The Italian Migrant Literature: a new literary canon?: a comparison to post-colonial discourse

This research paper gives a glimpse on the state of art in the Italian language literary production by immigrants living and set in Italy. The literature of “migrants” is a new cultural phenomenon for Italy, presenting interesting linguistic contaminations and hybridizations between Italian and the original languages of writers coming from every part of the underdeveloped world. An example of Italian and Portuguese hybridization(”The Portulian”), as literary language, will be also quoted. It is supported the idea that migration towards a new language is not necessarily a loss but a creative expression and a new literary-linguistic code. The Italian migrant literature is also compared to the post-colonial discourse, underlying the different/analogous aspects of the emerging Italophone migrant literature in relation to the conventional Anglophone and Francophone post-colonial literatures. The migrant literature in Italian has also socio-economic implications and is a positive consequence of the mass migration that Italy had to face in the last thirty-forty years. This new narrative production, which is also giving life and oxygen to the asphyxiated Italian publishing industry, is being focussed on by more and more Italian academics and scholars. The paper also analyzes and monitors some examples of Italian migrant literature narrations and its main literary topoi and themes in relation to the socio-economic context of these writers.