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This paper analyzes how Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words tends to displace Italy both linguistically and spatially, through the use of abstract descriptions of its spaces. By de-linking the experience of Italy from its spaces, Lahiri portrays a multicultural country, in which borders are shaped by linguistic, raced, gendered lines rather than by geography. Her writing is powerful as it describes and intimate and introspective experience as a racialized foreigner, however her experience of Italy is divorced from a wider social context. Because of this reason, In Other Words shares some common themes, and equally important differences, with the description of Italy – and the experiences of belonging and marginalization that are associated with this space – which can be found in the works by both nonwhite migrant writers who write in Italian and foreign travelers, who chronicle their aesthetic experience of Italy.

The road movie genre has been employed in migration cinema to stage important discussions on shifting migration patterns and to criticize Europe’s border policies. This chapter analyzes how the stylistic and thematic conventions of this genre have been employed in Italian films about migration to portray the contested spaces of the Mediterranean. In particular, I will focus on the ways in which Elia Moutamid’s Talien (2017) depicts the route that connects Italy to Morocco. As the road movie genre has been employed by counterculture movements to express the opposition to traditional values, the use of the conventions of this genre in Talien challenge hegemonic and monolithic views of national identity. Talien reconfigures driving as a social and cultural practices that questions the contradictions of Italian society.

This chapter focuses on the representation of bridges in literature, movies and painting about and by Italian Americans. While the bridge has been described both as a place in which cultures and social classes can meet, many of the text, films and artworks analyzed in this chapter show that this architectural element is often represented as a border between different social, economic, and ethnic groups. The analysis highlights a shift between the use of the bridge to emphasize the discrimination of Italian Americans in a society dominated by the white American Protestant elite towards the beginning of the 20th century to the use of this architectural element to emphasize a difference in terms of class and race privilege between Italian American and non-white ethnic groups towards the end of the century. The article ultimately proposes to avoid using the trope of the “bridge between cultures”, since it implies that cultures are separated and do not continuously hybridize each other.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s definition of heterotopia, the article analyses the filmic and literary representation of Stazione Termini, Rome’s main train station. The Fascist architectural project, which mirrors an idea of the nation as homogeneous, monolithic, and white, begins to be challenged in the post- World War II representations of Termini which depict the station as the place where liminal and unexpected experiences can occur and accepted moral codes of behavior are put into question. The article then focuses on the recent representation of Termini as a key place of contact with and among immigrants. While migration literature describes the station as a place of belonging, other contemporary representations of Termini depict it as a non-place, revealing the fear of a globalized world. The representation of Termini either as an isolated place in the urban geography of Rome or as a place that mirrors the multicultural reality of present-day Italy highlights a tension between different ways of practicing the same space.

This monograph is a meditation on how transnational migrations have influenced how the sense of place and the politics of space are represented in literature and film about migration to, from and within Italy. It examines work produced in Italian and English, and it emphasizes how culture and national identity can be reconsidered in a more inclusive way within a world marked by increased mobility. The text is divided into three main sections – “Places”, “Spaces” and “Crossings” – each of which contains two chapters. Chapter 1 argues that bridges, as they are represented in literature, movies and paintings about and by Italian Americans, are often used as symbols to highlight the social improvement of this ethnic group. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s definition of heterotopia, Chapter 2 analyses the filmic and literary representation of Termini station. The representation of Termini either as an isolated place in the urban geography of Rome or as a place that mirrors the multicultural reality of present-day Italy highlights a tension between different ways of practicing the same space. Moving from the analysis of “Places” to the analysis of “Spaces”, Chapter 3 examines how Pannone’s ‘American Trilogy’ (1991-98) and shows how memory of the myth of America in Italy rethinks ‘Italian’ history with a trans-national lens. Chapter 4 analyzes how Juhmpa Lahiri’s In Other Words (2015) dislocates Italy both linguistically and spatially by de-linking the experience of Italy from its physical spaces. “Crossings” focuses on reflections about moving through a space, and how the ways in which a space is practiced or experienced changes our understanding of it. Chapter 5 analyzes the ways Giuliano Santoro’s Su due piedi. Camminando per un mese attraverso la Calabria (On My Two Feet: Walking for a Month in Calabria, 2012) and Wu Ming 2’s Il sentiero luminoso (The Bright Path, 2016) describe walking as an activity which allows one to recognize the social modifications of space, and to rethink the geographies of suburban areas in Italy. Chapter 6 discusses how Elia Moutamid’s Talien (2017) reimagines driving as an activity that links physical movement through spaces to reflections about transnational mobility and national belonging. Moving beyond the analysis of literature and film about the representation of spaces of migration, the coda argues that finding new ways of inscribing the memory of the past in the present can be a way of rethinking subjectivity, memory and belonging.

