Figures of difference: Race, nation, gender and African Italian literature

Since 1990, a new body of italophone cultural production has emerged, the so-called Italian Literature of Migration written by immigrant artists in Italy, which offers new voices and new perspectives on Italian society and culture, on the tensions (both societal and personal) embedded in the ongoing processes of transculturation (heightened by Italy's new status as a “country of immigration”), and on the (re)valuation of non-European cultures and individuals.; This thesis examines the writings of transplanted African artists and their various representations of life in the interspaces of culture, nation, language, gender and race. Chapter one offers a very brief overview of the role of (the idea of) Africa in forming Italy and “Italians”, before turning to an extended analysis of Wole Soyinka's theoretical figures of Ogun and the “fourth stage” as models for intercultural artistic production. The “fourth stage” or “abyss of transition” becomes an emblem of the shifting, uncertain conceptual space between “fixed” unities (of culture, nation, identity) that transcultural migrants perforce inhabit, while resisting the disintegration of their former selves. Ogun represents the force of creativity and socially committed action (a model for the intercultural artist) which “unites” resistant realms.; Chapter Two gives a schematic summary of the development of the Literature of Migration in Italy before examining Somali-Italian Shirin Ramzanali Fazel's and Senegalese Saidou Moussa Ba's literary overturnings of and “responses” to embedded “colonialist” manicheisms of culture and race. Chapter three looks at recent literary, filmic and political representations of Italy which present it as a mere image of a mythicized (and at times monstrous) “West”. This chapter examines political rhetoric and spectacle, Italian films, and short stories by Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo (originally from Congo) and Tunisian Imed Mehadheb. Chapter four analyzes and critiques the metaphorization of woman as symbol of nation and family through analyses of Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di uccidere, Fazel's “Il segreto di Ommdurmann,” and French-Algerian Nassera Chohra's autobiographical Volevo diventare bianca. The final chapter examines certain artists' use of nativist tropes of orality and the interconnectedness of worlds in order to figure themselves as griots or storytellers who simultaneously preserve and transmit culture and work to “bring worlds together”.