Lupus in Fabula: The Workings of Fear in Italian Migration Narratives

Abstract

This article analyses the expression of fear within the novel I lupi della notte by Amor Dekhis, and with reference to other narratives written by migrant writers in Italian, tracing not only the outcomes of fear but also its origins and operations in the stories told. In so doing, it attempts to articulate how an imaginary of fear which finds its expression in individual stories, often deploying the tropes of fable, is also indicated and begs interpretation as a shared emotion or even a collective condition. Drawing upon discussions of the production and circulation of fear by Sara Ahmed, as well as Freud’s exploration of the uncanny, the article posits a fluid and multilateral interaction of fear and threat. This, in turn, indicates ways of understanding through transnational narratives a more widespread, even globalized, condition of fear in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture.