La letteratura postcoloniale italiana per l’infanzia (2010-2021) : Lingua, spazio, colore

• Although Italian postcolonial literature, defined as literature written by migrants and second-generation migrants in Italian, has been studied broadly at least since the 2000s, Italian postcolonial literature for children has almost completely been ignored. The only monograph that has dealt with this corpus is the groundbreaking E noi? Il “posto” degli scrittori migranti nella narrativa per ragazzi by Lorenzo Luatti published in 2010. Ever since then, with very few exceptions, there have not been any attempts to deal with this corpus. What has happened since 2010? Have postcolonial children’s books continued to grow in number? And what stories do they tell? To answer these questions, this dissertation analyses a corpus of texts published between 2010 and 2021. Out of these nearly one hundred books, thirty have been subjected to a close reading, resulting in analyses that are transdisciplinary and comparative in nature. I argue that the corpus shapes a postcolonial imaginary, which I refer to as a set of implicit or explicit images that strengthens the counter-narrative already created by Italian postcolonial literature “for adults”. In particular, I uncover how these books display the acquisition of agency by the characters and the rupture of the Eurocentric and adultocentric narrative to de-establish Italian collective memory. This is done along three main interpretative lines that structure the analytical chapters: language, space, and colour. After the introduction and the presentation of the theoretical framework, the second chapter focuses on the negotiation between Italian and the language of the Other. After arguing that the corpus often circulates within the Italian cultural panorama as a translated text, I investigate the strategies through which child characters exercise their agency through the appropriation of their names, their memories, and their stories to dismantle the binarism-based labels underlying their socially constructed identities. In the third chapter, I first concentrate on the intersection between critical geography and postcolonial studies; then, I explore how the child characters transgress boundaries, dissolve the geographic determinism, and evade adult and colonial surveillance by mapping the urban space with their own memories. A focus is also reserved for school as a place where children experience bullying, cyberbullying, and racism. In the fourth chapter, dedicated to colour, I show how the dichotomy darkness–badness is dismissed in the corpus through the exploration of human and nonhuman skin colours, both visually and verbally. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to the books that manage to eliminate colourism by dissociating colour from a “natural” meaning; indeed, they employ colours to explain context-oriented meanings which, once modified, can lead to changes.The dissertation concludes by stating how these books inform a postcolonial imaginary by discussing issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and mental health. In particular, the characters claim their agency by transgressing the physical and conceptual boundaries imposed on them by Western and adult oppression. The re-telling of memories and the insertion of silences and breaks enhance the necessity of re-thinking the sequence-based ideology on which History lies. Finally, I stress the need for more studies in these directions by highlighting the liveliness and dynamicity, as well as the social importance, of this corpus. 

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Postcolonial

Italian postcolonial

Postcolonial Studies

Children’s Studies

collective memory

picturebooks

graphic novels

Italian literature

Romance Languages, Specialisation in Italian

romanska språk med inriktning mot italienska

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

dok (subject category)