This chapter argues that Wu Ming 2’s Il sentiero luminoso (2016) and Giuliano Santoro’s Su due piedi. Camminando per un mese attraverso la Calabria (2012) describe walking as an activity which allows one to recognize the social modifications of space, and to rethink the geographies of suburban areas in Italy. This analysis resounds with Robert P. Marzec’s invitation to study how literature has represented the privatization and the capitalist and neoliberal organization of space, thus revealing forms of internal colonization, which epitomize a pillar of colonial ideology. Il sentiero luminoso and Su due piedi reconfigure walking as an epistemological, ecocritical and postcolonial practice which allows one to cross paths with people who are marginalized in Italy, especially migrants.

The chapter examines Gianfranco Pannone’s ‘American Trilogy’ - Piccola America. Gente del Nord a Sud di Roma (Little America. People from the North to the South of Rome) (1991), Lettere dall’America (Letters from America) (1995) and L’America a Roma (L’America in Rome) (1998) - showing how the trilogy employs the documentary genre not only as a way to inform the audience, hut to question the way in which imagination shapes reality and vice versa. First, Lettere dall’America is examined in light of the topos of letter writing in other literary and cinematic works featuring the Italian emigration to the United States. Second, the article anal yses how the migration from north-east Italy to the Pontine Marshes in central Italy is represented in Piccola America. Third, I discuss how L’America a Roma highlights the presence of southern migrants interpreting Mexicans in Italian westerns. Pannone uses documentaries to interrogate the fictional construction of America, and questions the view that narratives of migration are the objective reflection of ‘real’ experiences. Investigating the connection between nostalgia and the narration of history, this article also shows how the presence of a nostalgic vein in the trilogy is aimed at rethinking ‘Italian’ national history in a transnational dimension.

The article analyzes Beyond the Frame ( Oltre i bordi, 2023), a film based on Simone Brioni's fortuitous discovery of a family archive: a box of photographs taken in Italian East Africa in the 1930s by a distant relative. Beyond the Frame discusses colonial photography and visuality, as well as the material legacies of that past, challenging the gaze through which they framed the subjective and collective idea of Africa in Italian society. The article is divided into two parts, each of which discusses colonial photography and how Beyond the Frame observes, interprets, and reflects on how the legacy of colonialism shapes our present. In the first part, Brioni traces the process that led to the construction of a narrative that interweaves personal reflections and collective history. In the second part, Gianmarco Mancosu draws upon Ann Laura Stoler's work to discuss how the colonial archive and the remains of empire fashion our present, with a particular emphasis on photography and on colonial traces in the Italian cityscape. The article shows how the film works with as well as against the archive: how it enacts a process of resignification, thus modifying the original meaning of colonial pictures.

In an introduction, an epilogue and two parts – which include seven chapters in total – Fabrizio De Donno’s Italian Orientalism offers an enlightening and well-documented analysis of Italy’s Orient...

Scrivere di Islam. Raccontare la diaspora (Writing About Islam. Narrating a Diaspora) is a meditation on our multireligious, multicultural, and multilingual reality. It is the result of a personal and collaborative exploration of the necessity to rethink national culture and identity in a more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist way. The central part of this volume – both symbolically and physically – includes Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s reflections on the discrimination of Muslims, and especially Muslim women, in Italy and the UK. Looking at school textbooks, newspapers, TV programs, and sharing her own personal experience, this section invites us to change the way Muslim immigrants are narrated in scholarly research and news reports. Most importantly, this section urges us to consider minorities not just as ‘topics’ of cultural analysis, but as audiences and cultural agents. Following Shirin’s invitation to question prevailing modes of representations of immigrants, the volume continues with a dialogue between the co-authors and discusses how collaboration can be a way to avoid reproducing a ‘colonial model’ of knowledge production, in which the white male scholar takes as object of analysis the work of an African female writer. The last chapter also asserts that immigration literature cannot be approached with the same expectations and questions readers would have when reading ‘canonised’ texts. A new critical terminology is needed in order to understand the innovative linguistic choices and narrative forms that immigrant writers have invented in order to describe a reality that has lacked representation or which has frequently been misrepresented, especially in the discourse around the contemporary Muslim diaspora.

