To the Ending of Exiguous Narratives. How Migrant Literature Dissolve.

Abstract

The proposals submitted for 2014 Compalit Conference highlighted the marginality, almost the disappearance, of that niche in contemporary narrative usually pointed at as migration writing.

This omission compels to question the reasons for this absence of interest for a narrative which is considered as the main vehicle to represent the traumas of postmodernity, with a renewed hold on reality by the subaltern voices, pulled out from the silence of their social and geographical marginality, able in this way to place themselves at the centre of the cultural scene as a testimony of a necessary renewal of the poetical  and political national imagery.

Announced since the beginning (even in the absence of documented analysis) as a form of resistance writing, the texts produced within the field of Italian language have not managed yet to establish any eminent figure of multicultural intellectual, bearer of culturally and politically plausible proposals to face the transformation in the social fabric of the peninsula, in contrast with the apocalyptical discourse dominating the phenomenology of migrations.

Played upon the repetition of themes, flattened on the autoficional testimony, the proposals of a first generation of neo-italophone writers have left the stage to the more lively delegates of the second generation, denied a full access to citizenship and deprived of a productive role, so that even renowned female writers have shown a predictable compliance of masks, poses and images.

The absence of a wide transversal audience testifies a way of reading compromised by the phenomenology of the extra-textuality, where the instruments and symbols of an exotic otherness are generically valued - instruments and symbols unable to replace those defining the literary field of a Western periphery. The dominant didactic destination for this literature has created a perceptual paradigm based on the idea of a new “little Italy”, exiled within the instances of a marginal market, outside the publishing industry that counts, representing only one of those literatures of the exiguity (F. Paré), unsuitable to answer the need of a writing able to efficiently act on the social.

This essay tackles the limits and the uncertainties of more than thirty narratives publishe between 2013 and 2014, showing the progressive dissolution (fostered by an excess of ponderings on definitions, sign of a control anxiety by a section of “white” academia) of Italian migrant literature.