From the European South

a transdisciplinary journal of postcolonial humanities

Rappresentare la nazione oltre i confinamenti

Roberto Derobertis su Riscrivere la nazione. La letteratura italiana postcoloniale di Caterina Romeo

Abstract

Representing the nation beyond confinements. In her book Riscrivere la nazione. La letteratura italiana postcoloniale, Caterina Romeo focuses on a nearly thirty-year-old cultural phenomenon that she calls “postcolonial Italian literature.” Romeo analyses a wide group of texts written by authors who come from countries that had a colonial relationship with Italy and other European countries. In the first place, Romeo traces a diachronic historiography of the phenomenon, trying to group and define texts in as accurate a way as possible through geographical, historical, race, gender and theoretical tools. Her critical and theoretical references range from postcolonial to gender studies and theories, from more traditional literary studies and comparative literature to intersectionality, providing several references to fundamental postcolonial and feminist authors and texts, mostly from the English-speaking academic world. The book also offers an impressively complete bibliography, which lists the most important research works – both academic and independent – in the fields of Italian postcolonial and migration writings and cultures. Romeo sees postcolonial Italian literature as a strong reviving event in the country’s contemporary culture, both as a conflictual site where non-white and foreign origin or second-generation Italians can claim to express their own voices, and as a tool of desirable transformation at the heart of Italian identity – still considered strictly white and peninsular – and Italian citizenship, which still excludes people who were born to foreign parents on Italian soil. Postcolonial Italian literature must be considered, Romeo maintains, as a resistant counternarrative to mainstream ‘Italianness’.

Keywords

postcolonial Italian literature, identity, race, citizenship, cinema, Italianness, resistant counternarratives

Pages

133-138

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