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This article identifies a set of precarious, temporary, and travelling forms of commemoration that have been expressed in recent public artworks connected to Italy, and proposes them as case studies that together can enhance our understanding of how transnational memory is formed and functions across borders. These complex processes of memory-making are illustrated through a comparative analysis of Wes Anderson's Bar Luce (2015), Thomas Hirschhorn's Gramsci Monument (2013), and Muna Mussie's Oblio (2021). The selected works, which together add transnational nuance to James E. Young's concept of the 'counter-monument', enshrine the creativity which can reside in acts of forgetting and misremembering, in experiencing things second-hand or at a distance, and in re-materialising memory through tropes of ephemerality, portability, and dislocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sketches a history of how the concept of Italy has travelled worldwide to become a mobile cultural symbol in order to show how, as a signifier, "Italy" has also become increasingly detached from any national parameters of territory. It employs a lateral method of "looking sideways" at literary representations of Italy from "outside" the national canon to show how they can put pressure on what (and where) Italian culture now resides. Analyzing three contemporary works of world literature partially set in Italy (Daša Drndić's Trieste, Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, and Pajtim Statovci's Crossing), it suggests that we might consider broadening out the canon of transnational Italian literature to include works neither written by Italians nor written in Italian, but that offer sideways insight into Italian history and culture from elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a sudden proliferation of short story anthologies published in direct response to the refugee 'crisis' of 2015 and the US travel ban of 2017. This article focuses on two of these collections (The Displaced and Banthology, both published in 2018) in order to theorize the reasons behind this phenomenon. What makes an anthology better equipped than a single authored piece of writing to respond to such contemporary themes as migration and displacement? I argue that the answer might lie in the precise nature of their heterogeneous form, which allows anthologies to be assembled and reassembled by various stakeholders during their production and reception so that they mean differently in different times and places. My analysis of the anthology as assemblage brings Deleuze and Guattari's original concept into dialogue with newer notions of queer curation and postcolonial reading in order to conceive of processes of selecting and fitting elements together as deliberate tactics. I pay particular attention to how such processes highlight the agentic role of the reader, allowing them to make their own assemblages from the multiple interrelations that emerge between the anthology's composite elements, and I show through specific examples from primary texts of how this might be done. Developing this concept of assemblage reading (which is here also transnational by nature) allows me to extend the framework of the refugee anthology to encompass a much wider range of acts of collective creation in my conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]