La prospettiva interculturale e la letteratura della migrazione in Italia

The Italian literature of migration offers an interesting perspective for reflection on the themes of interculturality, pluralism, but above all on the ethnographic encounter. Migrant literature creates osmotic processes with its mixture of religions, cultures and languages. Analysis of this literature reveals a defense of the rights of the individual against those of collective identity, highlighting the triggering of a phenomenon termed ‘creolization’. This concept, borrowed from linguistics, describes the hybridization process to which all traditions are subjected, the continuous exchanges and reciprocal influences among them, and the way in which the migrant searches for and incorporates charascteristics of the culture with which he comes into contact, recombining his reality. Creolization, if interculturally experienced, requires that the heterogeneous elements placed in relation with one another be inter-valued and that the encounter between cultures generate a meaningful opportunity to relativize the drive for identity, without diminishing the value and richness of the different cultures. This can directly affect the social landscape. While migrant writers in Anglo-Saxon contexts today constitute an established literary category, in Italy such writers are a more recent phenomenon, emerging in the 90s. The first published works are socially focused and reveal all the difficulties associated with integration. In the second period, however, broader narrative plots are highlighted which are not limited to a narrative modeled on the expectations the second culture. This second and current phase is represented by the so-called ‘second generation / new Italians’, children of immigrants who arrived in Italy in the 70s and 80s. The narration of the foreigner in these writings is a political and social choice, capable of initiating a much deeper dialogue and a reflection on dichotomization, especially as it relates to the psychology of identity and related ways of claiming and the means of accessing rights.