labour
 Process of decolonization and poverty of North Africa
 Demise of communism in Eastern Europe after 1989, particular instability in
Albania, collapse of pyramid saving schemes.
 Break-up of Yugoslavia, ethnic conflict and war.
 Enlargement of EU
 ‘Arab Spring’ / conflicts in Middle East (Iraq, Syria)
Statistics and future developments
 4,922,085 legally registered foreigners in Italy, estimated 5,364,000.
 8.1 % of population.
 130,000 refugees arrived by boat in first 9 months of 2014 (3,000 deaths)
 Only 2% over 65, 1 million are children
 802,785 (9% of total) school children
 240,000 ‘mixed marriages’ from 1996-2008
 Changing society: increasingly multicultural / multiethnic?
 1 million Italians left Italy in last decade – is Italy becoming a country of
emigration again?
Origins of Migrants
 Romanians 933,000
 Morocco
525,000
 Albania
503,000
 China
321,000
 Ukraine
234,000
http://www.dossierimmigrazione.it/docnews/file/2014_Sintesi%20IDOS.
pdf
Jennifer Burns, H4.11, j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
Joanne Lee, H4.16, jo.lee@warwick.ac.uk
2. Migration literature and postcolonial literature in Italy
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Beginnings, 1990
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Co-authorship
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Publishers, distribution and circulation; ‘bestsellers’
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Readerships
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Male and female authors
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Definitions and classifications: ‘migrant writer’, ‘second generation’,
‘postcolonial literature’, ‘italophone writing’, ‘world literature’
Letteratura (italiana) della migrazione: a contested term which often refers to first
wave of migrant writing in Italy which emerged in the early 1990s. Authors tended
to be from West or North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Ghana), former French
colonial territories. In writing they rejected the language of the coloniser (French)
and turned to Italian as a more neutral form, often writing in collaboration with an
Italian writer /journalist – raising issues of agency and voice. These writings tended
to focus on personal experiences of migration, racism, difficulties of integration in
Italian society, living on the margins, split identities. They were mainly first person,
autobiographical texts. Examples include:
Pap Khouma (Senegal), Io venditore di elefanti (1990) with Oreste Pivetta.
Saidou Moussa Ba (Senegal), La promessa di Hamadi (1991) with Alessandro
Micheletti
Mohamed Bouchane (Morocco), Chiamatemi Alì (1990) with Carla de Gerolamo and
Daniele Miccione
Salah Methnani (Tunisia), Immigrato (1990) with Mario Fortunato
Nassera Chohra (French-Algerian),Volevo diventare bianca (1993) with Alessandra
Atti di Sarro
Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Lontano da Mogadiscio (1994)
Italophone writers (Pariati)
Second generation writers (G2): refers to children of migrants, often born and
schooled in Italy but not necessarily holding Italian citizenship. They didn’t
experience migration directly. Their writings reflect on multiple identities and
belongings.
Letteratura postcoloniale italiana: These writers don’t fit into the definitions of
‘migrant writers’, or even ‘second-generation writers’. Italian is often their native
language, they use it in inventive ways, creating new, hybrid forms. Examples:
Gabriella Ghermandi, Amara Lakhous, Igiaba Scego, Maria Abbebù Viarengo,
Genevieve Makaping, Ornela Vorpsi, Ribka Sibhatu, Cristina Ubax Ali Farah
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subject matter forces reflection on the legacy of colonialism
texts ‘talk back’ to normative constructions of Italian national identity and
dominant views of history.
Jennifer Burns, H4.11, j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
Joanne Lee, H4.16, jo.lee@warwick.ac.uk
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questions Italy’s colonial memory (or lack of it), and offer new insights into
Italian colonial history.
examines how knowledge is constructed and imposed on the colonised
challenges monolithic views of history through use of multiple voices and
perspectives
creates new, hybridized forms of language,
intertwines and mixes cultures, languages, literary traditions
questions hierarchies and explores power relations
challenges western images of the colonized (see Edward Said, Orientalism)
challenges ideas of Italian literature and the canon.
challenges binary oppositions and distinctions (black/white; western/nonwestern; cultured/primitive)
posits identities as multiple, hybrid, transnational and transcultural
‘For the first time a wider and widely unaware Italian public is being told in its own
language of the inextricable bundle of duplicities and sorrows which marked
individual lives across the colonial divide’ (Triulzi).
