Italian counter-travel writing: images of Italy in contemporary migration literature

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, some years after its explosion in the English-speaking world, a specifically Italian kind of ‘counter-travel writing’ began to develop in Italy. Focusing on this particular literary field – which includes works such as those by Salah Methnani, Pap Khouma, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, and more recently Gezim Hadjari, Laila Wadia, Jivis Tegno and Mihai Mircea Butcovan – the following article explains how migrants’ travelogues called into question the traditional definitions of Italian culture and literature. In these texts, travel writing is a Bhabhian ‘third space’, beyond the ethnocentric opposition of ‘them’ and ‘us’, where an original form of cultural mediation might be practised. This new perspective allowed migrant authors to represent Italianness as a post-ethnic concept, a blend of hybridisations between voices and languages in perpetual movement.