This study adopts a postcolonial approach to literary criticism by tracing the ghosts of Italy's colonial past to contemporary constructions of race, gender, and nationality and by considering how these persistent hierarchies are inscribed on the bodies of the protagonists in Italian postcolonial literature by Carla Macoggi, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, and Igiaba Scego. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the psychoaffective consequences of hereditary colonial power dynamics on the Black female diaspora protagonists, a theoretical framework which is referred to as "postcolonial pathology." Adapted for the Italian context from Ann Cvetkovich's concept of "political depression" in Depression: A Public Feeling (2012) which attributes depression to failed politics, and Good et al.'s conceptualization of "social suffering" in Postcolonial Disorders (2008) as an expected response to "disordered states," the notion of postcolonial pathology argues that positionality has affective sequelae: the multitude of mental illnesses which manifest in the novels' protagonists are owed to the failed decolonization process in Italy which began with a suppression of its colonial history and its later mythologization which was necessary to reify the implausible construct of the Italian nation itself with its millennia-long fragmentary past. The heredity of its colonial past manifests yet today in essentialist representations of Italianness which have injurious effects on the lived social, political, and psychological experience of the Other. This study focuses on the detrimental impact of lingering colonial power relations during a critical period of development when the child and adolescent protagonists are constructing their very notion of self. Frantz Fanon's theory of the "epidermalizing" mirror of racism, Kelly Oliver's paradigm of the "reversed mirror stage," and Michelle Wright's notion of the erasure of the Black female even in counter-discourses are enlisted. The selected texts of Italian postcolonial literature demonstrate that the distorted mirrors of race, gender, and the myth of the ethnic homogeneity of the Western European nation disrupt identity formation in the black female diaspora protagonists. As such, the narratives are framed as inverted Bildungsroman which recount the deformation of the youths' sense of self, thus resulting in grave psychopathy.

This edited volume aims to problematise and rethink the contemporary European migrant crisis in the Central Mediterranean through the lens of the Black Mediterranean. Bringing together scholars working in geography, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies, this volume takes the Black Mediterranean as a starting point for asking and answering a set of crucial questions about the racialized production of borders, bodies, and citizenship in contemporary Europe: what is the role of borders in controlling migrant flows from North Africa and the Middle East?; what is the place for black bodies in the Central Mediterranean context?; what is the relevance of the citizenship in reconsidering black subjectivities in Europe? The volume will be divided into three parts. After the introduction, which will provide an overview of the theoretical framework and the individual contributions, Part I focuses on the problem of borders, Part II features essays focused on the body, and Part III is dedicated to citizenship.

When civil war erupts in Somalia, cousins Domenica Axad and Barni are separated and forced to flee the country. Barni manages to eke out a living in Rome, where she works as an obstetrician. Domenica wanders Europe in a painful attempt to reunite her broken family and come to terms with her past. After ten years, the two women reunite. When Domenica gives birth to a son, Barni, also known as Little Mother, is at her side. Together with the new baby, Domenica and Barni find their Somali roots and start to heal the pain they have suffered in war and exile. This powerful yet tender novel underscores the strength of women, family, and community, and draws on the tenacious yearning for a homeland that has been denied.

"Describes Argentina's horrific dirty war, the chaotic final years of brutal dictatorship in Somalia, and the modern-day excesses of Italy's right-wing politics through the words of two half-sisters, their mothers, and the elusive father who ties their stories together"--

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.

An Italian journalist gets wrapped up in the criminality and cultural controversies of modern Turin in this “very funny” satirical novel (The New York Times). It’s October 2006. The northern Italian town of Turin has been rocked by a series of murders involving Albanians and Romanians, and journalist Enzo Laganà is determined to get to the bottom of the crime wave—even if he must invent a few sources to do so. But first he’s been conscripted to mediate the issue of a pig running loose in a mosque. Gino the pig belongs to Enzo’s Nigerian immigrant neighbor, Joseph. The Muslim community wants Gino killed, an animal rights group wants him saved, and Joseph is pleading his pig’s innocence. As Enzo navigates various calamities large and small, he scrambles to keep track of his lies even as he uncovers some uncomfortable truths about contemporary, multicultural Italy. “This very funny novel examines a town’s heightened ignorance and hostility toward foreigners, and what it means to be a “true” Italian, even if the native in question is a small pig.” —The New York Times

The contributors explore modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programmes in China and Zaire, and psychiatrists and their patients in Morocco and Ireland.

The essays in this volume explores the ways in which the Italian colonial experience continues to be relevant, despite the extent to which forgetting colonialism became an integral part of Italian culture and national identity.

DIVA theoretical troubling of the assumptions of uniformity in Blackness, comparing writings by and about African diasporic subjects from the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany./div

The recent histories of Italy and Somalia are closely linked. Italy colonized Somalia from the end of the 19th century to 1941, and held the territory by UN mandate from 1950 to 1960. Italy is also among the destination countries of the Somali diaspora, which increased in 1991 after civil war. Nonetheless, this colonial and postcolonial cultural encounter has often been neglected. Critically evaluating Gilles Deleuze and F x Guattari‘s concept ofminor literature as well as drawing on postcolonial literary studies, The Somali Within analyses the processes of linguistic and cultural translation and self-translation, the political engagement with race, gender, class and religious discrimination, and the complex strategies of belonging and unbelonging at work in the literary works in Italian by authors of Somali origins. Brioni proposes that theminor Somali Italian connection might offer a major insight into the transnational dimension of contemporaryItalian literature andSomali culture.