This five-part dialogue argues that despite its common positioning as a ‘minor’ player in Italian letters, Somali Italian literature has prompted a major shift in the Italian cultural field by bringing to light forgotten pages of Italian history. This chapter presents key issues in Shirin’s career which represents some aspects of Somali Italian authors’ struggles to be heard and read, including the processes of translation and self-translation, and the challenges to be published. The chapter argues that collaborative writing can challenge the ‘minor’ role that immigrant authors occupy in the present cultural industry and their marginalisation in academic discussions concerning them.

This essay introduces the main themes of Scrivere di Islam. Raccontare la diaspora. It focuses on the historical, cultural and literary encounter between Italy and Somalia with a particular emphasis on Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s life and literary career. It also discusses the impact of immigration literature on the Italian literary and cultural field. The analysis presents collaboration as a decolonial practice, which can produce unconventional outcomes such as a hybrid text like Scrivere di Islam. Raccontare la diaspora. Collaboration between writers and scholars can enrich critical enquiry and create texts and activities that potentially have a broader impact on a general audience.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s definition of heterotopia, the article analyses the filmic and literary representation of Stazione Termini, Rome’s main train station. The Fascist architectural project...

Although Italy and Islam have a history of interactions that stretches back centuries, the presence of Muslims in Italian society is a recent event that came as a result of migratory flows. Islam i...

This chapter analyzes the representation of Roma in Lino Aldani’s Quando le radici (1977) and Themoro Korik (2007), and Mario Soldati’s Lo smeraldo (1974). Instead of sharing the earlier generation of science fiction’s enthusiasm for the technological future, Quando le radici sees an escape from society as an act of resistance against modernization. While Quando le radici invites readers to “become Romani,” Themoro Korik describes an irreducible difference between Roma and Gagio (non-Roma). This section also illustrates Quando le radici’s significance in depicting the destruction of Italy’s rural areas and the internal colonization of the countryside. Quando le radici presents a different view on Roma than Lo smeraldo, which depicts this group as an imaginary presence.

This chapter argues that early Italian science fiction (sf) literature was pivotal in creating a sense of national belonging. Texts that imagined Italy’s future as a unified country, and warned of its enemies, aided in consolidating public opinion. Novels like Paolo Mantegazza’s L’anno 3000: Sogno (1897), Emilio Salgari’s La montagna d’oro (1901), and Enrico Novelli (Yambo)’s Gli esploratori dell’infinito (1907), featured exoticized Others in order to construct a cohesive national identity by contrast, and to justify colonial conquests. Explorers became the Italian literary heroes of the nineteenth century, making the terms “discovery” and “conquest” synonymous, thereby erasing the existence of indigenous people.

This chapter shows how science fiction has reflected on the rise of xenophobic and independentist factions in the Northeast of Italy. The analysis focuses on Gabriele Salvatores’s movie Nirvana (1997), which depicts the tensions between an imaginary Northern Conglomerate and the rest of the world; Tullio Avoledo’s dystopic novel about the memory of the Holocaust, La ragazza di Vajont (2008); and Francesco Patierno’s movie Cose dell’altro mondo (2011), an Italian remake of Sergio Arau’s movie A Day Without a Mexican (2004), that imagines what would happen if all migrants in Italy disappeared, and which is set in a small village in the Veneto region. Science fiction leads us to uncover stories of domination and discrimination and challenges the presumed geographical and historical stability of national sovereignty.

This chapter focuses on Futurist science fiction literature’s contribution to the Italian colonial enterprise. It analyzes Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste: Roman africain (1909), focusing on the derogatory representation of Africa and Africans. Moreover, it examines Lo Zar non e morto (1931), a collective work by the Dieci (the Ten). This novel was published in the early 1930s, when the regime was enacting a heavy propaganda campaign to prepare the populace for the conquest of a new empire. The analysis shows that while Mafarka expressed generic fantasies of domination in the wake of the Libyan War of 1911–12, Lo Zar non e morto expresses more openly racist, sexist, and anti-communist sentiments, in line with the regime’s racist policies in the 1930s.

Analyzing Stefano Tamburini’s comic book RanXerox (1978–97); Michele Medda, Antonio Serra, and Bepi Vigna’s comic book Nathan Never (1991); and literature written by migrant authors, such as Amor Dekhis, Miguel Angel Garcia, and Christiana de Caldas Brito, this chapter explores the representation of racial purity and hybridity in Italian dystopic narratives from the 1980s to the 2000s. The chapter traces the shift from dystopic narratives of the 1980s and 1990s—which represented identitarian and social alienation caused by modern technology and the capitalist mode of production—to the dystopic narratives of the early 2000s, which have focused on the effects of increasing racism and xenophobia.

