Literary Voices Of The Italian Diaspora In Britain

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.

In the century between 1870 and 1970, about twenty-seven million migrants left Italy to work and live abroad. As a result, the worldwide Italian diaspora reportedly numbers more than sixty million people. Until now, however, there has not been an anthology devoted to the literature of the Italian diaspora that places it in a global context. This landmark volume presents a truly international selection of works by more than seventy Italian-language poets who are writing in countries from Australia to Venezuela. Their poetry is collected here into eleven geographical regions. The history and current state of Italian-language poetry in each region receives a critical overview by a knowledgeable scholar, who also introduces each poet and provides a bibliography of his or her work. All poems appear on facing pages in both Italian and English. Poets of the Italian Diaspora is part of a long-range project, by the editors and contributors, to expand the boundaries of the Italian literary canon.

In recent years, Europe has had to constantly rethink and redefine its attitude toward new flows of immigrations. Issues of boundaries and identity have been integral to this reflection. Through a magnificent collection of essays, Migrant Cartographies examines both sites and conflicts and the way in which forms of belonging and identity have been reinvented. With careful analysis and exceptional insight, this volume explores the most recent literature on migration as seen from different European viewpoints. This book fills a conspicuous void in migration literature, as there are no comprehensive books on migrant literatures in Europe that address the full range of complexities of colonial legacies and linguistic productions.

Bound by Distance takes its place among a growing body of scholarship the goal of which is to challenge the kind of thinking that reproduces the "West" as a stable and homogenous political and discursive entity. The Italian nation, with its peculiar process of formation, the continuous tensions between its own northern and southern regions, and its history of emigration, provides an important case for complicating and reassessing concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance. The author analyzes the interactive space of the history of Italian state formation, Italian subaltern literature, Italian emigrant writing, and the current situation of North African and Asian immigrants to Italy, in order to contest the "feigned homogeneity" of the Italian nation and to complicate and reassess concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance.

This book examines the complexities of women’s lives in Africa and the transnational spaces of Europe and North America through the literary works of key African women writers. Using a postcolonial analytical framework, the book highlights the commonalities of African women’s identities and experiences across national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries in Africa and in western settings. It collates the multi-regional narratives of key African women writers who convey how women’s lives are shaped by social, economic, and political factors at home and abroad. It also illustrates the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender that flows through all the texts examined. Unlike existing works that explore African women’s fiction, this book uncovers the transformation from postcolonial themes of nationhood to global modalities of post-independence writing through the lens of gender. The book engages with feminist expression through broad themes including religion, war and ethnic conflict, women’s status in society, tradition and modernity and local and global tensions. A unique approach to literary criticism of Anglophone African women’s writing, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of African Literature, African Studies, Women’s Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Cultural and Ethnic Studies and Migration and Diaspora Studies.

This book examines the intersections among literary works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Shelley and Wilkie Collins, journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets, to establish Britain's imaginative investment in the seismic geopolitical realignment of Italian unification.

""New Italian Voices" is an anthology of English translations of short stories, poetry, drama and criticism by immigrant writers living in Italy and writing in Italian"--

The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes, the contributors theorize and re-imagine a range of historical and contemporary issues related to the broader questions of blackness, diaspora, hegemony, transnationalism, and "Black Europe" itself as lived and perceived realities. Contributors are Allison Blakely, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina Campt, Fred Constant, Alessandra Di Maio, Philomena Essed, Terri Francis, Barnor Hesse, Darlene Clark Hine, Dienke Hondius, Eileen Julien, Trica Danielle Keaton, Kwame Nimako, Tiffany Ruby Patterson, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Stephen Small, Tyler Stovall, Alexander G. Weheliye, Gloria Wekker, and Michelle M. Wright.

The first study of Anglophone and Italian novels by Somali diasporic authors, offering a new critical framework for multilingual and transnational analysis of Somali literature. Building on the latest scholarship about multilingual contexts, diaspora studies and the rapidly expanding field of Italian postcolonial studies, Marco Medugno examines Somali diasporic literature with a comparative perspective. Considering works written in English and Italian, he argues that Somali diasporic authors share similar themes and aesthetics, thus creating an interliterary community within the diaspora space. By using multilingualism as a starting point, Medugno provides significant insights into how Somali national and individual identities are constructed in diasporic, global contexts through geography, style, form, language and the re-writing of national histories emerging out of colonization and independence. Analysing acclaimed Somali novels such as Nuruddin Farah's Links and Crossbones, Igiaba Scego's Adua and Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother, he questions any definition of 'local' as 'provincial', instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns. Literature of the Somali Diaspora is organized around three themes: spatiality, language and resistance help to contextualize authors, forced by the decades-long Somali Civil War, to write outside Somalia and in different languages – including Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic – within global literary circuits. Their work thus creates a literature not confined within national borders but an interliterary global community, a transnational and multilingual space in which they share world aesthetic ideologies, challenge and engage with literary traditions in different languages and show an interplay between diverse cultures.

Brexit and the Migrant Voice provides a platform for the perspectives of European citizens and migrants living and working in the UK by assessing their representation in British and European cultural productions (literature, drama, the media) and by foregrounding their attitudes, their fears, and their concerns about Brexit. The book looks at Brexit through the eyes of Britain’s European citizens (‘Europe in Britain’), while also looking at European perceptions of Britain as a nation (‘Britain in Europe’), via a geographical journey – from West to East –across Europe. The book assesses how these countries, their citizens, and their cultural productions engage with the questions and challenges posed by Brexit. It brings together an exciting line-up of European academics and scholars, both early-career and well-established, from a variety of subject disciplines. Some live and work within UK Higher Education Institutions and thus look at Britain from within, while others reside within their countries of origin and look at Britain from the outside. Their chapters assess Brexit via a plethora of cultural outputs – Brexit fiction from their individual countries, opinion pieces, press discussions, but also narratives of compatriots affected by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. The authors’ individual focal points on fiction, journalism, blog posts, theatre performances, and other cultural productions offer an innovative and comprehensive picture about thoughts on Brexit from around Europe that will fill an important gap in the market. This book will appeal to the academic market at undergraduate, postgraduate, and academic researcher level in a wide variety of disciplines including Literature, Politics and International Relations, European Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Media Studies.