‘Rented spaces’: Italian postcolonial literature

Abstract

Moving from the marginal social space assigned to migrant women and from their condition of objects of enunciation, this essay analyses the literature produced by Italophone women writers, Italians of African, Eastern European or Indian ancestry as a controversial site of self-representation. Although they gain increasing visibility through access to publication, these writers still occupy ambiguous spaces of exotic objectification and limiting definitions. By choosing a postcolonial perspective as a theoretical approach which might help re-establish connections between a repressed colonial history and contemporary global migration, the essay suggests that, in their precarious occupation of Italian literary and linguistic spaces, postcolonial women writers inhabit different discursive places like a ‘rented apartment’ whose transitory power provides new strategies of literary and linguistic cohabitation, effectively disturbing the construction of supposedly homogeneous national and cultural spaces.