The aim of this chapter is to analyze five Italian apocalyptic films produced in the 1960s, and to explore how they have reflected Italy’s ongoing social and economic changes. Ugo Gregoretti’s Omicron (1963) speaks about the fear of the Americanization of Italy’s culture, and the effect of alienation in a consumerist society. Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow’s L’ultimo uomo della Terra captures a transitional moment, and Italy’s ambiguous status as both a colonizing and neocolonial country with strong political and economic ties to the United States. Liliana Cavani’s I cannibali (1970) expresses the fear of authoritarianism and political terrorism after the civil rights protest of 1968.

The book’s afterword rejects the perception of Italian science fiction as an imitative genre of US science fiction, and suggests that Italian science fiction is able to adapt and subvert foreign models as much as these foreign models had influence in Italy. The ways in which Italian movies and literary works modify the model text are active processes that can be seen in terms of resistance and collaboration with the dominant cultural hegemony. While science fiction in Italy has too often been perceived as a genre divorced from the identity politics narrated in coeval realist literature, this section argues that the science fiction genre is not isolated from social and political debates.

Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on contemporaneity (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 2009), this chapter focuses on alternate histories, asserting that the genre has been used to interpret Italian political history. For instance, Enrico Brizzi’s and Mario Farneti’s alternate history trilogies, which feature different visions of Italy’s past—either decolonizing the Italian imagination or celebrating Italy’s “civilizing” role in Africa—embody what John Foot has termed “Italy’s divided memory,” and its constitutive ambivalence regarding the legacy of Fascism (Italy’s Divided Memory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Stefano Amato’s Il 49esimo stato (2013a)—an alternate history that imagines what would have happened in the 1960s and 1970s if Sicily had become part of the United States—imagines Italy as a country colonized by the United States.

Although representing aliens in varying ways, Inisero Cremaschi and Gilda Musa’s Le grotte di Marte [The Caves of Mars] (1974), Daniela Piegai’s Parola di alieno [Alien Word] (1978), Anna Rinonapoli’s “Metamorfosi cosmica” [Cosmic Metamorphosis] (1986), and Luce D’Eramo’s Partiranno [They Will Leave] (1986) all attempt to reimagine the dualism of human or non-human, which mirrors that between Self and Other. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s critical reflections, the chapter demonstrates how science fiction—which was disregarded in Italy by dominant Marxist and feminist scholars—allowed women writers to explore new possibilities and limits in the narration of the alterity, reflecting on the interconnection of race and gender discrimination. This section challenges the idea that Italian science fiction is merely an entertaining B-genre, showing how it reflects on the legacy of colonialism, transnational migration, and processes of racialization and sexualization. This chapter also compares and contrasts the representations of aliens with those in popular Italian movies made at the beginning of a visible immigration to Italy, such as Luigi Cozzi’s Contamination (1980) and Pier Francesco Pingitore’s Ciao marziano (1980). The chapter argues that these movies give fictional shape to the repressed collective fears that might have in turn inspired contemporary racist propaganda against immigrants.

This documentary project on Italian colonialism began in 2009, with the goal of developing ‘La quarta via’, an oral tale by the Italian writer of Somali origins Kaha Mohamed Aden, into a film (Fig. 1). This tale narrates the story of Kaha’s birthplace, Mogadishu, which has been destroyed by an ongoing civil war. Kaha chose to use oral narration to build a space of dialogue that could be collectively discussed and re-elaborated. As this story contributes powerfully to the telling of Italian colonialism from the perspective of colonized subjects, I asked Kaha to collaborate in developing her work into a documentary. Three documentary makers — Ermanno Guida, Graziano Chiscuzzu, and Isacco Chiaf — offered their technical knowledge and means to the independent project. A preliminary version of the documentary was assembled after three days of shooting, in order to evaluate its reception. Due to the scarcity of films on Italian

In the Italian juridical debate, the French colonial model represented the imperialism based on assimilation policies ideal-type while Britain embodied a more flexible and less ideological colonial law ideal-type. Assimilation meant applying legal principles valid for citizens in colonizing countries to colonial subjects. Italian jurists dealing with colonial problems constantly blamed assimilation theories for their difficulties. Yet in various different contexts and periods, they espoused a sum of concepts which might be termed ‘differentialism’. In their rhetoric, differentialism preserved respect for different civilizations and social institutions. In actual fact, norms applying to indigenous people were always inspired by some form of racist contempt. Despite a widespread rhetoric presenting Italy as having a mission to extend ‘superior’ European law (founded on Roman law) to the colonies, native peoples were subjected to different legal systems inspired by pragmatism and arbitrariness.