‘In less than five years postcolonial writers in Italy are going to achieve what Italian
authorities and scholars have been unable or unwilling to do throughout the
postwar generation’ (Triulzi).
This writing helps ‘reformulate new understandings of Italianità’ (Comberiati).
‘The very idea of what it means to be Italian is changing in our hands’ (Portelli).
Jennifer Burns, H4.11, j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
Joanne Lee, H4.16, jo.lee@warwick.ac.uk
3. Theoretical frameworks and terms: what is the transnational?
i. Three key elements (Emma Bond, ‘Towards a Trans-National Turn in Italian
Studies?’, Italian Studies, 69.3 (November 2014), 415-24):
- ‘the trans-national suggests a stretching or going beyond the confines of national
boundaries (be that in cultural, spatial or temporal terms)’
- ‘it privileges a sense of flexibility […], it emphasizes the potential for individual
agency in the cultural logic of trans-nationality. Such flexibility can also be aligned
with Steven Vertovec’s basic definition of the trans-national as referring to the “multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nationstates”, thus identifying a fundamental sense of exchange that is inherent in the
term’
- ‘speaking specifically of cultural production, the trans-national is usually
associated with a “fluidity of constructed styles and practices: syncretism,
creolization, bricolage, cultural translation and hybridity”, which Vertovec sees as
together being capable of manifesting a sense of what Stuart Hall has called “new
ethnicities” (p. 416).
ii. Global economies and the transnational subject (Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship:
The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University
Press, 1999):
‘The multiple-passport holder is an apt contemporary figure; he or she embodies the
split between state-imposed identity and personal identity caused by political
upheavals, migration, and changing global markets. […] But are political borders
becoming insignificant or is the state merely fashioning a new relationship to capital
mobility and to manipulations by citizens and noncitizens alike?’ (p. 2).
‘The realignment of political, ethnic, and personal identities is not necessarily a
process of “win or lose,” whereby political borders become “insignificant” and the
nation-state “loses” to global trade in terms of its control over the affiliations and
behavior of its subjects.
If, as I intend to do, we pay attention instead to the transnational practices and
imaginings of the nomadic subject and the social conditions that enable his
flexibility, we obtain a different picture of how nation-states articulate with
capitalism in late modernity. [The transnational worker’s] very flexibility in
geographical and social positioning is itself an effect of novel articulations between
the regimes of the family, the state, and capital, the kinds of practical-technical
adjustments that have implications for our understanding of the late modern
subject’ (pp. 2-3).
Jennifer Burns, H4.11, j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
Joanne Lee, H4.16, jo.lee@warwick.ac.uk
iii. The agency of transnational literature and critical practice (from Paul Jay, Global
Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell
University Press, 2010):
‘the fiction and criticism I have been discussing […] collectively […] deploys
theoretical, critical, and imaginative thinking in order to both lay bare debilitating
histories and imagine new, contemporary relationships and structures of
power in an age in which the magnitude of change seems nearly overwhelming. At
the center is the whole question of agency, explored by critics […] in terms of
whether the forces of globalization flatten out (or homogenize) cultural differences
and restrict rather than expand economic and cultural power, and by novelists […]
in their linked explorations of how colonization, decolonization, and globalization
have simultaneously disabled and enabled personal, cultural, and political agency’
(pp. 195-96)
‘One danger of the kind of focus on difference I have been discussing […] is that it can
lead to a hardening of identity categories that can divide groups off from one
another, so that the older structures of division connected to the study of literature
under a nationalist paradigm get replicated in the very context of its critique. This is
the kind of danger we saw Paul Gilroy warning about in The Black Atlantic when he
pointed out how critiques of traditional narratives of national belonging run
the risk of creating absolutist categories of difference based on narrow
notions of ethnic belonging. [Novels] do not provide simple answers to
complex questions about identity, culture, and belonging, but rather they
productively trouble the way we think about those questions. In so doing, they
present a model for the critical work we do, for the very act of reading and
understanding them’ (pp. 199-200).
To sum up:
 Across, beyond, between, ‘trans’
 Shared space
 The national and the transnational
 The transcultural and the transnational
 The global and the transnational
 The multilingual and the translingual (translanguaging)
 Transnational subjecthood
 Transnational cultural production; transnational literature
 Agency and imagination
Jennifer Burns, H4.11, j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
Joanne Lee, H4.16, jo.lee@warwick.ac.uk