Who Needs ‘Italianness’?: Postcolonial and Migration Italian Literature.

Postcolonial literatures have described the direct conquest of speech by colonized subjects; this conquest, however, often takes place in metropolitan languages and is marked by power-based relationships, as can be witnessed in publishing mishaps, the attribution of literary prizes and in book reviews (Sapiro). For this reason too the question of language/languages is today at the centre of literary history and theory based on geographies that attempt to map literatures and languages in their reciprocal relationships, which are often determined by hierarchies characterizing the global circulation of books and knowledge. I shall try to analyse some elements of the transformations taking place, adopting as my starting point postcolonial and migration literatures, writings that offer the traditional and widely accepted connection between language, nation and citizenship.