Explores postcolonial discourse from the standpoint of feminism and writers in minority languages.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature is the leading critical overview of and historical introduction to colonial and postcolonial literary studies. Highly praised from the time of its first publication for its lucidity, breadth, and insight, the book has itself played a crucial part in founding and shaping this rapidly expanding field. The author, an internationally renowned postcolonial critic, provides a broad contextualizing narrative about the evolution of colonial and postcolonial writing in English. Illuminating close readings of texts by a wide variety of writers - from Kipling and Conrad through to Kincaid, from Ngugi to Noonuccal and Naipaul - explicate key theoretical terms such as 'subaltern', 'colonial resistance', 'writing back', and 'hybridity'. This revised edition includes new critiques of postcolonial women's writing, an expanded and fully annotated bibliography, and a new chapter and conclusion on postcolonialism exploring keynote debates in the field relating to sexuality, transnationalism, and local resistance.

This book addresses a rich corpus of contemporary narratives by authors who have come to Italy as migrants. It traces the figurative commonalities that emerge across these diverse texts, which together suggest the shape and substance of what might be termed 'migrant imaginaries'. Examining five central figures and concepts - identity, memory, home, place and space, and literature - across a range of novels and stories by writers of African and Middle Eastern origin, the study elucidates the affective and expressive processes that inflect migrant story-telling. Drawing on the work of cultural theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Michel de Certeau, as well as on recent work in postcolonial literary studies, memory studies, human geography and feminist theory, the book probes the varied works of Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Amara Lakhous, Mohsen Melliti, Younis Tawfik and many others. Each chapter posits alternative interpretations of the ways in which the interior experience of encounters across territories, cultures and languages is figured in this literature. In doing so, the book moves towards a wider apprehension of recent Italian migration narratives as suggestions of what a new notion of contemporary 'Italian' literature might look like, figured at once within and beyond the boundaries of a national literature, a national language and a national cultural imaginary.

Italy is one of the most recent immigratory destinations in Europe, having long been one of the continent's most important sources of emigration. Due to its strategic position in the Mediterranean, the Italian peninsula is a crossroads of complex transnational movements and represents a unique and dynamic context for the study of contemporary migration and its representation through the diverse channels of media, literature and film. The product of a two-year interdisciplinary research project into representations of migration to Italy, this volume brings together scholarly contributions from the fields of migration studies, linguistics, media, literature and film studies as well as essays by practitioners and activists. It provides both a multi-faceted snapshot of how diverse representations of immigration capture experiences and affect decision-making dynamics and an in-depth study of how media, literature and cinema contribute to the public perception of migrants within the destination culture.

This book is about migrants' lives in urban space, in particular Rome and Milan. At the core of the book is literature as written by migrants, members of a "second generation," and a filmmaker who defines himself as native. It argues that the narrative authored by migrants, refugees, second generation women, and one "native Italian" perform a reparative reading of Italian spaces in order to engender reparative narratives. Eve Sedgwick wrote about our (now) traditional way of reading based on unveiling and on, mainly, negative affect. We are trained to tear the text apart, dig into it, and uncover the anxieties that define our age. Migrants writers seem to employ both positive and negative affects in defining the past, present, and future of the spaces they inhabit. Their recuperative acts of writing, constitute powerful models of changes in/on place. As they look at Italian exclusionary spaces, they also rewrite them into a present whose transitiveness allows to imagine a process of citizenship and belong constructed from below.