Scritture dai margini. Testi migranti e mercato culturale in Italia

In almost three decades since the birth “Italian Migration Literature”, critical studies on Italian writings by foreign authors consolidated – closely observing stylistic innovations or lexical and semantic contamination – and expanded – by adopting philosophical, ethical and political methods and theories deriving from postcolonial studies. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the place that texts occupy in Italian society and market. However, an exhaustive analysis of migrant writings cannot ignore the consideration of the text as a cultural object, examined as both individual and collective creation, product of the literary marketplace and of the Italian cultural system, consumer good for a specific audience and representation as a production of meaning. Against the background of recent critical studies and through the study of specific works - the most successful works of the last thirty years will be taken into consideration - and with the help of a detailed examination of the paratextual elements, we therefore intend to interrogate the texts on narrative choices, socio-cultural influences and the value dimension in which they are placed today. Alongside the forms of resistance and deconstruction there is in fact the exploitation of the condition of marginality, obtained through the strategic reuse of stereotyped and exotic elements such as the dramatization of ethnic and sexual difference: a process that requires a thorough investigation, rejecting easy considerations of subordination, but by measuring its subversive potentialities against the dominant power structures, and understanding it as a form of contemporary agency. In short, the object - or rather the subject - of this study will be the role assumed by migrant and postcolonial literary production in Italian publishing market, in order to explore its methods and highlight their degree of adhesion to the neo-colonial paradigms or their potential of resistance.