Breaking Common Ground: Place, Imagination, and Migration in Twenty-First-Century Italy [electronic resource].

9781088318447

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (241 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

Starting in the 1970s, Italy began to transition from a country of net emigration to one of net immigration, and by the 2010s, the number of migrants living in Italy had reached approximately 8% of the total population. From the early 1990s, this changed demographic reality has given rise to a new body of artistic work encompassing many genres and formats. Concurrently, an ever-growing number of scholarly articles and books, both in the Italian and the Anglo-American academic contexts, have sought to analyze and interpret these artistic texts.The initial phases of scholarship on migration literature in Italy, situated between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, tended to focus their analyses on authorial figures, with a particular interest in the origins and identities of writers who themselves had undergone the migration journey. More recently, this scholarship has taken an interdisciplinary turn, drawing from related fields such as postcolonialism, feminism, and theories of mobilities; thus generating new ways of placing these texts into conversation with one another.This dissertation participates in this newly-expanded critical conversation by rooting its argument, its organization, and its readings of texts in the notion of place. In so doing, it follows a limited number of scholars in departments of Italian Literature and Italian Studies, most notably Jennifer Burns, Graziella Parati, and Teresa Fiore, who in recent years have taken cues from the corpus of work related to the "spatial turn" in the humanities (Foucault, Lefebvre, Tuan, Soja, Massey, et al) to analyze the literature of migration in Italy.Breaking Common Ground will build upon this work in several ways. First, it will argue that a spatial lens can serve as a productive point of departure from which texts produced both by Italians and by individuals who themselves have migrated to Italy may enter into dialogue. These two textual corpora have primarily been analyzed separately up to now, in spite of several significant commonalities.Second, it will seek to describe and explore a subtle tendency that has emerged across a broad range of migration-related works, namely that a small number of specific places appear time and again as frequently-used backgrounds and settings. This clustering phenomenon does not come about by chance, but rather constitutes a deliberately-chosen strategy through which texts can address complex aspects of contemporary migration in a manner that is legible to an Italian public. By situating a text within a pre-existing place-discourse, an author can access a series of associations that an arbitrary or fictitious setting would not provide. This study, therefore, will explore three places commonly utilized by migration-related texts, and it will show how each place serves as a focalizer for specific themes and concerns.The first chapter will describe Lampedusa, a tiny island that is also Italy's southernmost point, where migrant boats have continually landed since 1992. Each of the five texts discussed in this chapter examines the contested value of a migrant life and meditates upon how to mourn and commemorate the deaths of individuals who are viewed as "illegal" by the Italian state. The second chapter will explore a series of texts set in the Esquiline neighborhood of Rome, all of which take up the challenge of imagining a multicultural Italy. The third chapter moves north to the Veneto region, and will focus on a small group of texts that center around the inner subjective worlds of migrants who live against a backdrop of isolation and exclusion.Although grounded in theories of space and place, the dissertation will utilize a close-reading approach, thus aligning with the efforts of a small number of scholars of migration literature in the Italian context.The closing section of Breaking Common Ground will consider some of the potential consequences of authors inscribing new meanings upon these real life places. It will suggest that in spite of the widespread anti-migration sentiment in Italy in the late 2010s, the process of developing place-discourses that adhere to specific sites creates space for migrants within a shared cultural framework, thus giving migrants access to an expanded definition of Italianness.At the same time, it will propose that re-imagining place also points towards one possible means of addressing the interconnected global processes that will drive profound changes in the coming years: climate change; population health; global migration; and automation and artificial intelligence. These phenomena will radically alter the lived environments of nearly all individuals, and a flexible approach to building new cultural meanings, like the one that emerges across the series of texts described here, will be essential.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. Italian.