Overview

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.

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9783031100451

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Reviews

“This essay not only draws the most complete picture of Italian postcolonial literature in the last thirty years until nowadays: it forces the reader to embrace the political issues contained in this work opting for an intersectional and postcolonial perspective. It is impossible—and not even desirable—to remain politically neutral in front of this work that highlights the hidden part of the colonial past and its lasting effects in the present.” (Anna Eberle, Annali d'italianistica, Vol. 41, 2023)

Author Information

Caterina Romeo is Associate Professor at Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy, where she teaches Literary Theory, Gender Studies, and Migration Studies. She is the author of Riscrivere la nazione. La letteratura italiana postcoloniale (2018) and Narrative tra due sponde: Memoir di italiane d'America (2005). She has coedited Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (2012), Postcolonial Europe (special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies, 2015), and Intersectional Italy (special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2022).

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